a strife of living energies, the covetousness of impassioned and
puissant units. Italy as a whole is almost invisible to the student by
reason of the many-sided, combative, self-centered crowd of numberless
Italian communities. Proximity foments hatred and stimulates hostility.
Fiesole looks down and threatens Florence. Florence returns frown for
frown, and does not rest till she has made her neighbor of the hills a
slave. Perugia and Assissi turn the Umbrian plain into a wilderness of
wolves by their recurrent warfare. Scowling at one another across the
Valdichiana, Perugia rears a tower against Chiusi, and Chiusi builds her
Becca Questa in responsive menace. The tiniest burgh upon the Arno
receives from Dante, the poet of this internecine strife and fierce
town-rivalry, its stigma of immortalizing satire and insulting epithet,
for no apparent reason but that its dwellers dare to drink of the same
water and to breathe the same air as Florence. It would seem as though
the most ancient furies of antagonistic races, enchained and suspended
for centuries by the magic of Rome, had been unloosed; as though the
indigenous populations of Italy, tamed by antique culture, were
reverting to their primal instincts, with all the discords and divisions
introduced by the military system of the Lombards, the feudalism of the
Franks, the alien institutions of the Germans, superadded to
exasperate the passions of a nation blindly struggling against obstacles
that block the channel of continuous progress. Nor is this the end of
the perplexity. Not only are the cities at war with one another, but
they are plunged in ceaseless strife within the circuit of their
ramparts. The people with the nobles, the burghs with the castles, the
plebeians with the burgher aristocracy, the men of commerce with the men
of arms and ancient lineage, Guelfs and Ghibellines, clash together in
persistent fury. One half the city expels the other half. The exiles
roam abroad, cement alliances, and return to extirpate their conquerors.
Fresh proscriptions and new expulsions follow. Again alliances are made