The Patriot

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.