Classic Poem

Unhappy Italy, how internal strife has lost you that ancient courage and your fathers' rule of the world! Have you a nook which cannot tell of foreign servitude, of spoils, of miserable ruin? Speak, you vine-bearing, unshakeable hills, where Erethenus flows in pleasant streams and with full horns slips into the sea to join the waters of the Euganeans!
O happy land, for long more peaceful than all others, most holy country of the gods, rich in wealth, fertile in men, happy in fruitful fields, swift Athesis and the waves of Benacus — who can remember your calamities and height of your miseries, and who can equal our sorrows, our ignominious submission, our foreign rule? Hold low your head, Benacus, hide beneath your stream, and let no god glide now among your lordly laurels.