and importing the connotation gained by the word people in the revolutions of the last two centuries, students are apt to assume that the Popolo of the Italian burghs included the whole population.  In reality it was at first a close aristocracy of influential families, to whom the authority of the superseded Counts was transferred in commission, and who held it by hereditary right.[3] Unless we firmly grasp this fact, the subsequent vicissitudes of the Italian commonwealths are unintelligible, and the elaborate definitions of the Florentine doctrinaires lose half their meaning.  The internal revolutions of the free cities were almost invariably caused by the necessity of enlarging the Popolo, and extending its franchise to the non-privileged inhabitants.  Each effort after expansion provoked an obstinate resistance from those families who held the rights of burghership; and thus the technical terms primo popolo, secondo popolo, popolo grasso, popolo minuto, frequently occurring in the records of the Republics, indicate several stages in the progress from oligarchy to democracy.  The constitution of the city at this early period was simple.  At the head of its administration stood the Bishop, with the Popolo of enfranchised burghers.  The Commune included the Popolo, together with the non-qualified inhabitants, and was represented by Consuls, varying in number according to the division of the town into quarters.[4] Thus the Commune and the Popolo were originally separate bodies; and this distinction has been perpetuated in the architecture of those towns which still can show a Palazzo del Popolo apart from the Palazzo del Commune.  Since the affairs of the city had to be conducted by discussion, we find Councils corresponding to the constituent elements of the burgh.  There is the Parlamento, in which the inhabitants meet together to hear the decisions of the Bishop and the Popolo, or to take measures in extreme cases that affect the city as a whole; the Gran Consiglio, which is only open to duly qualified members of the Popolo; and the Credenza, or privy council of specially delegated burghers, who debate on matters demanding secrecy and diplomacy.  Such, generally speaking, and without regard to local differences, was the internal constitution of an Italian city during the supremacy of the Bishops.

[1] It is not necessary to raise antiquarian questions here relating to the origin of the Italian Commune.  Whether regarded as a survival of the ancient Roman municipium or as an offshoot from the Lombard guild, it was a new birth of modern times, a new organism evolved to express the functions of Italian as different from ancient Roman or mediaeval Lombard life.  The affection of the people for their past induced them to use the nomenclature of Latin civility for the officers and councils of the Commune.  Thus a specious air of classical antiquity, rather literary and sentimental