"Today Benevento is largely a brand new city with oases of beautiful monuments. Even in the remnants of what was once the intellectual aristocracy of the South, alive although numerically restricted, I have noticed here a passion for art, a defense of the artistic and archaeological heritage, which are less common in the North of Italy. It is that humanistic passion that in the South of Italy now threatens to be shipwrecked, but which here is kept awake, as I said, also by civic pride. (pp. 496-497)"