Yet it must be remembered that during the five centuries above mentioned Italy was given over to Lombards, Franks, and Germans.  Feudal institutions, alien to the social and political ideals of the classic world, took a tolerably firm hold on the country.  The Latin element remained silent, passive, in abeyance, undergoing an important transformation.  It was in the course of those five hundred years that the Italians as a modern people, separable from their Roman ancestors, were formed.  At the close of this obscure passage in Italian history, their communes, the foundation of Italy’s future independence, and the source of her peculiar national development, appeared in all the vigour and audacity of youth.  At its close the Italian genius presented Europe with its greatest triumph of constructive ability, the Papacy.  At its close again the series of supreme artistic achievements, starting with the architecture of churches and public palaces, passing on to sculpture and painting, and culminating in music, which only ended with the temporary extinction of national vitality in the seventeenth century, was simultaneously begun in all the provinces of the peninsula.

So important were these five centuries of incubation for Italy, and so little is there left of them to arrest the attention of the student, dazzled as he is by the ever-living glories of Greece, Rome, and the Renaissance, that a visit to the ruins of Canossa is almost a duty.  There, in spite of himself, by the very isolation and forlorn abandonment of what was once so formidable a seat of feudal despotism and ecclesiastical tyranny, he is forced to confront the obscure but mighty spirit of the middle ages.  There, if anywhere, the men of those iron-hearted times anterior to the Crusades will acquire distinctness for his imagination, when he recalls the three main actors in the drama enacted on the summit of Canossa’s rock in the bitter winter of 1077.

Canossa lies almost due south of Reggio d’Emilia, upon the slopes of the Apennines.  Starting from Reggio, the carriage-road keeps to the plain for some while in a westerly direction, and then bends away towards the mountains.  As we approach their spurs, the ground begins to rise.  The rich Lombard tilth of maize and vine gives place to English-looking hedgerows, lined with oaks, and studded with handsome dark tufts of green hellebore.  The hills descend in melancholy earth-heaps on the plain, crowned here and there with ruined castles.  Four of these mediaeval strongholds, called Bianello, Montevetro, Monteluzzo, and Montezano, give the name of Quattro Castelli to the commune.  The most important of them, Bianello, which, next to Canossa, was the strongest fortress possessed by the Countess Matilda and her ancestors, still presents a considerable mass of masonry, roofed and habitable.  The group formed a kind of advance-guard for Canossa against attack from Lombardy.  After passing Quattro Castelli we enter the hills, climbing gently upwards