all sorts of intellectual feasting there is an absolute
penury, dearth, and famine. Unquestionably,
both in Turin and at Genoa, a few steps
have been made since the time when the Madre
Priora of an Ursuline pensionnat gravely debated
in her awful mind the mooted point, "Whether
a girl should be taught to write, since that
necessary accomplishment might be turned to the
wicked purpose of writing a billet-doux ; "but a
long time must elapse ere an Italian woman, and
indeed even her stronger half, are supplied with
sufficient means for that education which in
other happier communities may be said to begin
after schooltime. In Italy there exists no literature,
hardly two lines, calculated to give persons
of mediocre understanding and culture that taste
for, and habit of, reading which furnishes the
mind with a certain amount of Conversation-
Lexicon information. To a man used to English
town and country houses, nothing appears more
striking than the almost total absence in Italy
of books, considered simply as indispensable
articles of furniture and objects of civilised
luxury. People read nothing but their own
newspaper (much good may it do them!), or at
most the Siècle or the Débats. Turin boasts
only one club, and two or three paltry circulating
libraries. Such towns as Ivrea, Biella, and
Casale have actually no establishments of either
kind; and the casinos or clubs that are now
being opened in the minor country towns abound
more in packs of cards than sets of books.
Railways exist, but railway libraries are not
even dreamt of; reading in Italy is, in short, by
no means reckoned among the necessaries of
life.

A farrago of books, and even several reviews
and literary papers, weekly or bi-monthly, are,
indeed, published in Turin, as well as in Florence,
Milan, and throughout the cities of Lombardy;
but they are all productions belonging to Old
Italy, new commentaries on old Dante—that
eternal Dante!— motheaten chronicles, or
dissertations on some antique, cracked Etruscan
potsherd, without a spark of life in it. In
all these branches of dilettantism, Tuscany
has a decided advantage, and, to say the
truth, in all literary, bibliographical, or
educational activity. The downright Piedmontese
—the descendants of the subjects of
those Victor Amadeuses who valued the worst of
their drummers more than the greatest of their
scholars—continue to this day to be the
"Macedonians of Italy"—a term which is far from
intended as a reproach. It may be suspected
that the works of certain writers, whose names
have attained a European reputation, are, even
in Italy, more extensively purchased than read.

Men cannot live even by Dante, Tasso,
and Metastasio alone: the mind requires
fresh nutriment, as it grows and moves
onwards; and the national literature in Italy has
been at a dead stand-still since Manzoni.
Beyond the frontier streams of the free Sardinian
lands, this intellectual dearth is generally, and
not quite unjustly, accounted for, by referring it
to a variety of obvious political causes. It
undoubtedly is hard for any man to write where
he is not allowed, at his own peril, and upon his
personal responsibility, to think and express
what comes uppermost into his mind; but
Piedmont has achieved her freedom; language and
action are now only limited by the just bounds
of the law. No little good would accrue
to the country, in the dearth of native productions,
from the free importation of the treasures
of more fertile lands; although, as far as French
literature is concerned, there is no doubt but
that young Italian politicians and mature ladies
of fashion see more of that than is good for
them. But the whole produce of the German
and English mind is terra incognita for even the
most curious and enterprising Italian reader;
not only on account of the national Italian
prejudice revolting against everything Teutonic,
but also because the study of the Northern
languages has been till now most miserably
neglected in Italy. Great results might therefore
be expected from a liberal supply of good
translations.

With mental stagnation it is only consistent
that material stand-still should be associated.
Piedmont is in everything nearly two centuries
in arrear of modern—at least English—
civilisation. Anywhere out of the reach of railways,
we have to look for consolation in travel to
those days when, in England also, as late as the
reign of George II., the coach of his queen,
Caroline, could not be dragged from St. James's
to Kensington in less than two hours. What
first strikes a traveller on his arrival, is that
nothing can well be more shocking than the
roads, public conveyances, and houses of
entertainment. Railways do not by any means cross
the country in every direction, and many of
these districts are sure to be raised sooner by
the archangel's trump than by the shrill sounds
of the locomotive's whistle. Now, it seems here
to be a settled maxim, that railroads are everywhere
to supersede roads, so that the latter are
allowed to fall into decay, not only in the enjoyment,
but even in the mere prospect and expectation
of railways. A bill has gone through the
Chambers, by virtue of which all roads running
parallel to a railway in operation cease to be
maintained at the charge of the state. Wherever
steam forsakes the traveller, it leaves him to
grapple with difficulties which render a journey
an almost herculean feat. There are in Piedmont,
royal, provincial, and municipal roads, so
called, as the construction and keeping of them
devolves on the government, on the counties, or
on the boroughs and parishes; but it would be
hard to say which are the most abominable.

A fault common with all Italian roads, and
traceable to ancient ideas of Roman magnificence,
is their absurdly great width. There is hardly a
road across the vast plain of Piedmont that will
not give passage to six carriages abreast. To
say nothing of the deplorable waste of land in
an extremely fertile country, where every square
inch of ground is, or might be made, worth its
weight in gold, it ought to occur to the
roadmakers that the maintenance of such a road