I
In the month of March, 1848, news came to Rome of the insurrection in
Vienna, and a multitude of the citizens assembled to bear the tidings
to the Austrian Ambassador, who resided in the ancient palace of the
Venetian Republic. The throng swept down the Corso, gathering numbers
as it went, and paused in the open space before the Palazzo di
Venezia. At its summons, the ambassador abandoned his quarters, and
fled without waiting to hear the details of the intelligence from
Vienna. The people, incited by a number of Venetian exiles, tore down
the double-headed eagle from the portal, and carried it for a more
solemn and impressive destruction to the Piazza del Popolo, while a
young poet erased the inscription asserting the Austrian claim to
the palace, and wrote in its stead the words, “Palazzo della Dieta
Italiana.”
The sentiment of national unity expressed in this legend had been the
ruling motive of the young poet Francesco Dall' Ongaro's life, and had
already made his name famous through the patriotic songs that were
sung all over Italy. Garibaldi had chanted one of his Stornelli when
embarking from Montevideo in the spring of 1848 to take part in the
Italian revolutions, of which these little ballads had become the
rallying-cries; and if the voice of the people is in fact inspired,
this poet could certainly have claimed the poet's long-lost honors of
prophecy, for it was he who had shaped their utterance. He had ceased
to assume any other sacred authority, though educated a priest, and at
the time when he devoted the Palazzo di Venezia to the idea of united
Italy, there was probably no person in Rome less sacerdotal than he.
Francesco Dall' Ongaro was born in 1808, at an obscure hamlet in
the district of Oderzo in the Friuli, of parents who were small
freeholders. They removed with their son in his tenth year to Venice,
and there he began his education for the Church in the Seminary of the
Madonna della Salute. The tourist who desires to see the Titians and
Tintorettos in the sacristy of this superb church, or to wonder at the
cold splendors of the interior of the temple, is sometimes obliged to
seek admittance through the seminary; and it has doubtless happened to
more than one of my readers to behold many little sedate old men in
their teens, lounging up and down the cool, humid courts there, and
trailing their black priestly robes over the springing mold. The sun
seldom strikes into that sad close, and when the boys form into long
files, two by two, and march out for recreation, they have a torpid
and melancholy aspect, upon which the daylight seems to smile in vain.
They march solemnly up the long Zattere, with a pale young father
at their head, and then march solemnly back again, sweet, genteel,
pathetic specters of childhood, and reënter their common tomb,
doubtless unenvied by the hungriest and raggedest street boy, who asks
charity of them as they pass, and hoarsely whispers “Raven!” when
their leader is beyond hearing. There is no reason to suppose that
a boy, born poet among the mountains, and full of the wild and free
romance of his native scenes, could love the life led at the Seminary
of the Salute, even though it included the study of literature and
philosophy. From his childhood Dall' Ongaro had given proofs of
his poetic gift, and the reverend ravens of the seminary were
unconsciously hatching a bird as little like themselves as might be.
Nevertheless, Dall' Ongaro left their school to enter the University
of Padua as student of theology, and after graduating took orders, and
went to Este, where he lived some time as teacher of belles-lettres.
At Este his life was without scope, and he was restless and unhappy,
full of ardent and patriotic impulses, and doubly restricted by his
narrow field and his priestly vocation. In no long time he had trouble
with the Bishop of Padua, and, abandoning Este, seems also to have
abandoned the Church forever. The chief fruit of his sojourn in that
quaint and ancient village was a poem entitled II Venerdì Santo, in
which he celebrated some incidents of the life of Lord Byron, somewhat
as Byron would have done. Dall' Ongaro's poems, however, confess
the influence of the English poet less than those of other modern
Italians, whom Byron infected so much more than his own nation.
From Este, Dall' Ongaro went to Trieste, where he taught literature
and philosophy, wrote for the theater, and established a journal in
which, for ten years, he labored to educate the people in his ideas of
Italian unity and progress. That these did not coincide with the ideas
of most Italian dreamers and politicians of the time may be inferred
from the fact that he began in 1846 a course of lectures on Dante, in
which he combated the clerical tendencies of Gioberti and Balbo, and
criticised the first acts of Pius IX. He had as profound doubt of
Papal liberality as Niccolini, at a time when other patriots were
fondly cherishing the hope of a united Italy under an Italian pontiff;
and at Rome, two years later, he sought to direct popular feeling from
the man to the end, in one of the earliest of his graceful Stornelli.