Then the budget of news would be unfolded, and every murder or highway robbery within the circuit of fifty miles, every accident that has taken place in the town that day, is as circumstantially related as if a reporter from Scotland Yard had been in attendance. Next, there are the maladies of all their invalid acquaintances to be discussed; while any remarkable complaint amongst members of the _mezzo cetto_ and shopkeepers, whom of course they all know by sight and name, is also gratefully admitted to the general repository. Add to these the births, present or anticipated, in the high world of Macerata, and, above all, the marriages—an unfailing source of speculation and interest—and a tolerable idea may be formed of the home department of the Colloquial Gazette, which supplies the place of newspapers and weekly periodicals, &c., to an Italian interior. The foreign intelligence is almost equally well supplied, though not so widely, or, more properly speaking, not so unreservedly communicated. How they contrived to know all they did of what was passing in other countries, considering that the newspapers allowed to be circulated only gave the official report of some events, and pertinaciously ignored others, was always a surprise to me, though fully weighing the stimulus to inquiry of which the Government's senseless restrictions were naturally productive.
But this information, as I have remarked, was not common to all, nor dispensed to all equally. The happy possessor of any contraband political novelty could be detected by his air of mysterious importance, his unwonted sententiousness, his impatience till the one or two old _codini_, who had devolved like family heir-looms upon the marchesa, had taken their leave; when it would be related, with the accompaniment of many gleeful expressive gestures, how such and such tidings had been received, that must have been like gall and wormwood to the existing powers.
Piedmont—constitutional Piedmont, progressist Piedmont—generally furnished the substance of these discourses. One day it would be whispered that a law was being contemplated in that contumacious little kingdom, for the suppression of many among the monastic orders; another, that its clergy were rendered amenable to civil tribunals for offences unconnected with ecclesiastical discipline: or else it would be ecstatically reported that the minister Cavour snapped his fingers at the threatened interdict, and answered the vituperation of the exiled Archbishop of Turin by fresh concessions to liberty of conscience. These graver themes were but interludes, however. As if fearful of lingering too long upon them, they used to pass to more trivial subjects with strange versatility, though losing no opportunity of levelling a shaft against their own Government, and inveighing at the existing and daily-increasing grievances, which not even the respectable codini any longer attempted to defend.