Mathematics in Italy in the second half of the 19th century

At the International Congress of Mathematicians held in Rome in April 1908, Vito Volterra gave the plenary talk Le Matematiche in Italia: Nella Seconda Metà del Secolo XIX at 10.00 on Monday 6 April in the Sala degli Orazi e Curiazi of the Campidoglio. We give a version of this talk below in which we have added the first names of most of the mathematicians mentioned.

Mathematics in Italy: In the second half of the 19th century.

By Vito Volterra.

In November 1860, a young thirty-year-old was the first to be appointed to the chair of higher geometry in the ancient University of Bologna.

It was the same year in which many memorable events reconstituted the nation and many unexpected events renewed the whole of Italian life. But the echo of the sounds of the war and the clamour that aroused the establishment of the new kingdom did not obscure the impact of Luigi Cremona, who from the Bolognese chair exhibited the wide programme, which he himself, and the school that took its name from him, had to carry out as they turned a new page, and the noble words spoken in his inaugural address passed quickly throughout Italy.

It is with a feeling of satisfaction that today, after half a century, exmining the path travelled, the high excitement which Cremona then addressed to young Italian scientists can be recalled. At the appeal of the new professor, universal sentiments and vows were answered in Italy; happy hopes filled the hearts in which the delight for the new and laboriously conquered homeland was associated with an aspiration towards the highest scientific ideals.

A few months earlier, Enrico Betti had begun his teaching of higher analysis and geometry in Pisa, with the same intentions. In Pavia, almost simultaneously, Francesco Brioschi began the course of higher analysis and Emanuele Fergola also began in that year the same teaching in Naples, while Guiseppe Battaglini started his new lessons in higher geometry.

Italy was then clearly aware that a high intellectual mission was due to it because of its ancient traditions and because of the place it once again occupied in the civilized world.

Carlo Matteucci, a physicist of great talent, who devoted his last years to the organisation of Italian studies, in the dawn of the new kingdom, preparing school systems, told Parliament that a nation that wants to be free and great does not live only on soldiers and on railways, and what a misunderstanding would be created for Italy, resurrected to the nation, if, in the arts, letters and sciences, it did not take up that place that had distinguished it in other times.

Also Quintino Sella, who perhaps better than any other, gathered in his great soul the feelings of the most chosen part of the nation, and better understood what serious moral duties were incumbent on Italy on the day when he accomplished his great political work by taking possession of the Eternal City, to Theodor Mommsen, who told him that you are not in Rome without having cosmopolitan purposes, he replied: "Yes, we cannot fail to have a cosmopolitan purpose in Rome: that of science;" and before the Parliament he solemnly affirmed: "Italy has a debt of honour to humanity ... science for us in Rome is a supreme duty."

It is no wonder then that, in following the development of the sciences, there is a sudden transformation in Italian thought, due to its rapid progress and diffusion, and to the new characters with which it is filled and enriched in the years following the period of political resurgence.

Presenting the development of mathematics in Italy in recent years in short terms, this is the task I have set myself today.

Various elements must be taken into account in order to fully understand which factors contributed to the recent development of the studies of interest to us and to clearly understand the part that each of them has played.

We must first take into account the characteristics of the Italian genius revealed in a long and uninterrupted tradition that, moving from the schools of antiquity, reaches up to our present century; then examine the effect produced by the new methods of teaching and learning, and the profitable emulation that resulted from the colliding of opposing tendencies. Finally, it is necessary to see the influence that the discoveries of foreign mathematicians had on us, an action that led to the increasingly universal character acquired by science and the fruitful virtue of the ever closer international relations and the increasingly lively currents of thought they produced.

With one of those sculptural phrases typical of his conceptual style, Eugenio Beltrami thus reviewed a book by Ernesto Cesàro: "The book really has the requirement of Italianness, that is to say, of that 'quid' that results from the combination of seriousness with the agility of the words and the thoughts, that is the artistic elaboration of the scientific material."

No words more effectively and in a more sober and precise way could characterize Italian mathematical production, not only recent times but of all times.

Artistic sentiment, understood in its highest and most comprehensive meaning, has had, and still plays, a large part in geometric discoveries. It can therefore be understood how mathematics, the science that is not only the purest and most ideal, but is the most frankly artistic of the sciences, has been able to find, since ancient times, a favourable terrain for developing in Italy, where artistic genius is innate in the people, and the character of the mathematical work produced by the Italian geniuses is well understood, a character that will be seen in the various schools and in the different trends that we will have the opportunity to examine.

I would go beyond the limits that I prescribed if I wanted to follow the tradition in all its long journey, from the classical era, through the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, until now, or if I only stopped in the first half of the last century, which marks perhaps the saddest and darkest period. A sad and dark period, in which internal discord is almost reflected in intransigence and scientific intolerance.

Through the writing of Gino Benedetto Loria, the history of the mathematical school that reigned in Naples at the beginning of the 19th century is well known. In it, men who were also of genius, opposed the great discoveries of Joseph-Louis Lagrange and what was modern and new in science, considering it meritorious to bring the subject back several centuries. It has been repeated many times that no public teaching position was given to Guiseppe Battaglini before 1860; in one competition he had been unsuccessful and the reason was that in the treatment of the theme he had been inspired by the new and fruitful ideas of George Salmon, rather than the ancient methods of Isaac Newton.

It is then said, and allow me to repeat it as an indication of the times, that in Tuscany around 1835 a scholar of ecclesiastical law (who was also a scholar of oriental languages) and an algebraist sought the respective chairs of the University. In assigning them they were mistakenly exchanged; the mathematician was appointed professor of canon law and the jurist had algebra. The protests of the interested parties were of no avail because the nomination "motupropri" were now signed and they did not want to change them. The mathematician renounced, but the law expert Orientalist taught algebra, repeating Louis Francoeur's famous texts by heart, throughout his life.

Nonetheless, it would be unjust to keep quiet about the fact that in this interval of time bright flashes of light from time to time appeared in Italy; illustrious names and well-known works attest to it. My colleague Professor Valentino Cerruti, in the last meeting of the Italian Society for the Advancement of Sciences, highlighted this period with rare mastery and illustrated some important researches that were carried out or started at that time.

What was missing in that first fifty years is noted by Luigi Cremona with sagacity and he enunciated it with rough frankness in his famous inaugural address. The reactionary orders of our schools and the small number of chairs prevented the field of university education from widening and the columns of Hercules to come from official programmes. The noble efforts of distinguished men were most often unsuccessful because they lacked any connection between them and because they were often opposed by the governments of the time, for whom public ignorance was a valid support for power.

The institution of special chairs for higher education in mathematics was the first and bright thought of the national government, which it entrusted to the illustrious men whose names we mentioned, to whom, no less illustrious others followed. So suddenly a new environment was formed and a new era began.

The teachers, in the full vigour of their intellectual production and their enthusiasm for scientific research, were called to teach what they themselves studied and discovered day by day; the students had to witness the creation of science with all its struggles, its difficulties, its repentances, its crises, its sweet victories, and they themselves, in turn, had to work alongside and together with the men of genius who had started it.

The schools which were formed in this way and which, thanks to the connection of the efforts and the continuity of the aims, not only to make the best endowed talents shine, but also to make the work of less elevated minds profitable, can easily be recognized; it is then easy to discover and follow in them the origin and continuation of the various and most important thoughts.

Enrico Betti in Pisa and Eugenio Beltrami, first in Pavia and then in Rome, were the two champions of mathematical physics in Italy for about thirty years.

Of different ingenuity and culture (the first formerly master of algebraic theories and the other an original discoverer in the geometric field, even before they devoted themselves to the applications of analysis to physical problems), they rose to high fame also in this branch of studies, of which they carried out, in their long career, almost all the most abstract and theoretical parts, leaving the imprint of their genius.

The researches that Betti, in parallel with his teaching, developed on potential, elasticity and heat cannot be considered detached from each other, since a single thought guides them, a thought that passed from him to those who followed him, and, gradually, it refined and completed itself until it reached the final and most perfect results.

The fundamental concepts and methods of George Green and Carl Friedrich Gauss had opened the way for the general integration of the Laplace equation, the basis of potential theory; Betti's aim was to transport the same methods, first into the field of the science of elastic equilibrium, then into that of heat.

With the works of Betti, as Roberto Marcolongo brilliantly showed in a readable historical summary, a new and long series of frankly Italian research on the integration of equations of elasticity is inaugurated, so much so that it can be said that, if Galileo was the first to see the problem of equilibrium of elastic bodies, it was thanks to the Italian geometers, more than two centuries later, to have largely contributed to carrying out the general theory of those equations in which Navier had represented and, so to speak, captured the whole mechanism of the phenomenon.

After Betti's brilliant debut on the question with the reciprocity theorem and with its broad and fundamental applications, which lay at the foundations of the whole method, Cerruti's research and the discovery of Carlo Somigliana's formulas follow a short while later.

Roberto Marcolongo, Orazio Tedone and others carry research into numerous questions and in the meantime they began in parallel with these studies, through the researches of Emilio Almansi, Guiseppe Lauricella, Tullio Levi-Civita, and Tommaso Boggio, those on the double equation of Laplace.

Finally, the general problems of vibration are detached and differentiated from those of equilibrium, due to the irreducible and essential diversity of the question revealed by the qualities of the characteristics, and they also raise these to a systematic treatment.

Beltrami's research was of a different nature but also in that same field in which Betti had reaped so wide a harvest and with so much fruit.

In order to follow the uninterrupted thread of ideas that guided Beltrami throughout his scientific career, it is necessary to go back to his first researches which refer to the theory of surfaces, to their representation, and turned around the differential parameters and complex variables; research among which the memoirs relating to non-Euclidean geometry shine, in importance and originality, with which Beltrami aimed to give a real solidity to the ideas of Gauss and Lobachevsky and the famous memoirs that commented and interpreted Riemann's theories on curved spaces.

These doctrines on space aroused new curiosities in men of science and were the origin of a new direction of thought. Is it possible to ascertain, and in what way, whether or not space has a curvature?

The idea of resorting to the examination of natural phenomena that could reveal it was spontaneous. Beltrami can be considered among those who conceived the plan to systematically establish a theory of physical phenomena with the hypothesis of a curvature of space, and this explains the transition of this great mathematician from the terrain of research in analytical geometry to that of mathematical physics, since the evolution of his genius remained dominated by this high thought.

But a long period of preparation and orientation precedes in him the explanation of the thought itself, and to this period we owe a large production of works that reattach themselves to classical research on various fields of mechanics and physics. Each of them brings a scientific contribution in itself and shines for its exquisite workmanship and clear treatment, so that their importance is very great, not only for the content, but also because they imposed themselves as a model of elegance on Italian geometers. It was said that Giosuè Carducci's robust prose taught the art of expressing one's thoughts to a whole generation of writers. I wonder if in a similar way Beltrami's writings were not able to shape what I would call the mathematical style of the new generation in Italy, which was inspired by his fine art of carrying out thoughts and calculations and of admirably merging them with each other.

With what I have said so far, and even if I added what Ernesto Padova, Ernesto Cesàro and the others did, who, in the footsteps of Beltrami, dealt with similar problems, I would have given only a very incomplete idea of Italian work in the mathematical physics field.

The researches on mechanics, in which among others Francesco Siacci and Giacinto Morera turned their studies to the methods of Jacobi, Lie and Mayer, the applications of theories of transformation groups to potential theory, which Levi-Civita dealt with, the works on celestial mechanics, on the dynamics of systems and in particular of fluids, and on statics, in which, besides the names already mentioned, those of Domenico Chelini and Domenico Turazza and more recently of Dino Padelletti and Gian Antonio Maggi stand out, and many other studies would also be necessary to be able to analyse, indicate and collect, if not coordinate, the work of the last fifty years in this branch of mathematics. Nor would this complete what would be appropriate to expose, that the mathematical physics researches from the most abstract and analytical region are extended, by degree to degree, almost continuously to that of physics. I will not extend my analysis to this whole field, but it is not possible for me to leave out the discoveries of Galileo Ferraris, whose source must be sought in the purest geometric conception, and which nevertheless had so much importance in practice and gave rise to a flourishing school of electrical engineering studies, in which it became a noble tradition to base oneself on solid and safe mathematical bases.

I already had occasion, in one of the past congresses, to talk about Brioschi, Betti and Casorati and to highlight the different way in which each of them conceived the theory of analytic functions. Their methods are connected to the three great phases that, in its majestic evolution, this doctrine, true ruler of the mathematics of the 19th century, went through. The turn of each of these great masters towards one of the aspects with which the theory of functions presented itself was a consequence of the very most salient qualities of their spirit, of their intimate natural dispositions, and the attitudes they took in front of the theory itself are reflected in all the other attitudes of their scientific life.

This I tried to prove eight years ago and I don't want to repeat myself now. I then spoke of the fruitful virtue that the writings and lessons of these three mathematicians had on young Italians, many of whom, having become masters at the same time, devoted much of their activity to the theory of functions and to all the other doctrines directly connected to it, both in the field of differential and integral equations, and in that of applications to geometry and mechanics; I also tried on that occasion to find out how the influence of the works of Abel and Jacobi and of the fundamental concepts posed by Cauchy, Weierstrass and Riemann were carried out and taught in Italy.

The memory of that period, now classic, is always present with us, in which the theory of functions was shaped in the form that it has assumed and continues, and the memory of the years, full of intense fervour, is kept alive, in which they were understood in Italy, exposed by the very mouth of its discoverer, the fundamental theorems of Mittag-Leffler, and in which the lessons that Charles Hermite delivered in Paris spread and were read and repeated, while from Germany returned those who, having listened to Weierstrass and the Klein, spread their findings. Meanwhile the great works of Poincaré and Picard, Fuchs and Neumann opened vast horizons and pushed our mathematicians towards new problems.

The mere hint of what Ulisse Dini, Luigi Bianchi, Salvatore Pincherle, Ernesto Pascal, Gaicinto Morera, Ernesto Cesàro, Leonida Tonelli, Giulio Vivanti and many others achieved, who worked with such success, would take me far.

After all, the results I should talk about, now well known and which have become part of the common mathematical heritage, reattach and intertwine with the famous discoveries that the most illustrious foreign mathematicians made at the same time, so much so that the Italian results could not be considered as being alone, but we should examine them merged in the great current that drove and dragged the mathematical thought of the last century.

But without going further on the theory of analytic functions, their extension and related studies, and not even mentioning the many doctrines with which algebra is rich, in which Francesco Brioschi, Enrico Betti, Giusto Bellavitis, Nicola Trudi, Francesco Faa Di Bruno before, and more recently Alfredo Capelli, Ernesto Pascal, and Giuseppe Bagnerà reported, nor on the science of numbers, that Angelo Genocchi, Luigi Bianchi, Ernesto Cesàro, and Ruggiero Torelli cultivated with much love, let me speak of a branch of research that flourished with us outside the great movement that stirred all mathematics in Europe, which remained somewhat forgotten for a few years, but which recently aroused interest and curiosity everywhere.

I mean those researches which are not very extensive, although bristling with ever new difficulties, often arid, but still full of attractive results due to their sometimes paradoxical aspect; of those researches, that is, on functions of real variables and their most peculiar singularities, which were effectively called studies on the deformities and monstrosities of mathematics, in which the help of the laws, so to speak, physiological geometry is lacking, and not only does every intuition fail, but all the easy and seductive forecasts most often mislead.

In every vast garden, in which ancient centuries-old plants, rich and luxuriant cultures, attract the attention of those who observe it for the first time, there is a lonely corner, a hidden greenhouse, where the skilled gardener chooses and cares for some plants very singular, in which his expert eye has noticed some variations and particular characters. In the field of mathematical research, that hidden corner with those delicate cultures is represented by the studies to which I have now referred. But they are those humble seedlings, which will probably one day give new and beautiful varieties and which will enrich the garden with rare and precious shapes; in the same way those subtle and minute studies are destined to give life to new concepts and unexpected applications.

It was Ulisse Dini who introduced and spread in Italy the love for these researches with his works, and even more, with his effective and original teaching. Anyone who has undergone the charm of his lessons, in which so many abstruse thoughts become easy and clear by magic, will feel sympathy for the research itself throughout their lives.

Weierstrass and Riemann, starting from ideas that had gradually infiltrated analysis, had started them, George Cantor had made everyone amazed with his unexpected revelations, Paul du Bois-Reymond had penetrated into many dark problems and Gaston Darboux had discovered many beautiful and original propositions. Dini, coordinating this set of doctrines, enriching them with new truths, had the courage to bring them to Italy in the school at the very beginning of the studies of infinitesimal analysis and as the basis of them. A daring undertaking of his youthful years, through which his teaching acquired a new complexion, while the ancient theories were enlivened by a breath of freshness and youth.

Attracted by these studies, a school of mathematicians was formed in Italy who consecrated the strengths of their ingenuity to the development of these doctrines and brought them important results.

And the studies took two directions for us: one led Guido Ascoli, Cesare Arzelà and others to concrete researches on series, limits and the theory of functions; the other aimed, with Giuseppe Peano and with the school that gained an impulse from him, to give an ever more solid basis to the fundamental concepts, merged with those doctrines that deepened the criticism of the postulates and went day by day into regions always more abstract, acquiring an increasingly philosophical character.

And now that I have mentioned in my rapid examination of these latest researches, in which what Felix Klein calls the arithmetic spirit, dominates, let me pass into the field which is usually called geometric studies.

Indeed a passage that some years ago in Italy would have appeared, rather than passing from one to another order of disciplines, crossing the borders of two camps armed against each other. This situation of combat is singular, manifested among us perhaps with greater intensity than elsewhere and whose study offers an argument with interesting and curious considerations.

Analysis and geometry, which were considered and used as two opposite terms, cannot, neither for their origin, nor for their history, nor for their nature, correspond to concepts that are eliminated and mutually exclusive; on the contrary, I will say that they cannot compare with each other, as a relationship between colour and volume, between the weight and the shape of bodies, cannot be established.

The names of analysts and geometers gave rise to those singular classifications or, to put it better, to those strange confusions that astonish those who, from outside, watch the progress of Italian studies. A simple commonality of language that they used made collections of essentially different subjects group together, while mathematicians were separated from each other aiming at a common goal and who, by the content of their works, had no reason to stand out, but that only because the appearance of the procedures used could appear different.

It would therefore seem that a great misunderstanding has presided over certain school struggles, although certainly the persistence of ancient customs and the reactions that manifest themselves towards all methods when they tend to cross certain limits have also contributed to it.

But these struggles, fruitful and generous, that benefited by exciting the hearts and pushing the research along the different, apparently divergent, ways only by which science progresses, are now, as my friend Corrado Segre showed in his beautiful speech delivered at the last Congress, a thing of the past.

The figure of Luigi Cremona predominates and stands out throughout the course of geometric studies in Italy: the primitive impulse they had from him, and their rapid development, was due to his teaching, which was leading the way, with the wide sympathy they encountered and spread they achieved.

The elements of geodesy, mathematical physics and infinitesimal analysis, although in a restricted and limited way, were nevertheless subjects of teaching in our universities, even in the first half of the last century, but in the universities themselves, in no way did they accept the doctrines of higher geometry, which instead flourished in foreign schools. Well, just over forty years had passed since the day Luigi Cremona began its teaching, and Felix Klein could attest that Italy had become the centre of geometric research.

Cremona follows directly Chasles and after him Poncelet, in the first period of his scientific production, then his relations become closer to Plücker, Möbius and mainly Steiner. His works on the theory of curves and surfaces are now classic works, and the doctrine of transformations (which diectly from him took the name Cremonian) was founded by him when he posed the problem of rational transformation in all its generality.

Giuseppe Veronese, Eugenio Bertini, Riccardo de Paolis, Ettore Caporali, Giovanni Battista Guccia, Domenico Montesano, were his direct disciples, and others, such as Vittorio Martinetti and Alfonso Del Re, who indirectly connect to him, although distinct from each other by different working in different institutions, form a host of valiant geometers who made his school famous.

Following the Erlangen programme which, on the basis of the fruitful group concept, managed to classify the ancient and modern theories of geometry and coordinated them according to a systematic plan, showing the various directions coming from a common point of view, it would be easy to locate in this great scheme the work of Cremona and those of his followers and students, and in general that of the various Italian geometers. But time does not allow me to do it and I will therefore have to limit myself to a brief mention of some directions and trends.

The general concept of multi-dimensional spaces had been widely developed, and in Italy, Eugenio Beltrami with general studies of curvature and Enrico Betti with those of connection, had made it quite familiar, before Giuseppe Veronese began his research in this field. Now, what distinguishes his work from that of his predecessors is the frankly geometric character that Veronese gave to his treatment, a character that manifests itself in the very generation of the spaces and in the applications that he made of them.

The further development of these studies in Italy and the new direction they took is mainly due to Corrado Segre with the original direction of his research, and he must be joined by Pasquale del Pezzo, Gino Fano and others. In the second phase of his scientific career, in which he returned to the great work of Max Noether, Segre was responsible for the start of that complex of works with which Castelnuovo, Enriques, Severi, De Franchis obtained their important results on the theory of surfaces, the most recent of which are connected to Émile Picard's discoveries on algebraic functions and thus fall within the orbit of function theory.

In Italy there were numerous enthusiasts of the theory of algebraic forms, at the head of which Guiseppe Battaglini and Enrico D'Ovidio can place themselves, who followed the directions of Cayley, Sylvester, Gordan, and geometrically interpreted the results of algebra. The many works of varying nature and in different directions by Alfredo Capelli and Ernesto Pascal, by Francesco Gerbaldi, Giovanni Maisano and Luigi Berzolari, by Angelo Armenante and Giulio Pittarelli and others, prove the broad and fruitful activity of this school.

Finally, I could not forget the direction (which constantly dominated in the second half of the last century) which goes back to the foundations of geometry, dissecting them and subjecting them to a profound criticism, whose influence is reflected in various ways also in elementary teaching. This tendency manifests itself in a large number of research papers and books and systematically manifests itself in various works, among which I restrict myself to mentioning those of Francesco De Paolis, Veronese and Enriques.

But another area of geometric research of a different nature was cultivated and thriving in Italy. I intend to speak of that geometry which was called infinitesimal, which rose on the basis of the discoveries of Monge and Gauss and, thanks to a long series of works among which the work of Darboux has recently excelled, has provided powerful aids and fruitful methods for the doctrine of differential equations and has enriched the theory of functions with beautiful and fundamental interpretations, while it has been of great help in research in mathematical physics and mechanics.

When already speaking of Beltrami, I mentioned his first works in this field of study, in which Dini also began his scientific career, but first of all it was Brioschi who spread Gauss's fruitful ideas among us, grasping all their importance, so this great one deserves not be forgotten.

The most modern research by Bianchi led to many important and ingenious contributions to the theory of applicable surfaces and to almost all branches of differential geometry, those of Ricci who introduced new procedures and finally the beautiful memoirs of Cesàro on intrinsic geometry, as well as the works of their students, they make up a rich and harmonious collection of studies that make a noble response to the works of pure geometry and algebraic geometry of which I spoke earlier.

The fast race through the field of ideas and studies that I wanted to travel has come to an end. As in any rapid journey, it was possible to grasp only the appearance of those things that flew past. Together with the image of them therefore remains the regret of having left out many and of having observed in a brief way what would have been worthy of careful and profound examination. But I hope that the region travelled may have left the whole impression of being lush and fertile and of promising a fruitful future.

Italy in its youthful and daring impulse towards new ideals did not forget the glories of the past: the historical studies of mathematics took place alongside the original papers. The publication of the Baldassarre Buoncompagni's Bulletin and Gino Loria who collected historical research, while the journals of Tortolini, Brioschi, Battaglini and Guccia brought together the original research, proving the interest that the ancient works aroused in us.

But there was a grandiose historical reconstruction, a feat which must be remembered with special honour. For a feeling of high duty and as a pledge of gratitude from the whole nation rises to the one who taught us to read the book of nature in mathematical characters, the new Italy wanted the critical and complete publication of the works of Galileo, a noble and vast enterprise, for which the re-enactment of a whole epoch and of a whole world was necessary, and which was accomplished under the high auspices of His Majesty the King, great and munificent always in promoting and encouraging what returns to the advantage and decorum of the Fatherland. The name of the Antonio Favaro, who directed the work and devoted loving care to it over long years, remains linked to this famous publication.

I initially indicated the didactic influences that presided over the birth and development of the brilliant research period of the last few years. Today, with the rise of the new century, new needs are making themselves felt which determine more modern orientations of our schools and especially of the schools of engineers; schools with a long and constant tradition connected to us within the faculty of science. The problems, which affect the entire range of mathematical disciplines and which are now being imposed and urgently needed to be resolved, make the present moment comparable to that which passed fifty years ago, when our studies were established into the current structure.

But it is with sure faith that we look to the future, hoping for the constant and harmonious development of Italian mathematical thought combined with that of other nations, since we do not doubt that the same high purposes, combined with the exact intuition of the nation's most lively needs, will drive today, as they inspired half a century ago, men whose senses are entrusted with the fate and future of the Fatherland.

Last Updated January 2020