Today is May 5th, which is an important day for Italy. Why? Because it marks the death of Napoleon, year 1821, and is also the title of a famous Italian poem.

Napoleon has been a very important figure for Italy because his brief rule over our peninsula meant, for the first time in Italy after the fall of Roman Empire, rules and principles equal for all the cities in it, and some sort of dignity that the French Revolution's principles brought to us. This gave strength to the idea of a unified Italian nation, and its foundation, forty years after Napoleon's death, is certainly one of his merits. Or, demerits, whatever.

Anyway, our national poet and novelist, the reassuring, catholic, milanese, elegant, bookish patriot Alessandro Manzoni, wrote this famous poem about the death of Napoleon and called it "Il cinque Maggio", "The Fifth of May". You can read it here (in Italian).
The poem is unfailingly taught at the elementary or secondary school, and in theory should be learned by heart by any Italian pupil. Obviously very few remember anything of it.

Everybody knows the first verse, though, "Ei fu. Siccome immobile", which means roughly "He passed away. Just like unmovable". Well, "just like unmovable" is explained three verses below, when his unmovable corpse is paralleled with the "astounded land" that remains still like a dead corpse at the hearing of the news. What happened in our modern language is that the two phrases got linked together in a quite funny tautology that goes like "He passed away, just like unmovable", which obviously doesn't mean a great deal.
Anyway, since the Italian language used in poems and plays in those years is hardly recognizable as a spoken language, nobody can really "feel" a poem like that at the first read now, without making a not easy mental translation into contemporary Italian. Thus the verses are easily forgotten, and, as I said, as in this case very few remember anything after the first verse or so.

That said, "Il 5 Maggio" is still a very important poem, and the reason is very simple: aside of the first verse, other two catching phrases in comprehensible Italian that can be read in the poem are very well alive in our modern language as proverbs, or euphemisms.
"Dall'Alpi alle Piramidi", "From the alps to the Pyramids", is sometimes used to characterize some very long path or distance one covered during a task. And "Ai posteri l'ardua sentenza", "posterity will be the judge of it" is used everywhere there's some doubt about something that can be considered either good or bad.

This is pretty much all that remains alive of a poem that supposedly meant so much for our history given the fact that it's mandatory to learn it at school. I certainly learned many verses of it when they told me to, maybe even them all. But I know I recited them without minding their meaning at all, just like (I suppose, since I am not even baptized) some do with prayers.
Blah-blah-blah, blah-blah.

I wonder if, other that meaning that we don't actually learn anything useful from teachers at school, which is pretty obvious, this means also that the poem is actually not very good, not meant to last, because its language is too literary and abstract.
Actually, I found only a couple of verses I'd save, throwing all the rest away for posterity, you know, closed into some cupboard.

how many times, at the silent
dying of a inert day,
he stayed, (...)
his arm folded at his breast

it's the only moment in the poem when you can actually picture something in your imagination, other than ideas, and something "to see", to walk into, is all I ask to literature. End of the post.

-- in picture, above: mr. Napoleon