There _was_ no progress! The _contadini_ on the little farm which I came to possess before I left Tuscany cultivated it precisely after the fashion of their grandfathers and great-grandfathers, and strenuously resisted any suggestion that it could, should, or might be cultivated in any other way.

But my _contadino_ inhabited a large and roomy _casa colonica_; he and his buxom wife, had six stalwart sons, and was the richer man in consequence of having them.

No, in my early Florentine days the _cogito, ergo sum_ could not have been predicated of the Tuscans.
But the condition of things in the other states of the peninsula, in Venice and Lombardy under the Austrians, in Naples under the Bourbon kings, in Romagna under the Pope, and very specially in Modena under its dukes of the House of Este, was much otherwise.

In those regions the Italians were "thinking" a great deal, and had been thinking for some time past.

And somewhere about 1849, those troublesome members of the body social who are not contented with eating, drinking, and singing--cantankerous reading and writing people living in towns, who wanted most unreasonably to say, as the phrase goes, that "their souls were their own" (as if such fee-simple rights ever fall to the lot of any man!)--began in Tuscany to give signs that they also were "thinking." I remember well that Alberi, the highly accomplished and learned editor of the _Reports of the Venetian Ambassadors_, and of the great edition of Galileo's works, was the first man who opened my altogether innocent eyes to the fact, that the revolutionary leaven was working in Tuscany, and that there were social breakers ahead! This must have been as early as 1845, or possibly 1844.