Avanti

As Italy prepares to celebrate the 150th anniversary of its unification next month, some Italians are asking themselves whether it did more harm than good

Feb 24th 2011 | from the print edition

THE tourists who flood into Rome’s forum, Florence’s Uffizi gallery or St Mark’s Square in Venice might be surprised to learn that Italy is one of the youngest countries in Europe. It was unified only in 1861, and not until ten years later did Rome take over from Florence as Italy’s capital. This youthfulness may help to explain the country’s fragility, which is being tested anew under the messily embarrassing rule of Silvio Berlusconi.

David Gilmour’s splendid book tells the story of Italy from Roman times. He canters through the early years, with a few diversions to explore the importance of city-states in medieval days or the glorious offshoot that was Venice. But the heart of his book is its account of the unification, or Risorgimento, and of Italy’s subsequent chequered history.

His broad themes can be summed up in two famous quotations about Italy. One is Prince Metternich of Austria’s dismissive 1847 observation that Italy was just “a geographical expression”. The other is the comment made in 1861 by Massimo d’Azeglio, a pioneer of unification, that “we have made Italy; now we must make Italians.”

Like most foreign visitors who experience Italy’s culture, buildings, physical beauty, food and climate, Mr Gilmour, a British historian and journalist, is a passionate fan. That makes his skewering of Italy’s myths more striking. Giuseppe Verdi, he insists, may have been a great opera composer but he was neither a great patriot nor a nationalist. The men who unified Italy, notably Camillo Cavour, Giuseppe Garibaldi (pictured) and Giuseppe Mazzini, as well as Azeglio, were patriots (at least for Piedmont), but by no means heroes. Mazzini was a dreamily unsuccessful revolutionary, Garibaldi an unscrupulous adventurer whose invasion of Sicily in 1860 was illegal and Cavour an old cynic who never travelled south of Pisa.

The book dwells on two other weaknesses in the Italian Risorgimento. The first is the lack of enthusiasm of so many Italians. The church was against it—hence the undignified spectacle of Pope Pius IX scampering out of the Palazzo del Quirinale in 1870. Venice never wanted to join. Most important, although many in Naples and Sicily welcomed the takeover from Turin, this reflected disillusion with their Bourbon monarchs, not enthusiasm for Piedmont’s Victor Emmanuel II.

Quite soon after 1861 both northerners and southerners were questioning the wisdom of unification. The snobbery of the north towards supposedly backward Naples was (and still is) striking. Yet Naples was for many years the biggest city in the peninsula; it built the first steamboat, suspension bridge and railway in Italy and, even more surprising, was as late as 1800 more liberal than most of the rest of the country.

The second weakness in the Risorgimento was an unabashed desire for military success. This theme was well explored in Christopher Duggan’s recent history of Italy, “The Force of Destiny”. Despite the influence on Italy’s fortunes of wars involving France, Austria and Prussia (the German chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, claimed that Italy sprang from three battles beginning with “S”: Solferino, Sadowa and Sedan), unification was achieved with little fighting. That left Italy’s leaders thirsting for a war to demonstrate their new country’s greatness.

This thirst proved a scourge. Some 6,000 Italians were killed in the disastrous battle of Adowa in Abyssinia in 1896. More than 1m died in the first world war, most through incompetence in a conflict that Italy could easily have sat out. An unslaked desire for military glory propelled Benito Mussolini to power in 1922, making him in a sense another child of the Risorgimento. Mussolini at least conquered Ethiopia, but for him and his people the second world war was yet another disaster.

The best bit of modern Italian history had to wait until 1945, when Alcide de Gasperi began the country’s post-war boom. Although Italy had problems, including a revival of the Mafia and a merry-go-round of weak governments, 50 years of rapid growth have made it a rich country. Its big concern now is the struggle to stay rich—something that years of economic stagnation under Mr Berlusconi, Italy’s longest serving prime minister since the war, makes far harder.

Italy’s north-south divide remains gaping, too (though, as the author says, there is a less well known east-west divide either side of the Apennines). Indeed, the country’s diversity is a constant feature of Mr Gilmour’s book. He notes that in 1861 only one Italian in 40 spoke the language (Victor Emmanuel barely did so). He cites surveys from 1960 finding Sicilians ignorant of Italy. And he quotes northerners whose disdain for the south, or Mezzogiorno, leads them to call it Africa or Egypt.

Curiously Italy’s uneasy and in some ways incomplete unification is now re-emerging as an issue for Mr Berlusconi alongside his squalid legal cases. His government survives thanks to the support of the Northern League, which wants a far more decentralised Italy—and some of whose voters favour a new country, Padania. Perhaps the celebrations of Italy’s 150th birthday will reignite national fervour and revive morale. Sadly, shallow politicking is more likely.

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