The proximity of the two countries tended not for it, but against it. They had been often at war; all the memories of the Piedmontese people, the heroic exploit of Pietro Micca, the royal legend of the Superga, turned on resistance to the powerful neighbour. A long line of territorial nobles like the Bensos transmits, if nothing else, at least a strong sentiment for the birth land. In Cavour this sentiment was, indeed, to widen even in boyhood, but it widened into Italian patriotism, not into sterile cosmopolitanism.