The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Patriot, by Antonio Fogazzaro, Translated
by M. Prichard-Agnetti

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Title: The Patriot
Piccolo Mondo Antico

Author: Antonio Fogazzaro

Release Date: September 20, 2010 [eBook #33778]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PATRIOT***

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THE PATRIOT

(PICCOLO MONDO ANTICO)

by

ANTONIO FOGAZZARO

Author of "The Saint"

Translated from the Italian by M. Prichard-Agnetti

G. P. Putnam's Sons
New York and London
The Knickerbocker Press

Copyright, 1906
by
G. P. Putnam's Sons

INTRODUCTION

_The Patriot (Piccolo Mondo Antico)_ was published in Milan in 1896, and
has reached its forty-fourth edition, which is in itself sufficient
proof of its popularity; for Italians do not purchase books largely, and
one volume will often make the tour of a town, coming out of the
campaign in rags and a newspaper cover.

Although _The Patriot_ is not an historical novel in the true sense of
the term, it certainly throws a wonderful side-light on those ten years
of "deadly cold and awful silence," a silence broken only from time to
time by the cries of the martyrs of Mantua, by the noise of inward
strife in the Papal States, and by the weeping of mothers who saw their
sons disappear behind the clanging doors of Austrian fortresses. These
ten years stretched drearily from the disastrous field of Novara to the
glorious days of Magenta, Solferino and San Martino (1849-59).

Antonio Fogazzaro, born in Vicenza in 1842, was a child when the battle
of Novara was fought and lost; but when the French drove the Austrians
from the bloody field of Magenta, he, a youth of seventeen, was ready to
be fired with patriotic enthusiasm.

During those years, there was little the patriots could do save to feed
the fire of hatred against the foreign oppressors, and prepare, as best
they could, in secret and in constant danger of death, for the moment
when Piedmont should once more give the signal of revolt.

In the n