I could do little more than disentangle the political currents, get familiar with certain names in the intellectual world, and plot out the city, historically and sociologically, after a fashion. A noted psychologist, Dr. Assagioli in Florence, had gone over the philosophical situation for me; and in Rome, Professor Pettazoni of the university told me of the political tendencies. A young Modernist priest, discharged from his theological professorship for suspected connection with the “Programma,” who talked about as much English as I did Italian, proved very friendly and informing, and gave me a sense of that vast subterranean, resistless, democratizing and liberalizing movement in the Church. Various types, Italian cavalry officers, professors of pedagogy, Sicilian lawyers, an emotional law student from Lecce, who took me to the university and talked republicanism to me, passed through the pension. And in Rome anyway you simply seeped Italy in, from the newspapers, as vivid and varied as those in Paris, and the host of little democratic and political weeklies, most of them recent, but fervent and packed with ideas that indicated a great ferment of young intellectual Italy. The young Florentine Papini gives in his picturesque books the picture of the Italian soul struggling with French, English and German ideas, and trying to hew some sort of order out of the chaos. One got the impression that Nietzsche was raging through the young Italian mind. But I was all for the candor and sympathy and personality of this expression. Papers like “La Voce,” published by Papini’s friends, have an idealistic sweep such as we simply cannot imagine or, I suppose, appreciate in this country. I had touched a different national mind. Expressions which seem wild to us fell there into their proper and interpretative order.