Praise to the people of Romagna and to Romagna, a “benevolent and benefactress land” that rejects the whining

They have rejected all complaints, never victims, to exhibit without pomp but with absolute elegance a competent, precise language that also explains and rationalizes the apocalypse. They always find a way to ennoble themselves even in defeat, those of Cesena, Forlì, Faenza, Bagnacavallo, Ravenna, of the towns covered in muddy water

Edmondo De Amicis must have had his reasons for dedicating his famous and tender horror story to the “Blood of Romagna”, with the fifteen-year-old Ferruccio who repents of his “scaping” by embracing his grandmother and protecting her with his body from the stab of the infamous Mozzoni , obtaining her love’s contrite pardon on his deathbed. The nineteenth century has its ethno-regional knowledge, and who are we to judge its literary scapegraces? Dante intensely and tormentedly loved the Romagna of tyrants, of blood and of authentic and beastly wayssubtly and obliquely damning it in the Inferno with the impossible absolution of Guido da Montefeltro (“ch’assolver non si può chi non si pente / né pentere e volere set loro può / per la contradiction che non consente”), redeeming it in part in the Purgatory and celebrating it in peace in Paradise, which seems to have been written in the productive idleness of Ravenna.