This national gift did not, however, confine itself to the criticism and description of individuals, but felt itself competent to deal with the qualities and characteristics of whole peoples.Throughout the Middle Ages the cities, families, and nations of all Europe were in the habit of making insulting and derisive attacks on one another, which, with much caricature, contained commonly a kernel of truth.But from the first the Italians surpassed all others in their quick apprehension of the mental differences among cities and populations.Their local patriotism, stronger probably than in any other medieval people, soon found expression in literature, and allied itself with the current conception of 'Fame.' Topography became the counterpart of biography;while all the more important cities began to celebrate their own praises in prose and verse, writers appeared who made the chief towns and districts the subject partly of a serious comparative description, partly of satire, and sometimes of notices in which jest and earnest are not easy to be distinguished.Next to some famous passages in the 'Divine Comedy,' we have here the 'Dittamondo' of Uberti (about 1360).
As a rule, only single remarkable facts and characteristics are here mentioned: the Feast of the Crows at Sant' Apollinare in Ravenna, the springs at Treviso, the great cellar near Vicenza, the high duties at Mantua, the forest of towers at Lucca.Yet mixed up with all this, we find laudatory and satirical criticisms of every kind.Arezzo figures with the crafty disposition of its citizens, Genoa with the artificially blackened eyes and teeth (?) of its women, Bologna with its prodigality, Bergamo with its coarse dialect and hard-headed people.In the fifteenth century the fashion was to belaud one's own city even at the expense of others.Michele Savonarola allows that, in comparison with his native Padua, only Rome and Venice are more splendid, and Florence perhaps more joyous--by which our knowledge is naturally not much extended.At the end of the century, Jovianus Pontanus, in his 'Antonius,' writes an imaginary journey through Italy, simply as a vehicle for malicious observations.But in the sixteenth century we meet with a series of exact and profound studies of national characteristics, such as no other people of that time could rival.