Trevor Dean and Daniel Waley,
The Italian City-Republics, 5th ed. (London: Routledge, 2023), pp. 5-6:
The sentiment within the city-state of sharing a common citizenship was
not solely the result of having a common place of residence. When, in his
fiction of a journey through the afterlife, the poet Dante meets the soul of
the unhappy Pia dei Tolomei (Purgatorio V, 134), and she says that 'Siena
made me' (Siena mi fe), she is doing more than announcing her place of
birth. She is saying that the city-state of Siena provided the physical, social
and political environment in which she grew up, that it moulded her outlook and personality. The modern citizen is shaped by varied forces, among
which the monstrously powerful energy of the nation-state competes with
international mass communications and with the generally diluted and disappearing strength of regional and local patriotism (resurgent though it
is in some areas). The local newspaper demonstrates the survival of older
loyalties, and in Italy itself the spirit of campanilismo, of the cherished and
longed-for city tower, is not yet dead. But the citizen who fought alongside
his neighbours against the citizens of the neighbouring cities knew through
his way of life a now-vanished patriotism and campanilismo.
Id., p. 6:
And
one must add the attachment that almost all people, and especially those of
conventional and conservative temperaments, feel to what is familiar, the
spectacle of the same daily surroundings and accustomed ways of speech.
Only thus can one understand something of the intensity of that emotion
which Dante conveys in a passage of the Purgatorio (VI, 70 ff) when Virgil
utters the single word 'Mantua' and a figure replies:
'O Mantoano, io son Sordello
De la tua terra;' e l'un l'altro abbracciava.
('O Mantuan, I am Sordello from your town.'
And they embraced.)
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