The Last Austrian Who Left Venice

In the spring and early summer of the year last past -- the year 1866 -- the hatred felt by Venetians towards the Austrian soldiers who held their city in thraldom, had reached its culminating point. For years this hatred had been very strong; how strong can hardly be understood by those who never recognise the fact that there had been, so to say, no mingling of the conquered and the conquerors, no process of assimilation between the Italian vassals and their German masters.

Venice as a city was as purely Italian as though its barracks were filled with no Hungarian long-legged soldiers, and its cafés crowded with no white-coated Austrian officers. And the regiments which held the town, lived as completely after their own fashion as though they were quartered in Pest, or Prague, or Vienna -- with this exception, that in Venice they were enabled, and, indeed, from circumstances were compelled -- to exercise a palpable ascendency which belonged to them nowhere else. They were masters, daily visible as such to the eye of everyone who merely walked the narrow ways of the city or strolled through the open squares; and, as masters, they were as separate as the gaoler is separate from the prisoner.