At the same time it is an indubitable fact that Italians who live among the Romans come to prefer them to their other compatriots; and I have heard this preference expressed by people so far apart as an educated Piedmontese and an uneducated Calabrese. Perhaps they learn from the Romans tolerance, the smallness of small things, and the greatness of great ones. Perhaps they realise that the Roman has learnt with an admirable patience and teachableness the new lessons that have been put before him. Thrown from easy circumstances into the vortex of the struggling life of the new capital--overtaxed and underfed--he has suffered as much as the newcomers for a political change which he demanded less loudly than they; and it is to his fair credit that a revolution has taken place in Rome without bloodshed, without violence, without undue bitterness, and that the element of crime and lawlessness has not been supplied by him. The Roman is not a hero, and not a saint, but neither is he a _Camorrista_ and _mafioso_ like the men of the South, nor a _teppista_[5] like the men of the North. [5] The _Teppa_ and the _Camorra_ are respectively institutions of the north and south of the peninsula. The former is recruited exclusively from the lowest classes, and is nothing less than a league of the ill-conditioned bent on every sort of evil deed. The _Camorra_--like the _Mafia_--is more akin to a secret society, and to those factionist practices which are eminently characteristic of Italy. In this sense the _Camorra_ is a national institution, which infects every Italian enterprise, and functions in every Italian theatre. The _Mafia_, like the _Camorra_, is widespread in Naples and Sicily and counts men of all ranks among its members. None of these were ever Roman institutions; and the _teppisti_ who now afflict Rome are an importation from the north. _Roman Customs and Roman Satire_ The customs of the Romans have been depicted by the inimitable art of Pinelli, their ways of thinking and feeling by Belli in his sonnets and in the modern sonnets of Pascarella. Here the satire, the cynicism, the rude intellect, the ignorance, the self-interest, meet us in every picture.