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No greater honor could have been paid to him than that he should have been chosen as their champion by the Italianissimi of his day in the battle royal with such a giant as Gluck, an honor richly deserved by a composer distinguished by multiplicity and beauty of ideas, dramatic insight, and ardent conviction.
All of the intensity of these art-campaigns, and many of the conditions of the last, enter into the contest between Richard Wagner and the Italianissimi of the present day.
For there are scores of cities where Wagner would be even more popular than he is, were it not for the woful rarity of competent dramatic singers and conductors. There is, therefore, no hope for the Italianissimi, who sigh for their maccaroni arias and their "Ernani" and "Gazza Ladra" soup. Italian opera has ceased to exist in New York, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, and St.
All this, which seems of questionable utility, and worse than questionable taste, is approved by the fiercer of the Italianissimi, and though possibly the strictness of the patriotic discipline in which the members of the Committee keep their fellow- citizens may gall some of them, yet any public demonstration of content, such as going to the opera, or to the Piazza while the Austrian band plays, is promptly discontinued at a warning from the Committee.
These sometimes exercise the most menial employments: I knew one noble lord who had been a facchino, and I heard of another who was a street-sweeper. The few opulent patricians are by no means the most violent of Italianissimi. They own lands and houses, and as property is unsafe when revolutionary feeling is rife, their patriotism is tempered.
However, whether rich or poor, the Italianissimi hate their Austrian rulers like poison; and in this hatred they are joined by the mass of the wealthy Israelites, who divide the commerce with the Greeks. The wealthy Italianissimi subscribe handsomely to every Italian charity and movement, and periodically and anonymously memorialize the King of Italy.
A grand illumination of the town in honor of the taking of Rome fifteen years ago. Except Sor Asdrubale, my landlord, who shakes his head at the Piedmontese, as he calls them, the people here are all Italianissimi. The Popes kept them very much down since Urbania lapsed to the Holy See in 1645. Sept. 28th. I have for some time been hunting for portraits of the Duchess Medea.
But neither this nor any other measure of reform, however well adapted to circumstances and the character of the people, could ever have satisfied the Italianissimi, whose hatred of every existing institution was boundless as it was incomprehensible.
The Italianissimi have so far imbued the people with their own ideas and feelings, that the recurrence of the famous holidays now merely awakens them to lamentations over the past and vague longings for the future.
We were all equally "Italianissimi," as the phrase went then; all equally desirous that Italy should accomplish the union of her disjecta membra, throw off the yoke of the bad governments which had oppressed her, make herself a nation, and do well as such. But we differed widely as to the ultimate utility, the probable results, and, above all, as to the motives of the Emperor's conduct. Mrs.
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