An interesting feature of the streets is the frequency of carved inscriptions, commemorating citizens who died in their struggle for liberty.  Amid quiet by-ways, for instance, I discovered a tablet with the name of a young soldier who fell at that spot, fighting against the Bourbon, in 1860:  “offerse per l’unita della patria sua vita quadrilustre.”  The very insignificance of this young life makes the fact more touching; one thinks of the unnumbered lives sacrificed upon this soil, age after age, to the wild-beast instinct of mankind, and how pathetic the attempt to preserve the memory of one boy, so soon to become a meaningless name!  His own voice seems to plead with us for a regretful thought, to speak from the stone in sad arraignment of tyranny and bloodshed.  A voice which has no accent of hope.  In the days to come, as through all time that is past, man will lord it over his fellow, and earth will be stained red from veins of young and old.  That sweet and sounding name of patria becomes an illusion and a curse; linked with the pretentious modernism, civilization, it serves as plea to the latter-day barbarian, ravening and reckless under his civil garb.  How can one greatly wish for the consolidation and prosperity of Italy, knowing that national vigour tends more and more to international fear and hatred?  They who perished that Italy might be born again, dreamt of other things than old savagery clanging in new weapons.  In our day there is but one Italian patriot; he who tills the soil, and sows, and reaps, ignorant or careless of all beyond his furrowed field.

Whilst I was still thinking of that memorial tablet, I found myself in front of the Cathedral.  As a structure it makes small appeal, dating only from the seventeenth century, and heavily restored in times more recent; but the first sight of the facade is strangely stirring.  For across the whole front, in great letters which one who runs may read, is carved a line from the Acts of the Apostles:—­

“Circumlegentes devenimus Rhegium.”

Save only those sonorous words which circle the dome of S. Peter’s, I have seen no inscription on Christian temple which seemed to me so impressive.  “We fetched a compass, and came to Rhegium.”  Paul was on his voyage from Caesarea to Rome, and here his ship touched, here at the haven beneath Aspromonte.  The fact is familiar enough, but, occupied as I was with other thoughts, it had not yet occurred to me; the most pious pilgrim of an earlier day could not have felt himself more strongly arrested than I when I caught sight of these words.  Were I to inhabit Reggio, I should never pass the Cathedral without stopping to read and think; the carving would never lose its power over my imagination.  It unites for me two elements of moving interest:  a vivid fact from the ancient world, recorded in the music of the ancient tongue.  All day the words rang in my head, even as at Rome I have gone about murmuring to myself:  “Aedificabo ecclesiam meam.”  What a noble solemnity in this Latin speech!  And how vast the historic significance of such monumental words!  Moralize who will; enough for me to hear with delight that deep-toned harmony, and to thrill with the strangeness of old things made new.