Among the various causes which may be assigned for this phenomenon, the most important undoubtedly is the fact that the Italians have always looked upon themselves as of one race with the ancient Romans, and the heirs of all the glorious traditions attached to the names of the heroes, poets, and artists of the Eternal City. In similar manner they regarded Latin as their true mother-tongue, of which the vernacular was a mere corruption. Hence it came to pass that all the literature which we find in Italy before the thirteenth century, and a large proportion of that written in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, was in Latin and not in Italian, which seemed to the writers of those days unworthy of forming the medium of poetry and learning. This feeling of kinship was a natural one for those who lived in the same cities in which the Romans had lived, surrounded by the imposing ruins of the ancient world, speaking a language, which although essentially a modern one, with all its characteristics, was still nearer to Latin than French, Provençal, or Spanish. For these men the irruptions of the northern barbarians, the Goths, the Lombards, and later the Normans, were only a break in the continuity of the historical development of the Latin race in Italy. This spirit--which explains the popularity and temporary success of Arnold of Brescia, in the twelfth century, and of Cola di Rienzi, in the fourteenth, in their efforts to restore the old forms of the Roman republic--must be kept constantly in mind by the student, not only of the political history of Italy, but of its literature and art as well. Yet this natural feeling does not rest altogether on fact. The Italians of to-day are not the pure descendants of the ancient Romans, but, like the other so-called Latin races, are of mixed origin, more nearly related, it is true, to the Romans, yet in general formed in the same ethnical way as their neighbors. With the downfall of Rome, Italy, like France and Spain, was overrun by the hordes of German tribes, who, leaving the cold and inhospitable regions of the North sought for more congenial climes in the sunny South. As the Franks in France, the Visigoths and Vandals in Spain, so the Ostrogoths in Italy, toward the end of the fifth century, conquered and colonized the country, and under Theodoric restored for a brief time an appearance of prosperity. In the sixth century came the Lombards, and after destroying and devastating city and country as far south as Rome, and even beyond, finally settled in upper Italy now known from them as Lombardy. Several centuries later came the Normans from France and conquered Sicily and the southern extremity of the peninsula. All these peoples were of German origin, and being gradually merged with the conquered race, formed what we now call the Italian people.[1]