The original poem of The Student is
a rather lively series of pictures, from which we learn that it
was once the habit of studious youth at Padua, when freshmen, or
_matricolini_, to be terrible dandies, to swear aloud upon the public
ways, to pass whole nights at billiards, to be noisy at the theater,
to stand treat for the Seniors, joyfully to lend these money, and to
acquire knowledge of the world at any cost. Later, they advanced to
the dignity of breaking street-lamps and of being arrested by the
Austrian garrison, for in Padua the students were under a kind of
martial law. Sometimes they were expelled; they lost money at play,
and wrote deceitful letters to their parents for more; they shunned
labor, and failed to take degrees. But we cannot be interested in
traits so foreign to what I understand is our own student-life.
Generally, the comic as well as the sentimental poetry of Fusinato
deals with incidents of popular life; and, of course, it has hits
at the fleeting fashions and passing sensations: for example, Il
Bloomerismo is satirized.
The poem which I translate, however, is in a different strain from any
of these. It will be remembered that when the Austrians returned to
take Venice in 1849, after they had been driven out for eighteen
months, the city stood a bombardment of many weeks, contesting every
inch of the approach with the invaders.
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