It was to the imagination of the Italians that the peculiar character of their vengeance was due.The sense of justice was, indeed, one and the same throughout Europe, and any violation of it, so long as no punishment was inflicted, must have been felt in the same manner.But other nations, though they found it no easier to forgive, nevertheless forgot more easily, while the Italian imagination kept the picture of the wrong alive with frightful vividness.The fact that, according to the popular morality, the avenging of blood is a duty--a duty often performed in a way to make us shudder--gives to this passion a peculiar and still firmer basis.The government and the tribunals recognize its existence and justification, and only attempt to keep it within certain limits.Even among the peasantry, we read of Thyestean banquets and mutual assassination on the widest scale.Let us look at an instance.
In the district of Acquapendente three boys were watching cattle, and one of them said: 'Let us find out the way how people are hanged.'
While one was sitting on the shoulders of the other, and the third, after fastening the rope round the neck of the first, was tying it to an oak, a wolf came, and the two who were free ran away and left the other hanging.Afterwards they found him dead, and buried him.On the Sunday his father came to bring him bread, and one of the two confessed what had happened, and showed him the grave.The old man then killed him with a knife, cut him up, brought away the liver, and entertained the boy's father with it at home.After dinner, he told him whose liver it was.Hereupon began a series of reciprocal murders between the two families, and within a month thirty-six persons were killed, women as well as men.
And such 'vendette,' handed down from father to son, and extending to friends and distant relations, were not limited to the lower classes, but reached to the highest.The chronicles and novels of the period are full of such instances, especially of vengeance taken for the violation of women.The classic land for these feuds was Romagna, where the 'vendetta' was interwoven with intrigues and party divisions of every conceivable sort.The popular legends present an awful picture of the savagery into which this brave and energetic people had relapsed.We are told, for instance, of a nobleman at Ravenna who had got all his enemies together in a tower, and might have burned them; instead of which he let them out, embraced them, and entertained them sumptuously;whereupon shame drove them mad, and they conspired against him.Pious and saintly monks exhorted unceasingly to reconciliation, but they can scarcely have done more than restrain to a certain extent the feuds already established; their influence hardly prevents the growth of new ones.The novelists sometimes describe to this effect of religion--how sentiments of generosity and forgiveness were suddenly awakened, and then again paralysed by the force of what had once been done and could never be un.done.The Pope himself was not always lucky as a peacemaker.Pope Paul II desired that the quarrel between Antonio Caffarello and the family of Alberino should cease, and ordered Giovanni Alberino and Antonio Caffarello to come before him bade them kiss one another, and threatened them with a fine of 2,000 ducats if they renewed this strife, and two days after Antonio was stabbed by the same Giacomo Alberino, son of Giovanni, who had wounded him once before; and the Pope was full of anger, and confiscated the goods of Alberino, and destroyed his houses, and banished father and son from Rome.The oaths and ceremonies by which reconciled enemies attempted to guard themselves against a relapse, are sometimes utterly horrible.
When the parties of the 'Nove' and the 'Popolari' met and kissed one another by twos in the cathedral at Siena on New Year's Eve, 1494, an oath was read by which all salvation in time and eternity was denied to the future violator of the treaty--'an oath more astonishing and dreadful than had ever yet been heard.' The last consolations of religion in the hour of death were to turn to the damnation of the man who should break it.It is clear, however, that such a ceremony rather represents the despairing mood of the mediators than offers any real guarantee of peace, inasmuch as the truest reconciliation is just that one which has least need of it.
This personal need of vengeance felt by the cultivated and highly placed Italian, resting on the solid basis of an analogous popular custom, naturally displays itself under a thousand different aspects, and receives the unqualified approval of public opinion, as reflected in the works of the novelists.All are at one on the point that, in the case of those injuries and insults for which Italian justice offered no redress, and all the more in the case of those against which no human law can ever adequately provide, each man is free to take the law into his own hands.Only there must be art in the vengeance, and the satisfaction must be compounded of the material injury and moral humiliation of the offender.A mere brutal, clumsy triumph of force was held by public opinion to be no satisfaction.The whole man with his sense of fame and of scorn, not only his fist, must be victorious.
