I had thought to throw some light upon the manners of the Italian proletariate by exploring the archives of trials for witchcraft. But I found that these were less common than in Germany, France, Spain, and England at a corresponding period. In Italy witchcraft, pure and simple, was confined, for the most part, to mountain regions, the Apennines of the Abruzzi, and the Alps of Bergamo and Tyrol.[243] In other provinces it was confounded with crimes of poisoning, the procuring of abortion, and the fomentation of conspiracies in private families. These facts speak much for the superior civilization of the Italian people considered as a whole. We discover a common fund of intelligence, vice, superstition, prejudice, enthusiasm, craft, devotion, self-assertion, possessed by the race at large. Only in districts remote from civil life did witchcraft assume those anti-social and repulsive features which are familiar to Northern nations. Elsewhere it penetrated, as a subtle poison, through society, lending its supposed assistance to passions already powerful enough to work their own accomplishment. It existed, not as an endemic disease, a permanent delirium of maddened peasants, but as a weapon in the arsenal of malice on a par with poisons and provocatives to lust. I might illustrate this position by the relation of a fantastic attempt made against the life of Pope Urban VIII.[244] [Footnote 243: Dandolo's _Streghe Tirolesi_, and Cantu's work on the Diocese of Como show how much Subalpine Italy had in common in Northern Europe in this matter.] [Footnote 244: See _Rassegna Settimanale_, September 18, 1881.]