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Of course, Washington’s greatest role was as the Pater Patriae, the Father of His Country — a title admirers began bestowing on him even before the country technically existed.

Outraged by the graffiti that appeared on her apartment building, Spitzmiller and her friends—all women, all foreigners except for Anita Garibaldi, great-granddaughter of the pater patriae—began leading weekend “retakes” to clean the walls and floors of Rome.

Putin himself, a father figure to his proteges, would then become a pater patriae, or, to use a Singaporean formula, a president mentor.

But it is not the mediæval Florence that the divine singer had known, which his ghost now revisits, but the Florence of the Quattrocento–with the completed Cathedral and the cupola of Brunelleschi rising over it, with the Campanile and the great tower of the Palazzo della Signoria completed–the Florence which has just lost Cosimo dei Medici, Pater Patriae, and may need fresh guidance, now that great mutations are at hand in Italy.

Entitled by public decree Pater Patriae, he was buried at his own request without any pompous funeral, beneath a simple marble in front of the high altar of San Lorenzo.