GIUSEPPE PARINI


I

In 1748 began for Italy a peace of nearly fifty years, when the Wars
of the Succession, with which the contesting strangers had ravaged
her soil, absolutely ceased. In Lombardy the Austrian rulers who had
succeeded the Spaniards did and suffered to be done many things for
the material improvement of a province which they were content to
hold, while leaving the administration mainly to the Lombards; the
Spanish Bourbon at Naples also did as little harm and as much good to
his realm as a Bourbon could; Pier Leopoldo of Tuscany, Don Filippo I.
of Parma, Francis III. of Modena, and the Popes Benedict XIV., Clement
XIV., and Pius VI. were all disposed to be paternally beneficent to
their peoples, who at least had repose under them, and in this period
gave such names to science as those of Galvani and Volta, to humanity
that of Beccaria, to letters those of Alfieri, Filicaja, Goldoni,
Parini, and many others.

But in spite of the literary and scientific activity of the period,
Italian society was never quite so fantastically immoral as in this
long peace, which was broken only by the invasions of the French
republic. A wide-spread sentimentality, curiously mixed of love and
letters, enveloped the peninsula. Commerce, politics, all the business
of life, went on as usual under the roseate veil which gives its hue