"Chamberlain pointed specifically at modern Italy as a symbol of the degenerated state of Mediterranean Europe. He proffered evidence for this view in his "masterpiece" Die Grundlagen des XIX Jahrhunderts: "He who travels from London to Rome, goes from the clouds to the sun, but at the same time from a refined civilization and a high culture towards barbarism, filth, brutality, ignorance, lies, and misery. It is not a spectacle of decadence that we contemplate in the south: it is a simple arrest of development; that population has remained in the Roman imperial civilization , while the world has marched forward. Today, it is true, they have begun to awkwardly imitate the north, but instead of assimilating the superior culture, they finish by losing the picturesque vestiges of their past originality. "The "Mediterranean" is thus as low in the scale of culture as Seville and Athens are today cities "less European" than are New York and Melbourne. Between the Germans and the "chaotics" there is an abyss over which it is not possible to build a bridge.""