There were, so far as one could judge, from the floods of printed and of spoken eloquence which marked that day, two prominent thoughts in people’s minds: two prominent points of contact and association between the thought of the Divino Poeta and the aspirations of Italian patriotism. The first of these is more general, the second more specific. In general, Dante is rightly held to be the true Father of the Italian language and literature—that “bond which unites us to our native place.” “Love for our native tongue,” says Witte—and he has in mind a passage of Dante’s _Convivio_—“is the expression of our love of our native land.” For Dante Italy is— Il bel paese dove il _Si_ suona. “The beauteous land where _si_ is uttered”; and to that land the work of his mind and of his pen lent an added beauty, and wove a spell which should draw together all her scattered elements in the enthusiasm of a common speech and a common literary heritage. That is Dante’s first claim to supply the inspiration of a “United Italy.” The second claim is, as we have said, more specific. It is claimed for him that he described, as it were prophetically, the future boundaries of Italy. In the ninth Canto of the _Inferno_ (113-114) he includes the whole of the Istrian peninsula in Italy, describing the broad inlet to the east of it—the bay which stretches northward up to Fiume—as “The Quarnaro which shuts in Italy and bathes her boundaries”— Sì come a Pola presso del Carnaro, Che Italia chiude e suoi termini bagna.... Again, in his words about the Lago di Garda in the Twentieth Canto of the _Inferno_ (61-63)— Suso in Italia bella giace un laco A piè dell’ alpe che serra Lamagna Sovra Tiralli, ch’ ha nome Benaco. “Up in fair Italy there lies a lake afoot the Alp that bars out Germany above Tyrol, that bears the name Benaco:” he seems to include not only the whole of Lake Garda but the Trentino too, “barring out Germany” beyond the great watershed. At Ravenna, in 1908, one might have been led to suppose that these two passages summed up the main interest of the _Divina Commedia_; but though the utterances are, as a matter of fact incidental, they do point to the fact that the Italy which Dante so passionately loved, and which consciously or unconsciously he did so much to bring into being, was a definite “geographical expression” if it was also something more.