Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: INTRODUCTION Among the historians and scholars engaged on the period of the Italian Risorgitnento, a numerous and effective body in the Italy of to-day, Signor De Cesare holds a high place. His reputation rests chiefly on his famous Fine di un regno, the history of the last years of the Bourbon Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and its fall in 1860 before Garibaldi's attack. Impartiality and intimate social and family knowledge are the special keynotes of his work, both in his "necrology" of the Kingdom of Naples, and in the somewhat similar work on the last years of the Papal Dominion in Central Italy, of which an abbreviated version is here presented to the British public. A patriotic Italian, Signor De Cesare soberly rejoices in the fall of the two extraordinary governments of which he has left us such minutely photographic impressions. But he has the impartiality of a man well able to see the faults of all parties and persons. He is as easily revolted by Liberal and Patriotic as by Clerical violence and rodomontade. He is full of sympathy with what was picturesque and kindly in the past, and of criticism for what is still unreformed in the new Rome. For the new Rome, as he clearly sees, is in some respects all too much the outcome of the oldRome which it undertook to destroy. The picture of Pio Nono himself, kindly, narrow, pleasingly childish, shrewd in small matters and stupid about great affairs, writing charades on the word tremare (" to tremble ") at the last supreme moment when the Italian troops were pouring over the breach near the Porta Pia and the oldest monarchy in Europe was crumbling on his head (p. 455), is a good example of impartiality in historical portraiture. Signor De Cesare's impartiality is largely a result of the other quality of his work—intimate soc...