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Updated: June 27, 2025
This cosmopolitan society was entirely unlike the narrow coteries of the ancient Piedmontese aristocracy which are so graphically described by Massimo d'Azeglio, and the absence of constraint in which Cavour grew up makes a striking contrast to the iron paternal rule under which the young d'Azeglios trembled.
I believe that if I had been sensible of it I should hays read much more of such humane Italian poets and novelists as Manzoni and D'Azeglio, whom I perceived to be delightful, without dreaming of them in the length and breadth of their goodness. Now and then its extent flashed upon me, but the glimpse was lost to my retroverted vision almost as soon as won.
Recalling the Spanish royal personage whom courtiers let burn to death sooner than deviate from the motto, ne touchez pas la Reine, D'Azeglio protested that if he was to risk his head, or totally to lose the king's favour, he would think himself the vilest of mankind if he did not write the words which he had not been permitted to speak.
What is not doubtful is, that, accustomed as they were to being lectured and bullied by foreign courts, the Italians derived the greatest encouragement from the openly expressed sympathy of well-known English visitors, whether they came in an official capacity like Lord Minto, or unofficially like Mr Cobden, who travelled as a missionary of Free Trade, and was received with rapture with which, it is to be feared, Free Trade had little to do by the leading Liberals in Italy: Massimo d'Azeglio at Genoa, Mancini at Naples Cavour and Scialoja at Turin, Minghetti at Bologna, Ridolfi at Florence, and Manin and Tommaseo at Venice.
Piedmont, because it, at least, enjoys an independent life, and possesses an army and a surplus in the treasury. His friends answered: 'What of Charles Albert, of 1821, of 1832? Now, there was no one who felt less trust in Charles Albert than Massimo d'Azeglio; he admitted it with something like remorse in later years.
D'Azeglio was ready to accept what had the prospect of being a most thankless office, but on one condition that the Sardinian plenipotentiary should be received on an equality with the representatives of the great Powers.
But underneath and apart from the matchless patriotism and ability of a few great men like D'Azeglio, Mazzini, Garibaldi, Manin, Cavour, and, not least, the King of Sardinia himself, who reigned at Turin as a constitutional monarch before the revolution, should be mentioned the almost universal passion of the Italian people to throw off the yokes which oppressed them, whether imposed by the King of Naples, or by the Pope as a temporal prince, or by Austria, or by the various princes who had divided between them the territories of the peninsula, diverse, yet banded together to establish their respective tyrannies, and to suppress liberal ideas of government and all reforms whatsoever.
The significance of such facts, wrote the English minister at Turin, could only be the coming fall of the Pope's Temporal Power. L.C. Farini was sent by Victor Emmanuel to administer the provinces of Modena and Parma, and Massimo d'Azeglio was charged with the same mission in Romagna.
It was in these circumstances that Massino d'Azeglio came to me one morning, in the garden of our house in the Via del Giglio the same in which the poet Milton lodged when he was in Florence to which we had by that time moved, and told me that he wanted me to do something for him.
Lord Malmesbury was so favourably impressed by Sardinia's docility and so furious with the Austrian coup de tête that he became in those days quite ardently Italian, which he assured Massimo d'Azeglio was his natural state of mind; and such it may have been, since cabinet ministers are constantly employed in upholding, especially in foreign affairs, what they most dislike.
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