He Garners Information About The Jewish And Albanian
Colonies Of South Italy; He Studies Romaic "Under One Of The Few
Greeks
who survived the fatal siege of Missolonghi" and collects words of Greek
speech still surviving at Bova and Maratea
(Maratea, by the way, has a
Phoenician smack; the Greeks must have arrived later on the scene, as
they did at Marathon itself).
A shrewd book, indeed. Like many of his countrymen, he was specially
bent on economic and social questions; he is driven to the prophetic
conclusion, in 1828, that "the government rests on a very insecure
basis, and the great mass of the intelligence of the country would
gladly welcome a change." Religion and schooling are subjects near his
heart and, in order to obtain a first-hand knowledge of these things in
Italy, he enters upon a friendship, a kind of intellectual flirtation,
with the Jesuits. That is as it should be. Extremes can always respect
one another. The Jesuits, I doubt not, learnt as much from Ramage as he
from them....
I wish I had encountered this book earlier. It would have been useful to
me when writing my own pages on the country it describes. I am always
finding myself in accord with the author's opinions, even in trivial
matters such as the hopeless inadequacy of an Italian breakfast. He was
personally acquainted with several men whose names I have
mentioned - Capialbi, Zicari, Masci; he saw the Purple Codex at Rossano;
in fact, there are numberless points on which I could have quoted him
with profit.
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