secrecy. From the kingdom of Naples, Carbonarism spread to the Roman
states, and found a congenial soil in Romagna, which became the focus
whence it spread over the rest of Italy. It was natural that it should
take the colour, more or less, of the places where it grew. In
Romagna, where political assassination is in the blood of the people,
a dagger was substituted for the symbolical woodman's axe in the
initiatory rites. It was probably only in Romagna that the
conventional threat against informers was often carried out. The
Romagnols invested Carbonarism with the wild intensity of their own
temperament, resolute even to crime, but capable of supreme impersonal
enthusiasm. The ferment of expectancy that prevailed in Romagna is
reflected in the Letters and Journals of Lord Byron, whom young Count
Pietro Gamba made a Carbonaro, and who looked forward to seeing the
Italians send the barbarians of all nations back to their own dens, as
to the most interesting spectacle and moment in existence. His lower
apartments, he writes, were full of the bayonets, fusils and
cartridges of his Carbonari cronies; 'I suppose that they consider me
as a dépôt, to be sacrificed in case of accidents. It is no great
matter, supposing that Italy could be liberated, who or what is
sacrificed. It is a grand object--the very poetry of politics. Only
think--free Italy!!! Why, there has been nothing like it since the
days of Augustus.'

The movement on which such great hopes were set was to begin in the
kingdom of Naples in the spring of 1820. The concession of the
hard-won Spanish Constitution in the month of March encouraged the
Neapolitans to believe that they might get a like boon from their own
King if they directed all the forces at their command to this single
end. To avoid being compromised, they sought rather to dissociate
themselves from the patriots of other parts of Italy than to