The Celebration of 1921, on the sexcentenary of the Poet’s death, was marked again with patriotic fervour. The troops who had redeemed “Italia irredenta” in the Great War offered a wreath of bronze and silver at his shrine in Ravenna; and shouts of “Viva l’ Italia! Viva Fiume!” echoed in the Banqueting Hall of the castle of Poppi in Casentino, where Dante had been a guest of the Conti Guidi, and in sight of which he had fought as a young man in defence of his native city. The patriotic cries had now a new note of triumph about them, because Dante’s prophetic envisaging of Italy as “one, and to be loved” and his incidental marking out of her true boundaries had at last been verified.[377] Between these two, on September 14th, 1908, Ravenna, his “last refuge,” was the scene of a most enthusiastic ceremony, to which flocked representatives of the as yet unredeemed Italian fringe, and men of Trent and Trieste and Gorizia and Pola and Fiume claimed Dante as the prophet of their own “italianità” and of their proximate liberation from the foreign yoke. There is a little-known incident connected with the first of these Celebrations—that of 1865—which is worth recording, if only for its simple pathos. The story of an attempt at Dante-worship that was motived rather by personal loyalty than by patriotic ardour, yet was baulked by the barrier set up by a foreign domination between a true-hearted Italian and his goal. Antonio Maschio[378] was close upon forty years old when the news came to him in his humble Venetian dwelling that Italy was going to celebrate her greatest Poet in his native City of Florence. He was a simple gondolier, son of a small pork-butcher on the island of Murano. In the year ’48, so notable in the annals of Italy’s fight for freedom, he picked up some stray sheets of paper in a tobacconist’s shop, on which were printed Cantos xiii. and xiv. of the _Inferno_. He took them home and read and re-read them: From that day he took Dante as his Master, and devoted all his spare moments to the study of the _Divina Commedia_. He lived to see, as he conceived, Dante’s prophecy of the “Veltro”—the great Liberator—fulfilled in 1871; when Victor Emmanuel entered Rome, and before he died he was in correspondence with some of the greatest Dante scholars in Italy and abroad.