Institutions
- As the plural name Papal States indicates, the various regional components, usually former independent states, retained their identity under papal rule. The Pope was represented in each province by a governor, either styled papal legate, as in the former principality of Benevento, or Bologna, Romagna, and the March of Ancona; or papal delegate, as in the former duchy of Pontecorvo and in the Campagne and Maritime Province.
- The police force, known as sbirri ("cops" in modern Italian slang), was billeted in private houses (normally a practice of military occupation) and enforced order quite rigorously.
- For the defence of the states against the nascent Italian state in the last years of papal territorial autonomy, an international Catholic volunteer corps, called Papal Zouaves after a kind of French colonial native Algerian infantry, and imitating their uniform type, was created and fought in many engagements with great courage against superior odds in men and equipment.
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Famous quotes containing the word institutions:
“The way in which men cling to old institutions after the life has departed out of them, and out of themselves, reminds me of those monkeys which cling by their tails—aye, whose tails contract about the limbs, even the dead limbs, of the forest, and they hang suspended beyond the hunter’s reach long after they are dead. It is of no use to argue with such men. They have not an apprehensive intellect, but merely, as it were a prehensile tail.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“In abnormal times like our own, when institutions are changing rapidly in several directions at once and the traditional framework of society has broken down, it becomes more and more difficult to measure any type of behavior against any other.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“Schools are generally feminine places, institutions where conformity is valued, taught largely by conformist women.”
—Judith M. Bardwick (b. 1933)