BEFORE THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
poor of Rome lived upon the fragments that fell from the tables of fifteen or twenty thousand rich foreigners who spent the winter there, — upon the cardinals, the Papal court and the Roman princes.[1] Says an English traveler in 1741: "Viterbo, Montefiascone, Ronciglione, and the rest of the towns we passed through are all in the same miserable condition, tho' in a pleasant and fruitful country: We saw ruinous houses and poor people, with fine churches, rich clergy, and fat convents."[2] Of Rome itself the same writer says: "This City, which was once the mistress of all the riches of the then known world, is now so poor, that, to change a pistole in a shop, you must buy half the value in goods, and take the rest in several bank notes, each of the value of half a crown sterling."[3] He adds, with some extravagance, "It is very probable that in a few years both the town itself and all the neighborhood may be perfectly void of inhabitants, and, like the former Babylon, only a haunt of monsters and beasts of prey."[4]
In the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, the great minister Tanucci had brought about notable reforms, but the social conditions throughout the country districts were substantially those of feudal times. The peasantry were not only desperately poor, but they were illiterate, superstitious, hopeless, and such they continued to be throughout the eighteenth century, and even long after. More than one fourth of the population were ecclesiastics, who had gathered up a large proportion of the wealth of the country into their own hands.
Even in the middle of the nineteenth century a brilliant historian points out in enumerating the reforms that were urgently needed: "In no country of Europe was this triple revolution more lamentably overdue than in Naples, where the tyranny, uncontrolled through long centuries, of priest, of noble, and latterly of king, had left marks of devastation not only on the welfare of a few passing generations, but deep in the national character itself. …" Referring to "the hill towns of southern Italy," he continues, "In those miserable abodes of fear, poverty, and supersti-
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