But now, even more decidedly than then, the upper classes displayed obliquities of meanness, baseness, intemperance, cowardice, and brutal violence, which are commonly supposed to characterize villeins.
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.