I am not writing the history of political events, but the history of a Roman family during times of great uncertainty and agitation.

If any one says that I have set up Del Ferice as a type of the Italian Liberal party, carefully constructing a villain in order to batter him to pieces with the artillery of poetic justice, I answer that I have done nothing of the kind.

Del Ferice is indeed a type, but a type of a depraved class which very unjustly represented the Liberal party in Rome before 1870, and which, among those who witnessed its proceedings, drew upon the great political body which demanded the unity of Italy an opprobrium that body was very far from deserving.

The honest and upright Liberals were waiting in 1866.

What they did, they did from their own country, and they did it boldly.