The Force of Destiny

CHRISTOPHER DUGGAN

The Force of Destiny

A History of Italy since 1796

ALLEN LANE

an imprint of

PENGUIN BOOKS
ALLEN LANE
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First published 2007

1

Copyright © Christopher Duggan, 2007

The moral right of the author has been asserted

All rights reserved

Without limiting the rights under copyright
reserved above, no part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior
written permission of both the copyright owner and
the above publisher of this book
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

EISBN: 978–0–141–90834–2
For J.

‘Cela est bien dit… mais il faut cultiver notre jardin.’

Contents

List of Illustrations
List of Maps
Preface

PART ONE:
Awakening, 1796–1815

1 Deliverance, 1796–9
2 Searching for the Nation’s Soul
3 Conspiracy and Resistance

PART TWO:
Preaching, 1815–46

4 Restoration, Romanticism and Revolt, 1815–30

5 Fractured Past and Fractured Present
6 Apostles and Martyrs: Mazzini and the Democrats, 1830–44
7 Educators and Reformers: The Moderates

PART THREE:
Poetry, 1846–60

8 Revolution, 1846–9
9 Piedmont and Cavour

10 Unity, 1858–60
 PART FOUR:
Prose, 1861–87

11 The New State

12 The Road to Rome, 1861–70
13 The Threat from the South, 1870–85
14 National Education
15 Sources of Authority: King, Church and Parliament, 1870–87

PART FIVE:
War, 1887–1918

16 Francesco Crispi and the ‘New European Order’, 1887–91

17 The Fin de Siècle Crisis

18 Rival Religions: Socialism and Catholicism

19 Nationalism
20 The Great War, 1915–18

PART SIX:
Fascism, 1919–43

21 Civil War and the Advent of Fascism, 1919–22

22 The Establishment of a Dictatorship, 1922–5

23 The Fascist Ethical State

24 Community of Believers

25 A Place in the Sun, 1929–36

26 Into the Abyss, 1936–43

PART SEVEN:
Parties
27 The Foundations of the Republic, 1943–57
28 The Economic Miracle, 1958–75

29 Towards the ‘Second Republic’

 

References
Index
List of Illustrations

Photographic acknowledgements are given in parentheses.

1. An allegory of the invasion of Italy, 1796 (Museo Centrale del
Risorgimento)
2. The horses of St Mark’s being shipped o to France, 1797
(University of Reading Library)
3. Antonio Canova’s monument to Vittorio Al eri (Alinari
Archives, Florence)
4. Pietro Rossi, Lord of Parma, by Francesco Hayez (Pinacoteca di
Brera, Milan)
5. Peter the Hermit Preaching the Crusade, by Francesco Hayez
(Giulio Einaudi Editore/private collection)
6. A meeting of Carbonari, 1821 (Museo Centrale del
Risorgimento)
7. An engraving celebrating Pope Pius IX’s allocution, 10 February
1848 (Museo Centrale del Risorgimento)
8. La Meditazione, by Francesco Hayez (Civica Galleria d’Arte
Moderna, Verona)
9. Giuseppe Mazzini (Alinari Archives, Florence)
10. Count Camillo Benso di Cavour (Istituto Mazziniano, Genoa)
11. King Victor Emmanuel II and Rosa Vercellana (Giulio Einaudi
Editore/private collection)
12. The bandit leader Nicola Napolitano (Editori Riuniti)
13. Giuseppe Garibaldi wounded, 1862 (Museo Centrale del
Risorgimento)
14. Francesco Crispi meeting Bismarck at Friedrichsruh, 1887
(Rizzoli Editore)
15. The Battle of Adua, 1896 (Fototeca Storica Nazionale Ando
Gilardi)
16. An emigrant family from southern Italy, New York, 1905
(Giulio Einaudi Editore/private collection)
17. Giovanni Giolitti (UTET, Turin)
18. Gabriele D’Annunzio (Alinari Archives, Florence)
19. The fascist squad of Fermo (Archivio Centrale dello Stato,
Rome)
20. The Madonna del manganello, Monteleone Calabro (Arnoldo
Mondadori Editore)
21. Jumping over bayonets in the Mussolini Forum (Alinari
Archives, Florence)
22. The entrance to the exhibition for the bimillennium of Augustus
(Alinari Archives, Florence)
23. Camel troops parading before the Vittoriano, Rome (Alinari
Archives, Florence)
24. Hitler and Mussolini at Florence railway station (Alinari
Archives, Florence)
25. The front cover of the rst number of the La difesa della razza,
1938 (Biblioteca Nazionale, Rome)
26. Piazzale Loreto, 29 April 1945 (PA Photos/Empics)
27. A Christian Democrat electoral poster, 1948 (Archivio Storico
Fotocroce, Piacenza)
28. The advent of television, Carpi, 1956
(Giancolombo/Contrasto/eyevine)
29. The launch of the new FIAT 500,1957 (Archivio Storico Fiat,
Turin)
30. Ravenna, May Day, 1961 (Berengo Gardin/Constrasto/eyevine)
31. A southern immigrant arriving in Milan, 1969 (Uliano Lucas)
32. The murder of Benedetto Grado, Palermo, 1983 (Franco
Zecchin/Picturetank)
33. Silvio Berlusconi, 2004 (Renato Franceschin/Grazia Neri)
List of Maps

1. Italy before 1796

2. The uni cation of Italy 1815–70
3. Italy since 1919
4. Italy and the Mediterranean basin
Preface

The composer Giuseppe Verdi was not a man with particularly

strong or sophisticated political views, but he was almost unerringly
alert to the mood of his audiences; and when, at the beginning of
1861, just a few months after the extraordinary chain of events that
had led, in what many observers felt had been a providential
fashion, to the uni cation of Italy under King Victor Emmanuel II of
Piedmont–Sardinia and his prime minister, Count Camillo Cavour,
he was approached by the Imperial Theatre of St Petersburg to write
a new opera, he quickly alighted for his subject on a play that had
been written nearly thirty years earlier by a well-known Spanish
writer and politician, the Duke of Rivas, Don Alvaro o la fuerza del
sino – Don Alvaro, or the Force of Fate. Verdi worked on the opera in
the late summer and autumn of 1861, and in November 1862 La
forza del destino (The Force of Destiny), as it was now called, received
its premier in St Petersburg. It was a considerable success, and the
composer was rewarded by the Tsar with the Order of St Stanislas –
though the third performance was marred by a demonstration
staged, it seems, by Russian musical nationalists who were unhappy
at the o cial accolades being meted out to a foreign work.1
La forza del destino was not an overtly political opera – though it
contained invocations to war against the Austrians (‘the eternal
plague of Italy and her sons’) that were guaranteed to excite Italian
audiences when it toured the peninsula: a large part of north-eastern
Italy was still under the rule of Austria in 1862 and there was much
talk at the time of the need for a fresh military o ensive to nish
the work of uni cation. But running through Verdi’s opera (the only
one to which he gave an abstract title) was an idea that appeared to
many patriots to encapsulate the essence of the political drama that
had unfolded in 1859–60: that, irrespective of human intentions and
actions, there was a force, a hidden hand, which was directing the
course of history towards predetermined goals. Was this not the best
explanation for how the country had been uni ed in the teeth of so
many seemingly insurmountable obstacles? There had been the
indi erence or outright hostility of much of the Italian population,
the bitter antagonism between the moderate and democratic wings
of the national movement, the existence of deep-rooted regional
divisions, the absence of strong economic, cultural and linguistic
bonds, and the vehement opposition of the three greatest powers on
the continent: the Roman Catholic Church, Austria and France (the
emperor Napoleon III had been happy to see an enlarged Piedmont,
but the last thing he had wanted was to bring about a united Italy
that might rival France in southern Europe).
That the uni cation of Italy had been in large measure fortuitous
had been underlined for many Italians by the sudden death in June
1861, just a few weeks after the formal proclamation of the new
kingdom, of Count Cavour, the man who more than any other had
appeared to have a sense of the direction in which a airs in the
peninsula were moving and some degree of mastery over them.
Verdi had called him ‘the Prometheus of our people’; and when
news came through of his demise, he wept, he confessed, ‘like a
child’.2 The impression that the country now faced an extremely
precarious future was reinforced by the rapid deterioration of law
and order in the south of the peninsula in the second half of 1861,
mounting insolvency and a slide towards civil war. And when,
shortly after completing the score of La forza del destino, Verdi
accepted a commission for a work to mark an international concert
for the London Exhibition in the spring of 1862, he produced a
cantata, entitled Inno delle nazioni (Hymn of the Nations), in which a
‘bard’ calls for a world of peace and invokes divine aid for the
completion of Italy’s political and moral resurrection – but in terms
that were far more redolent of uncertain yearning than con dent
expectation:
O Italy, O Italy, O my fatherland betrayed,
May the benign heavens be propitious to you still,
 Until that day when you rise again, free, to the sun!
O Italy, O Italy, O my fatherland!

From the moment when the French revolutionary forces of

Napoleon Bonaparte crossed the Alps into Piedmont and Lombardy
in the spring of 1796 and brought with them the idea that the
people of Italy might constitute a free and independent nation, the
struggle to determine the character of a new unitary state in the
peninsula proved immensely di cult. Even more problematic was
how to transmit to millions of illiterate peasants, most of them
scattered in isolated mountainous settlements, the idea that their
primary loyalty should henceforth be to something called ‘Italy’.
Ever since the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West in the fth
century, the peninsula had been subjected to a succession of
invaders; and amid the chaos it was the Church and the network of
largely autonomous towns in the north and centre of the country
that had emerged as the most enduring focal points of political
authority. Often, though, it was a smaller unit – a faction, a party,
an urban district, a confraternity or a family – that had developed as
the principal focus of an individual’s allegiance. How to graft ‘the
nation’ onto this intensely fractured political landscape – and in the
teeth of the countervailing universalism of Roman Catholicism –
was to be the main task confronting those who were drawn to the
ideology of patriotism created by the French Revolution.
This book seeks to examine how, under the impact of the
Napoleonic invasion and the mixture of optimism and resentment
that this engendered, an initially small group of educated men and
women began to promote the idea of an Italian nation and consider
why a country that in the past had boasted the civilizations of
classical Rome and the Renaissance had fallen behind other parts of
Europe so conspicuously in recent centuries – economically,
culturally and politically. Much of the discussion focused on the
problem of the Italian character, using concepts that had been made
familiar by writers of the eighteenth century (and earlier) who had
endeavoured to account for the rise and fall of states and empires in
essentially moral terms. The task of what came to be known as the
Risorgimento (literally ‘resurrection’ or ‘revival’) was not just to
secure the independence of Italy from foreign rule (French, initially,
and Austrian after 1815), but more fundamentally to eradicate the
vices that centuries of despotism and clerical rule had allegedly
engendered – for example, subservience, indiscipline, excessive
materialism and a lack of martial ardour. This approach to the
country’s problems retained a powerful allure long after uni cation
in 1860, fed by repeated disappointments in domestic and foreign
policy. It reached its apogee with fascism.
The restoration of absolutist government throughout the
peninsula after 1815 forced patriots to look above all to secret
societies to further their cause; but as the young Genoese
conspirator Giuseppe Mazzini came to recognize in the early 1830s
after a series of failed insurrections, the crucial issue was not so
much revolutionary leadership and organization as education –
reaching out to the mass of the population, ‘the people’, and
persuading them to support the cause of progress and national
unity. And the key to success in this domain, he believed, lay in
appropriating the language and practices of the most powerful
framework of reference for the majority of Italians, Catholicism, and
harnessing them to the cause of the nation. Hence his emphasis on
the centrality of God, faith, duty, doctrinal purity, preaching,
martyrdom and blood to the attainment of a new united Italy. The
interpenetration of religion and politics, the sense – part instinctual,
often quite calculated – that political movements needed to make
use of the paradigm of the Church if they were to win an
enthusiastic popular following, was to remain an enduring theme of
Italian history deep into the twentieth century.
The decades leading up to the uni cation of Italy laid down the
principal terms of the debate about the nation; and many of the
issues that had so preoccupied patriots in these years of the
Risorgimento – the questions of character and education, the desire
to recover former greatness, the problem of how to engage the
masses, the search for a common history, the balance between
freedom and unity, regionalism and centralization, and the place of
the Church – were carried over into the new kingdom and continued
to inform much of the political and cultural life of Italy down to the
Second World War (and in certain signi cant respects beyond). And
one important reason why these concerns remained as pertinent and
vital after 1860 as they had been before was because of a widely
shared sense that the national movement had only succeeded in
bringing about the material uni cation of the country – and that
largely as a result of foreign intervention. ‘Moral uni cation’, as it
was frequently referred to, had yet to be achieved. Relatively few of
the peninsula’s 20 million or so inhabitants felt emotionally engaged
with the new state; and many were overtly hostile. As the
Piedmontese politician Massimo d’Azeglio observed in a remark that
became famous, Italy had been made, but the task of making
Italians had still to be accomplished.
The fortuitous manner in which uni cation was achieved gave
rise after 1860 to a complex amalgam of hopes and fears. There was
an acute sense of the precariousness of the new kingdom and of the
fragility of the institutions – neither parliament nor the monarchy
could claim signi cant moral authority; and the fact that the most
in uential organization in the peninsula, the Church, was hostile –
refusing to recognize Italy’s existence formally until 1929 – widened
the gap between the masses and the state. The rapid emergence of
revolutionary socialism from the 1870s further accentuated the
division between what was referred to as ‘real Italy’ and ‘legal Italy’.
In these circumstances the country’s rulers felt impelled to adopt a
variety of strategies, some of them mutually con icting, in an e ort
to create moral uni cation and thereby, it was hoped, ‘make
Italians’. The realization that many of the policies pursued –
including centralization, su rage reform, military service and
education (understood in broad terms, and distinct from
‘instruction’) – were either ine ective or counter-productive led
increasingly to a view that the best means of healing the country’s
inner fractures and giving the state the prestige that it lacked was
through war. After all, had not every major nation in the world –
whether Britain, France, the United States, or (in 1864–70)
Germany – been forged in the crucible of military success?
But the impulse towards war did not only derive from concern at
the country’s lack of internal cohesion. It was also fed by the
rhetorical legacy of the Risorgimento, and the often extravagant
claims made by the likes of Mazzini and Vincenzo Gioberti about
Italy’s glorious future destiny. Admittedly such claims were
intended in large measure as tools for mobilizing popular support
for the cause of uni cation, but they inevitably clung to the image
of the resurgent nation, and after 1860 disillusioned patriots were
quick to denounce what they saw as the prosaic character of the
new kingdom and contrast it with the ‘poetry’ of the Risorgimento.
Failures in foreign policy and the frequently disparaging attitudes
displayed by foreign governments towards Italy created a growing
antipathy to cautious parliamentary liberalism and an increasing
receptiveness to the language of bellicose nationalism. The chasm
between expectations and the reality of the country’s limited
material resources, already a feature of the Risorgimento, grew
more pronounced, causing the German Chancellor, Otto von
Bismarck, to remark on one occasion: ‘Italy has a large appetite, but
poor teeth.’
The drift towards hyperbole, evident in the writings of the
‘national bards’, Giosuè Carducci and Gabriele D’Annunzio, and in
the politics of Francesco Crispi in the 1880s and 1890s and
subsequently of the Nationalists and Mussolini, owed much to the
strength of the idealist tradition within Italian elite culture – the
belief, in part of religious provenance, that it was spirit rather than
matter that shaped the course of history. If Italians learned to think
in ambitious terms and eschewed their former cynicism and
passivity, what was to stop the country emerging once again as a
dominant force in Europe? But the extraordinary manner in which
Italy had come into being in 1859–60 also cast its shadow over later
generations, prompting the likes of even sober-minded politicians
such as Giovanni Giolitti to throw caution to the wind on occasions
and embark on some unpredictable venture – as he did on the
 ftieth anniversary of uni cation in 1911, with his sudden invasion
of Libya. If providence had come to the rescue of Cavour and
Garibaldi, why might it not do so for others prepared to take similar
risks? But to live dangerously was to risk falling prey to the
intoxication of hubris; and hubris could bring nemesis in its wake,
as the 1940s showed.
Once unleashed in the 1790s, the idea that ‘the people’
constituted the nation and that the nation should be coterminous
with the state was a genie of ferocious power. As the case of Italy
suggests, the imperative inherent in the concept of unity could be as
disruptive and coercive as it was liberating. Mazzini dreamed of a
world composed of free nations living in contentment and universal
peace. But as his own career amply demonstrated, it was one thing
to ordain the existence of a God-given community and quite another
to persuade millions of disparate men and women that this was the
unit of humanity to which they naturally belonged. Furthermore, it
was far from self-evident that nations would ever reach the point
where they felt su ciently secure and internally cohesive to pass
from a condition of ‘becoming’ to one of being ‘made’. Mazzini
himself was a quintessential Romantic, inclined to value the pain of
pursuit above the joy of attainment, and he often stressed how
moral identity was inseparable from ‘mission’ – a category that did
not augur well for harmonious international co-existence.
This book seeks to explore how the national idea unfolded in Italy
during the last two centuries and examines some of the initiatives
that politicians, intellectuals and others undertook in an e ort to
bridge the gap between the imagined community and the reality
(though what was regarded as reality was itself often the product as
much of imaginative interpretation as of objective description).
Inevitably, given the countless rivulets that feed into all thoughts
and feelings, a work of this kind can only ever hope to provide a
very partial picture of the complex interaction between the moral
and material worlds; and the fact that no two human beings can
harbour exactly the same outlooks or responses means that many
dimensions of the debates have necessarily been overlooked or
underplayed. What I hope to indicate, though, in the course of the
narrative is how the problem of the Italian nation has been
formulated in terms that recur throughout the country’s recent
history; and while these terms should not be seen as having had any
teleological force, they might legitimately be regarded as
constituting one of the patterns in the carpet that it is the task of the
historian to identify.
The nation-state has not enjoyed a particularly good press during
the last few decades, certainly in continental Europe, and historical
writing has tended to re ect this by seeking to highlight the
persistence of local or regional identities deep into the modern era
and stressing how for most people a plurality of loyalties was a
reality of life. But the fact of multiple layers of attachment is not an
argument for placing the nation-state in the dock and claming that it
per se was to blame for the tragedies of the twentieth century.
Human beings from time immemorial have felt the need to owe
primary allegiance to a collective body of one kind or another – be
it a tribe, a city, or some alternative ethnic, geographical or cultural
unit; and the impulse to assert the identity of the group, however
large or small it may be, can easily lead – especially when feelings
of insecurity are involved – to aggression and intolerance. There is
no reason to suppose that a supra-national structure such as Europe
would be any less prone to the same uneasy dynamics of self-
de nition – particularly if the latest ideological cleavages in the
world were to result in a concept such as Christendom being
plucked from the historical locker and held up as a possible solution
to current anxieties.
In Italy, the political earthquake of the early and mid-1990s that
led to the collapse of the First Republic has sparked erce debates
about the merits and demerits of uni cation and a protracted
argument about which elements of Italian history should be
celebrated and which condemned. The Northern League has
declared that the south of the country should properly be regarded
as a separate nation and has criticized the Risorgimento for having
imposed the straitjacket of unity on the country. And in the south
voices of protest have been raised against what have been seen as
the persistent colonialist and racist attitudes of northerners and the
perpetration during the 1860s of what some have claimed was
tantamount to genocide. The parties of the right have looked to
rehabilitate fascism and have condemned the left for its inability to
face up to the political crimes that were committed by anti-fascists
during (and immediately after) the war, while the left has retaliated
by defending the work of the Resistance and highlighting the
illiberal, undemocratic and inhumane aspects of Mussolini’s regime.
The acrimonious character of these debates, and the fact that they
have been linked closely to current party political battles, has
created a di cult climate in which to discuss Italy’s modern history:
exaggeration, omission and distortion have been common features
of much recent discussion. No historian can expect to remain
unin uenced by these polemics, even when writing from a distance;
and some of the central themes in this study – among them the
question of why Italy has failed to acquire a strong sense of either
the nation or the state – have been thrown into sharp relief largely
as a consequence of the turmoil following the breakdown of the
‘First Republic’. But it has not been my intention in writing this
book to engage systematically with any one point of view. I have
tried to see events in Italy during the last two centuries as far as
possible from the standpoint of the participants, and such issues as
whether or not uni cation was an error make little sense
historically. This does not mean that the past should be viewed with
moral neutrality: understanding may attenuate blame, but it cannot
absolve those who have the advantage of hindsight, and are able to
see what particular lines of thought and action ultimately led to,
from rejecting political systems and ideas that resulted in so much
human su ering and damage.

In writing this book I have incurred a number of debts. During the

last ten years a group of outstanding Italian scholars have
revitalized the study of the Risorgimento by examining how the
national message was generated and transmitted. I owe an
enormous amount to their work, and especially to the pioneering
studies of Alberto Banti. I am particularly grateful to the British
Academy for the award of a two-year Research Readership in 2003–
5, which freed me from university commitments and enabled me to
undertake much of the necessary reading and re ection. My
colleagues in the Department of Italian Studies at Reading have
been a source of support as well as intellectual stimulation over the
years, and I would like to thank them for their forbearance during
my absence. Richard Bosworth read almost the entire typescript and
his comments were invariably highly perceptive, saving me from
stylistic infelicities as well as factual inaccuracies. Francesca Medioli
o ered some very astute observations on the early chapters. Others
who generously helped with speci c points include David Laven,
Lucy Riall, Stephen Gundle, Chris Wagsta , John Foot, Linda Risso
and Grazia De Michele. Naturally any errors that remain are entirely
my responsibility. I would also like to thank Elena Gianini Belotti,
whose excellent novel Prima della quieta rst introduced me to the
case of Italia Donati. I am very grateful to my agent, Felicity Bryan,
for her encouragement and belief in the project from the outset, and
to Simon Winder at Penguin Books for his unfailing enthusiasm and
consummate editorial wisdom. Mark Handsley has been an excellent
copy-editor. My greatest debt is to my family. This is the second
large volume that Amy and Tom have grown up with, and no writer
could ask for a better salve for the pessimism often engendered by
studying the crooked timber of humanity than being continually
reminded of what is important and good in life. My heartfelt thanks
to them – and to Jennifer, to whom the book is dedicated.

I have not included a bibliography: the sources for a book of this

kind and scope are inevitably somewhat eclectic (and mostly in
Italian). Those wishing for guidance on further reading in English
could usefully begin by consulting D. Beales and E. Biagini, The
Risorgimento and the Uni cation of Italy (London, 2003), D. Mack
Smith, Modern Italy: A Political History (New Haven and London,
1997) and P. Ginsborg, Italy and Its Discontents 1980–2001 (London,
2001).
 In order not to burden the text with Italian, I have in general
given the titles of books, poems and paintings in English – unless the
original is well known, signi cant or suggestive. I have not
anglicized Italian names of kings and princes except in the cases of
Victor Emmanuel and Ferdinand.

Italy before 1796

The uni cation of Italy 1815–70
Italy since 1919
Italy and the Mediterranean basin in the inter-war years
PART ONE

Awakening 1796–1815

Deliverance, 1796–9

Soldiers… Your fatherland has the right to expect great things of you.
Will you live up to its expectations? You still have battles to ght, towns
to capture and rivers to pass. Everyone is burning to carry the glory of
the French people far and wide. Everyone is eager to impose a glorious
peace. Everyone wishes to be able to return to their village and say with
pride: ‘I was in the army that conquered Italy!’ My friends, I promise you
this conquest; but… you must respect the people you are delivering…
People of Italy, the French army is coming to break your chains. Meet it
with con dence.

Napoleon Bonaparte, proclamation to the Army of Italy, 26 April

1796

But where will I nd refuge? In Italy? A prostituted land, forever the

prize of victory. Will I be able to face those who have despoiled, derided
and sold us without weeping with anger? Destroyers of peoples, who
make use of liberty in the same way as the popes made use of the
crusades. Oh! I have often wished to plunge a knife in my heart, in
despair at being able to avenge myself, and shed all my blood amid the
last cries of my fatherland!

Ugo Foscolo, Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (1802)

THE ARRIVAL OF NAPOLEON

On Sunday, 15 May 1796, the feast of Pentecost, Napoleon

Bonaparte entered Milan in triumph. In the space of a little over a
month his ill-equipped army of some 30,000 men had secured a
series of lightning victories over the Piedmontese and Austrians, and
now the whole of northern and central Italy lay open before him.
Quite what he intended to do with the newly conquered territories
was far from clear, and many of those who turned out in the late
spring sunshine to watch the French troops ling through the streets
of the city must have experienced a good deal of uncertainty and
dread as well as excitement. The French authorities had announced
ahead of the invasion that Napoleon was coming to set ‘the peoples
of Italy’ free and to ‘break their chains’;1 and Napoleon himself had
promised the Milanese that their city would become the capital of a
republic stretching from sea to sea, enjoying the ‘eternal friendship
of France’.2 But there could be no guarantee that such promises
would be kept.
Among those watching the ragged French troops ling into Milan
was an elderly economist, Pietro Verri. Verri had been a leading
gure in the movement to introduce reforms that had swept through
most of the Italian states in the 1760s and 1770s. Like many fellow
intellectuals, Verri had grown increasingly disillusioned at the slow
pace of change and disenchanted with princely governments, and
had retired from public life in 1786. The outbreak of the French
Revolution had rekindled his hopes. Observing the French soldiers,
he was conscious of a raw energy – an energy rooted, he felt, in the
self-con dence that came from their feeling of belonging to a
‘nation’, and which more than compensated for their lack of
equipment and their indiscipline:
They marched in disorderly fashion, and were dressed in tattered uniforms of di erent
colours. Some had no arms, and there was very little artillery. Their horses were weak and
scrawny. When mounting guard, they sat down. They looked not so much like an army as a
population that has brazenly sallied out from its town to invade the surrounding
neighbourhood. Tactics, discipline and skill were constantly subordinate to the national
commitment of a people ghting for themselves against [the Austrian] automata, who were

ghting from fear of punishment.3

Verri’s admiration for the French troops arriving in Milan was

shared by his friend the distinguished choreographer and dancer
Gasparo Angiolini. Angiolini had been born into a theatrical family
in Florence in 1731, and like many talented Italian artists of his
generation had decided as a young man to leave the provincial
con nes of his home city and try his luck in the courts of northern
Europe. After a decade of travels, he had risen to become director of
ballet at the Imperial Theatre in Vienna, where he had worked
closely with the great opera composer Christoph Willibald von
Gluck, developing the dramatic narrative style known as ballet
d’action. In 1766 he had moved to St Petersburg to take over from
the illustrious Austrian choreographer Franz Hilverding, at the
Imperial Theatre. Laden with honours and pensions, he had
returned to his native country in 1778 and had taken up the post of
choreographer at the theatre of La Scala in Milan. His villa,
Malgacciata, outside the city, was frequented by such luminaries as
the poet Giuseppe Parini and the jurist Cesare Beccaria.4
Living and working abroad, often alongside Italians from other
parts of Italy, Angiolini had developed a strong sense of belonging
to a great cultural nation. But he had also grown aware that Italy
had lost its former pre-eminence in the arts and was now
languishing behind the rest of Europe. This was a view that had
become widely shared by the middle years of the century, with
Italian and foreign commentators frequently reaching for metaphors
of ‘sleep’ and ‘waking’ to describe the situation. The distinguished
Venetian philosopher and art critic Count Francesco Algarotti had
written from Berlin in 1752 of how Italy had once ‘opened the eyes’
of other nations and led them out of barbarism; but now it was
‘taking a little nap’. He was saddened by this state of a airs, but
philosophical: ‘Let us be consoled by our past achievements… Other
nations now dominate; but we were ourselves once dominant.’5
Algarotti’s sense of resignation was not uncommon at the time;
but from the 1760s a mood of mounting frustration had begun to set
in among educated Italians. If Italy was sleeping, then it had to be
woken, forcibly if necessary, in order to catch up with other
countries. Amid the imperial splendours of St Petersburg, Gasparo
Angiolini (whose compatriots in the city included Bartolomeo
Rastrelli, architect of many of St Petersburg’s nest buildings,
including the Winter Palace) had become infected with this new,
more aggressive mood, and in a celebrated polemic he had written
of how it was ‘humiliating for every good Italian’ that in the north
of Europe dance and theatre had soared to heights of excellence,
while in Italy, once ‘mistress of all learning’, productions were being
staged that ‘disgraced’ and ‘shamed’ her. But he was con dent that
there would soon be a revival: ‘In every age Italy has had its
Cimabues… its Dantes, its Pico della Mirandolas and its Galileos, the
leading gures and most outstanding talents in every sphere, who
have restored the arts and the sciences.’6
Angiolini was deeply excited by the arrival of Napoleon and the
French in Milan in May 1796. It seemed to him, as to many other
educated men and women who over the preceding decades had
absorbed the Enlightenment ideals of moral and material progress,
to herald a new era of freedom and regeneration for both the city
and Italy. And he hurried to show his enthusiasm for the
revolutionary order, constructing a curious tree of liberty in front of
his villa of Malgacciata: a massive oak with a Phrygian bonnet of
polished bronze tied to its top-most branch, and two enormous sails
of canvas hanging below that swelled and apped in the wind.
Angiolini had a similar tree of liberty set up in the piazza of a
nearby village, summoned the local peasants and delivered a speech
to them about the importance of what was taking place. Their
response, it seems, was one of intense bemusement and anger.7
Milan must have seemed to Angiolini in the next three years a
vibrant city – the city ‘awoken from its slumbers’ described by the
great French romantic writer Stendhal in the opening pages of his
novel The Charter-house of Parma, where the height of ambition was
no longer ‘to print sonnets upon little handkerchiefs of rose-coloured
ta eta on the occasion of the marriage of some young lady
belonging to a rich and noble family’, but altruistically to serve ‘the
nation’.8 Though ill and gout-ridden, Angiolini put his wealth and
considerable talents at the disposal of the new regime, hoping to
spread the gospel of revolution to the people. He produced
pamphlets and jotted his political thoughts down in notebooks,
which he had printed and distributed to his friends. He became
involved in the setting up of the National Theatre, and almost
certainly contributed to the production of such popular (and
educational) musical dramas as The Dream of a Democrat, The
Republican and Silvio, or the True Patriot. But his revolutionary
ardour was in due course to cost him dear.9

Italy in 1796 was not a single state and in no obvious sense a

‘nation’. Ever since the collapse of the Roman Empire in the west in
the fth century, the peninsula had been contested by a succession
of invaders – Huns, Goths, Lombards, Byzantines, Arabs, Normans,
Hohenstaufens, Aragonese, Angevins – who had left the country
politically, culturally and economically fragmented. In the Middle
Ages the prosperous urban communities of the north and centre –
towns such as Genoa, Milan, Verona, Padua, Bologna, Pisa, Florence
and Siena – had rebelled against the nominal sovereignty of the
German emperors north of the Alps and established self-governing
city-states. But they had fought bitterly with one another and so
added to the legacy of disunity. The ambitions of the popes in Rome
to have their own independent state in the centre of Italy had
created a further element of division. In the sixteenth century the
Spanish had established supremacy over much of the peninsula after
several decades of devastating wars; in the early eighteenth century
they were replaced by the Austrians. But the political fragmentation
remained, and by the time Napoleon’s armies arrived there was still
a kaleidoscope of discrete states in Italy. They included the Republic
of Genoa, the Kingdom of Piedmont–Sardinia, the Republic of
Venice, the Duchy of Modena, the Duchy of Parma, the Grand-
Duchy of Tuscany, the Papal States and the Kingdom of Naples. The
Duchy of Milan formed part of the Austrian empire.
However, the idea of ‘Italy’ as, potentially at least, a single
political unit had acquired far greater signi cance than before as a
consequence of the French Revolution, a movement that had
injected fresh meaning and extraordinary dynamism into the terms
‘nation’ and ‘fatherland’. In the past the words nazione and patria
had been used rather loosely in Italy (as elsewhere). They might
denote simply the region or the city where someone had been born;
or (more commonly) they could indicate a collection of people with
what appeared to be a shared cultural heritage. Hence the frequent
references to the ‘Venetian nation’, the ‘Lombard nation’, the
‘Piedmontese nation’, the ‘Neapolitan nation’ and the ‘Sicilian
nation’. From the early eighteenth century, talk of an ‘Italian nation’
grew more common, but again the sense was mainly cultural – a
people possessed of a shared language and literature. There was no
suggestion of Italians abandoning their political allegiances to the
existing states.
A good example of this idea of the Italian nation is an essay
published in a journal edited by Pietro Verri, Il Ca è, in 1765.
Entitled ‘Of the fatherland of the Italians’, it takes the form of an
imaginary conversation with a stranger who on entering a co ee
shop in Milan is asked whether he is a ‘foreigner’. The stranger says
he is Italian, ‘and in Italy an Italian is never a foreigner’. But he is
told that this claim has little meaning, as in Italy it is ‘the universal
practice to call anyone who has not been born but who lives within
the precincts of a city wall a foreigner’. The stranger goes on to
argue that Italy is a nation dating back to the time of the Romans,
and that it is precisely because Italians have failed to put aside their
di erences and recognize that they have a common fatherland that
so much damage has been done to the cause of progress in the
peninsula. However, he draws a clear distinction between cultural
and political patriotism: while Italians need to work together to
increase ‘national glory’ in the sciences and the arts, they still have
a duty to obey the laws of the state they live in.10
The outbreak of the French Revolution changed the terms of the
debate. Self-styled ‘patriots’, like Pietro Verri, who followed events
in France with enthusiasm, began to wonder whether the ‘Italian
nation’ might not form a political as well as a cultural unit. The
most important gure in the development of this line of thinking
was a young Tuscan called Filippo Buonarroti, a distant descendant
of the great Michelangelo. Buonarroti had embraced the radical
democratic ‘Jacobin’ ideas of the revolution and was worried on the
eve of Napoleon’s invasion of Italy that the French government
might be looking to pursue a policy of conquest rather than
‘liberation’ in the peninsula. To forestall this danger, he urged
Italian patriots to prepare insurrections ahead of the French army in
the name of the ‘freedom of Italy’:
We cannot wait to see that joyful moment when our fatherland shall be free. And above all
we want the frivolous distinctions of having been born in Naples, Milan or Turin to
disappear among patriots. We all belong to the same country and the same fatherland.
Italians are all brothers… and must make common cause and consult one another about

the best course of action.11

In May 1796, shortly before Napoleon reached Milan, Buonarroti

was arrested for his part in a plot – the ‘conspiracy of the Equals’ –
to overthrow the government in Paris. But the idea that Italy should
form a single state continued to gain ground among Italian patriots
and was aired in the myriad newspapers, pamphlets and political
clubs that sprang up in northern Italy in the wake of the victorious
French armies. Napoleon himself encouraged such talk. Though in
private he was extremely sceptical about Italian unity – he told a
senior diplomat in 1794 that it was ‘a beautiful idea’, but that he
could see no way in which Piedmontese, Lombards, Genoese,
Romans and Neapolitans could all be turned into ‘one people’12 – in
public he spoke of his admiration and liking for the ‘descendants of
Brutus and Scipio’ and his hopes that the Italian people might be
roused from their torpor after many centuries of enslavement.13

Napoleon was almost certainly a moving spirit behind the famous

competition that was launched by the French-controlled
administration in Milan in September 1796 for an essay on the
subject ‘Which form of free government is most conducive to the
happiness of Italy?’ This competition was remarkable for airing
many of the themes that were to dominate the debates about Italian
unity and the Italian nation in the decades to come. The organizing
committee felt that the essays should serve an educational purpose:
for centuries Italians had been kept in ignorance by their tyrants,
which was the main reason why they had so far failed to display the
‘signs of energy’ that were required for winning freedom. The
learned were therefore invited to reveal to ‘the people’ the ideals of
liberty and equality, show them the blessings that these principles
would bring, and remind them of Italy’s ancient glories. Entries
could be written in French, Italian or Latin, and the prize would be
a gold medal worth 200 zecchini.14
Most of the fty-seven essays submitted to the competition
argued that Italy should have a unitary republic similar to that of
France. According to the winning entry by a young philosopher
from Piacenza, Melchiorre Gioia, the principal factor behind the
failure of Italy over the centuries to win freedom was not, as was
often claimed, its climate (the great French writer Montesquieu had
famously argued in his The Spirit of the Laws, 1748, that hot climates
engendered sloth and servility, cold ones energy and independence)
but its political fragmentation. This lack of historical unity
demanded that Italy should become a centralized state and not a
federation. Italians were ‘weak’ in character and prone to
quarrelling and, if the country remained divided, they would ght
each other for local dominance and generate ‘a thousand ferocious
discords’. In the meantime foreign enemies would ‘avidly watch the
growth of factions and the increase in national hatreds’ and seize
the opportunity to invade. With the introduction of liberty and
equality, bonds of brotherly a ection would be created, and there
would no longer be ‘Sicilians, Florentines and Turinese, but Italians
and men’.15
Not all of the essayists were quite so con dent. One Venetian
writer felt that the divisions that had plagued Italian history were so
deeply entrenched that the democratic government of a new unitary
republic would have to work extremely hard to fuse Italians into a
‘single people’ imbued with a ‘national spirit and national
character’. Reason was to be the principal tool of education. To
prevent any possible jealousy, the capital of Italy was to be located
in the middle of the peninsula in a purpose-built city (as in the
United States of America), and administrative boundaries would be
drawn up on rational rather than historical lines. Local capitals
would be selected so as to avoid generating rivalries, and public
buildings would be of equal size and conform to a standard
template. In this way, Italians would gradually lose their old corrupt
habits and be reborn as ‘citizens’, with the good of la patria their
sole concern.16
The majority of entrants to the competition agreed that a unitary
republic was the best way to ensure that Italy overcame its
historical divisions and had su cient strength to deal with a foreign
invasion, but a few thought that such an arrangement was
unrealistic. According to the former priest and passionate
Piedmontese democrat Giovanni Ranza, the regional di erences in
Italy were so pronounced that unity stood as much chance of
success as the search for ‘perpetual motion or the philosopher’s
stone’. He suggested a federal republic made up of eleven states
with a General Congress in Pisa (and the construction there of a
giant monument to ‘our mother’, the French Republic).17 Other
writers supported federalism on the grounds that the climatic
di erences between north and south, the mountains and the plains,
had resulted in very di erent character types, with the south being
largely mercurial and ‘Greek’ in spirit, the north stolid, sober and
‘German’. ‘The blunt and well-fed Lombard does not need the same
laws as the crafty Genoese and the clever Tuscan. And what
Ligurian or Venetian dolt would ever respect the lordship of
Naples?’18
The problem of the Italian character loomed large in many of the
essays. Most writers believed that the Italians had become corrupt
and enervated, and lacking in those virtues that had helped to
create the Roman empire and the free city-states of the Middle Ages.
Some entrants, like Melchiorre Gioia, believed that the vices of
Italians would be made good simply through the salutary e ects of
liberty, but others claimed that more would be needed. One writer
proposed ‘a vigorous campaign of public education’ to make Italians
aware of just how much damage had been done to them by
centuries of tyranny and Roman Catholicism. Only in this way
would they be roused from their current inertia, and recover ‘that
bellicose and free genius’ that had once made them the rulers of the
world.19 Nor was this education to be narrowly conceived. Clubs,
associations, newspapers, schools, laws, public ceremonies, plays,
poetry and music could all be channels for the creation of a new
patriotic spirit in Italy.20
The Milan competition had as its theme what kind of government
Italy should have, and in the circumstances it is hardly surprising
that most of the writers took the French Republic as their model.
Apart from a general recognition that Italians had su ered from
centuries of division and might need to be educated to democracy
and freedom, there was little discussion of exactly what the Italian
nation was. Even its geographical parameters were unclear. Some
writers seemed instinctively to equate Italy with the ‘Lombard
nation’ and assumed the new republic would be limited to the
regions in the north, while others saw Italy as embracing the whole
of the peninsula, but with Sicily excluded. At least one writer
wanted Italy to include Corsica and Malta together with the Italian-
speaking provinces of Switzerland. Nevertheless there was an
assumption behind the competition that Italy was a nation, and this
view acted as a powerful spur to further re ection and debate
among the educated in the years to come.

From Milan, Napoleon swept southwards and eastwards with his

army, occupying the territories of Bologna, Ferrara, Modena, Reggio
and the Papal Legations in the summer and early autumn of 1796.
In the course of the next months the young general dabbled in
constitutional experiments – the rst of a string of political
arrangements that were to punctuate the history of Napoleonic Italy.
In December representatives of the cities of Bologna, Ferrara,
Modena and Reggio assembled at a congress and proudly
proclaimed the formation of the Cispadane Republic (‘one single
people, one single family’). Elections were staged, a new
constitution drawn up, and a white, green and red tricolour (in
horizontal bands – vertical bands were introduced only in 1805)
adopted as its ag; but in May 1797 Napoleon decided to abolish it
and create a new republic, the Cisalpine Republic, comprising
Lombardy, Reggio, Modena, Massa and Carrara. At the same time
the Republic of Genoa was replaced by a new Ligurian Republic.
The French government’s attitude to Italy was highly ambivalent.
Despite all the talk of liberation, the principal motive behind the
invasion of northern Italy was harshly pragmatic. Italy was a
diversion from the main theatre of war in northern Europe, and any
conquests were intended as bargaining counters with which to try to
persuade Austria to make peace and agree to the Rhine frontier.
There was no programme for unifying the peninsula. Indeed, a
united Italy could only be threatening to France: far better to keep it
fragmented and under French control. Napoleon, it is true, to a
certain extent pursued his own agenda in Italy: like Caesar in Gaul,
he saw Italy as a power base from which to launch his political
career, and it suited him to curry favour with Italian patriots and
play the national card rather more than his masters in Paris would
have liked. But he too had no real interest in fostering Italian unity.
 The high material price of ‘liberation’ soon became clear. The
French state was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and the
government in Paris looked upon Italy as a source of easy plunder.
‘Leave nothing in Italy that our political situation enables you to
carry o and which could be of use to us,’ Napoleon was told in
May 1796.21 Milan was saddled with an immediate indemnity of 20
million francs, Modena with one of 7.5 million, Parma with 2
million. Vast quantities of horses, mules, oxen and grain were also
requisitioned. When an armistice was signed with the Pope in June
he was ordered to pay 21 million lire in gold and silver ingots, coin
and matériel. By the end of 1796, according to one estimate, nearly
58 million francs had been exacted from the Italian territories in
money and valuables. And this policy of rapine was to continue
unabated for the next two years.
One particularly galling aspect of this policy – certainly to the
educated elites – was the seizure of works of art. Again it was Paris
that encouraged this depredation, telling Napoleon that the French
people needed to be compensated for their sacri ces not just with
‘the glory of military trophies’ but also with ‘the charm of the
consoling and salutary arts’.22 In Milan paintings were stripped from
churches and monasteries, and thirteen volumes of Leonardo
manuscripts were removed from the Ambrosiana library (only one
was returned in 1816), along with a codex of Virgil annotated by
Petrarch. Under the terms of their armistices, the dukes of Modena
and Parma were each obliged to surrender twenty paintings to
Napoleon; the Pope one hundred works of art and 500
manuscripts.23 Everywhere Raphaels, Correggios, Titians, and
Carraccis were packed up and sent to Paris to add cultural lustre to
the cause of liberty.
Venice su ered especially harshly. In May 1797 French troops
occupied the city, so bringing to an end a thousand years of
Venetian independence, using as a pretext an incident involving a
French ship that had entered the lagoon. They embarked on a
protracted campaign of spoliation; and the plundering continued
even after Napoleon gave Venice to Austria under the Treaty of
Campoformio in October. The Doge’s Palace, and churches such as
San Giovanni e Paolo, the Gesuiti, Madonna dell’Orto and San
Zaccaria were stripped of works by Tintoretto, Bellini, Titian, Paris
Bordone and others. Among the most important paintings seized
were two massive canvases by Veronese – the Feast of Levi from San
Sebastiano and the Wedding Feast at Cana from the refectory of San
Giorgio Maggiore – the latter now in the Louvre. Hundreds of rare
books, sculptures, manuscripts, prints and maps were also taken.
The ultimate humiliation came on 7 December 1797 when the four
bronze horses that for six hundred years had graced the facade of
San Marco, and which more than anything symbolized Venice’s
former imperial greatness, were taken down and sent o to adorn
the Tuileries Palace and later the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel in
Paris.24
The surrender of Venice to the Austrians under the Treaty of
Campoformio shattered the faith of many Italian patriots in
Napoleon. Among those who were most enraged was a talented and
histrionic nineteen-year-old writer from an old Venetian family, Ugo
Foscolo. Like many of his contemporaries, Foscolo had been
exhilarated by the arrival of the French in northern Italy, and in the
spring of 1797 he had ed Venice to join up with Napoleon’s army.
In May he had published an ode, ‘To Bonaparte the Liberator’ –
dedicated to the city of Reggio, centre of the Cisalpine Republic,
whose citizens had rst roused ‘somnolent Italy from its sleep’ – in
which he had expressed his hopes for the future of a free Italy in
terms that were at once passionate and transcendental (‘Italy, Italy,
with ethereal rays / dawn returns on your horizon / to herald
perpetual sunlight’). The poem’s tone of vague yearning mingled
with an undercurrent of morbid pessimism about the chances of
regeneration was to be characteristic of much romantic nationalism
in Italy during the decades to come.25
When Foscolo learned of Campoformio his response was
theatrical: ‘Armed with a dagger, and making horrible exclamations
and gestures, he plunged his weapon into the rostrum [from which
he was declaiming], swearing he would personally strike the
per dious Bonaparte through the heart.’26 He did not attempt to
carry out his oath, it seems, but instead transferred much of his
anger to a book that was to be become one of the most in uential
texts of the national movement or Risorgimento. The Last Letters of
Jacopo Ortis, published in 1802, tells the story of a young man who
is forced to ee his native Venice after its surrender to Austria. He
takes to the Eugenean hills, and falls in love with a girl called
Teresa. But Teresa is already betrothed to a marquis. Tormented by
his love for Teresa and his lost fatherland (both Venice and Italy),
he sets out in pursuit of solace, but neither the beauties of Italy’s
landscapes nor the vestiges of its past glories console him.
Everywhere he is reminded that Italy is su ering under the yoke of
foreign domination, and, like Teresa, is not free. He returns home
after two years to nd Teresa married, and kills himself.
Foscolo’s racked romantic hero was to furnish a powerful model
for many Italian patriots. Su ering and self-sacri ce as a
consequence of exile – and exile could be emotional as well as
physical: ‘all Italians are exiles in Italy’, Foscolo later wrote27 – now
took on an aura of nobility. Moreover the linkage between sexual
longing and Italy’s condition of enslavement was to be an important
ingredient in the appeal of the national cause in the years to come,
especially to educated young men imbued with the romantic precept
of self-realization through struggle. Italy – imagined either as a
violated mother, or sister, or ancée – had to be fought for and
freed and her honour avenged. However, the very elusiveness of the
object of pursuit – Teresa/the fatherland – in Foscolo’s novel was
also to nd an echo (and a dangerous one) in the national
movement: those who struggled for Italy should not expect to be
satis ed. Italy would always exist as an ideal – to be made and
remade, morally if not materially.
Foscolo’s disillusionment with the French was shared by another
important writer who, like Foscolo, played a major role in shaping
the cultural parameters of the national question in Italy. Born in
Piedmont in 1749, Count Vittorio Al eri travelled around Europe
indulging his twin passions for racehorses and women before
deciding to dedicate himself to literature. As for many other Italian
émigrés of the period, the experience of living abroad gave him a
strong sense of cultural patriotism; but as a Piedmontese aristocrat
he had been brought up to speak and write French. For Al eri
language was the principal determinant of nationality, and in 1776
he went to Tuscany to (as he put it) ‘un-French’ himself –
foreshadowing another famous patriotic pilgrimage to the cradle of
the Italian language, that of the novelist Alessandro Manzoni fty
years later. Thereafter Al eri turned his hand to playwriting and
produced a string of successful tragedies, mostly on classical
subjects, whose central theme was the struggle of the heroic
individual for freedom against oppression and tyranny.
A central theme of Al eri’s work was the celebration of virility.
This was partly because he disliked what he saw as the accid
cosmopolitanism of French-inspired politesse, but also because he
wanted to rouse Italians from their decadence and recover the
primitive, even barbaric, energy of the Italic race that had once
produced Scaevola, Brutus, and the Gracchi, and the glories of
ancient Rome. As a writer he saw it as his duty to inspire: indeed he
cast himself in the role of the vatic poet of national resurrection –
the rst of a long line of such gures from Foscolo to Giosuè
Carducci and Gabriele D’Annunzio – who would impart ‘boiling
passion to hearts and minds… and an insatiable thirst for great
deeds and glory’.28 He believed that Italy had a mission to lead the
world out of decadence and into a new era of liberty.
Having settled in Paris with his mistress, Louise, Countess of
Albany, wife of the dissolute and alcoholic Charles Edward Stuart
(‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’), Al eri was at rst enthusiastic about the
French Revolution. But his enthusiasm evaporated with the onset of
the Terror, and in 1792 he ed the French capital for Italy, where
he spent the last years of his life in Florence excoriating France for
its hegemonic ambitions and inciting Italians to hatred of ‘those
barbarians from across the mountains’.29 Al eri’s anger was
heartfelt – especially after Napoleon’s invasion in 1796 – but it was
also instrumental. He believed that Italy would only become a
nation capable of great achievements if its people came together and
learned to bury their di erences; and there was no more e ective
and energizing national glue than a shared enemy. As he wrote in
his posthumously published work, Il Misogallo (The Anti-Gaul):
O Italy, hatred of the French, under whatever ensign or mask they present themselves,
must be the single and fundamental basis of your political existence… May the word
MISOGALLO from now on be accepted into your language as signifying… FREE ITALIAN.
Then before long the time will return when the French no longer possess such
overwhelming resources and numbers, and you will have shed all the vileness of your
customs, divisions and opinions. Then you will be great in your own right; and from having
hated and despised the French in fear, you will move majestically to hating and despising

them in scorn.30

Al eri was a preacher of sentiment and morality rather than

thought. But that made his in uence on future generations all the
greater. According to the literary critic Francesco De Sanctis, a
future Minister of Education in uni ed Italy who himself believed
passionately in the need for Italians to bury their di erences and
become a morally integrated nation, Al eri was ‘a gigantic and
solitary statue wagging an admonitory nger’.31 Al eri sought to
teach Italians that they shared a common patria, and they should
work together in loving and defending it; that they had a glorious
past, which should serve to shake them from their current lethargy
and drive them to throw o the yoke of foreign domination. He
called for ‘strong feeling’ and ‘masculine virtue’; and he prophesied
in the concluding poem of Il Misogallo that the day would come
when ‘now resurrected, Italians [would] stand bravely on the eld
of battle, and defeat the French, no longer cravenly defended by
another’s arms’.32

The patriotic exhortations of Foscolo and Al eri could not easily

eradicate the legacy of history. The arrival of Napoleon and the
collapse of Austrian rule in northern Italy opened the oodgates to
old municipal rivalries, and once liberated the cities of the Po Valley
hurriedly sent deputations to Paris to appeal for as much territory as
they could as independent republics. Milan had a particularly large
appetite: it claimed Genoa, Mantua, the Venetian terra ferma, even
Venice and Dalmatia. Modena wanted Ferrara; Ferrara wanted
Cento and Pieve, but preferred to be ruled by Milan rather than
Bologna. Bologna angled for the Romagna, Ferrara and Ancona;
Ancona wanted the Marche, but when this looked impossible it
asked to be included in the Cisalpine Republic
–anything but be ruled by Rome again. Ironically municipalism
often fuelled the calls for Italian unity at this time: Brescia and
Reggio saw unity as a means of throwing o the baleful yokes of
their old capitals of Venice and Modena.
The strength of these municipal rivalries greatly hampered
government of the Cisalpine Republic, and made something of a
mockery of calls for an Italian nation ‘one and indivisible’.
Napoleon, who by temperament as well as by education liked
centralization, found the constant spats between the Italian cities
deeply frustrating. In France, he commented ruefully, everything
was centred in Paris, but in Italy Milan’s claims were bitterly
contested by Bologna, Pavia, Padua or Venice.33 He tried juggling,
but with scant success. In 1797, and again a few years later, he
sought to create a National Institute along French lines and o ered
to locate it in Bologna as compensation for Milan being made
capital. But the Milanese dug their heels in, and the plan had to be
aborted. (He eventually found a solution in 1810 with the
establishment of a Royal Institute of Sciences, Letters and Arts in
Milan, but with four additional sections meeting at regular intervals
in Bologna, Padua, Verona and Venice.)
These rivalries were not just a question of local pride and historic
memories. Utilitarian considerations of jobs, contracts and taxes also
came into play. Melchiorre Gioia, the winner of the 1796 essay
competition, who had argued for a unitary Italian state precisely
because he hoped that it would stop municipal and factional
quarrels, watched with dismay in 1798 as the Cisalpine Republic
became hamstrung by scal revolts and disputes over the
assignment of public contracts and the location of state institutions:
[One politician] wants the guns to be bought in Brescia, whereas the interest of the
Republic demands that they be put up to tender open to all sellers; [another] wants the
Mantua lottery to be introduced into Milan in de ance of all justice and good faith; the
inhabitants of Reggio want the court of appeal to be located in Reggio, the Bolognese

struggle against the excise on foodstu s as if it did not exist in their department.34

But even more damaging than divisions between city and city was
the division between the cities and the countryside. During the early
1790s peasants in some parts of Italy had occasionally voiced their
discontent at taxes, or high food prices, or feudal burdens, using
ideas that had ltered through to them from across the Alps (‘What
payments, what taxes, what Royal Court! We want to do it like the
French!’, an angry mob had cried in the piazza of a small southern
Italian town in December 1793 when the council was discussing the
payment of communal taxes to the king);35 but in general the Italian
peasantry had adopted the views peddled by their parish priests and
saw the Revolution in terms of rampant godlessness (as well as
requisitions and more onerous demands from the state – not least
military service). The writer Stendhal’s bucolic description of French
soldiers standing at cottage doors in the spring of 1796 ‘dandling
the housewife’s baby’ and dancing the monferrina and saltarello with
local girls was largely a gment of his imagination.36 Napoleon’s
army met with fear and at times vicious opposition as it advanced
through the northern countryside.
Peasant fears and anger found an outlet in an explosion of
religiosity. In the Romagna and the Marche priests led their
congregations in public prayers, calling for divine mercy against the
sacrilegious ‘beasts’ that had invaded the Papal States. Mass
pilgrimages were staged to the shrine of the Holy House at Loreto.
In Ancona the eyes of the Virgin Mary were seen ickering in a
painting, and as word spread, crowds ocked to the church from all
over the Marche, and the miracle was repeated time and again in
front of the ecstatic onlookers. At Monte Santo, the church bells
were heard ringing in the middle of the night when the building was
empty, and a succession of remarkable cures were reported at the
shrine. ‘It is quite incredible how many images were declared to be
miraculous in those days in Rome and a hundred other places across
the State,’ recorded the father of the great poet Giacomo Leopardi,
‘and how many prints were made of these images, and how many
works were published describing the miracles, and how many
sensible people were convinced of their authenticity.’37
Popular hostility to the French descended into violence in many
places. In May 1796 some 5,000 peasants and artisans stormed into
Pavia and forced the garrison to surrender. A month later in Lugo,
news that the French had seized a silver reliquary of the patron
saint of the town, Saint Illaro, sparked o an orgy of rioting, with
the heads of murdered soldiers being paraded through the streets in
triumph.38 In April 1797 Verona erupted into ve days of vicious
street ghting, and some 200 French soldiers were butchered, to
cries of ‘Viva San Marco! Viva San Marco!’ Very often it was the
clergy who played a leading part in inciting the violence. Among
those arrested and shot by the French in their brutal suppression of
the Verona rising was a priest called Luigi Franzini. The text of a
sermon he had preached, urging the Veronesi to kill ‘these savage
men’ (‘let their blood be a sign of our salvation, for liberty is never
secured without blood’), had been discovered in his house.39
Some of the worst instances of bloodshed occurred in central
Italy. In a bid to strengthen its position in Italy and minimize the
chances of an attack on the Cisalpine Republic from the south, the
French government decided in January 1798 to invade the Papal
States. As the French army led by General Berthier arrived at the
outskirts of the Eternal City, several hundred Roman patriots
gathered in the ruins of the Forum and proclaimed a republic. They
then ascended the Capitol, erected a Tree of Liberty, and hoisted the
Republic’s new ag, a white, red and black tricolour. General
Berthier entered the city and delivered a stirring speech from the
Capitol, full of classical references, in which he exhorted the
Romans to show themselves worthy of their past greatness. The
popular response was swift. Incensed by the Pope’s ight and by a
new law giving civil equality to the Jews, the Trastevere quarter
rose up to cries of ‘Long live Mary, long live the Pope’. The French
suppressed the rising mercilessly. Similar risings (and similarly
brutal suppressions) took place in the months that followed in the
provinces. At Città di Castello, in Umbria, for instance, some 5,000
peasants besieged the town and massacred 300 of its largely French
garrison.40
THE NEAPOLITAN REPUBLIC, 1799

But it was southern Italy, where the gulf between town and country,
rich and poor, was at its greatest, that saw the worst atrocities. In
the wake of the occupation of Rome, relations between France and
the Kingdom of Naples became strained, and in May 1798 King
Ferdinand IV signed an alliance with Austria and stepped up
preparations for war. The destruction of the French eet by Nelson
at the Battle of the Nile on 1 August caused a urry of excitement at
the Neapolitan court (‘Oh brave Nelson, oh victor, saviour of Italy,’
Queen Maria Carolina exclaimed repeatedly); and when Nelson
landed in Naples on 22 September he received a magni cent
reception, with the king rowing out several miles to shake ‘nostro
liberatore’ personally by the hand and bands on the shore playing
‘Rule, Britannia’ and ‘See, the Conquering Hero Comes’. Nelson
stayed with the elderly British ambassador, Sir William Hamilton,
and his vivacious young wife, Emma, who provided him with soft
pillows and baths of asses’ milk.41
On 23 November the Neapolitan army, led by an Austrian,
General Mack (who spoke no Italian), advanced against the Roman
Republic. The French were driven back, and on 29 November
Ferdinand entered Rome proudly on horseback, took up residence in
the Farnese Palace, and issued a proclamation inviting the Pope to
return to the city. But his success was short-lived. Thanks largely to
Mack’s incompetence, the much smaller French forces under
General Championnet were allowed to regroup and counter-attack.
Rome had to be abandoned, 10,000 prisoners were taken, and the
remains of the Neapolitan army were soon eeing in chaos.
Championnet pushed south towards Capua, inducing panic in the
Neapolitan court, and on the night of 21 December the king and
queen slipped secretly out of Naples with Nelson, and sailed for the
safety of Palermo. They left behind a city teetering on the edge of
anarchy.
Naples was by far the largest city in Italy, with a population of
some 400,000. It was a city of enormous extremes, with an opulent
aristocracy, living in grand urban palaces, who divided their time
between the court and the opera house of San Carlo, a small middle
class – made up predominantly of lawyers – and a mass of poor
people, who eked out a precarious living in a myriad, often
ingenious ways, and who were known collectively as the lazzari or
lazzaroni, probably from the saying ‘as naked as Lazarus’.42 These
lazzari elicited horror and admiration in almost equal measure in
foreign observers – ‘the most abominable rabble and loathsome
vermin that ever infested the earth’, according to Charles de Brosses
in his famous travel letters published in 1799; ‘picturesque’,
according to Madame de Staël in her novel Corinne, or Italy, in
1807.43 They had a strong collective identity, and an almost visceral
attachment to the king and the Church – above all to the local
patron saint, San Gennaro, whose blood, preserved in two phials in
the cathedral, miraculously lique ed twice a year as a sign of
benefaction.
When news came through in mid-January that General Mack had
signed a truce with General Championnet, and agreed to hand over
half the kingdom to the French, the lazzaroni took to the streets in
fury, seized the city’s fortresses, opened the prisons, and murdered
anyone suspected of Jacobin sympathies. A group of ‘patriots’ in the
meantime announced the formation of a ‘committee’ to help the
advancing French. Among them was the high-minded journalist and
poet Eleanora Fonseca Pimentel. With the city dissolving into
anarchy, King Ferdinand’s deputy in Naples, Prince Pignatelli, ed
to Sicily, and General Mack handed himself over to the French. A
measure of calm was only restored when the elderly Cardinal
Archbishop of Naples ordered the church bells to be rung and
processed through the centre of the city bearing the phials
containing the blood of San Gennaro. People fell to their knees in
prayer.
 On 21 January a yellow, red and blue tricolour appeared above
the Sant’Elmo fortress, and four cannon shots announced the
formation of the Neapolitan Republic. The French advanced into the
city and were met with furious popular resistance, and for two days
the lazzaroni indulged in a spree of looting, burning and murdering.
The patriots from Sant’Elmo supported the French with a heavy rain
of re onto the streets. By the evening of 23 January General
Championnet had secured control of most of the city, and issued an
edict guaranteeing impunity to all who laid down their arms. In a
further conciliatory gesture, he went the following day to the
cathedral, where the archbishop ordered a Te Deum to be sung in
thanksgiving. The seal was then set on the French victory by an
unscheduled liquefaction of San Gennaro’s blood.
The Neapolitan Republic, which emerged under the tutelage of
the French forces, never succeeded in winning popular support. The
new government was composed of lawyers, clerics, writers, and
professors of Greek and botany, and its most pressing concern was
to bring an end to feudalism. A law was promulgated in late
January abolishing entails and primogeniture, but legislation on
feudalism itself got bogged down in discussions about whether
common lands should revert to the barons or to the state. A law was
eventually passed in April, but by then it was too late. High taxes
were another source of popular discontent, with much of the scal
burden being placed onto the peasantry. Accordingly the Republic
soon became synonymous in the minds of the rural masses with the
interests of the propertied, and opposition to it dovetailed with old
class hatreds. ‘At the sound of the tambourine / The poor have
arisen,’ ran a rebel song in Basilicata at this time. ‘At the sound of
the bell / Long live the little men / At the sound of violins / Ever
death to the Jacobins!’44
The leaders of the Republic placed much faith in education as a
way to win over the masses. The draft constitution declared that it
was the duty of all citizens ‘to illuminate and instruct others’, and it
stipulated that special tribunals would be set up in every district to
monitor and correct people’s behaviour.45 Newspapers and journals
with a strongly pedagogic mission proliferated in these months. One
of the most famous was the Monitore napolitano, edited by the
leading patriot Eleanora Fonseca Pimentel. She was acutely aware of
the gulf that separated the uneducated ‘plebs’ from the state, and
she called for speeches to be written and delivered in Neapolitan
dialect, ‘to spread civic instruction to that section of the population
which has no other language but this’, and for popular
entertainments such as puppet shows to represent republican
subjects. The masses, she said, mistrusted the patriots, ‘because they
[did] not understand them’, and a system of ‘national education’
needed to be established to transform the unlettered poor into
responsible members of ‘the people’.46
With the Republic struggling to attract popular support, Queen
Maria Carolina and her lover, the chief minister John Acton, made
plans from Sicily to retake the kingdom. King Ferdinand was more
concerned with hunting, but readily went along with their schemes.
The man they chose to head the counter-revolution was Cardinal
Fabrizio Ru o, a close friend of Maria Carolina and Acton, and
someone renowned for his great courage (and his scandalous love
a airs). Early in February Ru o landed with a small cohort of men
in southern Calabria, where he had feudal estates, and issued a
proclamation to the ‘brave and courageous Calabrians’, urging them
to unite under the ‘standard of the Holy Cross of our beloved
sovereign’, avenge the Pope and the ‘insults to religion, king and
fatherland’, and drive out the ‘sectarian conspirators’ who were
seeking to ‘deprive us of our holy religion, destroy the divine
morality of the Gospels, despoil us of our property, and threaten the
honour of our women’.47
As Ru o advanced north towards Naples, volunteers poured in,
attracted by his promise that those who fought for him would be
rewarded with ‘the goods of patriots… and the pillage of the towns
and lands that openly resisted them’.48 He was true to his word. At
Cotrone, despite o ers from the small garrison of thirty-two French
soldiers to surrender, an assault was ordered, and for two days the
town was ransacked, and men and women, armed and unarmed,
murdered. ‘On the morning of [the third day],’ according to Pietro
Colletta, a contemporary historian, ‘a magni cent altar and an
ornate cross were erected on the site, and after mass had been
celebrated by a warrior priest of the Holy Faith, the cardinal, richly
dressed in purple, lauded the achievements of the previous two
days, pardoned the sins that had been committed in the heat of
battle, and raising his arm aloft, made the sign of the cross, and
blessed his followers.’49
The king urged Ru o on (‘I am saddened by the excessive
leniency that you display towards those who have rebelled against
me,’ he wrote to him on 28 March),50 and other towns in the path of
the ‘Christian Army’ su ered a similar fate to Cotrone’s. Ru o’s
forces, swelled by bandit gangs and escaped prisoners, and
protected from a French attack by British and Russian warships
patrolling the west and east coasts, reached the outskirts of Naples
on 13 June, the feast of Saint Anthony of Padua. By now they
numbered some 40,000 men. At an open-air mass, Ru o placed
them under the protection of Saint Anthony – San Gennaro had
shown his unworthiness by liquefying for the French – and the
following day the assault on the city began.
It was a brutal a air, worse than the slaughter in January, and it
seared itself on the collective imagination for decades. It lasted for
over two weeks. The lazzaroni joined in, roaming the streets with
the Calabrians to cries of ‘Long live the king’, hacking down Trees of
Liberty, ransacking and burning the houses of the rich, looting
monasteries and churches, and murdering anyone who looked like a
supporter of the Republic. Many republicans attempted to conceal
their distinctive owing ‘Jacobin’ haircuts by sticking on false
pigtails, but to little avail. ‘If a Jacobin you want to nd / Pull his
pigtail from behind / If it comes o in your hand / That is a true
Republican’, ran a popular verse at the time.51 The diarist Carlo De
Nicola watched the horror of severed heads and mutilated bodies
with mounting nausea, a disgust that reached a peak on 2 July when
the corpses of two Jacobins were burned, and chunks of their
charred esh were sliced o by the angry mob, passed round ‘even
to children’, and consumed. ‘Here we are in the middle of a city of
man-eating cannibals who eat their enemies.’52
Ru o did his best to limit the carnage by agreeing to a treaty with
the French and republican garrisons holding out in the city’s forts,
but his orders were ruthlessly countered by Nelson – who arrived in
the Bay of Naples with the British eet on 24 June, declared Ru o’s
treaty invalid, and promptly proceeded to have a leading rebel
hanged from the yardarm of one of his ships, and his body ung
into the sea without Christian burial, as a sign that no quarter
should be shown to the enemy. The king and queen were equally set
on revenge. Ferdinand returned to his capital on 10 July, greeted by
rapturous crowds shouting: ‘We want to see our father’, and in the
weeks that followed dozens of patriots were tracked down and then
hanged or decapitated. Among them were distinguished intellectuals
such as Domenico Cirillo, professor of botany at Naples university,
friend of Linnaeus and fellow of the Royal Society in London.
Another was Eleonora Fonseca Pimentel. She went to the sca old on
20 August, her brown skirt tucked modestly around her legs, and
uttering the words of Virgil: ‘Forsan et haec olim meminisse juvabit’ –
‘Perhaps one day even these things will bring pleasure.’ Oblivious to
such erudition, the crowd cheered loudly as she hanged.53
2

Searching for the Nation’s Soul

‘I am Italian,’ Corinne interrupted. ‘Forgive me, my Lord, I think I see in

you the national pride which is so often characteristic of your
compatriots. In this country we are more modest; we are neither self-
satis ed like the French, nor proud of ourselves like the English. All we
ask of foreigners is a little indulgence, and as, for a long time, we have
been denied the lot of being a nation, we are often greatly at fault, as
individuals, in lacking the dignity which is not permitted to us as a
people. But when you know the Italians, you will see that in their
character they have a few traces of ancient greatness, a few scanty, half-
obliterated traces which might, however, reappear in happier times.’

Madame de Staël, Corinne, ou L’Italie (1807)

I do not believe that all good institutions came from Egypt, Greece,
Thrace or anywhere else you care to name. They arise wherever there
are men. Nature has given us life, and it would be absurd to think that,
needing to breathe in order to preserve it, we had been forced to draw
breath from another people.

Vincenzo Cuoco, Platone in Italia (1804–6)

PLATO IN ITALY

The fall of the Neapolitan Republic was part of a more general

collapse of French power in Italy in 1799. Northern Italy was
overrun by Austrian and Russian forces in the spring, with Milan
being taken in April and Turin in May. Tuscany, which had been
hastily occupied by the French early in the year, had to be
abandoned in the summer. The Roman Republic held on for a while,
but it too fell in September. Everywhere the progress of the coalition
troops was assisted by popular risings. In Piedmont a peasant army
known as the ‘Massa cristiana’ roamed the countryside pillaging and
rooting out sympathizers of the French to cries of ‘Long live the
king! Long live the emperor! Long live Jesus and Mary!’, while in
Tuscany a similar army, led by an ex-dragoon o cer, his wife and
his wife’s lover, an English diplomat, and supported by numerous
priests and monks, terrorized the countryside to cries of ‘Viva
Maria!’
By contrast to these huge popular movements, the opposition to
the French of those Italian patriots who hoped for a unitary republic
was of very limited impact. A number of Jacobins responded to the
events of 1797–8 by seeing in unity the best, perhaps the only,
means of ensuring independence from foreign control, and a
shadowy secret organization appeared in northern Italy called the
Society of Rays, with cells in Bologna, Modena, Reggio and Milan.
This aimed to ‘irradiate’ the message of unity and resistance to
French aggression throughout the peninsula, but it lacked
coordination and its leaders were unclear as to whether they wanted
a single republic or a federation.1 In 1799 Italian patriots addressed
several petitions to the government in Paris urging it to pursue a
policy of Italian uni cation as the best way of ensuring France had a
strong ally on its southern ank. But these petitions fell on deaf
ears.
 The lack of patriotic sentiment in Italy was deeply galling to
those, like the choreographer Gasparo Angiolini, who had had such
high hopes of better things in 1796. Following the collapse of the
Cisalpine Republic, Angiolini was arrested by the Austrians and
questioned about the Tree of Liberty that he had erected outside his
villa (and which the peasants had chopped down and burned in
1798). He was imprisoned and then deported to Dalmatia, before
being released and returning to Lombardy a broken man. Shortly
before his death in 1803 he wrote an impassioned memoir, in which
he lamented the failure of Italians to prevent the French behaving as
conquerors and keeping the peninsula divided. ‘All this occurred
because we do not know how to act together, because we have no
national spirit… O Italy, O Italy, to what level of baseness have you
been reduced?… O Italy, when will you awake?… You were the rst
in Europe, now you are the last, the last because everyone subdues
you… Only when Italy again recovers its warrior spirit will it
avenge and humiliate its enemies.’2
Another despondent observer of the situation in Italy at this time
was a young writer called Vincenzo Cuoco. Cuoco had been born
into a provincial middle-class family in the Molise region of
southern Italy in 1770, and had moved to Naples to study law. He
had never graduated: his real passions were for history and
philosophy, and he had got caught up in elite intellectual circles,
befriending such men as Mario Pagano and Vincenzo Russo – both
of whom were executed in 1799 for their roles in the Neapolitan
Republic. Cuoco himself played only a minor part in the Neapolitan
Republic, but he was nonetheless sentenced to exile and had his
property con scated on the return of King Ferdinand. While in exile
he re ected on the tragic events he had witnessed in Naples, and
published his conclusions in 1801 in his Historical Essay on the
Neapolitan Revolution of 1799 – a work that was to prove extremely
in uential.
According to Cuoco the fatal aw in the Neapolitan revolution
was the chasm separating the leaders from the mass of the
population. Naples in recent decades had lost all sense of its cultural
distinctiveness, with the government and the court being packed
with foreigners – men like John Acton, or the queen’s con dante
Emma Hamilton – and intellectuals keenly aunting the latest ideas
from north of the Alps. ‘We became by turns French, or Germans, or
English; we were no longer anything.’3 The revolution of 1799 was a
‘passive revolution’, transplanted from France onto Neapolitan soil,
with a French constitution and French ideas; and not surprisingly it
meant absolutely nothing to the great majority of ordinary
Neapolitans:
Our revolution was passive, and the only way it could have been successful was if we had
won over the opinion of the people. But the views of the patriots and those of the people
were not the same: they had di erent ideas, di erent ways of doing things, and even two
di erent languages… The Neapolitan nation could be considered as divided into two

peoples, separated in time by two centuries and in climate by two degrees.4

Cuoco may have been in uenced by the conservative writers

Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre, but his principal debt was
almost certainly to the great early-eighteenth-century Neapolitan
philosopher Giambattista Vico. Vico had elaborated a general theory
of the cyclical decline and regeneration of nations, and had argued
that nations, like individuals, had unique characters that were
moulded by events and expressed in di erent languages and
cultures. For Cuoco, as for many other patriots in the early years of
the nineteenth century grappling with the problem of how to bring
the Italian nation into being (assuming that it existed, and most took
it for granted that it did), a crucial question was whether and how
this historically shaped national character could be changed. In his
Essay Cuoco suggested that the revolution in 1799 might have
worked if the leaders had focused more on the needs of the masses,
for example by creating representative local bodies and
concentrating on bread and butter issues such as taxation and land.
But he also felt that the masses had to be reformed. They lacked
necessary civic qualities such as ‘love of the fatherland and military
virtue’.5
 Cuoco talked about the ‘Neapolitan nation’, but he also referred
quite freely to the ‘Italian nation’, and when he settled in Milan
after the French had retaken the city in 1800 following Napoleon’s
victory over the Austrians at the Battle of Marengo in June, his
interest in the ‘Italian nation’ grew stronger. This development was
partly (and rather ironically) because he felt that he and other
southern exiles were treated as complete foreigners in Lombardy.6
In 1803 he launched a newspaper, Il Giornale Italiano, the main aim
of which was to help form a national spirit in Italy and educate
Italians to the ideals of unity and independence. Italians needed to
celebrate their past greatness, he said. They should study their own
country and stop believing that foreign things were always better.
The state should take charge of education, and give it a strongly
religious in ection (the people were instinctively religious), create
citizens, and teach them to have pride in their nation and strive for
its glory. And Italians must be taught to ght: like Machiavelli,
Cuoco saw military strength as the foundation of political life.7
Cuoco was the rst Italian writer to state clearly that the national
problem in Italy was above all one of education, of how to turn a
population of lazzaroni and peasants, vitiated by centuries of foreign
domination, priests, political division and ignorance, into a
patriotic, independent, united and disciplined people. It was a view
of the national question that was to have enormous resonance in the
decades to come. It is no coincidence that the most important
ideologue of the Italian nation, Giuseppe Mazzini, who came to
regard it as his God-given mission to educate Italians to their
national duty, as a young man copied out and assiduously annotated
Cuoco’s articles in Il Giornale Italiano.8 But if Italians needed to be
educated and their character changed, what was the end product to
be? What sort of nation should Italy aspire to become?
For some patriots at this time, such as the dramatist Al eri,
republican Rome o ered a template. But it was a vague and rather
problematic one. Al eri could admire the raw energy, heroism and
altruism of ancient Romans who thrust their hands into braziers or
had their sons condemned to death for treason (and his own
autobiography was in part written to show how he had transcended
the dissolute ways of his youth and refashioned himself as a ‘new
man’, resolute, independent and duty-driven), but it was hard to
push the paradigm too far. After all, if Al eri condemned the French
for their imperial ambitions, how could he urge Italians to imitate
their ancestors, who had ended up by being masters of almost all of
the known world, Gaul included?
For Cuoco there was much to admire in the Romans, not least
their patriotism and military valour, but his philosophical
temperament led him to hanker after a less sanguinary model for
the Italian nation. He found it in a mythical civilization that had
ourished before ancient Rome and Greece, and was, in his eyes,
superior to both of them. His case for this remote origin for Italy
was set out in an abstruse and rambling (but highly successful)
novel called Plato in Italy, which describes the journey made by the
philosopher Plato and a certain Cleobolus from Greece to Italy, their
talks with local wise men, and their discovery of a once mighty
‘Etruscan’ state, whose people had ‘prospered in laws, agriculture,
war and trade’, but who had, as a result of moral degeneration, been
overrun by foreign invaders and lost their independence and unity:
When this was, I cannot tell you… All I can say is this: that in those times all the Italians
formed one single people, and their imperium was called ‘Etruscan’… Today only the
smallest part of Italy survives with that name. I know that industry and trade generated
wealth, and wealth generated sensual pleasure and easy living, and that these sapped rst
the strength of the people and then the strength of the government, too. The state
collapsed, the arts were neglected and forgotten, and vice produced oppression and

poverty… and Italy again became a desert in which men returned to living like beasts.9

Cuoco published his novel in 1804–6, as the French were

tightening their grip once again over the entire peninsula, and he
intended it as a paradigm for Italy’s present condition. He had high
hopes for its impact. He told Napoleon’s stepson, Eugène de
Beauharnais, that reminding his readers of Italy’s former greatness
would ‘foster the public morality of Italians, and inspire in them
that spirit of union, that love of the fatherland, and that love of
military service, that till now they have lacked’.10 His ambition was
clearly overstated; but it was an ambition that in the decades to
come was to re many other Italian patriots, alarmed at what
seemed the paucity of civic virtue around them and eager to
regenerate their nation. In 1843, for example, the Piedmontese
priest Vincenzo Gioberti looked to inspire nationalist feelings among
Italians by making similar claims to Cuoco’s for Italy’s cultural pre-
eminence (and for the nation’s pre-Roman origins) in his bestselling
book On the Moral and Civil Primacy of the Italians.
Not that the idea of a primordial Italian civilization was regarded
by Cuoco as simply mythic. Giambattista Vico had argued in 1710
for the existence of a highly sophisticated pre-Greek society in Italy
on the basis of a philological study of Latin, and in 1723–4 the
posthumous publication of a monumental history of ‘Etruria’ by an
eccentric Scottish adventurer and professor of law at Pisa called
Thomas Dempster fuelled what soon became a veritable industry of
‘Etruscology’. An academy was set up in Cortona in 1726 to
propagate knowledge of the Etruscans, and archaeological nds of
elaborately painted tombs, funerary sculptures and other imposing
works of art in central Italy encouraged scholars such as Mario
Guarnacci (author of The Italic Origins, 1767, whose huge bequest of
Etruscan artefacts and 50,000 books to the city of Volterra in 1761
created one of the rst public museums in Europe) to claim that
Etruria was the source not just of Roman civilization but of world
civilization as a whole.11
IN THE BED OF PROCRUSTES: NAPOLEONIC RULE

The idea of a free and unitary ancient Italian civilization that had
been overrun by the Romans had strong patriotic resonances after
the French reimposed their control over the peninsula from 1800.
Napoleon’s second invasion of Italy in the spring of that year,
following his coup of 18th Brumaire and the creation of the
Consulate, led to a fresh round of constitutional experiments, with
borders once again being rubbed out and redrawn almost at will.
The Cisalpine Republic was reconstituted in Lombardy and Emilia,
with the addition in 1801 of sections of the Veneto, and later of
Modena, the Romagna and the Marche. In 1802 it was restyled the
Italian Republic, and in 1805 the Kingdom of Italy. Piedmont was
made a ‘French military division’ in 1801 before being annexed to
France the following year (Sardinia remained in the hands of the
House of Savoy, under the protection of the British eet). Tuscany
became the Kingdom of Etruria under a member of the Bourbon
family (and was then annexed in 1807). The former republic of
Lucca was made a principality and given to Napoleon’s sister Elisa
in 1805. The south of Italy was conquered in 1806 and became a
kingdom ruled rst by Napoleon’s brother, Joseph, and then by his
brother in law, Joachim Murat. The Papal States were annexed in
1809 and the Pope, Pius VII, carried o to France.
The main hopes of Italian patriots were pinned on the Cisalpine
Republic, and from 1800 Milan was again the centre of discussions
about an independent state. There was talk of a possible federation
for the whole of Italy (Napoleon’s foreign minister, Talleyrand,
favoured such an arrangement) or of a separate northern Italian
kingdom. But Napoleon had little time for these ideas. Napoleon’s
principal lieutenant in the Cisalpine Republic, the widely respected
moderate Count Francesco Melzi d’Eril, accepted the constraints
imposed by Paris, but himself harboured patriotic ambitions. He
hoped that the Republic might, if it was administered e ciently and
produced a good army, become the natural kernel of an Italian
nation, irradiating patriotic virtue and gradually drawing to itself
other territories of the peninsula: ‘No, we are not yet a people; and
we must become one and form ourselves into a nation, strong
through unity, happy through wisdom, independent through true
national sentiment.’12
As in 1796–7 Napoleon was very uncomfortable with talk of
Italian unity – divide et impera was more to his taste – but politically
it suited him not to crush patriotic hopes altogether. Having drawn
up a constitution for the Cisalpine Republic, which gave its
President near absolute powers (despite article two stating that
sovereignty resided with ‘the universality of citizens’), he summoned
a consultative assembly of 441 notables to Lyon at the end of 1801
to approve the text and secure his appointment as President. Many
of the delegates were clearly not happy at what they felt was an
a ront to the Republic’s independence and, in an attempt to mollify
them, Napoleon convened a nal plenary session on 26 January, in
which, surrounded by a glittering array of generals and ministers, he
delivered a speech, in Italian, setting out his plans and justifying his
acceptance of the presidency. Every time he uttered the word
‘Cisalpine’, however, there were cries from the delegates of ‘Italian’.
And when he ordered the nal version of the constitution to be read
out, there was a chorus of ‘Italian, Italian, Italian’ from all sides of
the hall. Napoleon bowed to the delegates’ wishes, and amid
rapturous applause the Cisalpine Republic became the Italian
Republic.13
But in political terms the victory amounted to little. Francesco
Melzi d’Eril was appointed Vice-President, and over the next three
years he managed to carve out some autonomy for the Republic
(despite Napoleon insisting on almost daily reports), creating a
relatively e cient, conservative, state committed to the
maintenance of law and order, sound public nances, scal and
administrative rationalization, and support for the landowning
classes. But on crucial matters it was Napoleon who dictated terms.
Thus d’Eril’s attempts to furnish the Republic with distinctive Italian
penal and civil codes failed: Napoleon insisted on the French ones
instead. D’Eril also failed to expand the borders of the Republic,
despite interest from territories such as Lucca, Parma and Liguria in
annexation. Nor would Napoleon allow the Republic to have
separate diplomatic representation: all of its foreign policy decisions
were taken in Paris.
When in 1805 the Republic of Italy became the Kingdom of Italy,
and a new Viceroy, Eugène de Beauharnais, was appointed, there
was even less freedom for manoeuvre. In part this was because the
growing demands of war required that Italy be compliant and
obediently supply money and men to support the French army. In
part, too, it was because Napoleon now felt less obliged than before
to temper the prejudices that he, like many of his compatriots,
harboured towards Italians. ‘You are wrong to think that the Italians
are like children,’ he told Eugène in July 1805. ‘There is evil in
them. Do not let them forget that I am the master and can do
whatever I wish. This needs to be drummed into all peoples, but
especially the Italians, who only obey the voice of a master. They
will respect you only if they fear you, and they will fear you only if
they realize that you understand their false and deceitful
character.’14 Eugène took the message to heart, remarking to his
new subjects that if Milan were in ames, ‘you must ask for orders
to extinguish them’.
Napoleon was conscious of the power of spectacle to awe and
impress, and he hankered after a grand coronation in Milan. He
ordered the hapless Melzi d’Eril to lead a deputation o ering him
the crown of Italy. Melzi at rst hesitated, then agreed, and then
tried to soften this fresh blow to Italy’s independence by seeking to
have Lombardy made a separate monarchy. But to no avail. Early in
April 1805 Napoleon set o from Fontainebleau, crossed the Mont
Cénis pass, and descended into the Lombard plain, stopping at
Marengo to recall the battle and inaugurate a monument to the
dead. On 9 May he entered Milan amid delirious scenes, and for
three weeks received a steady stream of admiring ministers,
councillors, generals, judges, prelates, writers and scientists, who
led past him amazed at his a ability, his knowledge and grasp of
detail. On 23 May, in a dazzling ceremony in the cathedral, he was
invested with the title of King of Italy, placed the Iron Crown of
Lombardy (which had been used in medieval imperial coronations:
it was in fact made of gold, but contained a thin band of iron said to
have been beaten from a nail used at the Cruci xion) on his own
head, and proclaimed the ancient Lombard formula: ‘God gives it to
me. Let anyone who touches it beware.’ Popular enthusiasm was
said to be almost boundless.15
Melzi d’Eril was bitterly disillusioned at this loss of any remaining
autonomy, but he and other high-minded patriots were in a small
minority. The middle classes were for the most part satis ed with
the opportunities for jobs and the purchase of former feudal or
ecclesiastical lands opened up by the Napoleonic regime, and served
it loyally. Members of the old aristocracy were less comfortable with
the new order, and often retreated sullenly to their estates, like the
Marchese del Dongo in Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma (who
repeated darkly, ‘It is ideas that have been the ruin of Italy’);16 but
in general their attitude was one of acquiescence rather than of
overt hostility. Intellectuals and artists were courted assiduously by
Napoleon and Eugène and encouraged to celebrate the Empire. And
many obliged. Thanks in part to the enthusiastic patronage of the
Bonaparte family, Antonio Canova became the most celebrated
sculptor in Europe (the painter David said he could write to him
using as an address ‘Antonio Canova, Europe’),17 while Gaspare
Spontini triumphed in Paris with grand operas such as La Vestale.
The poet and close friend of Ugo Foscolo, Vincenzo Monti, enjoyed
enormous success as the laureate of the Napoleonic regime in Italy.
Napoleon had a passion for uniformity, and what had worked in
France was deemed good for others. Throughout continental Italy
(Sicily and Sardinia never came under his control) French rule led to
the imposition of nearly identical administrative structures and
constitutions. Everywhere departments (or provinces) were created,
run by government-appointed prefects (intendants in the south),
with below them districts and communes, also with centrally
appointed o cials. Consultative councils were set up, composed of
‘respectable’ members of society; but they were purely consultative:
elective democracy was anathema. The judiciary was restructured
into three tiers; the scal system was rationalized (with four
categories of direct tax); internal customs barriers were removed;
and weights, measures and currency were standardized. The French
penal, civil and commercial codes were introduced, and the
remaining vestiges of feudal tenure and privilege (considerable in
southern Italy) were abolished. Relations with the Church followed
those of the 1801 concordat between France and the Pope.
Such uniformity appealed to rational minds, and the gains were
often palpable. For contemporaries the spirit of progress enshrined
in the new administrative order found a potent symbol in the
introduction of street lighting. ‘At night [Naples] – formerly so dark
that it concealed thefts and obscene crimes – was now lit by one
thousand, nine hundred and twenty brilliant lamps,’ recalled the
historian and enthusiast for the new order Pietro Colletta.18 But in
many parts of Italy, especially in the south, the writ of the new
legislation simply did not run: communities were too cut o and
communication too di cult to allow for enforcement. There was
also popular resistance to change, a conservatism compounded by
aversion to a system whose main features for the masses were
higher taxes, military conscription and the closure of monasteries.
As Colletta noted indignantly, ‘the people’ rejected the metric
system and ‘remained with the ancient barbarism of an in nite
number of di erent weights and measures’. Similar opposition
greeted attempts to control gambling and prostitution.19
EVOKING NATIONAL MEMORIES

Although the young poet Ugo Foscolo had talked operatically of

plunging a knife in Napoleon’s heart after the Treaty of
Campoformio in 1797, he forgave him. He fought alongside the
French army in 1799, was wounded at the siege of Genoa, ed Italy
in the wake of the Austrian victories, and returned to Milan after the
Battle of Magenta. In 1801, between military assignments and
intense love a airs, and at the request of the Cisalpine Republic, he
penned a passionate appeal to Napoleon urging him to respect
Italy’s independence and freedom. In this Oration to Bonaparte for
the Congress of Lyon he took up Cuoco’s central thesis about the need
to match political institutions to the culture and character of the
nation. ‘Any constitution that is not based on the nature, arts,
strengths and customs of its people is useless and dangerous.’ He
wanted Napoleon to create a republic based on sound
administration and economic prosperity; but it had to be Italian: ‘I,
along with the entirety of the people, describe our liberty as being:
to have no magistrate (except for Bonaparte) who is not Italian…
There is no freedom… where national independence is in chains.’20
Exactly what this nation was, and who felt part of it, he (like
Cuoco) was not inclined to discuss. In the next few years, though,
posted on the sunless north French coast with the Napoleonic army,
translating Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey and fathering a
child by an English woman, his sense of emotional attachment to an
imagined Italian community deepened and bore fruit in his most
celebrated work, On Tombs. This long ode took its cue from a decree
that extended to Italy a French law banning burials inside churches,
for reasons of hygiene. For Foscolo such a ban threatened to sever
the link between the living and the dead – above all the glorious
dead – that was essential to the spiritual health of a society. He
re ected on the impact that seeing the graves of Machiavelli,
Michelangelo and Galileo in Santa Croce in Florence had had on his
own imagination (and on that of Vittorio Al eri), and how
recollection of past greatness could spur strong spirits to ‘noble
deeds’. Would the Greeks at Marathon, he wondered, have found
‘the courage and the anger’ to resist the Persians had Athens not
made a cult of its heroes and raised sacred monuments to them?21
Foscolo was naturally prone to dyspepsia, but the craven and
supine behaviour of his compatriots particularly incensed him. As he
wrote in the Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis: ‘Where then, [Oh Italy], are
your sons? You lack nothing except the strength that derives from
concord… Wretches! We are constantly recollecting the liberty and
glory of our ancestors, whose splendour is all the more magni cent
in so far as it lays bare our present abject slavery.’22 By recalling
‘the Italian glories’ of the illustrious dead, celebrated in tombs such
as those in Santa Croce, Foscolo hoped that Italians might be
inspired to take a more robust stand against their French overlords.
And sadly these ‘glories’ were virtually all that was left of greatness
in Italy ever since foreign invaders had breached ‘the ill-defended
Alps’ and stripped Italians of ‘their arms, patrimony, fatherland and
altars, everything except memory’. It was now up to ‘strong
intellects’ (presumably self-appointed vatic poets such as Foscolo
himself) to act as priests of national redemption, and, ‘when hope of
glory should once again shine upon Italy’, to ‘take auspices’ at the
tombs of the great, and urge Italians to action.23
For the most part ‘the Italian glories’ were literary: Foscolo refers
in his ode to Dante, Petrarch and Parini as well as Al eri and
Machiavelli. Such a focus was hardly surprising given that the
Italian language had for long been the main foundation of Italy’s
claims to nationhood. And it was precisely because the national
question was so closely tied up with a literary tradition that Italian
writers, from Al eri and Foscolo onwards, were to feel that they had
a prerogative to act as guardians of the nation’s conscience. But
Foscolo was also keen to parade other glories before his
compatriots, especially military glories, as one of his most pressing
concerns was with the decline of military valour in Italy. A year
after writing On Tombs he began publishing a lavish edition of the
works of the great seventeenth-century Modenese general Raimondo
Montecuccoli – the most highly regarded military theorist of the
time. His aim, Foscolo said, was ‘more than literary’: he wished, ‘by
the example and precepts of an illustrious fellow citizen, to inspire
the Italians with a portion of his martial spirit…’24
Partly on the strength of his edition of Montecuccoli’s works,
Foscolo was elected to the Chair of Eloquence at the University of
Pavia, and on 22 January 1809, to a packed and expectant audience
of students, academics and political dignitaries, he delivered his
inaugural address. The post was an o cial one, and to underscore
his independence and his reputation as an Italian patriot Foscolo
refused to include the customary eulogy of Napoleon (though this
did not prevent the lecture being accepted immediately for
publication). His theme was, ‘Of the Origin and O ce of Literature’.
Drawing heavily on his detailed knowledge of ancient Greek culture,
with occasional nods towards Renaissance Italy, he set out, in
carefully honed Italian, his belief in the civil mission of literature.
He maintained that literature’s original purpose was to preserve the
value system and traditions of a community, by ‘lending grace to
those opinions that contribute to civil concord’ and condemning
vigorously any ideas that would ‘erode social bonds’ and expose a
society to factionalism, disorder and foreign invasion.25
Turning to Italy, Foscolo grew impassioned. He lamented the fact
that it was foreign academics who were now the leading authorities
on classical civilization, and he berated Italian intellectuals for their
hermetic aloofness and inability to emulate the brilliant examples
set by Machiavelli and Galileo and present their ideas in a style that
was elegant and accessible to the general public. He decried the
moral shortcomings of the educated class and their failure to impart
a civic morality that was grounded in patriotism and public virtue.
After all, what other nation could boast a history that had so many
lessons for the present? And yet who had followed in the footsteps
of Livy and Machiavelli?
Oh, the virtues, misfortunes and errors of great men cannot be written in cloisters and
ivory towers! We have chronicles, genealogies and municipal annals… but where is a
history of Italy?… O Italians, I exhort you to the study of history, as no other people can
claim more disasters to be lamented, more errors to be avoided, more virtues to be

respected, and more great spirits worthy of rescue from oblivion…26

What most concerned Foscolo was the education of the (largely

urban) middle classes, those ‘located by fortune between the idiot
and the littérateur’. Such people were crucial to the future well-being
of the nation: they had ‘houses, land, social status and security of
inheritance, and when possessed of civil and domestic virtues they
ha[d] the resources and energy to impart these to the masses and to
the state’. At present, though, they were wallowing in ignorance.
Ignored by the merchants of high culture, they were feeding on a
diet of newspapers, novels and popular verses, which left them with
little sense of the beauty of their language and literature and prey to
all manner of ‘stupidities and vices’. It was up to the men with
education and principles to set aside their disdain for the common
herd, and make it their mission to teach the mass of the population
how to live virtuously and love Italy, and so rescue the nation from
its decadence – a nation whose spirit and essence were timeless and
immortal:
My fellow citizens! How meagre is the comfort to be had from being pure and enlightened
if you cannot defend our fatherland against the ignorant and the immoral! Love your
nation and love literature openly and generously, and you will at last know one another
and have the courage that stems from unity… [L]ove your fatherland, and you will not
allow the native purity, richness and grace of our tongue to be polluted with foreign
terms… Visit Italy! O adorable land! O temple of Venus and the Muses! How have you
been portrayed by travellers who claim to celebrate you! How have you been humiliated
by foreigners who presume to teach you how to behave! But who can describe you better
than he who is born to behold your beauties all the days of his life?… Neither the
barbarism of the Goths, nor the disputes between provinces, nor the devastations of
countless armies, nor the fulminations of theologians, nor the usurpation of scholarship by
monks, have extinguished in these lands that immortal ame that inspired the Etruscans
and the Latins, inspired Dante in the nightmares of exile, Machiavelli in the agony of
torture, and Galileo amidst the terror of the inquisition… Prostrate yourselves on their
tombs, ask them about how they were great and unhappy, and how love of their
fatherland, of glory and of truth increased their courage, the strength of their spirit, and

the blessings they have bestowed on us.27

This peroration elicited prolonged and rapturous applause. But

Foscolo’s hope that a love of the nation and its literature would
create a community of intellectuals proved illusory: ‘Italy’ was a
word charged with powerful emotions, but it belonged chie y still
to the sphere of rhetoric. Foscolo’s scorn for most of his fellow
writers, mere lackeys in his view of the Napoleonic establishment,
embroiled him in increasingly ugly feuds and cost him the
friendship of among others Vincenzo Monti. When in 1811 his
tragedy Ajace was staged at La Scala in Milan his enemies turned the
occasion into a asco, and the play was banned after one
performance. Foscolo was forced to leave the Kingdom of Italy. He
withdrew to Tuscany, where in relative seclusion he turned his hand
to rare ed works, including a satire on Milanese society written in
biblical Latin. The role of Old Testament prophet, caustic and aloof,
suited him. It was also to appeal to other self-appointed priests of
the national cause in years to come.
“BEAUTIFUL ITALY”: SONS AND LOVERS

When Vittorio Al eri died on 8 October 1803, his lover, Louise,

Countess of Albany, was determined he should have a grand
monument in the church of Santa Croce in Florence. The choice of
artist seemed obvious: Italy’s greatest poet should be
commemorated by Italy’s greatest living sculptor, Antonio Canova.
At the time Canova was inundated with commissions from princely
courts around Europe, but the Countess of Albany was strong-willed
and well connected. So too was her new lover, the French painter
François Xavier Fabre. And together, and with the support of the
papal Secretary of State, Cardinal Consalvi, they persuaded Canova
to undertake the memorial.
Progress was slow. The countess was not happy with Canova’s
original design of a stela with genii and a bas-relief portrait of the
writer: for 10,000 scudi she felt entitled to at least one three-
dimensional sculpture. There was also the problem that Canova was
busy at the time with other major commissions, such as the colossal
statue of Napoleon, naked, as ‘Mars the Paci er’: the monument to
the author of the Anti-Gaul had to wait. However, by early 1807 the
nal composition had been settled on: a large sarcophagus on a two-
tiered elliptical base, with lyres, masks, festoons, garlands and
inscriptions, and at the front a majestic woman, personifying Italy.
To make room for the monument next to the tomb of Niccolò
Machiavelli the countess elicited the help of the ruler of Tuscany,
Elisa Baciocchi, in having a number of older, if historic, tombs
cleared out of the way. She had also used her powerful contacts to
overcome the opposition of the clergy of Santa Croce to her own
name guring prominently on the plinth: her relationship with
Al eri had after all been somewhat scandalous.28
The monument was inaugurated in September 1810 and the
general response was overwhelmingly enthusiastic. Canova had
gone to considerable lengths to ensure that the composition was
‘grave and majestic’, ‘to correspond’, he wrote, ‘… to the eriness of
the pen of this supreme poet’ (he had allegedly read Al eri’s works
and Foscolo’s On Tombs to gain inspiration). In particular it was the
gure of Italy – the rst ever depiction of the nation in a monument
– that attracted the greatest plaudits. Adapted from Canova’s statue
of Temperance on the tomb of Pope Clement XIV and from his
image of Venice on a projected memorial to Francesco Pesaro, the
tall and graceful woman, with a coronet of crenellated towers, and a
owing high-waisted classical dress and cloak, her head bowed in
grief, and dabbing tears from her eyes, almost immediately
established itself as a powerful icon for Italian patriots: Italy as the
collective mother weeping for a lost son, and by extension weeping
at her own sorry plight over a lifeless, unresurrected nation. When
Foscolo paid a visit to his ‘holy friends and masters’ in Santa Croce
in 1812 he came away ecstatic at Al eri’s memorial: ‘Oh, how
beautiful Italy is! Beautiful! And yet, for all that, she stands over a
grave.’29
The personi cation of Italy as a woman with a crown of towers
and city walls on her head – symbolizing the country’s strong
municipal traditions – was Roman in origin. It reappeared
occasionally in eighteenth-century allegorical paintings, such as
Martin Knoller’s fresco of The Apotheosis of Alberic the Great (1777–
82) in the Palazzo Belgioioso d’Este in Milan, where an Amazonian
warrior with large bare breasts (foreshadowing French revolutionary
representations of liberty, democracy and the nation as a mother
suckling her children), a long spear and a star above her coroneted
head, points to a Roman legionary standard bearing the inscription
‘Italy liberated from foreigners’. But it was during the Napoleonic
period, when there was a concern to make politics into a secular
religion, that the iconography of Italy began to ourish.
The images of Italy in the Jacobin years of 1796–9 were in the
main pale re ections of their French counterparts: a young woman,
usually with one of her breasts naked, in a Greek or Roman tunic,
carrying a spear, Phrygian bonnet and a bundle of lictors’ rods or
fasces. Iconographic innovation came with a competition launched
by the Cisalpine Republic in 1801 for a painting on the theme of
Italy’s gratitude to Napoleon for its liberation to be hung in the
projected Bonaparte Forum in Milan (whose monumental buildings
were never completed). An exhibition of the submitted works was
held at the Brera Academy and attracted huge public interest, with
troops being deployed to control the crowds. The winning entry by
Giuseppe Bossi was especially striking. While other artists showed
Italy passively restored to life and liberty by Napoleon, Bossi’s
canvas, su used with neoclassical dignity and grandeur, depicted a
strong, statuesque woman, dressed in green and white, with a red
girdle, a crown of walls and towers round her head, standing
proudly before the seated Napoleon, one arm outstretched to receive
from him branches of olive and oak leaves (symbols of peace and
constancy), the other clasping a copy of the constitution of the
Republic.30
Further images of Italy appeared at this time, some of which
achieved wide circulation as prints. For example, an allegorical
drawing by the most famous Italian artist of his day, Andrea
Appiani, showed Hercules (symbolizing the French people)
scattering the forces of reaction with his club, while the gure of the
Italian Republic, a woman crowned with towers, is presented by
Minerva to Napoleon, who is ordering Victory to close the door of
the temple of Janus (as a sign of peace).31 Appiani also produced an
image of the Cisalpine Republic as a somewhat dishevelled woman,
again crowned with towers, surrounded by a throng of naked
children imploring Napoleon for help, in the cycle of paintings
known as the Triumphs of Napoleon in the Royal Palace in Milan –
the most important single work of artistic propaganda of the period.
And high art was not the only medium through which ideas and
images of the Italian nation were generated. Following the lead of
revolutionary France, civic festivals were organized in Italy after
1796 in a bid to mobilize ordinary people and create enthusiasm for
the new political order. Often the focus was some famous local
gure: Dante in Ravenna, Ariosto in Ferrara. In Mantua in 1797 a
day of celebrations was staged for Virgil, and statues of the poet and
assorted other luminaries, among them Columbus, Galileo, Rousseau
and Petrarch, were paraded through the streets. To save money –
and, as far as the city’s republican elite was concerned, also to score
a political point: though whether the mass of the population shared
their glee seems unlikely – statues of saints were taken from the
city’s churches and turned into secular icons.32
Some of the most elaborate festivals were held in Milan, where a
large arena, begun in 1805, staged gymnastic games, horse and
chariot races, and mock naval battles, with participants and
spectators often decking themselves out in Roman costume for the
occasion, while a vast tract of open land near the Sforza castle,
designated the Bonaparte Forum, was home to spectacular mises en
scène. The festival of 26 June 1803 was especially lavish, with the
artist Appiani having a major hand in its design. Among the key
works were a giant statue of the Italian Republic, erected by the
Naviglio canal, with a bas-relief on its pedestal of the Departments
as young women holding hands in a joyous dance, and two statues
of the French and Italian Republics ‘amorously embracing… in the
most beautiful green bower’, with beside them four gures of Fame,
‘announcing this happiest of unions to all the world’. In the centre of
the Bonaparte Forum, amid a sea of smoking altars and tripods, rose
a massive column, surmounted by a gure of Napoleon, with a relief
around the drum showing the French army crossing the Great St
Bernard. Near to it were two slightly smaller columns bearing
representations of the French and Italian republics.

Ceremonies and symbols were tools of the new civic religion of

patriotism. They were instruments for engendering, channelling and
focusing popular enthusiasm around the cult of the nation. But in
the case of the most important and probably most in uential
literary personi cation of Italy in this period, that of the supremely
beautiful, talented and sibylline gure of Corinne in Madame de
Staël’s 1807 novel, Corinne, or Italy, the inspirational power of the
symbol was undercut by disquieting strains of criticism (all the more
disturbing for their being largely implicit and almost casual)
towards those who had failed to make the heroine happy and
prevent her tragic early death. This was no doubt one reason why
the novel (which went through over forty editions in the course of
the nineteenth century)33 was never as popular in Italy as it was in
Britain, France or the United States. Italy as a beautiful and
digni ed matron or grieving mother was an invitation, without
criticism, to comfort and support; as a radiant young woman who
could not nd a worthy partner among her compatriots, the call to
help and action was interlaced with aspersions cast on Italian
masculinity – though the response might be all the more vehement
as a result of wounded amour propre.
Corinne, or Italy was the fruit of a trip that Madame de Staël made
to Italy in 1805 in the company of her children’s tutor, the
distinguished German academic and translator of Shakespeare,
August Wilhelm von Schlegel, and the great Swiss scholar Simonde
de Sismondi. Sismondi was then engaged in writing the rst volume
of his monumental history of the Italian medieval republics, a work
whose celebration of the raw energy, military prowess and
independence of the city-states in the centuries before the
Renaissance helped to inspire a generation of Italian patriots. Born
to Swiss Protestant parents, brought up in a highly cosmopolitan
environment in Paris – her father was Jacques Necker, Louis XVI’s
eminent nance minister, whose sacking in July 1789 triggered the
storming of the Bastille – and married when young to a Swedish
aristocrat, Madame de Staël was fascinated by questions of national
identity and in particular by the institutional and environmental
forces that went into shaping the characters of di erent peoples.
Before 1805 her opinion of Italians had been low: her emotional and
intellectual centre of gravity had been located rmly in the north of
Europe. But the in uence of Sismondi, a passionate love a air in
Rome, and anger at Napoleon’s despotic callousness towards both
herself and the peninsula softened her prejudices.
In print, at least. In private, her behaviour on her trip to Italy was
characteristic of the impatience and condescension shown by many
northern travellers at this time, an attitude that she herself
caricatured in Corinne in the gure of the frivolous and philistine
Frenchman, the Count d’Erfeuil (‘as nations, I like only the English
and the French… It is just a prejudice to admire those thorn-covered
ruins… There is not a monument intact in Europe today which is
not worth more than those stumps of columns, than those bas-reliefs
blackened by time…’).34 De Staël hurried through the north and
centre of Italy, dismissive of most of the monuments and works of
art, quarrelling continually with Schlegel, who wanted to do
sightseeing properly, irritated by the sycophancy of the local érudits,
who everywhere turned out to shower her with tributes in verse and
prose, and declaring that there was nobody worth talking to apart
from the poet Vincenzo Monti. Only when she got to Rome did
things change. There the statuesque 39-year-old salonnière and
enthusiast for Rousseau and free-love encountered the handsome
Dom Pedro de Sousa Holstein, a future prime minister of Portugal,
fteen years her junior; and Italy suddenly acquired a much more
appealing air.35
Madame de Staël wrote Corinne in Switzerland and France
between 1805 and 1806 at the time when Napoleon was extending
his despotic control over almost the entire peninsula; and this
backdrop, together with the republican Sismondi’s patient and no
doubt insistent tutoring of de Staël as she dashed through the
peninsula, ensured the novel had a sharp political undertone (as
Napoleon immediately saw: he was enraged, and renewed de Staël’s
ban from Paris). On the surface, though, the novel was little more
than a rather melodramatic romantic tale. Lord Nelvil, a young,
handsome and world-weary Anglo-Scottish aristocrat, goes to Italy
to restore his health and meets a vivacious and emotionally
liberated poet called Corinne, just as she is being crowned with
laurels on the Capitol in a brilliant ceremony in honour of her
genius. They fall in love and travel together around Italy, drinking
in the country’s beauties and admiring its artistic treasures. But
Nelvil is increasingly troubled by his late father’s wish that he
should marry a suitably demure English girl, and returns to England
to try to resolve the con ict that he feels between love and duty.
Corinne secretly follows him, believes Nelvil has abandoned her for
someone else, goes back home, distraught, and enters into a long
decline, losing her good looks and her talents, and eventually dies;
but not before she has seen Nelvil again and been reconciled to him,
after he explains that he had never ceased to love her, and had only
deserted her because he was under the misapprehension that it was
she who had in fact deserted him.
Corinne, though, is also a highly intellectual novel, whose imagery
and plot are heavily informed by the conversations that were taking
place at the time among the educated about nations and nationality
(this latter word was invented by Madame de Staël’s circle and
appears for the rst time in European literature in Corinne).36 The
gure of the heroine is de Staël’s attempt to encapsulate the soul of
the Italian nation (and this is Italy as a whole, irrespective of
regional diversity, for wherever Corinne goes, whether Rome,
Naples, Florence or Venice, she is immediately recognized and feted
by all classes). Physically she is made to resemble one of
Domenichino’s exotic and sensuous Cumaean Sibyls (‘An Indian
turban was wound round her head, and intertwined with her
beautiful black hair… Her arms were dazzlingly beautiful; her tall,
slightly plump gure… gave a keen impression of youth and
happiness; her eyes had something of an inspired look’); in character
she is represented as artistic, creative, intellectual, spontaneous,
emotional and una ected. But Corinne is the timeless essence of
Italy, a kind of Platonic ideal, and not its historical reality, for
political decadence and fragmentation have produced moral decline.
As Prince Castel-Forte, the acme of contemporary Italian manhood,
says:
We say to foreigners: ‘Look at her, she is the image of our beautiful Italy; she is what we
would be but for the ignorance, the envy, the discord, and the indolence to which our fate
has condemned us.’ We delight in gazing at her as an admirable product of our climate and
of our arts, as an o shoot of the past, as a harbinger of the future. And when foreigners
talk ill of this land which gave birth to the great minds that have enlightened Europe,
when they have no pity for our failings which arise from our misfortunes, we say to them:

‘Look at Corinne.’37

If Corinne is Italy, the quintessence of the sun-soaked south with

its perpetual proneness to lethargy and sensuality, Lord Nelvil is the
northern soul, rational and intrinsically active, but inclined by cold,
damp and fog to gloomy introspection. But as an Anglo-Scottish
peer he is also a symbol of the political freedom and vigorous self-
governance that de Staël and her circle so admired; and the question
that nags through the novel – and it is one that is made all the more
pertinent by the recent suppression of the Italian Republic – is how
a successful marriage between Italy and liberty could be achieved.
That Italy is suited to freedom and ourishes in its presence is
a rmed in the radiant nature of the love a air (and Corinne wastes
away and dies once she is deserted by Nelvil); and that the country
has the potential to recover its former greatness is explicitly stated
(and for both these reasons Sismondi regarded Corinne as ‘a noble
defence of a people that everyone else has long treated with
ingratitude’).38 But who is to bring about Italy’s regeneration given
that Italians, or at least Italian men, have been rendered so corrupt,
decadent and e ete by centuries of servitude?
Clearly not the French, who were incapable of love or sympathy
for Italy; and implicitly not the British either (though with the early
chapters being conceived around the time of Nelson’s victory at
Trafalgar, it is possible that de Staël initially entertained the hope of
British armed support; and some English liberals of a romantic
disposition, such as Lord William Bentinck, would certainly have
relished the challenge of supporting Italian nationalism). Corinne
speaks of two former lovers who had both turned out to be
inadequate, ‘a great German nobleman’ and a Roman prince
(representing, presumably, the medieval Empire and the Papacy):
the rst had brawn, but insu cient intellect, and did not want to
live in Italy, the second ‘shared all [her] tastes, and liked [her] way
of life’, but lacked the strength to protect her when things got
di cult.39 By default, then, the responsibility for protecting Corinne
(‘Corinne’s… eyes sought the protection of a man friend, a
protection no woman, however superior she may be, can ever
dispense with’)40 would seem naturally to lie with Italian men. But
how were they to nd the necessary vigour and determination for
the task?
This was a question that in the years to come was to trouble
many Italian patriots as well as foreign observers. And it was a
question that had already taxed the minds of some of the most
astute historians and philosophers in Italy since the end of the
fteenth century, when the humiliating conquest of the peninsula by
Spanish, French and German troops had led Machiavelli and others
to speculate on what had gone wrong and why a land that had
produced such great citizens and warriors in ancient Rome could
have become so conspicuously lacking in civic and military virtues.
Catholicism was one much favoured culprit. But in that case, why
had the French, who were also Catholics, ended up conquering
almost the whole of Europe to cries of ‘Vive la patrie!’? Madame de
Staël’s preference was to attribute Italy’s plight to its despotic
political institutions and the cynical rapaciousness of foreigners. As
Corinne tells Lord Nelvil, after he has disparaged Italian men for
their weakness and lack of purpose in life (like Madame de Staël
herself in private: in her travel notebooks she was utterly scathing
about the ‘feminine’ character of Italian males):41
What you say about the Italians is what all foreigners say… But you must probe more
deeply to judge this country, which at di erent periods has been so great. How comes it
then that this nation was the most military of all under the Romans, the most jealous of its
liberty in the medieval republics, and in the sixteenth century the most famous for
literature, science, and the arts?… And if now it is no longer distinguished, why would you
not blame its political situation, since in other circumstances it has shown itself to be so
di erent from what it is now?… In every age, foreigners have conquered and torn apart
this beautiful country, the goal of their permanent ambition; and yet foreigners bitterly
reproach this nation with the failings of nations that have been conquered and torn

apart!42
The degenerate behaviour of Italians is thus due to their having
been subjugated and divided for centuries. But there was a problem
with this line of argument, for if, as de Staël says, ‘governments
make the character of nations’,43 how can a people which has
become deeply corrupted nd the moral resources needed to throw
o the yoke of tyranny? And if by some accident of history that
yoke is thrown o for them (by, say, a foreign power), what is to
stop the vices of the people then vitiating the institutions and
destroying them before those institutions have had time to work
their pedagogic e ect?
Here was another conundrum for Italian patriots to wrestle with,
particularly those of a democratic persuasion who believed in
representative government and an Italy made by and for ‘the
people’. How could there be a guarantee that those who were
elected to an assembly would not simply mirror the behaviour and
values of the unregenerate masses? It is a thought that seems to
have troubled Madame de Staël towards the end of her novel. When
Lord Nelvil returns to England he is struck by the dignity, order and
prosperity of his native land, and the ‘poetic impressions’ that had
lled his heart when he was with Corinne gave way to ‘the deep
feeling of liberty and morality’. He now has nothing but pity for
Italy, where there is no society or public opinion, and where ‘the
institutions and social conditions only re ect confusion, weakness,
and ignorance’.44 There was always the hope, of course, that a
virtuous minority might succeed in educating Italians, using the
medium of literature in particular to evade the censors (‘There is so
much feeling in our arts that perhaps one day our character will
equal our genius,’ says Corinne, after quoting a patriotic line from
Al eri). But here, too, de Staël was aware that a similar circularity
of cause and e ect risked nullifying the impact of the written word
on Italian society. For, as Corinne acknowledges, one of the
consequences of centuries of enslavement had been that Italian
writers had ‘lost all interest in truth, and often even the possibility
of expressing it’. Rhetoric and arti ce had come to replace serious
thought and genuine feelings.45
The personi cation of Italy as a beautiful woman – whether a
grieving young mother in search of consolation, or a sister or
ancée whose honour had to be safeguarded against predatory
foreigners (or avenged), or, as in the case of Corinne, a nubile and
poetic creature longing for the embrace of a strong protector – was
to develop into a major theme in the patriotic literature and art of
the next few decades and helped to inject into the movement for
national redemption a note of sexual frisson. And particularly when
mixed with religious sentiment it made for a cocktail powerful
enough to inspire young men to risk their lives in conspiracy or on
the barricades. Recalling his youthful infatuation with the cause of
Italian unity, the Tuscan democrat Giuseppe Montanelli wrote in
1853 of how he and his friends absorbed ‘the religion of the
fatherland’ from books, and how ‘Italy became for us a cherished
mother, a mother in chains, and we loved her as one loves one’s
mother’: ‘And we came to look upon the day when it would be given
to us to ght the battle for national redemption as the most
beautiful day of our lives.’46 Another leading democrat, Go redo
Mameli, described in January 1849 his frustration at the betrayal of
Italy, his metaphors slipping waywardly between the realms of the
sexual and the religious: ‘Italy had arisen most beautiful after
centuries in her tomb, armed with her faith; and she was
surrounded by countless lovers. But many only loved her to disarm
her, and many only kissed her on the face for Judas’ thirty pieces of
silver. And our poor fatherland was cruci ed.’47 Six months later,
Mameli achieved his own martyrdom, dying on behalf of his
beloved Italy from wounds he had received defending Rome against
the French.
3

Conspiracy and Resistance

The idea… behind this society came from a Bolognese of exceptional

intellect, and was called Platonic Astronomy… The solar circle was
divided into two hemispheres, one based in Bologna, the other in Milan.
These hemispheres only communicated with each other orally, not in
writing, and the words were carried from one hemisphere to another by
one of the planets, who while carrying out his mission was known as a
comet. Every member of the hemisphere was also the president, or rst
star, of a segment and directed its operations. Each star in a segment
constituted a ray, of which it was the source of light. Each member of a
ray was called a line; and whenever a ray got too big, the most active
lines broke away and formed new rays… [By 1802] the society had
30,000 lines.

G. Breganze, description of the Society of Rays, c. 1830

I wish, Lord, that you could feel fully the truth of what I have the honour
of telling you: that we are no longer the people we were twenty years
ago, and it is not possible for us to return to how we were except by
renouncing ways and feelings that are too dear to a nation that has the
desire, the means and the energy to be such.

Count Federico Confalonieri to Lord Castlereagh, 18 May 1814

RURAL REVOLTS

On the evening of 29 November 1807 Napoleon crossed the lagoon

to Venice. It was his rst and only visit to the city. It was cold and
wet, but the Venetians had gone out of their way to make the man
who had ended their independence and then handed them over to
the Austrians feel welcome, constructing a huge triumphal arch
across the entrance to the Grand Canal between the churches of San
Simeone and the Scalzi. For ten days the Emperor of the French and
King of Italy was feted by the nobility and middle classes. A
splendid regatta was staged in his honour, and there was a glittering
gala at the theatre of La Fenice (where a royal box had been built
specially for him), with the performance of a newly commissioned
cantata entitled The Judgement of Jove. In return for this hospitality
Napoleon passed a series of decrees, founding academies, opening
San Marco to the public (and making it a cathedral), and ordering
the demolition of the west end of the Piazza and the construction in
its place of a ballroom.1
From Venice, Napoleon travelled to Milan, where on 17
December he was the guest of honour at a mock naval battle laid on
for him in the newly nished arena. A nautical theme was not
without relevance, for on that same day he issued a decree
reinforcing the blockade of the ports of continental Europe against
British shipping – a policy that he had launched the previous year in
a bid to bring the British economy to its knees. Three days later he
addressed the electoral college of Milan. As often, he was careful to
atter his audience with patriotic rhetoric, recalling the past glories
of Italy and highlighting the damage that had been done to the
nation over the centuries by regional rivalries and divisions. But
precisely because there was still so much to be done to restore the
country to its former greatness, he said, the French and the Italians
should see themselves as brothers, and the Iron Crown of Lombardy
be united with the imperial crown of France. Italy, in other words,
was to remain subordinate to France.2
There was certainly resentment among the upper classes at
French rule; but it was muted. Nor did a burgeoning sense of
patriotism necessarily mean hostility to the Napoleonic order.
Vincenzo Cuoco was perfectly happy to occupy administrative posts
in Milan while urging the civic and political education of Italians;
so, too, was Melchiorre Gioia, who became a respected civil servant.
Foscolo’s snarls of anger and frustration were the exception rather
than the rule. Much of the explanation for this acquiescence lay in
Napoleon’s deliberate policy of seeking to win the backing of the
propertied classes; and in the last years of his regime this ralliement
gathered pace, with even the old nobility dropping its surliness
towards the Napoleonic order in many places and gracing the courts
of Naples and Turin, Florence and Milan with its presence.
The sale of former feudal ‘national lands’ was one important way
of winning support. In contrast to France, where the peasantry
bene ted heavily from such sales, in Italy it was mostly existing
landowners and the urban professional classes who gained. In
Piedmont typical bene ciaries were major aristocratic families such
as the Cavours, the d’Azeglios and the Balbos (all of whom were
later to play a major role in the national movement). In southern
Italy, where feudalism was abolished in 1806 in the wake of the
French occupation, there were attempts to ensure that the peasantry
received something. The key issue here was the common lands, on
which local people had enjoyed ancient rights, for instance, of
pasturage or wood gathering, and which had been critical to their
livelihood. A special commission was set up to explore the often
complex competing claims of feudatories and the commune to such
lands, and where rights were established, part of the land was
supposed to be given to the poorest peasants. In practice, however,
the barons were often able to thwart the endeavours of the state
o cials, and the issue of the distribution of the common lands was
to remain a running sore in many areas of the south well into the
twentieth century.
 Ecclesiastical lands also ooded the market in these years and
helped to keep the middle and upper classes happy. A concordat of
1803 between the Pope and the Cisalpine Republic declared
Catholicism the state religion and guaranteed the Church against
control by the civil authorities in many important areas. But once it
was signed, Napoleon proceeded to ignore both its spirit and its
letter. Religious orders were tightly regulated by the state, Church
property continued to be con scated, civil marriage and divorce
were imposed, and parishes were reorganized. The situation got
even worse after French troops annexed the Papal States in 1809
and arrested the Pope. In the countryside especially it was often
priests who took the lead in opposing the government and stoking
popular unrest. For the propertied classes, though, the material
bene ts of Napoleon’s anticlerical policies allayed most of their
spiritual qualms.
Though taxes on property certainly went up sharply under
Napoleon, the burden for landowners was o set by the steep rise in
the prices of wheat, rice, wine and other goods. The introduction of
the Continental Blockade from 1806 damaged Italian ports badly,
but Italy now became a major supplier of raw materials to France,
and this trade gave a powerful boost to agricultural production as
well as to the manufacture of silk. The merchant classes bene ted
from the removal of internal customs barriers, the uni cation of
coinage, the new commercial and civil codes and the vigorous road-
building programme that was undertaken, especially in the north of
the country (the great Simplon road, built over the Alps in 1802–5,
was emblematic). Italian manufacturing was already weak and may
not have been damaged much by French industrial imports. Indeed
it may have gained from supplying matériel to the army.
While most of the peasantry probably resented military
conscription, for the upper classes – or at any rate for those who did
not purchase exemptions – the experience of serving in the Grande
Armée was often a source of pride and (paradoxically) of patriotic
sentiment: Italians, after all, could ght, and ght well. When it
came to the army Napoleon was typically ambivalent in his attitude
to the national question. On the one hand he did not want the
Italian units to develop an independent identity: they were thus
incorporated into the main body of the French forces. On the other
he was quite happy for patriotic feelings to be nurtured among the
Italian regiments as a way of promoting esprit de corps. The Italian
language was declared the common medium of communication, and
dialect discouraged; and o cers were told to foster bonds of
fraternity among the troops by appealing to the idea of an Italian
‘patria’: ‘The concept of an Italian army, in name and practice, is to
be drummed into the conscripts as often as possible,’ ran a directive
from the Italian Minister of War in 1809. ‘They are to be told that
they serve for the splendour of Italy.’3 E orts were also made to
celebrate an Italian military tradition. For example, the Neapolitan
exile and patriot Francesco Lomonaco (who was a doctor: among his
patients were his friends Vincenzo Cuoco and Ugo Foscolo) followed
up his successful Life of Dante and Lives of the Illustrious Italians with
a three-volume work, Lives of the Famous Captains of Italy (1804–5),
written for the military academy of Modena.
There was a particularly strong cult of the ag in the army. The
rst time the Italian tricolour was used was on 6 November 1796
when Napoleon presented a red, white and green standard,
embroidered with a wreath of oak leaves and the republican
symbols of a Phrygian cap, the daggers of Brutus and Cassius, and
the inscription ‘Equality or death’, to the rst cohort of the Lombard
Legion. Two months later at the congress of Reggio, the tricolour
was adopted as the ag of the Cispadane Republic, and thereafter it
was employed by all Italian army units throughout the Napoleonic
period. In the campaigns fought on foreign soil in Germany, Spain
and Russia, where the Italian losses were huge (only 13,000 of the
85,000 who set out returned alive), the tricolour became a powerful
symbol of collective identity and su ering. And it is hardly
surprising that in the spring of 1814, when, under the terms of the
armistice of Schiarino-Rizzino, Italian units were supposed to
become incorporated into the Austrian army, there was widespread
resistance, and rather than hand over their ags troops preferred
instead to burn them, divide up the ashes, and sometimes eat them
in soup.4
The writer Stendhal – admittedly not always the most reliable
witness – was convinced that military service under Napoleon was
an important means of reducing regional divisions and countering
the bourgeois e eteness of many Italians. He recalled in 1817 how
before the arrival of the French ‘the aristocracy of Bergamo used to
feel an inexpressible contempt for the peaceable ways of the
Milanese, and would invade the masked balls held at La Scala,
rmly intending to o er provocation to anyone they met. “Let’s go
to Milan and slap a few faces!” was a common cry in Bergamese
society.’ However, the Napoleonic wars had ‘refashion[ed] all these
diverse regional idiosyncracies, and the gentlemen of Milan,
whether on the eld of Raab or in the Peninsular War, fought fully
as valiantly as their brother o cers from Bergamo or Reggio’.5
Whether the experience of army life had the permanent
nationalizing e ect that Stendhal believed is unclear, though it is
certainly the case that patriotic sentiment remained strong in the
ranks of Italian o cers after 1815 and was an important ingredient
in the insurrections that broke out during the rst years of restored
Austrian rule. It is also true that the idea of the army as the ‘school
of the nation’ was a powerful legacy to united Italy, and served to
shape many aspects of political life after 1860 in far-reaching (and
sometimes dangerous) ways. However, there seems little doubt that
educated Italians frequently felt they were helping the cause of
‘Italy’ while they were in the Napoleonic army, not least by
acquiring martial skills and making good some of the damage that
had been done by centuries of servitude. As a Venetian lieutenant
wrote to a Milanese friend from Calais in July 1804:
As an Italian, I attach great signi cance to this expedition for the fortunes of my country,
because it is certain that if the Italian Republic is ever mentioned in the general peace, it
will be because of these two wretched divisions… Our main aim is to learn about war, as
this will be the only means by which we can make ourselves free… We are still too young
to think of getting liberty. Let us think about being soldiers, and when we have got one

hundred thousand bayonets, then we will be able to talk.6

If the Napoleonic regime in Italy was on the whole successful in

winning over the middle and upper classes (albeit, at times, at the
cost of fanning potentially dangerous patriotic ames), it was far
less fortunate when it came to the mass of the population. The gulf
between the educated and the illiterate, the rich and the poor, the
town and the countryside, that Vincenzo Cuoco had identi ed as the
Achilles’ heel of the Neapolitan revolution of 1799 remained an
enormous problem after 1800, and continually threatened to
undermine the authority of the state almost everywhere in mainland
Italy. In the absence of a workable policy to distribute land to the
poor, there was nothing to mitigate the feelings of anger that many
peasants felt at rising prices, spiralling indirect taxation, the loss of
common lands, military conscription and the suppression of the
monasteries (which, apart from the o ence done to their religious
sensibilities, deprived them of an important source of charitable
welfare and jobs).
Unrest in the countryside grew particularly acute in northern Italy
at the end of 1805, when Austria ceded Venice and Dalmatia to the
Kingdom of Italy under the Peace of Pressburg. This change meant
peasants could no longer slip across the border as before to escape
conscription. Typical of the revolts at this time – and characteristic
of the severity with which Napoleon dealt with them – was an
incident at Crespino near Rovigo. It began in October 1805 as a
protest against taxes, with some fty local workers sacking the town
hall and destroying registers. Support for the rebels arrived from
nearby villages, and the local militia was disarmed and the gates of
the town thrown open to Austrian soldiers. When news of these
events reached Napoleon, he was incensed, and on 11 February he
signed a decree in the Tuileries declaring that the people of
Crespino should henceforth be stripped of their citizen rights and be
treated as ‘people without a fatherland’. They were to pay double
taxes, and be punished by oggings rather than imprisonment. And
over the entrance to the town hall he ordered the following
inscription to be set in marble: ‘Napoleon I, Emperor of the French
and King of Italy, has decreed: the inhabitants of Crespino are not
Italian citizens.’ The town was eventually pardoned – at the price of
one shmonger being shot.7
Napoleon’s relative leniency on this occasion was not always
repeated. The commander in charge of putting down a rising in the
mountains near Piacenza in January 1806 was ordered ‘to set re to
one large village and shoot a dozen rebels’.8 No less harsh was the
government’s response to a huge wave of revolts that swept across
much of northern Italy in 1809–10. These were triggered by tax
rises and an invasion of the Austrian army, but were often fuelled by
deep-seated tensions between town and countryside. In the Veneto
8,000 insurgents besieged Vicenza, while Schio, Feltre and Belluno
were captured, taxes abolished and the return of Venetian laws
proclaimed. In Rovigo the houses of Jews and wealthy merchants
were sacked and public documents burned, and in the Romagna a
series of tax revolts culminated in a full-scale assault on Bologna.
Often it was public o cials who were the main targets of peasant
wrath. The traumatized mayor of Crespellano wrote to the prefect in
October 1809 of ‘these monsters, speaking di erent languages,
terrible in appearance, but more terrible still in their deeds’, who
had sacked his town hall and raped his wife.9
But it was once again southern Italy that saw the worst violence.
Here popular anger at French rule after 1806, with its heavy taxes,
its con scations of Church property, its failure to resolve ownership
of the common lands and (from 1809) its imposition of conscription,
was compounded by old patterns of con ict – between rival towns,
between factions within towns, and between landlords and peasants
(Joseph Bonaparte described the violence as ‘a war of the poor
against the rich’). The British and the Bourbons (in exile in Sicily)
added a further dimension to the turmoil by giving military and
nancial support to bandits and rebels. The result was ve years of
brutal guerrilla warfare, much of it concentrated in Calabria and the
Abruzzi, in which some 20,000 French soldiers were killed. There
was little that was ‘patriotic’ about this violence, certainly in the
sense of ghting for some idea of ‘Italy’; though some of the rebels
undoubtedly felt inspired by feelings of loyalty to the king and the
Church.10
Appalling atrocities were perpetrated on both sides. Only one of
the peasant leaders, or capimassa, Geniale Versace, had a reputation
for being in any way merciful to captives, and prisoners were quite
regularly castrated, ayed, impaled, cruci ed or burned alive.
Giuseppe Rotella was justly nicknamed ‘the executioner’, while Capo
Scapitta was reputed to dine on esh from the freshly severed heads
of his enemies. The French replied with a similar ruthlessness. In
July 1806 Napoleon told his brother Joseph Bonaparte: ‘Grant no
pardons, execute at least 600 rebels… Let the houses of at least
thirty of the principal heads of the villages be burned and distribute
their property among the troops. Disarm all the inhabitants and
pillage ve or six of the villages that have behaved worst…
Con scate the public property of the rebellious villages and give it
to the army.’11 Joseph complied, and by December 1806 some 4,000
rebels had been killed on sight in the three provinces of the Abruzzi
alone.
The most famous rebel was an irregular soldier and bandit,
Michele Pezza, known as Fra Diavolo (Brother Devil). Born in 1771,
the son of a carter and trader from the small town of Itri in the
region of Lazio, Pezza had apparently earned his nickname while
still a child as a result of his unruly character and a vow that his
mother had made to San Francesco di Paola (which she had kept) to
dress her son as a monk if he ever recovered from a serious illness.
After murdering two men in the mid-1790s in a dispute over honour
(the classic starting point for many a brigand curriculum vitae), he
had ed to the hills and formed a bandit gang, but had been given a
pardon in return for enrolling in the Bourbon army. In 1799 he had
joined Cardinal Ru o’s Christian Army, leading a force of several
thousand notoriously bloodthirsty volunteers, and he had played a
prominent part in the overthrow of the Neapolitan Republic and the
subsequent attack on the French garrison in Rome. As a reward for
his services King Ferdinand had given him 2,500 ducats and
promoted him to colonel.12
When the French invaded the Kingdom of Naples at the beginning
of 1806 Pezza emerged once again at the head of a force of
irregulars, harrying the French mercilessly and conducting a reign of
terror in the towns and villages of Campania (all in the name of
King Ferdinand). He was supported by the British, who in July
landed a force in Calabria and defeated the French at the Battle of
Maida (an encounter bucolically commemorated in Maida Vale,
London). In the wake of this victory Pezza tried to start a rising in
southern Italy, but with little success. A huge bounty of 17,000
ducats was now on his head. The French were bent on capturing
him, and by an appropriate twist of historical fate, given the
fascination that he (and his moniker) were to exert on the romantic
imagination, the o cer entrusted with hunting him down was
Sigisbert Hugo, father of the great poet, Victor. Pezza and his men
were routed near Campobasso. Pezza himself escaped, but he was
caught soon after and turned over to the French (after being
wounded by rival bandits). He was promptly put on trial. British
requests to have him considered a prisoner of war were rejected,
and on 11 November 1806 he was executed in Naples as a common
criminal.13
The king and queen of Naples hurried to show their gratitude to
Fra Diavolo and celebrate his achievements – despite his highly
chequered career. A solemn mass was held for him in the church of
St John the Baptist in Palermo, attended by numerous political
dignitaries and a detachment of British soldiers, and with the
archbishop o ciating. Inscriptions proclaimed Pezza’s noble virtues
and glorious deeds, and the joy he had experienced in ‘dying for
[his] fatherland’.14 The support of the authorities for criminal
gures such as Pezza was to be an alarming feature of political life
in southern Italy for years to come and was to make the imposition
of the rule of law hard to achieve. And the fact that Pezza’s life, like
that of many other bandits after him, quickly became wrapped in
romantic myths, added further to the di culties the state faced in
making private violence morally repugnant. Indeed, Pezza was soon
swept into the pantheon of musical immortality with Daniel Auber’s
hugely successful comic opera, Fra Diavolo (1830), where he appears
as a dashing gure, masquerading as a marquis, who dupes Lord
and Lady Cokbourg (Eugène Scribe’s rendering of ‘Cockburn’) and
lches Lady Pamela’s diamonds from around her neck.
The campaigns of Sigisbert Hugo and other Napoleonic o cers
had an e ect, and for a couple of years after Pezza’s death the
violence in southern Italy abated. But in 1809 it ared up again
following the introduction of conscription by the new King of
Naples, Joachim Murat. As before, the clergy were often key gures
in the unrest, sometimes leading local rebellions in person, more
generally inciting the peasants to take the law into their own hands
and defy their godless masters: rebels were said to cut crosses on
their musket balls before shooting at the ‘French devils’.15
Monasteries frequently acted as bases for the insurgents, providing
them with food and shelter and serving as depositories for arms and
ammunition. In general, however, the unrest lacked coordination
and systematic leadership, and though it remained a serious
problem for some time, especially in Calabria (where the British
secretly channelled weapons and money to rebel gangs), by 1811
much of it had been brought under control by the French.
SECRET SOCIETIES AND OPPOSITION TO NAPOLEON

Secrecy was a necessary political tool in a climate of oppression.

Under Napoleon, and during the restoration after 1815, opponents
of the existing order were forced to try to evade the police and the
censors with subterfuge. One way of doing this was by coding their
dissent: for example, by disguising opposition in cultural debates
(about language, literary styles or the study of history), or in poetic,
artistic and musical symbols, or even in fashion statements (hair and
beards were a particularly rich source of political expression from
the 1790s). Alternatively recourse could be had to clandestine
organizations, with oaths and rituals being used to protect members
from in ltration or betrayal. However, secrecy was not just a
utilitarian commodity. It had also become charged with an
intellectual frisson in the eighteenth century: access to secret
knowledge was the key to revelation and enlightenment, and
brought with it membership of a new elite, one that was based on
intellect rather than wealth or social class.
The Italian secret societies for the most part evolved from
Freemasonry, which had apparently rst been introduced into
Tuscany from Britain during the 1730s. Despite papal bans,
Freemasonry had gradually spread through the peninsula, and by
the 1780s it had secured aristocratic and royal patronage and with it
a measure of respectability. But with the outbreak of the French
Revolution it came to be seen as subversive, and lodges were closed
or forced deeper underground, often assuming in the process a more
radical political character. The Society of Rays, which appeared in
parts of Lombardy and Emilia Romagna in the late 1790s, with a
vague programme of national independence and opposition to
France, almost certainly had Masonic roots. This society resurfaced
for a while after 1800, and may have been behind a rebellion that
broke out in Bologna in July 1802. But like so many of the sects of
these years, it su ered from municipalism and a lack of clear goals
and leadership, and soon zzled out.
A number of Catholic secret societies operated in these years,
spearheading reactionary opposition to Napoleonic rule, and their
roots were probably more in the various associations that had been
created by Jesuits after the suppression of the Society of Jesus in
1773 than in Freemasonry. They derived their support from the
anger felt at the anti-clerical and anti-papal policies of the French,
from loyalty to the old order, and from the conservative strand of
romanticism that emerged around the start of the nineteenth
century with its celebration of religion, mystery, authority and
aesthetic traditionalism. Christian Amity, an association founded
back in the early 1780s, operated in Piedmont, while the Society of
the Heart of Jesus was active under the Italian Republic (and caused
Melzi d’Eril and his government much anxiety). In the south there
were the sects of the Trinitari and the Calderari. These were
nurtured by agents of the Bourbons and drew inspiration from
Ru o’s Holy Faith movement of 1799.
But the most important of the secret societies was that of the
Carboneria, or ‘charcoal burners’. Exactly when and where it began
is uncertain. Some accounts suggested it began in Scotland, some in
the Jura, some in the forests of Germany. It may rst have
in ltrated Italy in the 1790s, but it only began to grow signi cantly
after 1806 in the Kingdom of Naples, in part thanks to support from
the British. The members of the Carboneria – Carbonari – were
broadly united in their opposition to Napoleon (the ‘fat wolf’ who
had ‘killed the republic’)16 and to French rule, and in their desire for
Italian independence, but as with the Society of Rays there was a
good deal of uncertainty about exactly what they wanted instead –
whether a federal republic or some form of constitutional monarchy.
There were also problems with the society’s social goals. Initiates
into the highest grade were apparently expected to embrace radical
egalitarian ideas of the kind that Filippo Buonarroti and his
followers had espoused back in the 1790s. But many rank and le
members – typically smaller landowners, professional men, soldiers
and civil servants, and clergy – would have bridled at such
extremism, and this part of the Carboneria’s programme was played
down.17
The Carboneria was heavily Masonic in both structure and style.
The basic unit was a local cell called a vendita, with a group of
vendite being controlled by a vendita madre (mother vendita), which
in turn answered to an alta vendita (high vendita). Initially there
appear to have been just two grades, those of Apprentice and
Master, but at some point a third grade was added, that of Grand
Master; and this tier was subsequently replaced by an additional
scale of a further seven grades, perhaps after 1815. With each grade
came a new initiation ceremony, rituals and catechism, and access
to a new level of knowledge: apprentices were taught general
philanthropic, moral and religious precepts, while those higher up
were given political instruction in how to set about overthrowing
tyrants. All Carbonari were required to be armed with a musket and
bayonet and to pay a monthly due to their vendita. To minimize the
risk of being betrayed by police spies or informers, organization was
tight. A liates were allowed access to only a small circle of other
a liates, and recognition signs and passwords were changed
regularly on the instructions of the alta vendita.18
In an uncertain world of political upheaval, peasant unrest and
fresh economic opportunities, the Carboneria was able to provide
useful networks of support and solidarity; and the bene ts to be
gained from the connections it generated must have compensated
for the risks that the initiates ran of being arrested and imprisoned.
These social bene ts were no doubt a major part of the sect’s
appeal. But another important aspect of the Carboneria, and one
that characterized the life of almost all the secret societies at this
time and later spilled over into the ethos and imagery of the
movement for national uni cation, was its religious character. The
language and rituals of the Carboneria drew heavily on Christian
liturgy and symbolism, and this, too, must have been a reason for its
appeal, emotionally, and probably intellectually as well.
 Central to the teachings of the Carboneria were the ideas of
steadfastness in the face of adversity, dedication to truth and virtue,
and opposition to tyranny. The patron saint of the society was Saint
Theobald, an eleventh-century hermit from a noble family who had
spurned worldly goods and honours and retreated to the forests of
Germany and northern Italy along with his friend Walter (and later
his mother) to live a life of austerity. Another key gure for the
Carbonari was Jesus Christ, as both man and God. The instruments
of the Passion – the crown of thorns, the nails and the cross – were
important symbols for the sect. And there were many allusions to
the life of Christ in its rituals. In the most common version of the
initiation ceremony for the grade of Master candidates were told
how Jesus, ‘Grand Master of the Universe’, was the perfection of
humanity, and how he had become the ‘victim of the cruellest
tyranny’ for having tried to educate the people and free them from
slavery. The candidate then had to take the part of Jesus in an
elaborate re-enactment of his trial before Pontius Pilate, and at the
climax of the cruci xion swear loyalty to the Carboneria.19
At the highest levels the rituals became more political (and more
gothic) but they were still shot through with religious and liturgical
allusions. A Carbonaro catechism of 1818 described the initiation
ceremony for the grade of Grand Master conducted by the
‘Lieutenant of the Patriarch’ in the presence of the alta vendita. The
candidate, carrying an acacia branch (a Masonic symbol of purity
and constancy) and a skull, was brought into a blue room, decorated
with white, red, black and green festoons and the image of an acacia
tree, with on either side of it the letters L and E, standing for liberty
and equality, and at its base a lump of coal, an axe and a dagger,
tied together with a white, red and black ribbon. The Lieutenant,
standing at a table, drew back a cloth to reveal a vessel containing a
red liquid, and said: ‘Behold this blood. It was gathered from the
severed veins of the tyrant in the last moments of his criminal
existence. Pour some of it into his skull, and drink it to seal your
union with us.’ The candidate knelt, declared his ‘undying hatred of
tyrants’, and swore to devote all his strength to destroying them. He
was then taught the greeting sign: the right hand, with the ngers
crooked, on the left shoulder, drawn down diagonally to the right
hip. Finally came the baptism of admission. Dipping a cloth into the
red liquid and touching the candidate’s eyes, ears, nostrils and
mouth, the Lieutenant said: ‘Your ears hear only the groans of
tyrants and the cries of joy of the liberated peoples… The corpse of
your enemy always smells sweet. Your lips are sealed with the blood
of tyrants.’20
While the Carboneria was the most important secret society in the
south of Italy, in the north the main liberal sects were those of the
Fildadel a and Adel a. These were probably rst introduced from
France by disa ected army o cers, and their ranks then swelled by
former Italian Jacobins, angry at the growing social conservatism of
the Napoleonic regime. The leading patriot and conspirator, Filippo
Buonarroti, became active in the Adel a after he was released from
prison in 1809 and soon gave it added vigour and direction (over
the next twenty- ve years he was to establish himself as the guiding
force in Italian sectarianism). Another secret society in northern
Italy was the Guel a, founded in Rome in October 1813 but most
active, it seems, in the Romagna, where it probably picked up the
remnants of the Society of Rays. The elusiveness and protean
character of these sects served to magnify the fears of the
Napoleonic police, and often pushed them to the brink of paranoia,
but the indications are that they only began to attract signi cant
support and present a serious threat to the authorities from the end
of 1812, when news of the disastrous conclusion of the Russian
campaign made it clear that the Napoleonic empire was beginning
to crumble.
The propaganda of the secret societies helped to give the idea of
liberating ‘Italy’ increased emotional force, and the explicitly sexual
imagery that was sometimes used injected notes of honour and
revenge (not to mention outright prurience) into the already
religiously charged domain of national redemption. A catechism of
the Guel a of 1817, divulged by a dying a liate to a priest in his
confession, was particularly graphic. It took the form of a dialogue:
 Q: Are you a Guelf?
A: My mother is married to the sea and her breasts are high
mountains.
Q: Who is your mother?
A: The woman with black locks and ne bosom, the most beautiful
in the universe.
Q: What are the qualities of your mother?
A: Beauty, wisdom and, once, strength.
Q: How has nature endowed her?
A: A delightful garden, graced with owers, where fruitful olives
and vines grow and a soft breeze blows.
Q: What is your mother doing now?
A: She is groaning, wounded.
Q: Who has wounded her?
A: Her neighbours helped by her degenerate sons.
Q: Why did they wound her?
A: Because they were jealous of her beauty.
Q: Where did they wound her?
A: In her breasts and her vagina.
Q: How did she come to be wounded?
A: Through the neglect of her guardians.
Q: How long has she been wounded?
A: For fourteen times one hundred years.
Q: Where are you going?
A: To nd a remedy for my mother…
Q: How will your mother be after she is cured?
A: She will come back more beautiful, strong and feared.

The a liate also revealed that the two recognition signs of the
Guel a were a hand placed on the forehead and an index nger
struck on the palm or wrist six times to signify each of the letters of
‘Italia’. A further revelation – and a good indication of just how
intellectually rare ed the world of the sectarians could be – was
that a true Guelf was expected once a month to dine on milk alone,
sipped in the light of the moon, in honour of Saturn and ‘the great
mother’ – an allusion to the poet Virgil’s description of Italy as
‘Saturn’s land, great mother of the harvest, great mother of men’.21

An important source of support for the sectarians was Sicily, which

had been occupied by the British after the Bourbons had ed there
in 1806 to avoid the French. The island had for some time enjoyed
close commercial ties with Britain thanks to the development of the
Marsala wine industry by English entrepreneurs since the 1770s.
And these ties were greatly strengthened during the Napoleonic
period as the fashion for forti ed wines grew in Britain in the
absence from tables of French clarets and burgundies. By 1814 four
English rms were operating in Marsala, with several others further
down the coast at Mazara. Such, indeed, was the extent of the
British interests in Sicily at this time that there were some thirty
consuls or vice-consuls dotted around the island. The close-knit and
for the most part very rich landowning Sicilian aristocracy relished
these links, seeing in them a way of realizing their long-held dream
of independence for the ‘Sicilian nation’ from much-hated Naples. In
Palermo salons it even became fashionable to speak Italian or
Sicilian with an English accent.
King Ferdinand did not enjoy being in Palermo and did not trust
the Sicilian nobility: all the principal posts in his government in
exile went to Neapolitans. His main concern seemed to be milking
the island for money to help pay for the war with France (as well as
the extravagant lifestyle of his court), and when, after various
clashes with the nobility, he tried to go behind the back of
parliament and raise taxes by decree, the opposition forces raised
the banner of revolt. Ferdinand (or more precisely his queen, the
redoubtable Maria Carolina, sister of Marie Antoinette: as in 1799
Ferdinand preferred to save most of his energy for hunting – and
botany – in the woods around Palermo) responded by having ve of
the ringleaders, all of them princes, arrested and deported to penal
islands. At this point it looked as if the constitutional tussle between
the king and the Sicilian nobility would be won by Ferdinand. But
on 22 July 1811 a new British commander, Lord Bentinck, landed in
Palermo.
Bentinck was a tall patrician-looking soldier of impulsive
character and robust Whig views who had recently returned from
acting as governor of Bengal. He had a rm belief in Britain’s
civilizing mission (as governor general of India he was later to
outlaw the practice of suttee) and an equally rm belief, derived
from Edmund Burke, that nations were primordial, almost mystical,
entities that needed to nd expression in appropriate civil and
political institutions. The tyranny of Napoleonic France, he thought,
could best be fought by promoting the causes of freedom and
independence (‘Bonaparte made kings, England makes nations,’ he is
reputed to have said shortly after arriving in Palermo).22 He
certainly considered Italy to be a nation, but he saw no reason why
Sicily should be part of it. Geography, history and the hostility of
the barons to Naples all suggested that the island could be seen as a
nation in its own right.
On reaching Sicily Bentinck quickly sided with the parliamentary
opposition, forced the king to accept a government of Sicilian
ministers (among them three of the deported princes), and had the
meddlesome queen banished from Palermo. Then in the summer of
1812 he sanctioned the introduction of a British-style constitution
that abolished feudalism, a rmed the sovereign independence of
Sicily, and created a two-chamber parliament, with a House of
Commons and a House of Peers, which had sole powers of
legislation and taxation, and to which the executive was answerable.
Bentinck was not altogether comfortable with this extraordinary
demonstration of Anglophilia. Apart from anything else he saw no
reason why the British constitution should work if transplanted to
the very di erent cultural environment of Sicily. And some of the
most level-headed Sicilians were similarly minded: ‘Too much
liberty is for the Sicilians, what would be a pistol, or a stiletto in the
hands of a boy or a madman’, one of the island’s most intelligent
reformers, Paolo Balsamo, warned Bentinck.23
Their fears were soon realized. In the absence of rmly
established traditions of compromise and trust, and without any
clear sense of a higher collective good to which private interests
should be subordinated, a series of bitter power struggles ared
between the nobility, the Crown and middle-class radicals in the
House of Commons. Just ten days after meeting under the new
constitution parliament was prorogued, and Bentinck was ruefully
forced to admit that his hopes for Sicily had been wildly misplaced.
The nation, he said, was still in its ‘infancy and weakness’, and was
not ready for freedom; and the islanders had to be governed with
‘bonbons in one hand and il bastone [the stick] in the other’. For
nine months from the autumn of 1813 he ruled Sicily as a dictator,
seeking to lay the foundations of ‘civil liberty’ with economic and
institutional reforms. In this way ‘the general character of the
people’ might begin to change and Sicilians learn the habits and
practices needed for ‘political liberty’.24
Bentinck had hoped that the example of constitutional
government in Sicily would inspire mainland Italians to rise up and
throw o the yoke of Napoleonic oppression. There was also the
model of Spain to look to. Here a huge popular revolt had broken
out against the French army in 1808, culminating, after several
years of vicious guerrilla warfare, and with the support of British
forces, in the introduction in 1812 of a radical liberal constitution.
Germany, too, was stirring. At the so-called ‘Battle of the Nations’ at
Leipzig in October 1813 a colossal army of Austrians and Prussians,
assisted by Russians and Swedes – in all nearly 400,000 men –
overcame some 200,000 Napoleonic troops, and in so doing laid the
cornerstone of German nationalism: the moment when ‘the German
people’ had come together to assert its identity.
From Sicily Bentinck established contact with members of the
secret societies in northern and southern Italy and urged them to
action. And revolts led by Carbonari did break out in late 1813 and
early 1814 against Joachim Murat in parts of Calabria and the
Abruzzi. However, they were local in character, lacked strong mass
support, and were quite easily extinguished. Propaganda was also
funnelled into Italy from printing presses in London, where in 1813–
14 a Milanese exile called Augusto Bozzi Granville took the lead in
exhorting his fellow Italians to unite and free themselves from the
ignominy of foreign domination in the pages of a patriotic literary
journal, L’Italico.25
In the turbulent climate of early 1814, when it was clear that over
twenty years of convulsive war were coming to an end and that the
fractured map of Europe would soon have to be haggled over and
pieced together again amid competing strategic, dynastic and
perhaps even national claims, it could seem to many with power at
their disposal that almost any throw of the dice might be worth the
gamble. Bentinck set his sights on a national rising in Italy. Like
many Englishmen of his background, he harboured feelings of
nostalgic sympathy for the land of Augustus and Virgil. But there
were also pragmatic geo-political considerations to his concept of
Italian independence. If, he told the Foreign Secretary, Lord
Castlereagh, in January 1814, ‘the national energy’ of the Italians
could be roused, as in Spain and Germany, ‘this great people,
instead of being… as formerly the despicable slaves of a set of
miserable petty princes, would become a powerful barrier both
against Austria and France…’26
But was there any ‘national energy’ in Italy? The British
government did not think so; nor, probably, did Bentinck himself. In
October 1812 he had told Archduke Francis of Austria that the
Italians had become ‘passive’ under French rule, that they had none
of ‘the character of greatness of soul shown by the Spaniards’, and
that their protests, such as they were, were ‘the complaints of slaves
rather than the murmurs of a magnanimous people who want to
conquer or die for liberty and independence’.27 However, he was
willing to see if any insurrectionary spark existed, and on 9 March
1814 he landed a small Anglo-Sicilian force on the Tuscan coast at
Livorno. A few days later he issued a proclamation calling on
Italians to put their trust in Britain, take up arms and ght the
French. There was no response. He then marched up the coast and
‘liberated’ Genoa, and suspecting (quite rightly) that the British
government had plans to hand the city over to the ercely
reactionary King of Sardinia once the war was over – an idea that
horri ed him – he decided to try and forestall this by restoring the
old Republic in keeping with what he felt were ‘the general wishes
of the Genoese nation’.28
Meanwhile Austrian troops had occupied the Veneto and pushed
back Eugène de Beauharnais. In Lombardy there was feverish talk
about salvaging an independent state from the wreckage of the
Kingdom of Italy, but the Milanese nobility could not agree on
whom to propose as their new ruler. A group of so-called ‘Pure
Italians’ led by Count Federico Confalonieri wanted almost anyone
provided he was not French, and looked to the British to save them
from the clutches of the Austrians; but others hankered after
Joachim Murat of Naples, or even Eugène de Beauharnais, and still
others had their eye on the Archduke Francis (an Austrian, but born
in Milan). On 17 April 1814 the elderly Francesco Melzi d’Eril tried
to force the issue in favour of Beauharnais, but this action so
incensed the Pure Italians that they unleashed a mob on the city,
which lynched the Finance Minister and overturned the
government. Beauharnais threw in the towel and handed Lombardy
to the Austrians, who entered Milan on 28 April, eighteen years to
the day after Napoleon had signed the armistice of Cherasco, which
had opened the way to the occupation of northern Italy by the
French.
Confalonieri and his Pure Italians were in reality much more
concerned with having an independent Lombard state that they
could dominate than with anything truly ‘Italian’, and this line
seems to have been generally shared. According to the writer
Ludovico Di Breme, the Milanese would happily have ruled the
whole of Italy, ‘but when it comes down to it, Italy does not extend
very far beyond the [suburb of] Borgo degli Ortolani, in their
view’.29 But in the spring of 1814 talk of nations and their rights
was very much in fashion, and in a desperate bid to prevent
Lombardy being relegated once again to the status of a province of
the Austrian Empire, Confalonieri begged Lord Castlereagh to
realize how much had changed in the past twenty years, and how
Italians now had ‘the desire, the means and the energy’ to be a
nation. Rule from Vienna would be a travesty: ‘No land is more
divided from Germany by natural barriers, linguistic di erences,
and divergence of character, temperament and habits.’ Castlereagh
was impervious to such appeals. The Lombards, he said, had
absolutely nothing to fear from the ‘kindly government of Austria’.30
During the years of Napoleonic rule the idea of an Italian political
nation had become imbued with new in ections, feelings and
energy, but an enormous gap still separated rhetoric from reality,
thought from action, and the mental universe of the educated from
that of the mass of the population. For millions of peasants scattered
about the countryside of the peninsula ‘Italy’ was still devoid of any
signi cance or resonance: their world was one of survival, bounded
emotionally by ties to the family, village and local saints, and by
hostility to tax collectors, recruiting o cers and, often, local
landowners. For most members of the middle and upper classes the
restoration of the old ruling dynasties in 1814–15 was met with
emotions that ranged from resignation to enthusiasm. Outright
anger and hostility were rare. Some of the more high-minded did
experience problems, though. After several years of devoted service
to Joachim Murat, Vincenzo Cuoco found the return of the Bourbons
hard to stomach, and su ered a mental breakdown from which he
never fully recovered. He died in 1823. Ugo Foscolo was for a time
tempted to throw in his lot with the Austrians, but could not bring
himself to swear an oath of loyalty to the Emperor. He went into
exile, rst in Switzerland and then England, where he stayed till his
death in 1827.
Even the most stirring appeals failed to have any impact on the
general mood of scepticism and acquiescence that seemed to have
descended on the peninsula. On 30 March 1815, a few days after his
brother-in-law, Napoleon, had re-entered Paris, amidst scenes of
wild jubilation – the start of the Hundred Days that were to
culminate in June at the Battle of Waterloo – Joachim Murat issued
a proclamation from Rimini calling on Italians to rise up and join
him in ghting for their independence and unity:
Italians! The hour has come in which the great destiny of Italy must be ful lled.
Providence is summoning you at last to be an independent nation. From the Alps to the
straits of Sicily one cry can be heard: ‘The independence of Italy!’… Was it for nothing that
nature erected the Alps as your barrier? Was it for nothing that you were given an even
greater barrier in di erences of language and customs and a unique and distinctive
character? No! No! Away with all foreign domination! You were once masters of the world,
and you have paid for that perilous glory with twenty centuries of subjugation and
slaughter. Let it be your glory now to break free from your masters… I appeal to you, noble
and unhappy Italians of Milan, Turin, Venice, Brescia, Modena and Reggio, and all the
other illustrious and oppressed regions… Form a strong and binding union with a
government of your choice, a truly national representation, and a Constitution worthy of

the century…31

Some Italian patriots were moved by Murat’s appeal. Alessandro

Manzoni, a young Milanese writer of great promise and future
distinction, a friend of Cuoco and Foscolo, began to write an ode
praising Murat and extolling the cause of Italian unity (‘we shall not
be free if we are not one’). After fty-one lines, though, he heard
that Murat had been defeated by the Austrians at the Battle of
Tolentino on 13 May, and abruptly stopped, leaving the poem
( ttingly) as a mere fragment.32 But Manzoni had picked up his pen,
not his sword; and in all only about 500 volunteers had responded
to Murat’s patriotic proclamation. After Tolentino, Murat ed to
France, but in October he returned to southern Italy with a band of
250 faithful followers in a last desperate bid to recover the throne of
Naples. He found nothing but hostility among the local Calabrians,
and after being cornered by Bourbon troops on the coast, he was
taken to the fort of Pizzo, and on 13 October was executed by ring
squad. The last words of this innkeeper’s son from a little village in
southern France, who in the tempestuous world of passion, ideals,
opportunism and seemingly endless possibilities thrown up by the
French Revolution had risen to become a general, a marshal, a
grand-duke and a king, were: ‘Spare my face. Aim for my heart!’33
PART TWO

Preaching 1815–46

Restoration, Romanticism and Revolt, 1815–30

Italia! Oh Italia! Thou who hast

The fatal gift of beauty, which became
A funeral dower of present woes and past,
On thy sweet brow is sorrow plough’d by shame,
And annals graved in characters of ame.
Oh, God! That thou wert in thy nakedness
Less lovely or more powerful, and couldst claim
Thy right, and awe the robbers back, who press
To shed thy blood, and drink the tears of thy distress.

Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto IV, xlii (1818)

O Italy, take care to honour the dead…

Turn around and look, my fatherland,
At that endless crowd of immortals,
And weep and feel ashamed;
For without shame grief is now foolish:
Turn, feel shame and rouse yourself,
And let the thought of our ancestors
And posterity for once spur you on.
Giacomo Leopardi, Sopra il monumento di Dante che si preparava
in Firenze (1818)
PUBLIC DUTIES

Francesco Hayez was the most distinguished north Italian painter of

his generation. There was not a great deal of competition, it is true.
After the death of the leading Milanese neo-classical artists Giuseppe
Bossi in 1815 and Andrea Appiani in 1817 there was something of a
dearth of talent. Neither Bossi nor Appiani had produced any pupils
worthy of note, and the only other artist of major stature was the
Bolognese Pelagio Palagi, an architect, ornamentalist, sculptor and
furniture designer, as well as portraitist, with a penchant for
archaeology (he built up a huge collection of ancient Roman,
Etruscan, Greek and Egyptian marbles, bronzes, gold, silver and
glass, and liked incorporating motifs derived from them into his
work).1 But Palagi was an accomplished painter, not a great one –
an academic, conservative air hovered about many of his canvases,
and they lacked spark and passion. And like Bossi and Appiani
Palagi su ered from having been rather closely identi ed with
o cial Napoleonic Italy.
In 1820 Hayez created a sensation in Milan with his exhibition at
the Brera Academy of a historical painting showing an obscure
fteenth-century military captain being implored by his family to
stay with them and refuse a request to go and ght for the Venetian
Republic. Hayez was twenty-eight years old. He had been born in
Venice in 1791 of humble parents, and in 1809 had won a
scholarship to study classical and Renaissance art in Rome under the
tutelage of the sculptor Antonio Canova. He was not a particularly
political animal (love a airs were his primary pursuit after
painting), and the momentous events sweeping Europe in the last
years of Napoleon’s empire do not seem to have touched him
deeply. He was enormously relieved to nd a way out of military
service (as was the young composer Rossini, just then bursting onto
the operatic scene, whom Hayez met and befriended in Rome in
1812),2 and with the return of the Austrians to northern Italy, and
after completing a papal commission, Hayez went back to Venice to
pursue his career, before moving to Milan in 1820.
Hayez’s early works had been largely classical in inspiration, but
for his 1820 Brera picture he decided to delve instead into the
Middle Ages. He recalled in his memoirs how he spent his evenings
reading Simonde de Sismondi’s history of the Italian medieval
republics (a work that was soon to establish itself as a canonical text
for Italian patriots), looking for a suitable subject, but his real
source was almost certainly the less politically illustrious Histoire de
la République de Venise (1759–68),3 by the Frenchman Marc-Antoine
Laugier. When the painting was exhibited Hayez underlined its
historical credentials with a detailed, if less than pithy, title: Pietro
Rossi, lord of Parma, stripped of his dominions by the Della Scalas, lords
of Verona, while receiving an invitation in the castle of Pontremoli,
whose defence he is conducting, to take command of the Venetian army
that is about to move against his enemies, is besought by his wife and two
daughters, with tears, not to accept the commission.
The painting was immediately hailed in Milan as revolutionary. It
was seen as an endorsement of the superiority of romanticism over
classicism. Critics praised its emotional pathos, its attention to
historical detail (evident in the architecture of the castle, the
costumes and the knights’ armour – clearly inspired, as were the
colours and the interplay of gestures and tilted heads, by Hayez’s
recent study of works by Venetian Renaissance artists such as
Giorgione, Cima and Carpaccio)4 and the unconventional poses of
the gures, with backs turned and faces hidden or half hidden,
generating tension and mystery and inviting viewers to use their
imaginations to work out the narrative and the expressions.
Patriotism, hommage and prescience of death were neatly blended in
the weeping daughter to the right, modelled on Canova’s statue of
Italy on Al eri’s tomb in Santa Croce.5 Hayez’s depiction of the
dilemma confronting Rossi also earned the admiration of critics.
Rossi’s face and pose, with their air of calm, dignity, sadness and
re ective uncertainty, seemed to encapsulate well the gravity of the
choice before him: whether to heed the siren calls of love and
domestic duty, or go and ght his enemies, the Della Scalas (he
chose the latter, and was killed in the process). But the success of
Hayez’s painting in 1820 was not due simply to its championing of
the new vocabulary of romanticism. Political factors were also at
work.

When Europe’s statesmen gathered in Vienna in November 1814 to

sort out the new political order their main concerns were to create
stability and peace, hold France’s imperialist inclinations in check,
and prevent any recurrence of revolution. The idea of popular
sovereignty – the chief culprit, it was widely believed, of much of
the turmoil in the previous twenty- ve years – was cast aside in
favour of the principle of ‘legitimacy’: the upholding of the
legitimate rights of sovereigns and states such as had existed prior
to the conquests of Napoleon. In general terms this approach meant
restoring the borders of 1789; but there was some elasticity in the
application of the principle. The ambitions of the main victors –
Britain, Austria, Prussia and Russia – together with the need to
ensure a balance of power and to contain France, resulted in the
sacri ce of some smaller states, including, in Italy, the republics of
Genoa and Venice.
As for the ‘nation’, the idea was now stripped of the revolutionary
apparel with which the French Revolution had clothed it and
returned to the safe conservative sphere of historical pragmatism.
Nations were not to be regarded as timeless mystical entities that
needed to nd expression in the liberated wills of their people.
Nations existed only in so far as they had demonstrated their
capacity to maintain political independence over time. Italy,
accordingly, was not a nation. It was, as the Austrian Chancellor
Prince Metternich brutally put it in 1847, ‘une expression
géographique’.6 And Italian nationalism was no more than a pipe-
dream of a handful of sectarians and intellectuals who felt they had
a right to threaten the existing political and social order and
unsettle the tranquil existence of the great mass of the population.
What, after all, did ordinary people want beyond material well-
being, sound administration and good laws?
In the conservative climate of the Congress of Vienna the
sympathy of English liberals such as Lord Bentinck for Italian
nationalism wilted in the face of old-style dynastic politics. It was
agreed that Austria should be compensated for losses of territory in
Germany and the Belgian provinces by receiving control of the
whole of Italy. Lombardy, the former Venetian Republic, Trentino
and the Valtellina were merged into the Kingdom of Lombardy–
Venetia and became part of the Habsburg Empire, ruled, through a
viceroy, from Vienna. The grand-duchy of Tuscany was restored to
the Emperor of Austria’s younger brother, Ferdinand III of Lorraine,
while the duchy of Parma was assigned to his daughter, Maria Luisa.
Modena was to be ruled by Francesco IV of Austria-Este, Lucca by
the Bourbons of Parma. In central Italy and the Romagna the Papal
States were reconstituted in full, but the Austrians were permitted to
station garrisons in the fortresses of Ferrara, Piacenza and
Comacchio, so enabling them to intervene swiftly in the Pope’s
dominions should any trouble arise there. In the south the Bourbon
Ferdinand IV was restored to his old kingdom (now restyled the
Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in a token gesture towards the Sicilians
for their loss of independence), but only after agreeing to a
permanent defensive alliance with Austria. Because it was regarded
as a strategically important bu er between France and Austria,
Piedmont–Sardinia was the one Italian state that was allowed to
keep formal independence. Its ruler was the arch reactionary, King
Victor Emmanuel I.
But the Restoration did not mean a wholesale turning back of the
clocks. The administrative, legal and other reforms that had been
introduced under Napoleon were in large measure retained after
1815. After all, the new more centralized machinery of government,
the abolition of feudalism, and the elimination of many of the
ancient privileges of the nobility and the Church strengthened the
powers of the monarchy and seemed nally to have resolved the
secular struggle between the king and his barons, centre and
periphery, in favour of the Crown. If the growth in state power
caused resentment – and it was bound to in some quarters – it was
hoped that this would soon melt away as subjects came to
appreciate the bene ts to be had from a more e cient bureaucracy
and justice system, improved schools, roads and public works, and a
lower (at least in comparison to the Napoleonic period) and fairer
tax burden.
However, if the broad principles of the ‘administrative monarchy’,
as the new form of government was called, were similar throughout
much of Italy, there were important variations in practice. In
Sardinia feudalism continued until the late 1830s, and only in 1848
were the legal codes in operation in Piedmont and in Liguria
extended to the island. In southern Italy King Ferdinand was quite
happy to keep (perhaps from inertia as much as prudence) the new
French-style structures of the judiciary and the Napoleonic codes
(with a few obeisances to the Church, as with the abolition of
divorce) – a move that enabled Neapolitan lawyers to argue with
good reason in the next few decades that they had the most
sophisticated legal system in Italy – but in Piedmont the
curmudgeonly Victor Emmanuel, who rode back into Turin in 1814
after eight years of exile in Sardinia pointedly wearing an old-
fashioned peruque and pigtail, reinstated much of the pre-
Napoleonic legislation. He abolished equality before the law and
gave himself the right to overturn court rulings. Jews and
Protestants were faced with discrimination once again, and the
aristocracy recovered many of its old privileges, as well as its
monopoly of boxes at the opera house. In the former Republic of
Genoa, however, such conservatism was intolerable, and here Victor
Emmanuel was forced to let his new subjects retain many of the
Napoleonic reforms.7
Similar variations were to be found in central Italy after 1815. In
the small duchy of Parma, the new ruler, Maria Luisa, refused to
make concessions to the Church, promoted the economy and public
education, and retained the French laws (not surprisingly, perhaps,
given she was Napoleon’s second wife). But next door in Modena,
the ambitious duke, Francesco IV, was in thrall to reactionary
romanticism and looked to carve out a personal efdom based on
the close alliance of throne and altar. He restored the old
administrative practices of the House of Este, swept away almost all
the Napoleonic legislation, welcomed back the Jesuits and other
religious orders, and forged contacts with a mysterious secret
Catholic sect called the ‘Consistorials’ (which some contemporaries
alleged was conspiring to drive the Austrians out of Lombardy–
Venetia and make Francesco ruler of much of northern Italy).8 In
Tuscany Ferdinand III remained true to the grand-duchy’s strong
traditions of enlightened reformism, but in the Papal States the Pope
refused to have truck with anything that smacked of the French, or
indeed of modernity: street lighting and vaccination were both
banned.9
The rulers of the Restoration wanted to rebuild a world in which
hierarchy and order were respected, and they hoped, with the moral
support of the Church, that they could win the hearts and minds of
the common people and bind them to their regimes. But they faced
serious economic problems. The costs of administration, not least
the charge on the exchequer of maintaining large garrisons of
Austrian troops, meant they were unable to keep taxation as low as
they would have liked. The reintroduction of tari s and customs
barriers a ected agriculture and commerce badly and food prices
and supplies were dangerously volatile. Famine continued to be a
perennial threat (tragically so in 1815–17), and poverty was
widespread: according to a survey in 1829, there were over 400,000
beggars, vagrants and unemployed in the Papal States out of a
population of some 2.5 million.10 There was also the problem of
land hunger, especially in southern Italy, where attempts by the
Bourbons to get the former commons distributed among the
peasantry were hampered by rapacious local landowners who
blocked settlements with court cases that dragged on sometimes for
decades.
 Conscription was another source of popular discontent. The
Napoleonic era had transformed the character of military con ict
between states, turning it from what was little more than a princely
pursuit of limited dimensions into something whose logic was
towards what the Prussian general Karl von Clausewitz called ‘total
war’. Mass armies were now inescapable (something that made the
pursuit of the active loyalty of subjects considerably more important
in the nineteenth century than the eighteenth). In Lombardy–
Venetia conscription was introduced in August 1815 to the
widespread dismay of the peasantry; and in 1820 the period of
service was raised from four to eight years (with much of this time
often being spent outside Italy).11 In Piedmont the standing army
was increased from 12,000 to 30,000 in 1817, and conscripts were
enlisted for eight years. In the south, the period of service was less,
six years; but fear of domestic unrest led the Bourbons to x the
peace-time army at 60,000.12 Sicilians were exempted from military
service: their loyalty was considered too suspect.
The masses were certainly a worry for the Restoration
governments, but there were good grounds for hoping that a re-
energized Catholic Church, with its religious orders, missions,
jubilees and pilgrimages, and panoply of new or extended popular
cults – those of the Virgin Mary in particular: the rosary, Our Lady
of Sorrows, the Marian month – would help keep the peasantry
quiet. The real problem, though, lay with the educated classes. For
years they had been exposed to ideas that were often diametrically
at odds with those of absolutism, and many of those who had risen
to positions of in uence under Napoleon now found themselves
pushed aside and replaced by members of the old aristocracy –
particularly in the Papal States and Piedmont (though a dearth of
skills among the nobles soon forced a partial volte-face).13 In the
south of Italy King Ferdinand kept on the majority of the Napoleonic
civil servants and army o cers, but here there was a major problem
with an education system that turned out too many graduates,
lawyers especially, for the jobs available.
 But the biggest source of friction with the upper classes lay,
paradoxically, in the failure of the restoration states to be more
restorative. The Napoleonic regime had come as a severe shock to
most of the old aristocracy, who had found the local powers and
privileges, on which they and their families had often prided
themselves for generations, swept away. This loss of local in uence
had been partially o set by the creation of provincial and
communal councils, in which nobles and professional men took the
lion’s share of the posts; but these councils had never had much
muscle. There were certainly those in the civil service and the army
who had become strong supporters of centralization, but the
majority of the old guard were desperately hoping in 1814–15 that
many of their old powers would be reinstated.14 They were bitterly
disappointed; and in their frustration they began to look with
growing fondness at constitutional liberalism and even at some form
of national unity as ways to undermine the Restoration settlement
and give themselves once again positions of in uence.

In the light of the cultural dynamism of Milan under Napoleon and

all the memories of the Italian Republic and the Kingdom of Italy,
the Austrian viceroy, Count Heinrich Bellegarde, knew it would be
hard to incorporate Lombardy and the Veneto successfully into the
Austrian Empire. Bellegarde was a ne soldier with a good political
brain who had spent many years serving the emperor loyally; but he
was not convinced that Vienna was right in pushing for
centralization (his family origins in Savoy may have inclined him to
be more sympathetic than many of his colleagues to Italian wishes).
He thought that a large measure of autonomy would be wise, and he
told Metternich in July 1815 that the best way for Austria to secure
real in uence in Italy would be by making the administration of
Lombardy–Venetia as independent and as ‘national’ as possible. And
since dreams of Italian national unity had begun to materialize
under Napoleon (and Milan was ‘saturated with this unitary spirit’,
he complained), any arrangements that might bring together the
di erent peoples of Italy along the lines of the German
Confederation ‘would be extremely pleasing to all parties’.15
The emperor was fond of Italy and admired its culture – he had
been born and brought up in Tuscany – but his overriding concern
was with the well-being of his empire as a whole. The Italian
provinces were important to him as a source of revenue and
conscripts. But they were above all vital for Austria’s security
against France, for it was on the plains of Lombardy that French–
Habsburg rivalry had for centuries been fought out. As Metternich
succinctly remarked, ‘It is on the River Po that we defend the
Rhine.’16 This was why Vienna was so determined to keep
Lombardy–Venetia on a tight rein and not to pander to autonomist
sentiment. Metternich, too, liked Italy greatly – but for what it was
and for what it had been, and not for what it might become. When
he visited the peninsula in 1817 he came in the deliberate guise of a
wide-eyed tourist and not a political observer, marvelling at ‘the
ridiculous cheapness of an enormous alabaster vase’ and delighting
in the relative sophistication and charm of Tuscan peasants. Italy
had about it, he felt, a serene beauty, which was not to be disturbed
(‘The basis of contemporary politics, I would venture to say, is and
must be sleep’).17
There was much resentment at Austrian rule in Milan. Levels of
taxation were thought to be unduly high – though it was hard to
prove this, given that the authorities kept the kingdom’s budgetary
accounts secret. Merchants were frustrated by the erection of high
protective barriers against Piedmont and France, which forced them
to direct their trade towards the rest of the empire and away from
the lucrative outlets of Genoa and Lyon. And civil servants and
lawyers became aggrieved as posts in the bureaucracy and the
judiciary were assigned to native German-speakers. The emperor, it
is true, tried to channel away the simmering discontent by
introducing a measure of representation (something that Napoleon
had not allowed), instituting a Central Congregation composed of
deputies drawn from the propertied classes. But these deputies were
centrally appointed; and their powers were merely consultative. An
attempt was also made (vain as it happened) to defuse the deep
rivalry that had long existed between Lombards and Venetians by
making the two regions into discrete administrative units with their
own governors (and separate Central Congregations). But this
arrangement hardly compensated Milan for losing its position as
capital of a kingdom.
So when the Austrian authorities attempted to win over the
educated elite and simultaneously dampen down Italian national
sentiment by opening Milan up to the latest developments in
European culture, they quickly found that the experiment back-
red. They tried to get Ugo Foscolo to edit a new government-
subsidized literary journal, the Biblioteca italiana. But after some
hesitation he refused, and set o for exile. And when the journal
came out in January 1816 it contained an article by Madame de
Staël on the innocuous-looking subject of literary translations, but
which very soon descended into a pitched political battle between
pro- and anti-Austrian intellectuals over the respective merits of
classicism and romanticism. The authorities ran for cover, and the
Biblioteca italiana soon abandoned any attempts to promote the new
romanticism and became instead the standard-bearer of
conservative culture in Milan.
De Staël had not said anything particularly provocative, but her
liberalism and known sympathies for the cause of Italian
independence ensured that the views she expressed in the article
acquired added political signi cance. She suggested that Italian
literature was rather insular and would bene t from being more
open to contemporary trends in other countries, especially England
and Germany. There was too much arti ce and not enough truth
and directness in Italian writing, and exposure to European
romanticism through the medium of translations would be salutary.
What gave her comments more than just literary value, however,
was her suggestion that the arts in Italy were failing to ful l their
civic mission to educate the public; and coming from de Staël, the
clear implication was that this education should be liberal and
patriotic. She wanted theatre especially to acquire a more elevated
tone, as it had in Germany under the in uence of Schiller and
Schlegel. At present, she said, Italians were renowned for chatting
during performances rather than listening, and this habit did
nothing to improve ‘the intellect of the nation’. Literature should
aim to combine pleasure with ‘public education’ and thereby aspire
to true greatness. For what, after all, could Italy claim distinction in
if not the arts? And if the arts languished, Italians ‘would sink into a
deep sleep from which not even the sun would be able to wake
them’.18
Inspired by de Staël, Milan’s patriotic liberals threw their weight
behind the cause of romanticism. Art must be direct and simple. It
must be true to nature and its subject matter drawn from real life,
whether contemporary or historical. It must seek to portray human
emotions and experience in all their richness and complexity. And,
as the poet Giovanni Berchet said in 1816 in what became in e ect
the manifesto of Italian romanticism, it must endeavour ‘to improve
the behaviour of men’. This aim meant reaching out beyond the
narrow con nes of traditional aristocratic audiences (whose culture
was so rare ed and cosmopolitan, according to Berchet, as ‘to lose
every trace of a national imprint’) and addressing ‘all those other
individuals who are able to read and listen’, in other words, ‘the
people’ (the uneducated masses, or ‘Hottentots’, were a lost cause).
Berchet was one of a new class of professional writers in Lombardy
who endeavoured to make a living from their pens, and his hope of
creating in Italy ‘a common literary fatherland’ made up (somewhat
fancifully) of ‘millions’ of readers had a self-interested material side
to it as well as an idealistic one.19
From September 1818 until October 1819 – when the Austrian
censors nally got tired of striking out passages with their blue
pencils and forced it to close – the Lombard liberal romantics had a
mouthpiece in a distinguished journal called Il Conciliatore. Its
contributors included some of the leading Italian intellectuals of the
day, among them the patriotic aristocrat Federico Confalonieri, the
lawyer Gian Domenico Romagnosi, and the writers Silvio Pellico,
Ludovico Di Breme, Ermes Visconti and Berchet. The journal was
eclectic in tone, and its articles covered a wide range of subjects,
from economics, geography and law, to science, religion, education
and literature. History featured prominently, thanks in part to the
direct involvement of Madame de Staël’s friend Simonde de
Sismondi, whose magnum opus on the Italian medieval republics
reached its nal volume in 1818 and appeared in translation from
the French the same year. Indeed it was from the pages of the
Conciliatore that a clarion call rst went out for Italians to turn their
attention to the Middle Ages – not just because the Middle Ages
were in vogue among romantic writers in northern Europe, notably
Walter Scott, but more importantly because there was now a
growing conviction that the roots of the Italian nation were to be
located in the medieval period, where the energy, civic pride and
warrior virtues of the city-states had produced independence,
freedom, economic prosperity and cultural glory for the peninsula.20
But how many people were there to share the ideas of the
Conciliatore? The editors certainly hoped for a big readership. For
long, they said in their programme, knowledge in Italy had been
restricted to a handful of scholars, ‘scattered in cloisters and
academies’, who argued with one another about abstruse points of
grammar and similar unworldly issues. But all that had now
changed. The reluctance of ‘the Public’ to engage in discussion of
serious matters (the result of ‘the sleep caused by prolonged peace’
and ‘the lack of communication between the various peoples of
Italy’) had been ended by the cataclysmic events of the previous
twenty years. ‘Stung by the spur of misfortune’, people had now
been taught to think and were open to fresh ideas; and it was to
assuage their appetite that a group of Milanese writers had ‘resolved
to o er a new journal to the ITALIAN PUBLIC’, driven by a fervent
commitment to ‘the common good’.21 Their optimism was not well
founded, though, and the writings of this virtuous minority scarcely
circulated beyond the plush salons of the liberal aristocracy. In its
brief life the Conciliatore managed just 240 subscriptions, almost all
of them in the city of Milan. The overwhelming majority of the
country’s 20 million inhabitants lay far beyond its reach. How to
connect to a larger audience was one of the biggest problems facing
Italian patriots in the decades to come.

In the summer of 1820 (when Hayez exhibited his canvas of Count

Pietro Rossi torn between domestic happiness and ghting)
revolution was in the air. A mutiny among troops in Cadiz at the
beginning of the year had sparked o a revolution in Spain, and in
March the king had been forced to restore the democratic
constitution of 1812. Inspired by this example, sectarians in
southern Italy had begun to prepare for a rising of their own, and
early in July a group of thirty Carbonari from the town of Nola
supported by soldiers from the local garrison marched through the
countryside to Avellino to the sound of blaring trumpets and cries of
‘Long live liberty and the constitution’. There they were joined by
two regiments from nearby Naples led by Guglielmo Pepe, a former
Napoleonic o cer who had fought in Spain and witnessed at rst
hand the potential power of guerrilla warfare. King Ferdinand
quickly bowed to the insurgents’ demands and agreed to introduce
the Spanish constitution, and on 9 July the victorious mutineers
paraded through the streets of Naples with bands playing and black,
red and blue Carbonaro banners waving, led by the proud members
of the ‘Mucius Scaevola’ vendita from Nola. A few days later the
revolution spread to Sicily, though from the start there were bitter
divisions here about which constitution to invoke (the Spanish or
Sicily’s own of 1812) and how far to push for independence from
Naples.
The ripples of revolution also spread northwards up the
peninsula. In Piedmont the reactionary policies of Victor Emmanuel
I had irritated the liberal aristocracy, and during the second half of
1820 demands began to be formulated for the granting of a
constitution and for a war to liberate Lombardy–Venetia and
establish a Kingdom of Upper Italy under the House of Savoy. The
growing belief (justi ed as it turned out) that Austria would soon be
forced to send troops to put down the revolution in southern Italy,
thereby greatly reducing its capacity to defend its northern
possessions, gave these proposals an air of practicality. In the
autumn contacts between the Piedmontese and Lombard liberals
intensi ed, and in Milan the members of the Conciliatore group,
most of whom belonged to a recent transmutation of the Adel a
secret society called the Italian Federation, took the lead in
preparing the ground for an insurrection. Their plans, though,
hinged on the willingness of the Piedmontese king to allow the
bitter pill of constitutionalism to be sugared by a dynastic war of
expansion against his old enemy, Austria. And that was far from
being a foregone conclusion.
The Austrian response to the unrest in Italy was to solicit the
support of the major powers for armed intervention. France and
Russia would happily have seen Austria’s in uence in the peninsula
reduced; but neither was comfortable with the fact that the
democratic Spanish constitution had been introduced in Naples. In
Britain there was plenty of support for the cause of Italian liberalism
and independence; but while London was reluctant to sanction
military repression of the revolution, it had no wish to fall out with
Metternich so soon after the Congress of Vienna. Accordingly, when
a congress was convened at Troppau in Silesia in October to try to
resolve the situation in Italy, Austria was able to secure a
declaration that would allow it to intervene in the Kingdom of the
Two Sicilies to restore absolutism. Britain and France did not sign it
– a foretaste of their future orientation towards Italian independence
– but neither was prepared to veto Austrian action. Out of respect
for their sensibilities Metternich agreed to invite King Ferdinand to
another congress at Ljubljana in January 1821 so he could explain
what steps he intended to take to put his house in order.
In Naples news of the Troppau declaration led to consternation in
liberal circles, but Ferdinand made a solemn pledge to parliament
and to ‘the Nation’ that if he went to Ljubljana he would make sure
his people enjoyed ‘a wise and liberal constitution’. But as soon as
he was out of his kingdom he let his mask slip, telling Metternich
that the constitution had been forced upon him and entreating
Austria to intervene. Early in February Austrian forces crossed the
Po into Papal territory and began the march south. In Naples, there
was little prospect of serious resistance. The army was badly split
between former supporters of Joachim Murat and more democratic
Carbonari elements, and no proper plans had been made for the
defence of the revolution. Indeed the best Neapolitan troops were in
Sicily, where they had been sent the previous summer to stop the
island pushing ahead with plans for independence (and also to help
the nobility, who having hoisted the ag of revolt quickly found
themselves in danger of being engulfed by urban and rural workers
out to settle old scores, abolish taxes and seize land). Nor was there
any realistic chance of the peasantry rising en bloc as they had in
Spain under Napoleon: as in 1799 the liberal intelligentsia in Naples
had failed to win over the rural masses. Consequently the Austrian
forces were able to advance rapidly, and despite a spirited show of
resistance by one commander, Guglielmo Pepe, the patriotic veteran
of the Peninsular War, they entered Naples on 23 March.
Meanwhile a revolution had broken out in Piedmont. Tension had
been growing since the start of the year. In January the army had
opened re on rioters in Turin university angered by the arrest of
two students for wearing red berets at the theatre, and in the weeks
that followed preparations gathered pace in liberal circles for a
possible rising and a war against Austria. A key gure in the
sectarians’ plans was the future heir to the throne, Carlo Alberto, a
young man of austere religious character, riddled with insecurities
(he was to be dubbed the ‘Hamlet of the monarchy’ by Giuseppe
Mazzini),22 whose upbringing in France during the Napoleonic
period was supposed to have left him sympathetic to liberal and
patriotic ideas. He certainly welcomed the attention of aristocratic
sectarians in these months and did nothing to disabuse them of their
hopes that when the rising broke out he would support them and
work to persuade King Victor Emmanuel to grant a constitution and
invade Lombardy–Venetia. On 6 March the main architects of the
conspiracy visited Carlo Alberto and told him that everything was
ready and that ‘the most glorious epoch in the history of the House
of Savoy’ was about to begin.23 They asked for his assent, and he
apparently gave it, shaking hands with the idealistic leader of the
coup, Count Santorre di Santarosa. Three days later a tricolour ag
(probably the green, white and red of the Kingdom of Italy)24 was
hoisted over the fortress of Alessandria, and the insurrection was
under way.
It did not go according to plan, however. Though the revolt
spread rapidly to a number of other garrisons in Piedmont, who
followed Alessandria’s lead in running up tricolours and proclaiming
the introduction of the Spanish constitution (though in some cases
the tricolour was that of the Carbonari), King Victor Emmanuel was
too frightened of Austrian wrath to back the rebels’ programme and
dealt the insurrection a fatal blow at the outset by abdicating. He
nominated Carlo Alberto as temporary regent, as the new sovereign,
Carlo Felice, Victor Emmanuel’s grimly reactionary brother, was at
that moment absent from the kingdom in Modena. Carlo Alberto
was caught. Forced to treat with the rebels he agreed on 15 March
to introduce the Spanish constitution, but added as a codicil to his
oath the words: ‘I swear to be faithful to King Carlo Felice. So help
me God.’25 Two days later he received a delegation of Milanese
liberals, who urged him to send the Piedmontese army into
Lombardy: he refused.
From Modena, Carlo Felice sent Carlo Alberto a proclamation
(pointedly in French: he scorned anything that savoured of Italian
patriotism) stating that he would not tolerate a constitution or
anything else that infringed ‘the plenitude of royal authority’. But
Carlo Alberto persisted in his ambivalence for a few days: he failed
to publish the proclamation, strung the rebels along by appointing
Santorre di Santarosa as Minister of War, and then secretly left
Turin on the night of 22 March and headed for the safety of Novara,
where the garrison was loyal to Carlo Felice. Abandoned to his fate,
and with many of the conspirators disheartened by Carlo Alberto’s
defection, Santarosa strove valiantly to mobilize what troops he
could for the liberation of Lombardy and defence of the revolution,
issuing a series of appeals containing ringing declarations of loyalty
to the king and wordy references to ‘honour’, ‘glory’, ‘virtue’,
‘brothers’, ‘the fatherland’ and ‘the nation’ – though quite what this
‘nation’ was, and how far it extended beyond northern Italy in his
mind, is unclear.
Santarosa, though, was preaching to the unconverted. The
revolution had been con ned almost entirely to the army, and then
mainly to sections of the o cer class; and now that defeat seemed
likely, the rank and le troops began melting away. The great mass
of the population remained utterly indi erent to talk of
constitutions and the freeing of their ‘brothers’ in Lombardy, even
more so when Carlo Felice issued an appeal to the powers still
assembled in Ljubljana for help and the Austrians responded by
preparing to send an army into Piedmont. The remnants of
Santarosa’s followers advanced east towards Novara, desperately
hoping that the troops there might yet be won over to their cause
(‘Soldiers of Novara! Will you soon make common cause with the
cruellest enemies of your fatherland?… No, brothers! Come and
embrace us, come!).26 But with 15,000 Austrians now on the west
bank of the Ticino river, their cause was hopeless, and in a skirmish
outside the walls of Novara on 8 April they were soundly defeated.
The Austrians then proceeded to occupy Alessandria (as a gesture of
humiliation they sent the keys of the city to the Emperor) and
installed garrisons across the kingdom, while the commander of the
Novara soldiers marched into Turin.
As in Naples and Sicily, the Piedmontese revolution had come to
an inglorious end. Around a thousand rebels managed to escape into
France or Switzerland or found a ship to carry them to Spain.
Santarosa took refuge in Paris, where he lived under an assumed
name, writing his memoirs. The young philosopher Victor Cousin
befriended him and for a time shielded him from the police. But he
was tracked down, imprisoned and then expelled. He went to
England and stayed with Ugo Foscolo in Chiswick, before moving to
Nottingham, where he tried to make a living teaching French and
Italian. In November 1824 he set o for Greece to ght for the cause
of independence; but the presence of Italians was not particularly
welcome, as they were seen as potentially embarrassing to the
international community. On 8 May 1825 Egyptian troops launched
an attack on the island of Sphacteria, and Santarosa was killed: he
allegedly looked too wretched to be worth sparing. His body was
never found.27
The fate of Santarosa and the other exiles of 1821 greatly moved
a serious-minded teenager with a passion for the novels of Walter
Scott and romantic literature in general, a deeply religious
sensibility, and a slight tendency to self-dramatization. Giuseppe
Mazzini was just fteen and a university student when in April 1821
he and his mother ran into some of the fugitive rebels wandering
along the quayside at Genoa desperately seeking a passage to Spain
and asking passers-by for help. As he recalled years later:

A man with a stern and erce expression, dark, bearded, and with a
piercing look which I have never forgotten, called out from a
distance and stopped us. He held out in his hands a small white
handkerchief and uttered simply the words: for the exiles of Italy.
My mother and her friend put some money into the handkerchief…
That day was the rst on which there took shape confusedly in my
mind… the thought that we Italians could and therefore ought to
struggle for the liberty of our fatherland… The memory of those
refugees, many of whom became my friends in later life, pursued me
wherever I went by day, and mingled with my dreams by night…
Upon the benches of the university… in the midst of the noisy
tumultuous life of the students around me, I was sombre and
distracted, and appeared like one suddenly grown old. I childishly
determined to dress always in black, imagining myself in mourning
for my country… Matters went so far that my poor mother became
terri ed in case I should commit suicide.28
In the wake of the revolutions of 1820–21 governments
throughout Italy became ercely repressive. The in uence of the
Church spread into almost every sphere of public life as rulers
looked to smother subversive liberal ideas under a blanket of o cial
piety. Education and censorship in particular felt the full weight of
Catholic morality and intolerance. In the south sweeping purges
were carried out of the army, the civil service and the judiciary, and
the Carboneria was reduced to a shadow of its former self, surviving
only as countless scattered fragments, often with new names and
rituals. In the Papal States the Jews were con ned once again to
ghettoes, and hundreds of political suspects were arrested, especially
in the Romagna, where the activities of the sectarians had been
strong. In Piedmont Carlo Felice felt vindicated in his reactionary
instincts and his mistrust of intellectuals (‘the bad are all educated
and the good are all ignorant’),29 and while the courts passed
dozens of death sentences on the rebels (almost all in absentia), the
administration was systematically cleansed of dissidents.
In Lombardy a series of high-pro le trials involving nearly a
hundred members of the Italian Federation, Carbonari and other
sectarians culminated in November 1823 in the sentencing to death
of Federico Confalonieri, Luigi Porro-Lambertenghi (the co-founder
of Il Conciliatore), Giorgio Pallavicino-Trivulzio, Francesco Arese and
a dozen other leading gures of Milanese intellectual and social life.
At an earlier trial the writer Silvio Pellico had also received a death
sentence. Many of the accused had unfortunately broken down
under interrogation and betrayed the names of fellow conspirators
(and despite what later propaganda alleged, the Austrian authorities
behaved with rectitude and did not resort to torture), and as a result
the sectarian movement was all but destroyed in Lombardy. Most of
the condemned had earlier found safety in exile, and in the case of
others the emperor agreed to commute the death sentences into
various terms of imprisonment, but this did not stop the victims
acquiring martyr status – especially after 1832 when Silvio Pellico
published a widely translated account of the eight years that he
spent in the prison fortress of Spielberg, a work that did enormous
damage to Austria’s reputation in the eyes of the international
community.30
With tightened censorship making it much more di cult for
liberals to voice their ideas openly in print, other media were to
acquire increasing importance in the 1820s and 1830s as vehicles
for patriotic sentiment. Paintings necessarily had a restricted
audience, but many of the most acclaimed works of Hayez and his
contemporaries could reach a very wide public in the form of
engraved reproductions. Images such as that of Pietro Rossi sadly
relinquishing the joys of family life in order to go and ght his
enemies thus helped to disseminate and celebrate key aspects of
public morality and so give them enhanced stature and force.
Furthermore, in a society that was attuned through Catholicism to
graphic depictions of the torments endured by saints as tests of their
holiness, pictures of secular su ering had a marked capacity to
move and sanction. When Francesco Arese returned to Milan after
serving three years in the Spielberg fortress, he commissioned Hayez
to paint a portrait showing him sitting in his bare stone cell with
chains on his feet (he may have been partly motivated by an uneasy
conscience: he had been one of the freest in his revelations to the
police). The contrast between Arese’s aristocratic dress and bearing
and his grim and servile circumstances was calculated to produce
the maximum emotional impact.
When the subject of the painting was taken from Italian history,
something else was also achieved: a link to the past that was not
only inspirational and instructive, but which also helped map out
the contours of a common ‘national’ tradition to which
contemporaries could see themselves as heirs. After purchasing
Hayez’s acclaimed canvas of Pietro Rossi (and having his death
sentence commuted into twenty years in prison, most of which he
served), Giorgio Pallavicino-Trivulzio decided while he was in the
Spielberg prison to commission a pendant to accompany it. He
turned to Hayez’s friend and rival, Pelagio Palagi, and the subject
that he chose was again one that focused on the sacri ce of
domestic happiness to a higher calling: Cristoforo Colombo bidding
farewell to his two small sons as he prepared to set sail from the
port of Palos to discover the New World. As a native of Genoa,
Colombo could reasonably be accommodated in the pantheon of
illustrious Italians whose character and achievements were worthy
of celebration, and in Restoration Lombardy there was something of
a cult of the explorer, with a major biography appearing in Milan in
1818, a verse epic in 1826, additional paintings by Palagi and other
artists, and several operas, including one in 1829 by the promising
young Neapolitan composer Luigi Ricci.31
But depicting the Middle Ages in Italy raised some awkward
problems. If Vico, Cuoco and others had challenged the view of
most Renaissance and Enlightenment scholars that the roots of
modern Italy lay in the Roman world, positing instead a pre-
classical civilization of united, peace-loving and cultivated
Etruscans, the growing belief of historians after 1815 that the
origins of the European nations were to be found in the bloody era
of barbarian invasions after the fth century AD meant turning the
spotlight onto a period fraught with ambivalent patriotic messages.
Columbus was a man of undoubted vision and energy: but why had
he been forced to rely on Spanish patronage for his voyages of
exploration? Pietro Rossi, too, was evidently somebody endowed
with ambition and ne martial virtues, ready to wreak vengeance
on his enemies. But who were his enemies? Not foreign invaders or
foreign oppressors, but the lords of Verona and their followers; in
other words, fellow Italians.
5

Fractured Past and Fractured Present

When the whole of Europe was moving towards centralized monarchical

government, Italy continued to be feudal… In Italy there has never been
a period of industrialization or of revolution for the bene t of the
bourgeoisie… The yoke that weighed on the di erent states of Italy [from
the sixteenth century] was neither equal nor general. There are some
provinces of Italy that from the time of the Greek emperors to the present
have only known government by hear-say… [and] rule themselves
according to their own customs and laws. Calabria, Basilicata, the
Abruzzi and large parts of Sicily are cases in point. On the other hand
Tuscany has never experienced the total loss of political rights that its
neighbours have.

Alexander Herzen, Lettres de France et d’Italie, 4 February 1848

The fundamental and radical di culty facing Italy is that it does not
exist… It is not a question simply of resurrecting a nation, but rather of
creating one… I have spent many years searching through the past for
an Italy; I have found towns, glorious communes, splendid atoms, but
nowhere anything that resembles that organism that we call a people.

Edgar Quinet, Les Révolutions d’Italie (1848–51)

‘UNITED… IN MEMORIES’: HISTORY AND THE NATION

Italy’s past was to remain thorny terrain for patriots throughout the
Risorgimento – and indeed well beyond. While it was widely
accepted that history had a vital role to play in fashioning a national
consciousness and (rather more questionably) in teaching Italians
how to be good citizens, the di culty lay in locating a common
thread. ‘The history of Italy is the history of a single nation
composed of a mass of separate states,’ asserted Pasquale Villari, a
young Neapolitan scholar and a future Minister of Public
Instruction, con dently in 1849. And he added that a detailed
examination of the individual states would reveal to a determined
enquirer the collective national fabric.1 But many thought such
optimism misplaced, indeed dangerous. As Giuseppe Ferrari, a
Milanese republican whose awareness of the historic strength of the
divisions in Italy led him to a passionate advocacy of federalism,
wrote in 1858: ‘Where then is Italy? What does it consist of? What
bond is there that links the republics, the signori, the popes, the
emperors and the invasions? What connection is there between
individuals and the masses, sectarians and wars, wars and
revolutions? Scholarship does not help shed any light. Indeed, far
from instructing us, it simply underlines the chaos…’2
The desire to locate the historical roots of the Italian nation had
developed a new urgency after the 1790s. The traditional idea that
Italians were the descendants of the Romans (culturally, if not
racially) was felt to be increasingly out of place as the
cosmopolitanism of the Enlightenment gave way to a new era of
nationalism. Apart from anything else, Rome had been far too broad
in its geographical reach and too universal in its legacy (had not the
French revolutionaries and Napoleon felt it quite natural to
appropriate aspects of its civic morality and iconography?) to
provide a viable model for Italy. The growing interest of Romantic
scholars in unearthing the origins and character of the peoples of
Europe gave the study of history fresh momentum in the rst
decades of the nineteenth century, and after 1815 many of the most
in uential Italian patriots – among them such brilliant gures as
Alessandro Manzoni, Massimo d’Azeglio, Cesare Balbo, Vincenzo
Gioberti and Giuseppe Verdi – looked to Italy’s past, and especially
the Middle Ages, for material with which to educate the public,
foster enthusiasm for independence, and justify their vision of the
nation-to-be.

For much of his long life, the great Milanese writer Alessandro
Manzoni was too plagued by anxieties to work quickly. He su ered
from frequent panic attacks. He was terri ed of thunderstorms,
frightened of crowds, and often fearful when out walking that a
house might collapse or the ground open beneath his feet. He could
not stand puddles, and the sound of sparrows drove him to
distraction. He felt at times that he would end up completely insane,
like his good friend Vincenzo Cuoco. As he grew older, though, he
learned to keep many of his neuroses at bay by sticking to a strict
regimen. He would walk for twenty- ve minutes before lunch, eat
the same food every day, go to bed at precisely the same time, and
always ensure that his clothes were exactly the right weight and
thickness for the temperature. If anxieties did assail him, he would
leave the house and set o briskly through the streets or countryside
until he felt calm, sometimes covering twenty or even thirty miles in
a day.3
Manzoni had a di cult upbringing. He was born in 1785 into an
aristocratic Milanese family (his mother was the daughter of the
great jurist Cesare Beccaria, and rumour had it that Alessandro was
the product of a liaison she had with the younger brother of the
eminent Enlightenment scholar Pietro Verri), but his parents
separated when he was just six, and he saw very little of them
thereafter. He found solace in intense study, and his precocious
literary talents brought him to the attention of Foscolo, Monti and
other leading gures in Milanese society. Marriage in 1808 to a
young Swiss girl, Enrichetta Blondel, and a growing family, created
some emotional stability in his life. So too did his intense re-
conversion to Catholicism in 1810, and stays in Paris, where he
became part of the liberal intellectual circle around Madame de
Staël, with its passion for romanticism and historical study. After
1815 he rapidly emerged as a dominant gure in Milanese literary
life, and though he did not contribute directly to the Conciliatore, he
promoted the cause of romanticism strongly, and his tragedy, The
Count of Carmagnola (1816–19) (the subject of a major painting by
Hayez), established itself as one of the key works of the new
movement. He also became close friends with Berchet, Visconti and
others of the Conciliatore group.
Freedom from oppression and the comforting embrace of a united
community – family and friends in the rst instance and beyond
them the nation and Christendom – were among Manzoni’s
cherished ideals, and when in March 1821 it looked as if the
Piedmontese revolution might spread to Lombardy, and from
Lombardy to the rest of the peninsula, Manzoni was red with
patriotic hope, and dropping his customary slow rate of
composition, he quickly wrote an ode. In it he imagined that the
rebels were already on the east bank of the Ticino river and were
taking a solemn oath to liberate the whole of Italy, and Italians
everywhere were responding in kind, raising their newly sharpened
swords to the sun, shaking hands with one another in fraternal joy,
swearing to be ‘companions on our deathbeds or brothers on free
soil’. The poem called on the Austrians to depart from a land ‘that
did not bear them’, and to remember how God had destroyed the
Egyptian army when Pharaoh had tried to keep the Israelites
enslaved; for at last, after long years of su ering and looking idly to
others for redemption, Italy’s sons, a people ‘one in arms, language
and faith, memories, blood and heart’, had risen up to ght for their
own freedom, united around the ‘holy colours’ of their ag and
strong in their sense of shared pain.4 Not surprisingly, given the
course of events in March and April 1821, Manzoni did not feel he
could publish the ode. Only after the Milanese had launched a
successful insurrection against the Austrians in 1848 did he feel the
moment had come to release it.5
Of the six elements that Manzoni listed as being shared by the
Italian people – arms, language, faith, memories, blood and heart –
the only one that in fact had much commonality in 1821 was ‘faith’
(and ironically this was the one that was ruled out of the national
equation when political unity was nally achieved). This
ingenuousness was of course partly due to artistic licence and the
demands of political rhetoric, but Manzoni was also su ering, like
many northern Italian intellectuals of his generation who crossed
the Alps far more readily than the Apennines, from a degree of
ignorance. He knew next to nothing of the mass of the population,
certainly in central and southern Italy where the levels of illiteracy
and general ignorance were most marked. He makes one allusion in
the poem to the extreme south of the peninsula (signi cantly using
a mythological reference point, ‘the cave of Scylla’), but otherwise
the geography is all northern; and when as a metaphor for the
remorseless fusion of all Italians he talks of tributaries mingling
their waters to form one mighty torrent, the rivers he names are
those that ow down through Piedmont and Lombardy into the Po.
Manzoni’s Italy, like Santarosa’s, was in reality restricted primarily
to the north.
The failure of the 1821 revolution and the subsequent arrest of
many of his friends left Manzoni deeply saddened, but it also gave
him a renewed sense of purpose, and the next few years were to be
the most creative of his life. History fascinated him; and in a recent
visit to Paris his interest in Italy’s past had been stimulated by
discussions with the brilliant young French historian Augustin
Thierry.6 But a problem that he and other Italian writers of his
generation faced was how to portray that past in a way that avoided
ambivalent or even con icting messages. In his verse tragedy The
Count of Carmagnola, published in 1820, Manzoni had focused on
the career of an early- fteenth-century mercenary captain executed
for alleged treason by the Venetians after they had hired him to
 ght the Milanese. In the play a chorus is used to provide an ethical
commentary on the action, and in the central episode, the Battle of
Maclodio in 1427, the Venetian troops are rebuked for rejoicing in
their victory. For in reality what was there to celebrate? ‘Brothers
[had] killed brothers’, and ‘heaven [was] lled with abomination at
the hymns of thanksgiving that were issuing from their murderous
hearts.’7 Nor was the o ence simply one of fratricide. It was also a
crime directed against Italy as a whole, for waiting in the wings,
observing the piles of dead on the battle eld with obvious glee,
were rapacious foreigners ready to descend and enslave a country
weakened by civil war.
Manzoni’s message was clear enough, but in training the spotlight
on a typical passage of Italian medieval history he risked
underlining just how deep-rooted and bitter (and thus, in the view
of many commentators, foreign especially, indelible) the internal
divisions were. As was well known, in England, France, Spain and
other European countries the domestic con icts of the Middle Ages
had gradually been resolved within the framework of a nation-state.
But in Italy this process had not happened, and to hold up to
audiences a mirror that showed their present weaknesses re ected
vividly in their past (albeit with a wag of the nger) might aid the
cause of the conservatives as much as of the patriotic liberals. And
Manzoni faced another problem: his Catholicism. If Italians were to
shake o the foreign yoke they would not only have to unite as
brothers but also ght; and war meant setting aside those paci c
Christian values that were widely seen as having sapped the martial
energy of Italians. Carmagnola is a warrior, but a Christian warrior,
who refuses to capitalize on his victory and magnanimously releases
his prisoners after the battle. Charged with treachery and sentenced
to death, he is consoled by the belief that justice is not to be had on
earth but in heaven – an idea that points logically towards
resignation and inaction.
Herein (from a patriotic point of view) lay the Achilles’ heel of
Manzoni’s vision of Italian history; and herein, ironically, may have
lain one important reason for his great popular success in the 1820s
and 1830s (and later). Delving back into the shadowy era of
Lombard domination in the seventh and eighth centuries, and
poring over the fragmentary documentation that had been gathered
by antiquarians such as Ludovico Antonio Muratori, Manzoni
thought he could discern the existence of an Italian ‘race’ and
‘nation’, an ‘immense multitude of men… passing unnoticed over
the land, its land’, oppressed by foreign rulers and su ering in
silence.8 But was that silence good or bad, a sign of abjectness or of
Christian fortitude? When in 1820–22, against the backdrop of the
failed revolutions in northern and southern Italy, he composed a
verse tragedy about the defeat of the Lombards by the Frankish king
Charlemagne in 774, he included a stirring patriotic chorus in which
he imagined the Italians, ‘a scattered crowd that has no name’,
roused to action from their servile condition.9 But the central
message of the play pointed in a di erent direction: that injustice on
earth should be seen as something that tempers and tests the
Christian soul and paves the way for happiness in the afterlife,
rather than as a springboard to expiation.
By the time he wrote his most famous work, the historical novel
The Betrothed (1821–5), Manzoni’s retreat from martial rhetoric and
heroic posturing was complete. The silent, su ering generations
who had peopled the peninsula in the Dark Ages under Lombard
and Frankish rule and formed the backbone of the ‘Italian nation’
found their spokesmen in the humble characters of Renzo and Lucia,
two village lovers in seventeenth-century Lombardy who are
thwarted in their plans for marriage by war, famine and the
machinations of an aristocratic overlord. The book certainly has its
patriotic aspects: the oppressiveness of Spanish rule, for example, is
suggested by the iniquitous and tyrannical behaviour of Don
Rodrigo. But national redemption is not at the heart of the novel
(indeed the word ‘nation’ appears only once in the 1827 edition).10
What really interests Manzoni is how the main characters respond to
su ering. And his celebration of passive Christian fortitude was not
surprisingly uncongenial and frustrating to more militant patriots
who were desperate to shake Italians out of their lethargy. Where,
asked Giuseppe Mazzini in a review of 1835, was the book’s spark?
The fact is that passion, the burning tempestuous passion that plants heaven or hell in your
soul, that makes you into a saint or a criminal, a giant or a pigmy, that ordains you for
martyrdom or for victory, is banished from these pages… Its joys are the joys of the family,
its su erings do not lead on to revolt, its expiations are always achieved through

submission and prayer… and its constant refrain is: Turn your eyes towards heaven!11

Other patriots were even more scathing. Luigi Settembrini, a

Neapolitan liberal who played a leading role in trying to educate
southerners to the national ideal in the 1830s and 1840s (and
su ered with imprisonment), said the novel’s perpetual preaching of
forgiveness and resignation to the will of God encouraged
‘submissiveness to slavery and negation of the fatherland’, and
thereby made The Betrothed into ‘the book of reaction’.12
Yet the work proved enormously popular, going through over
seventy editions and reprints between 1827 and 1870, and selling in
excess perhaps of a quarter of a million copies – a huge gure given
the restricted size of the reading public in Italy at this time. Some of
the book’s appeal may have been due indirectly to patriotic factors.
Here for the rst time was an Italian novel that could stand
comparison with the best that was being produced in Britain, France
or Germany. And the fact that it was widely translated and generally
well received abroad added to its cachet in Italy (‘one of the three or
four books which I have read with most pleasure in my whole life,’
said the French romantic writer Lamartine).13 Manzoni gave a
further patriotic in ection to the novel by setting out after 1827 to
make it a model for ‘correct’ written Italian everywhere in the
peninsula, taking as a yardstick contemporary spoken Tuscan, on
the grounds that this dialect was closest to the language of Dante,
Boccaccio and Petrarch, and gradually purging the text of
archaicisms and Lombard usages (an elderly Florentine governess
employed in his house in Milan allegedly had a decisive in uence
on the nal edition of 1840–42). But much of the appeal of The
Betrothed undoubtedly lay in its quaintly reassuring vision of Italian
history, with priests, local politics, family, unscrupulous landlords,
intrigue and sexual honour at its heart.

It took the Protestant historian Simonde de Sismondi to provide a

more robust patriotic vision. His achievement was two-fold. In the
rst place he provided a genuinely ‘national’ reading of Italian
history, one that could o er justi cation for concerted political
action in a way that the local histories of the Enlightenment period
– for example Pietro Verri’s of Milan or Rosario Gregorio’s of Sicily –
could not do. He maintained that in the ninth and tenth centuries
Italy had been swept by what he called ‘a celestial re’, which had
shot through ‘the entire nation’ and stirred the Italian people to
political action (contemporary interest in the electrical sources of
life and energy, of which the Bologna physicist Luigi Galvani had
been a pioneer, a ected Sismondi’s vision, as it did that of other
observers concerned with the problem of how to rouse Italy from its
‘sleep’). The second important element in Sismondi’s interpretation
was that it shifted responsibility for Italy’s decline away from areas
such as character and climate towards institutions. Italians had
become degenerate, certainly; but it was bad government, lack of
education and the pernicious in uence of the Church that were
among the chief culprits. The solutions were thus not hard to
discern.14
In contrast to Manzoni, Sismondi saw the barbarian invasions of
the early Middle Ages as having bene ted Italy. The Goths and the
Lombards intermarried with the natives, and their rough northern
energy fused with the re ned patriotism of the indigenous
population to create a powerful cocktail that resulted in the
communal movement of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the
Lombard League and the defeat of the German emperor Frederick
Barbarossa at the Battle of Legnano in 1176. The late twelfth
century marked the apogee of Italian history, and the emergent
nation, according to Sismondi, should have capitalized on its success
by cementing the alliances made between the city-states in the
campaigns against Barbarossa with a federal constitution. In other
words the Italians should have done what the Swiss did. In this way
they would have stayed free.15 But the moment was allowed to pass,
the bonds of friendship slipped, and Italy fell back into a state of
fragmentation and civil war, paving the way for Spain’s eventual
conquest of the peninsula in the sixteenth century.
Sismondi had originally intended to bring his history to an end
with the fall of the Florentine republic on 28 October 1530, but he
in fact continued it down to the late eighteenth century, when the
last ickers of republicanism were snu ed out by Napoleon. As a
passionate Italophile, Sismondi hoped that the example of an earlier
age, one possessed of ‘more virtue and energy than our own’, would
stir the embers of patriotism that still glowed beneath the ashes and
inspire Italians to action.16 What was needed, though, was
leadership, for with the exception of Al eri (whose widow was a
close friend) nobody, in his view, had yet pointed Italians in the
right direction. And good leadership could pay handsome political
dividends for those of a democratic persuasion, since, like a growing
number of romantically inclined foreign travellers who viewed Italy
through the lens of Rousseau, Sismondi believed that the ancient
qualities of the Italians survived still in the ordinary people,
particularly the peasants, who had remained untouched by the
e ete hand of society.17 In another age and environment might not
a bandit like Fra Diavolo have been a freedom-loving William Tell?
18
Sismondi’s celebration of the medieval republics provided Italian
patriots with much historical ammunition, and from the 1820s
episodes such as the oath of Pontida (1167), the Battle of Legnano
(1176), the Battle of Benevento (1266), the Sicilian Vespers (1282),
the duel of Barletta (1503), the siege of Florence and the Battle of
Gavinana (1530) were established as sites of national memory. So
were the careers of such men as the twelfth-century religious
reformer and scourge of the papacy, Arnaldo da Brescia, the
fourteenth-century tribune of the Roman republic Cola di Rienzo,
and the early-sixteenth-century military captains Ettore Fieramosca
and Francesco Ferruccio. But it was elements of Sismondi’s
monumental work rather than the totality of his vision that Italian
patriots latched on to. For the problem, once again, was that the
positive messages that the author hoped to impart risked being
undercut by the general tenor of the historical narrative. It was all
very well for Sismondi to say that Italians could have formed a
federal state in the twelfth century, but the fact is they did not; and
what is more they proceeded thereafter to tear at each other for
several hundred years until the Spanish stepped in and imposed
stability. The impulse to freedom that Sismondi wanted to
emphasize could also be seen as an impulse to anarchy.
This was the di culty with Italian history: it always seemed to be
pulling in di erent directions and o ered little prima facie support
for the idea of an Italian nation. The result was that the most
in uential works of patriotic literature in the Risorgimento were
those that took single episodes (the Battle of Legnano, the Sicilian
Vespers, the siege of Florence) and turned them into metaphors for
national redemption in ways that were not justi ed on strictly
historical grounds. Thus the victory against Barbarossa in 1176, or
the slaughter of the French in Palermo in 1282, or Ferruccio’s
struggle with the imperial forces in 1530 were used to suggest that
there had been a deep-seated sense of ‘Italian’ nationhood, a desire
for independence from foreign rule, that the ensuing centuries of
decadence had managed to sti e. These episodes were also chosen
to demonstrate that Italians had once been ercely military and
could ght and ght well, and that the common taunt of foreigners
(which many patriots found deeply insulting) that Italians were by
nature cowardly was historically unfounded.
Viewed as a whole though, Italy’s history o ered little comfort for
patriots. Ancient Rome undoubtedly had its glorious aspects, but as
far as its civil politics were concerned the Republic seemed largely a
chronicle of factionalism and civil war, the Empire of civil war and
licentiousness. A few scholars, like the great Milanese economist and
republican Carlo Cattaneo, managed to derive a positive message
from the turbulence of the Middle Ages, seeing in the vigour and
prosperity of the city-states a vindication of some kind of federal
structure for the future nation (but given the wretched relations that
had existed between most cities, and between most of the cities and
their surrounding countryside or contado, he not surprisingly felt
unable to spell out exactly what this would mean in concrete
political terms). For most patriots, however, the search for a holistic
vision of Italy’s past ended either in ction, or in the invisible
undergrowth of history (as with Manzoni), or in the realms of myth
(as with Cuoco).
The alternative was to see the past as something to be
transcended, an object lesson in what a new Italian nation-state
should try to avoid. This, broadly speaking, was the approach taken
by Carlo Botta, the historian of Italy whose works aroused most
enthusiasm among patriots during the Risorgimento (Michele Amari
and Pietro Colletta were also hugely admired, but they wrote about
Sicilian and Neapolitan history). Botta was a Piedmontese doctor
whose anti-clericalism and strong support for the French Revolution
forced him to seek asylum in France after 1814. In exile he
produced three major narrative works on Italian history: like much
of the patriotic literature written at this time they had to be printed
abroad, in France or in Switzerland, or else in Tuscany where the
censorship was relatively light. The rst covered the years 1789–
1814 (in six volumes, 1824), the second continued Francesco
Guicciardini’s Renaissance history, and went from 1534 to 1789 (in
ten volumes, 1832), and the third surveyed the entire course of
Italian history from Constantine in the fourth century down to the
fall of Napoleon (in ve volumes, 1825–7).
According to Botta, the Romans were vitiated by conquest and
unmanly foreign customs; the rule of law gave way to the imperium
of the sword; and ‘the soil of Italy… was bathed in blood shed by
Roman hands’.19 Christianity then sapped the martial spirit of the
Italian people and pagan tribes swept into a land that was divided
and without patriotism. The Middle Ages were an inglorious era.
Political factions prevailed: ‘and nothing so easily produces
corruption and decay’.20 There was a frenzy of warfare, as city
fought against city, showing that it was ‘more di cult to organize
liberty than overthrow tyranny’.21 And ‘Italy’ now meant nothing to
anyone: even the much-vaunted Lombard League was just an
extension of the Guelph–Ghibelline struggles. The one bright spot
was the literary revival begun by Dante and Petrarch, which
precipitated the glories of the Renaissance. But Italy remained
politically decadent, and the divisions in the peninsula opened the
way to foreign conquest from 1494. Thereafter Italy slid into a
prolonged period of lethargy, redeemed only by the achievements of
a few artists and scientists. The Enlightenment was a period of
signi cant improvements, but the cosmopolitan culture of the
eighteenth century eroded the national spirit (‘cosmopolitans… are
not patriots’).22 Napoleon brought material bene ts, but overall the
impact of French rule on Italy was negative: it led to ‘distasteful
adulation, a servile literature, an enslaved press, a total abasement
of character, the loosening of all patriotic bonds and the complete
loss of the prestige of the name of Italy. Italy under [Napoleon] was
no longer Italy. It was France.’23

Factionalism, division and an absence of patriotism: Italy’s fractured

and discordant past aroused feelings of deep anxiety in patriots of
the Risorgimento. ‘Have you not heard, my great and good
Lamartine, that no harsher insult could have been hurled at [Italy]
than diversity,… a word that sums up a long history of misfortune
and humiliation?’ wrote Manzoni in the spring of 1848.24 And the
sorry spectacle of centuries of weakness and con ict created a sense
of insecurity that had a profound in uence on the way the Italian
nation was imagined in the Risorgimento and also on the trajectory
of Italian politics after 1860, with their pursuit of integration and
‘moral unity’ as prophylactics against a slide into a seemingly
imminent abyss of chaos. Since the old Italy had been plagued by
internal discord, the new Italy must be a land of fraternal (and
sisterly) love, strength, and unity of purpose. As the young democrat
Go redo Mameli put it in verses written in 1847 (and which, as a
jaunty marching song, became Italy’s uno cial national anthem
after 1860, and in 1946, with some irony following three years of
occupation and civil war, the o cial anthem of the new Republic):
Brothers of Italy
Italy has awoken
And has placed on its head
The helmet of Scipio…
For centuries we have been
Downtrodden and derided
Since we are not a people
Because we are divided;
Let us gather round one ag
United in one hope
For now the hour struck
For us to come together…
Let us unite, let us love;
For union and love
Reveal to the peoples
The ways of the Lord.
Let us swear to make free
Our native soil:
And united in God
Who can ever defeat us?…
From the Alps to Sicily
Every place is Legnano Every man has the heart
And the hand of Ferruccio…
The sound of every bell
Has sounded the Vespers.
Let us form a tight cohort,
We are ready for death:

Italy has called!25

THE MATERIAL MOSAIC

In a celebrated chapter of The Duties of Man, published in 1860,

Giuseppe Mazzini explained to Italian workers what obligations they
owed to their nation, and why. God, he said, had granted to no
other country of Europe such sharply de ned borders:
To you who have been born in Italy, God has assigned, as if he wished to single you out,
the most clearly demarcated fatherland in Europe. Other countries have borders that are
more uncertain or broken, and here doubts may arise… But in your case there can be no
doubts. God has stretched around you sublime and irrefutable boundaries: on one side, the
highest mountains in Europe, the Alps; on the others, the sea, the immense sea… As far as
[the Alps] people speak and understand your language; beyond them you have no rights.
Yours without question are Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica and the smaller islands that lie

between them and the mainland of Italy…26

Mazzini’s conviction was based on faith rather than direct

experience. Apart from some brief visits to Tuscany and a short spell
in Rome in 1849, he had no rst-hand knowledge of Italy outside
his native Genoa. The great majority of his adult life was spent
abroad in exile, mostly London, where he was able to enjoy the
bene ts of tarmac roads, a fast-expanding rail network, horse-drawn
buses, national and local newspapers (foreign as well as British),
bookshops, libraries, clubs and an e cient postal service. A glance
at the map of Europe might indeed have suggested that God had
intended the Italian peninsula (and perhaps all its neighbouring
islands as well) to be one and indivisible, but had Mazzini travelled
as much in Italy as many English, French and German tourists did in
the decades after 1815 (or the occasional intrepid north Italian, such
as the distinguished Piedmontese artist and politician Massimo
d’Azeglio, who unusually for someone of his generation and
background had a good knowledge of Sicily – which he quite liked –
and Naples – which repelled him), he might have been less
con dent about the connection between geography and the nation.
Internally, Italy was riven by mountains, and while the broad at
plain of the Po valley had long been traversed by a good network of
roads and canals, much of the peninsula was still all but inaccessible
to the outside world in the rst half of the nineteenth century,
certainly during the autumn and winter months when heavy rain
turned the mule tracks and sheep runs into glutinous mires. While
all roads may once have led to Rome, in the 1820s only two did,
and neither was very safe. And beyond Rome there were only two
proper arteries heading southwards, one going through the malaria-
ridden Pontine marshes, the other through Sulmona and Isernia.
Both of these nished at Naples, thus leaving the regions of
Calabria, Basilicata and Puglia in e ect severed from the rest of the
peninsula. Crossing the Apennines from west to east was
particularly di cult, and it was far quicker and cheaper to get from
Rome to Ancona (some 200 kilometres as the crow ies) by boat,
via Naples, Reggio Calabria, Brindisi and Pescara, than by road.
Most small towns and villages in the mountainous interior were
beyond the reach of all but the most determined travellers: of the
1,828 communes in the mainland south 1,431 had no roads to serve
them in 1860.27
Engineering di culties as much as a lack of capital or initiative
were to blame for this parlous state of a airs. And the same was
true for railway building – though here the concern of the Church
that dark tunnels could pose a threat to morality also came into
play. Italy’s rst stretch of railway was opened in Naples in 1839,
and signi cantly its function was more one of dynastic security than
general utility: when completed its eighty-four kilometres connected
the royal palace of Caserta to the military bases of Castellammare,
Nocera, Capua and Nola. During the 1840s other Italian states
embarked on railway building, but progress was very slow, and by
the end of the decade there were only 620 kilometres of track in
operation (at this date Britain had nearly 10,000, Germany 6,000
and France 3,000). Except in Piedmont, almost no serious thought
was given to how railways might bene t the domestic economies;
and until 1846 there were no plans to link the networks of the
di erent states.28 The material integration of the peninsula was
clearly not high on government agendas.
This state of a airs was hardly surprising, and not just because
the Austrians were reluctant to do anything that might give
momentum to national uni cation. Italy had a weak economy, and
most of the axes of trade radiated outwards from the peninsula.
Exports of grain and olive oil from southern Italy, for example,
shifted in the course of the eighteenth century from Genoa and
Venice towards the wealthy industrializing economies of northern
Europe. Britain became a particularly important trading partner as
demand for ‘cloth oil’, used in the production of textiles, increased.
Sulphur, of which Sicily had almost a world monopoly, also had
important industrial uses, and most of it went overseas. Citrus fruit
was exported to grace the tables of wealthy urban families in
England, Austria and Germany, and soon further a eld in Russia
and the United States – which from the early nineteenth century
became the main market. In 1855 just 11.8 per cent of exports from
the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies were directed to other Italian states
(excluding the gure for the Austrian Empire). And imports showed
a very similar picture, with only 8.5 per cent coming from within
the peninsula.29
Matters were made worse by the protectionist policies that the
Italian states adopted after 1815. The one exception was Tuscany,
where Ferdinand III decided to keep faith with the free-trade
policies of his forebears, hoping thereby to bene t from the grand-
duchy’s good market position, its relatively strong agricultural
sector, its abundance of raw materials, including marble, mercury
and iron, and its commercially minded land-owning aristocracy: the
Marquises Ginori had produced high-quality ceramics at Doccia,
near Florence, since the mid eighteenth century, while from the
1830s Baron Bettino Ricasoli perfected the particular blend of red
and white grapes that made Chianti into one of the world’s great
wines. Yet, for all its openness Tuscany, like the Kingdom of the
Two Sicilies, ended up trading primarily with non-Italian partners,
with much of its produce passing through the cosmopolitan and
bustling free port of Livorno. Elsewhere the erection of numerous
tari barriers acted as a major disincentive to commercial life.
Goods travelling the sixty kilometres from Mantua to Parma had to
pass through seven barriers, while on the river Po boats could be
stopped and searched at up to eighty di erent points. In 1839 tra c
moving between Florence and Milan could take up to seven weeks
to cover the 300 kilometres.30
However, these obstacles did not produce any signi cant pressure
for the formation of a national market. Only towards the middle of
the 1840s did serious calls begin to be made for greater economic
integration in Italy, and then the leading proponents – aristocratic
liberals such as Cesare Balbo and Camillo Cavour in Piedmont –
were motivated much more by political than by strictly commercial
considerations.31 Most Italian producers appear to have been highly
wary of anything as unpredictable and dangerous as a single Italian
market, and their complaints were targeted at internal excises and
duties rather than protectionist tari s between states. This insularity
was re ected in the exclusive character and ercely local focus of
the relatively few agricultural and commercial associations that
existed in Italy in the 1820s and 1830s. One of the oldest and most
famous, for example, the Accademia dei Georgo li of Florence, had
a governing body of fty members, and according to the statutes all
of them had to be resident in Florence. Only in 1870 was this
requirement relaxed.32
Italy’s commercial and manufacturing classes were still relatively
small in size, certainly compared to those of Britain, Germany and
France, and even in the major cities their presence was limited. In
Naples, for instance, which had a population of 430,000 in the early
nineteenth century, trade in agricultural goods, public works
contracts, insurance and tax-farming was controlled by a tiny group
of around 300 merchants and bankers.33 The industrial sector,
textiles and engineering especially, saw some growth after 1815
thanks largely to government support (and secured notable
successes: the rst steamship in Italy was launched at Naples in
1818 and the rst iron suspension bridge was constructed over the
Garigliano river in 1828–32), but it still amounted to no more than
a few dozen entrepreneurs running a few dozen workshops. And
many of them were foreigners, Swiss and British capitalists with
names such as Vonwiller, Egg, Pattison and Guppy, enticed by the
Bourbons into investing their money in Naples in exchange for
guaranteed state contracts. Given their heavy dependence on court
patronage and protection it is hardly surprising that these
manufacturers were in general opposed to liberal reforms and an
open national market.34
Even in the economically most advanced city in Italy, Milan, the
business sector was small. In 1838 there were just 42 bankers, 25
money changers and 196 textile manufacturers in a population of
nearly 150,000 (and silk and cotton were Lombardy’s main
industrial products). In addition there were several hundred
wholesale merchants dealing in a variety of agricultural and
industrial goods such as cereals, sugar, leather and cloth – all told,
perhaps, little more than a thousand people – as well as 4,700
landowners (3,000 of them nobles) and a professional middle class
that included just 170 lawyers and 500 engineers.35 The horizons of
this economic elite were again, as in Naples, more local than
national. Though there was certainly a good deal of grumbling at
the Austrian tari system that forced producers to trade within the
empire, the fact was that the commercial life of Lombardy (and the
Veneto) looked inwards, or at best northwards over the Alps, and
had little reason to orientate itself ‘nationally’. This insularity was
evident in the agricultural and industrial societies of Milan, which,
like the Georgo li in Florence, were exclusive in character and
largely provincial in focus, something that even uni cation found
extremely di cult to break down. When in 1862 a group of
Piedmontese farmers tried to inject a more national note into
agriculture by setting up an Italian Agrarian Association, Milan’s
leading landowners responded by establishing their own Agrarian
Society of Lombardy.36
If there was little pressure for greater economic integration in
Italy coming from the country’s elites, there was none from the mass
of the population. The many thousands of artisans and shopkeepers,
domestic servants and clerks, who typically made up the middle
ranks of urban society (the ‘popolo’ or ‘people’ of contemporary
parlance) catered primarily to the needs of the local moneyed
classes and tourists. Below them lay the ‘plebe’ or ‘plebs’, a teeming
sea of poor, of no xed occupation, who eked out a living on the
streets, hawking chestnuts and o al, opening carriage doors and
carrying bags, taking patients to doctors and clients to lawyers,
o ering their services as casual labourers on building sites, or
simply thieving or begging. Their ranks were swollen by temporary
migrants from the countryside, especially when there was little work
on the land or food was unusually scarce. This huge underclass of
destitutes was particularly large in the southern cities – Rome,
Naples, Palermo – and it seems to have been growing in the early
decades of the nineteenth century as population pressure, poor
harvests and falling prices drove peasants out of agriculture.
In the countryside the population consisted mainly of subsistence
farmers and day labourers, who had relatively little contact with
urban markets, especially in the south, where the journey to the
major towns and cities was on average far greater than in the Po
valley. There was a strong tradition of migration, both seasonal and
more permanent, especially in northern Italy, where the expansion
of large agricultural estates from the late eighteenth century led to a
decline in smallholdings and an increase in underemployed and
landless workers. But much of this migration was directed outside
Italy – to the cities of eastern France (the great silk-manufacturing
city of Lyon, for instance) or further a eld to Spain and even South
America. Argentina was a particularly favoured destination for
seasonal workers known as ‘golondrinas’ or ‘swallows’, who spent
the winter months harvesting in the southern hemisphere and the
summer back in Italy. This transatlantic migration rose steadily in
volume in the rst half of the nineteenth century before becoming a
torrent after the 1870s.
Money, of course, and the prospect of a better lifestyle were what
mainly drew Italian peasants abroad. But the willingness with which
so many settled in foreign lands and frequently became assimilated
as Argentinians, Brazilians or Americans says something about the
inhospitable conditions that they happily left behind. Extreme
poverty was accompanied by poor diet and diseases such as malaria,
pellagra and cholera (average life expectancy at birth in the mid
nineteenth century was about thirty years; in England it was over
forty; in Europe probably only Russia was worse). But in addition to
their terrible material conditions most of them faced brutal
treatment from landowners or their agents, for outside Tuscany,
where there was a strong tradition of paternalism linked to share-
cropping contracts that encouraged good relations between
proprietors and peasants, there was little to temper the crude force
of the market. Southern landowners sometimes incorporated a
measure of feudal benevolence into the workings of the great estates
or latifondi, but not often it seems.37 In general the peasantry were
regarded with a mixture of contempt and fear by the propertied
classes, especially in the cities, where for centuries town walls had
been seen as a barrier, both psychological and real, between the
dark and menacing rural world, with its ignorance, squalor,
banditry and jacqueries, and civilized urban culture.
Italy’s economic fragmentation was underlined by the enormous
variety of currencies, weights and measures that continued to be
used in the peninsula after 1815. Napoleon’s attempts to achieve a
degree of standardization had apparently borne very little fruit. In
Lombardy – Venetia the main coins were the orino and the
Austrian lira; Piedmont had its own version of the lira (uniquely
based on the French decimal system), the Papal States had the
Roman scudo, Tuscany the Lucchese scudo and the lira, Naples the
ducato, and Sicily the onza. More localized and disparate still were
the myriad units that were employed for length and distance, liquid
and dry weights, and surface areas. Even within individual states
there could be considerable diversity. For instance, in the Kingdom
of Piedmont–Sardinia each region had its own separate system. In
Piedmont the main units of length were the trabucco, the piede, the
oncia and the raso; in neighbouring Liguria, the cannella and the
palmo; and in Sardinia the trabucco (which was six centimetres
longer than the Piedmontese trabucco), the canna and the palmo (a
centimetre and a half longer than the Ligurian palmo).38
Such di erences did not of course stop, or necessarily even
hamper, business transactions being conducted between the regions,
but they were an indication of how circumscribed and local much of
the peninsula’s economic activity was at this time. Even an energetic
and enterprising farmer like Camillo Cavour, whose horizons were
quite exceptionally broad for a Piedmontese aristocrat of his
generation (he imported guano from Liverpool and sold merino
sheep to the pasha of Egypt), operated mainly within a narrow
economic corridor in eastern Piedmont, and his paramount ambition
was to make his estate at Leri ‘more prosperous than any other in
the province of Vercelli’.39

If the economic life of the peninsula was local and fractured, so too
was the linguistic map. Italian – in other words the vernacular
Tuscan of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio – had been established
since the Renaissance as the standard medium for written (and if
need be oral) communication among the educated. Exactly how
many people spoke Italian at the time of uni cation has long been
debated, but recent estimates suggest that perhaps 10 per cent of the
population used it as their rst language, with especially heavy
concentrations in Tuscany and Rome (whose strongly cosmopolitan
environment necessitated a lingua franca).40 In addition it would be
reasonable to suppose that most of those who had received some
formal education and were o cially classi ed as literate – 22 per
cent in 1861 – understood and read Italian, even if they could not
write or speak it very well. But even with this higher gure nearly
80 per cent of the population still would have been conversant with
dialect only and would have struggled to understand or even
recognize Italian. When the Milanese aristocrats Giovanni and
Emilio Visconti Venosta took the unusual step of visiting inland
Sicily in 1853, the locals could not work out where they came from
and assumed they must be English.41
Of course multilingualism was the norm in much of Europe in the
nineteenth century, and it was generally taken for granted that one
language would be used at home, another at work, and yet another
perhaps when writing or carrying out o cial business. Nobles in the
Hungarian diet in the 1820s and 1830s conversed with each other in
Croat or Magyar, but switched to Latin when they got up to address
the assembly.42 Nor was the prevalence of patois in the countryside
all that unusual, as the case of rural France under the Third
Republic would suggest.43 But Italy’s dialects were remarkable in
their diversity, re ecting centuries of foreign conquest and
settlement – Greek, Arab, Norman, Catalan, Spanish, Albanian, Slav
– as well as the deliberate pursuit by many competing cities of
distinct local identities. As a result even relatively near neighbours
might nd it di cult to comprehend each other. Ugo Foscolo
claimed in the early nineteenth century – though perhaps with an
element of the exaggeration to which he was prone – that somebody
from Milan ‘would need many days of lessons’ before understanding
somebody from Bologna, and vice versa.44
For many patriots in the Risorgimento, the Italian language and
the glories of its literature were the biggest single source of national
pride, but as Foscolo and Manzoni frankly confessed, Italian was no
longer a living tongue by the early nineteenth century.45 All classes,
from the aristocracy and the highly educated to artisans and
peasants, used dialect. In Piedmont sermons were delivered in
dialect; in Venice judges and lawyers deliberated in dialect; and in
Naples dialect was used at court.46 And since the middle of the
eighteenth century the status of dialect had been underpinned by a
thriving literary tradition: the brilliant comedies of Carlo Goldoni in
Venice, the lyric poetry of Giovanni Meli in Palermo, and the
immensely popular comic and satirical verses of Carlo Porta and
Giuseppe Belli in Milan and Rome. In Piedmont the king and his
ministers generally spoke dialect and wrote French (much of
Cavour’s correspondence relating to the uni cation of Italy was in
French); and though Carlo Alberto himself had uncommonly good
Italian, he was amazed if he came across anyone of similar
competence. A patriotic Piedmontese noblewoman recalled a
conversation with the king in 1840 in which he complimented her
on her Italian:
‘You speak Italian very uently. Were you at college in Florence?’

‘No, Your Majesty. I’ve never left Turin.’

‘I’m astonished, as our ladies only speak Italian like French people speak it.’

‘That is because French is the language of court. Were you to talk Italian to them in the
way that you can, Your Majesty, everyone would love you for it…’

‘Everyone, yes, if everyone was like you.’47

STENDHAL’S ITALY: MUNICIPALISM AND IGNORANCE

The great French writer Stendhal adored Italy. Like Madame de

Staël he saw it as a land of art, beauty and imagination, a place
where the absence of social constraints and convention allowed for
the spontaneous expression of passion and emotion. It seemed the
antithesis of the chilly, drear and oppressive world of his childhood
in Grenoble. Like Madame de Staël, too, he longed for Italy to
recover its former glory and become a great nation; and though he
was aware that centuries of despotism and clerical rule had sapped
Italians of much of their ancient civic and military virtue, he
nonetheless believed there was energy still lurking beneath the
ashes of their cynicism and apparent resignation, waiting to be
fanned into life and surprise the world (‘who would have guessed, in
1815, that the Greeks, so docile and so obsequious to the will of
their Turkish masters, stood poised upon the very brink of
heroism?’).48 But unlike Madame de Staël, Stendhal was a great
admirer of Napoleon and believed that fteen years of French rule
had given the peninsula a salutary jolt; and while the Swiss writer
fretted over how to restore liberty to a society that had grown
decadent, Stendhal had little doubt that democracy would only take
root after another period of benevolent dictatorship.49
What struck Stendhal so forcibly as he travelled around northern
and central Italy in 1816 and 1817 was the strength of what he
called patriotisme d’antichambre, the erce and inordinate pride that
local people felt towards their home town or village. Some aspects
of this patriotism were charming, he thought; but it was often
accompanied by an insularity of outlook and a resistance to any
criticism or change. Milan was a wonderful city – his favourite – and
the Milanese were right to be fond of their newly completed
cathedral with its forest of spires, their ne opera house, large
palazzi with superbly e cient tin guttering, and clean streets. But
their values were still those of a medieval republic (‘indeed the
whole of Italy today is nothing but an extension of the Middle Ages’)
and their horizons restricted. They were passionate about their
patron saint, Carlo Borromeo; about the productions at La Scala;
about the mock naval battles, chariot races and sack races for
dwarves staged in the Circus of Napoleon; about the Sunday corso,
when the populace thronged the main streets to gaze at ‘its
aristocracy’ parading in carriages. But they were indi erent to
politics and despised the government as ‘predatory vermin’,
unworthy of their support. And they were broadly indi erent to
literature (there was no appetite for novels) and to the few dozen
intellectuals who frequented the salons of Confalonieri, Pellico and
their friends.50
Had this intense local patriotism been wedded to fraternal
feelings towards neighbouring Italian towns and cities, then national
sentiment might have been more in evidence, but as it was the
peninsula was scored with hostilities (‘Italy is quite as much the
native home of hatred as of love’).51 One of Stendhal’s informants
told him of the bitter animosity that Bergamo, Pavia and Novara
harboured towards Milan, and added that there was not a single
Italian city that did not loathe its neighbour, with the exceptions of
Florence (which no longer had the energy to keep up its old feud
with Siena, he said) and Milan (whose inhabitants were too
concerned with ‘keeping a good table and acquiring a warm
overcoat’ to indulge in hatred):
You do not need telling that these di erent peoples are very far from forming a
homogeneous nation… [and] it follows that our rulers have no di culty in the ful lment
of their aim: divide ut imperes. This unhappy people, shattered by hatred into fragments as
ne as dust, is governed by the several courts of Vienna, Turin, Modena, Florence, Rome

and Naples.52

As Stendhal travelled southwards from Milan, through Emilia

Romagna and Tuscany, he became increasingly disturbed by the
levels of prejudice and ignorance that he encountered, which gave
the local patriotisme d’antichambre an almost surreal quality. Each
town, each village, seemed like a closed universe, impervious to
criticism and the outside world, where the humblest talent and the
meanest public building were extolled to the skies. There was also a
great deal of superstition, and the emotional life of the poor was
dominated by the clergy, whose intercessions were continually
sought to ensure good harvests, avert natural disasters and keep evil
spirits at bay. The extent of the cultural gap separating the mass of
the population from the educated elite alarmed him. After reporting
how one village had been terrorized for days by the appearance in
the sky of a ‘dark spectre’ (which turned out to be simply an eagle),
he wrote: ‘I am afraid for the future of Italy. The nation will
continue to bring forth philosophers like Beccaria, poets like Al eri,
soldiers like Santarosa; but the trouble is that these illustrious
individuals are too isolated from the masses of the people.’53
For these masses life was hard and precarious, and the main
source of comfort came from the Church, whose capacity to engage
the hearts and minds of ordinary people through colour, music and
spectacle was remarkable. Stendhal observed this in Rome on 18
August 1817, when he watched the 77-year-old Pope Pius VII being
carried triumphantly through the city on a dais before a sea of
adoring faces, ‘stamped with the profound belief that the Ponti …
is the sovereign arbiter of their eternal felicity or damnation’. The
procession began with ve orders of friars bearing huge torches and
singing hymns. Then followed the regular clergy from the great
basilicas, divided into seven bodies by huge banners of scarlet and
yellow (the traditional colours of the city), ‘and each of these
banners, of wholly oriental aspect, was preceded by a weird and
wondrous instrument surmounted by a bell, from which, at regular
minute intervals, there was extracted a high and solitary note’. Next
came the cardinals:
Then, all at once, the multitude made genu exion, and there, mounted upon his advancing
dais swathed in draperies fashioned of the richest and rarest stu s, I beheld a gure, pale,
inanimate and proud, likewise shrouded in vestments reaching high above the shoulders –
a gure which seemed to me to merge into a single entity, a whole, one and indivisible,
together with the altar, the swaying dais and the golden sun, before whose orb the gure
was bowed down, as though in adoration. ‘You never told me that the Pope was dead,’
complained a child who stood beside me to its mother. And no words can better convey the
utter and motionless xity of this unearthly apparition. At that instant, amongst the
multitude which encompassed me on every side, there was not a single unbeliever, and

even I was to be numbered among the faithful, if beauty be counted a religion.54

How could a new secular religion of the Italian nation hope to

compete with the old faith?
LEOPARDI’S ITALY: THE ABSENCE OF SOCIETY

Perched on a hill to the south of Ancona, a few miles from the great
pilgrimage shrine of Loreto, Recanati was not untypical of many
small provincial towns in the Papal States. Its medieval towers and
walls bore witness to its importance as a military stronghold in the
Middle Ages, while its broad streets and substantial houses attested
to a degree of commercial prosperity in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. But by the time the poet Giacomo Leopardi
was born there in 1798 much of its a uence had vanished, and
Recanati was little more than a cultural and economic backwater,
dominated by the sound of bells from its seventeen churches and
awash with signs of its former wealth and distinction: a thirteenth-
century bishop’s palace, a ne cathedral with the sarcophagus of the
saintly fteenth-century pope Gregory XII, towers and monasteries,
a piazza, on one side of which stood the substantial palazzo in which
the Leopardi family had lived for over 500 years, and many
important Renaissance sculptures and paintings, including four
works – one of them a bizarrely dramatic Annunciation, complete
with startled cat – by the maverick Venetian genius Lorenzo Lotto.
Giacomo Leopardi’s father, Monaldo, was a conservative
nobleman, who dressed austerely in black and wrote religious,
philosophical, literary and historical works attacking the errors of
the French Revolution and defending Christianity as the necessary
bedrock of society. He hoped to shield his son from the dangers of
the modern world and had him educated privately by Jesuit tutors,
surrounded by the vast personal library he was amassing in Palazzo
Leopardi with what little remained of the family fortune. Giacomo
displayed precocious intellectual gifts, and by the age of eighteen he
had mastered Latin, Greek and Hebrew and several modern
languages, written a history of astronomy and a treatise on the
scienti c errors of the ancient world, and composed two tragedies,
poems and numerous verse translations. But he was far from happy.
He su ered from a spinal condition that left him deformed; and he
longed to escape from his family and Recanati, the ‘uncivilized town
of my birth’, where his scholarly aloofness and disdain for his fellow
townsmen made him less than popular.55
Romanticism had made su ering and personal growth the
material of art; and like Foscolo, Manzoni and Stendhal, Leopardi
found an outlet for his emotional discontent in an idealized vision of
the Italian nation – a vision that was made all the more powerful by
its being vague and ill-de ned and shot through with sexualized
imagery and exhortations to revenge and war. In a series of brilliant
odes written between 1818 and 1821 he contrasted the greatness of
the past with the ‘mediocrity’ and ‘mire’ of the present, portraying
contemporary Italy as a beautiful woman, covered in blood and
wounds, her clothes torn and hair dishevelled, with chains on her
arms, sitting on the ground, weeping. He appealed to the young men
of Italy – ‘her sons’ – to take up arms and rescue her, and so emulate
the ancients, ‘who rushed in droves to die for the fatherland’. And
he hoped that scholars and writers, by recollecting the achievements
of great men such as Dante and Tasso, and laying them before the
public, would prise Italians out of their ‘lethargy’ and inspire them
to ‘illustrious deeds’. For since the sixteenth century only one man
had arisen worthy of Italy (but ‘unworthy of his craven age’),
Al eri; and his erce energy, ‘masculine virtue’ and hatred of
tyrants had come to him, ‘not from this arid and weary land of
mine’, but from north of the Alps.56
Leopardi nally managed to break away from Recanati in 1822,
and went to Rome, and later Milan, Bologna and Florence, where he
met Manzoni and other leading writers. But travel did little to
improve his estimation of his fellow countrymen, and he remained
disturbed by their deep cynicism, resignation and lack of ambition.
He was also alarmed by just how little national sentiment there was,
and this at a time when other countries – Britain and France
principally, but also Germany, and latterly Spain and Greece –
seemed ush with patriotic feelings that were inspiring soldiers,
politicians, engineers, businessmen, writers and artists to new
heights. On re ection, it struck him that there was a close causal
connection between the state of the Italian character and this
absence of any clear sense of the nation, and he set out to analyse
the relationship between the two in an essay entitled ‘On the
Present State of the Customs of the Italians’ written in 1824 (but not
published till 1906).
Italy’s fundamental problem, he argued, was that there was no
‘society’, no national community, to which the disparate peoples of
the peninsula felt bound, and which regulated conduct and tastes
and gave rise to sentiments of honour and shame. And in the
modern world such a community was indispensable, as the
Enlightenment had left a vacuum by kicking away the religious
pillars on which societies had rested for centuries (here Leopardi
was taking issue with his father, who was doggedly looking to stem
the tide of change by defending the alliance of throne and altar). For
various reasons, not least the absence of a capital city like London
or Paris, Italians had no consciousness of a broader moral
collectivity, beyond their family or their town, that would generate
ideals and prevent cynicism – the besetting vice of Italians that led
them to disparage everyone and everything. Italians were
individualists, and were proud of it; and ‘every Italian city, indeed
every Italian, has his own style and way of doing things’. And the
problem was particularly acute in the smaller provincial centres.
The only forums in which most Italians looked to be judged were
those of the ‘passeggiate, festivals and Church’. No other society
existed. ‘They promenade, go to shows and entertainments, sermons
and masses, sacred and secular festivals. That is all…’57
Leopardi’s eye may have been jaundiced by his life in Recanati,
but his view of Italy was shared by many patriots of the
Risorgimento – well-educated young men (and some women) of
middle-class and aristocratic backgrounds, conscious of the gap that
separated themselves from the mass of the population, and their
poetic ideal of a resurrected, glorious Italy, vigorous and uni ed,
worthy of its great past, from the humdrum and fractured reality.
Leopardi died in 1837 in a villa on the slopes of Vesuvius, a lonely
and frustrated gure. But he left an enduring legacy of some of the
most beautiful lyric poetry of the nineteenth century, poetry that he
hoped would educate his fellow countrymen as well as entertain
them. As he wrote in his diary in 1821: ‘To arouse my poor
fatherland… I will seek to deploy the weapons of emotion and
enthusiasm, eloquence and imagination, in the poetry and prose that
it will be given to me to write.’58 Many of his more overtly
pedagogic projects remained incomplete on his death: ‘On the
Education of Italian Youth’, ‘Letters of a Father to his Son’, ‘Moral
Instruction for the Use of Children’. It was to be left to others to try
to nd ways of creating that sense of a national community that
Italy so manifestly lacked.
6

Apostles and Martyrs: Mazzini and the Democrats, 1830–

44

God does exist. But even if he did not exist, there exists the universal
belief in him: there exists the universal need for an idea, a centre, a
single principle… Superstition, intolerance and priestly despotism have
up till now fed on this impulse to believe. Let us deprive them of this
support, based on a false interpretation. Let us seize that idea, that
symbol of Unity: let us show God to be the author of liberty, equality and
progress. The masses will ignore men, not God. Our people, as a result of
many centuries of servitude, have been rendered cold, deathly cold; and
to rouse them we need a religious enthusiasm, the cry of the Crusades:
God wills it!

Giuseppe Mazzini, Corrispondenza con Sismondi (1832)

Reverend father… We know and follow the religion of Jesus Christ like
you, or, if you will permit me, better than you… Because the charity and
love that are the hallmarks of that religion are precisely what lead us to
this most cruel of ends… So, Father, rest assured that just as our death is
certain, so tomorrow, despite the terrible anathemas of Pope Gregory, we
will be up above (pointing to the sky). But we will not nd Dominic
there.

Anacarsi Nardi to a Dominican monk on the eve of his execution,

1844
‘ITALIANS CANNOT FIGHT’

In a eld outside Florence on 19 February 1826 the nephew of

Vincenzo Cuoco, Gabriele Pepe, fought a duel with the distinguished
French poet Alphonse de Lamartine. Pepe, a soldier, scholar and
writer who had supported the Neapolitan Republic in 1799 and
served with Napoleon’s armies in Italy and Spain, had settled in
Tuscany in 1823 and become part of the literary circle of Gian
Pietro Vieusseux, a Swiss merchant who had recently founded a
high-pro le liberal journal called the Antologia to follow in the
footsteps of the suppressed Conciliatore. Pepe had been angered by a
poem of Lamartine in memory of Lord Byron, in which the
Frenchman had described Italy as a land ‘of the past’ and of ‘ruins’,
where everything ‘sleeps’ (‘a land of the dead’ as it was famously
summarized), devoid of military virtue and given over to ‘per dious
sensual pleasures’. Pepe denounced Lamartine as ‘a trivial poet’; and
Lamartine, mistaking him, it seems, for his more illustrious
namesake Guglielmo, issued a challenge. Pepe won, wounding
Lamartine seriously in the arm and gallantly staunching the ow of
blood with his own handkerchief. He became the cynosure of
patriotic circles in Florence.1 In 1913 a large statue in his honour
was inaugurated in his tiny home town of Civitacampomarano in
the Molise, in the presence of the king’s cousin.
Lamartine’s claim that Italians were too indolent and pleasure-
loving to be capable of ghting was an old slur, dear to French and
German writers especially, dating back to the late fteenth century
at least.2 But coming as it did from one of the most widely read
European writers of his generation, it stung Italian patriots, and
stung them badly – especially those, like Pepe, who had served with
distinction in the Napoleonic campaigns, or later, in the 1820s and
1830s, in the wars of liberation in Spain, Greece and South America.
The patriotic novels of Massimo d’Azeglio and Francesco Domenico
Guerrazzi, written in the 1830s and 1840s, with their accounts of
Italian military heroism in the Middle Ages, were intended to
remind foreigners (as well as Italians) that Italians were far from
being congenitally supine. The great guerrilla leader, Giuseppe
Garibaldi, whose brilliant military career was to culminate in 1860
in the conquest of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and the
uni cation of Italy, saw his life almost as an extended riposte to
Lamartine. As he wrote in his memoirs:
How proud I was to be born in Italy! In that land of the dead! Among those people that do
not ght, as our neighbours say… Where a generation of young men arose who scorned
danger, torture and death, and marched fearlessly to ful l their duty and throw o the
shackles of slavery… The fatherland of the Scipios and the Gracchi, the nation that boasts
the Vespers and Legnano,… may for a moment be trampled on by the bullying foreigner,

but it can never be wholly without sons who can astound the world.3

The ease with which the Austrians put down the revolutions of
1820–21, and the purge of sectarians from the army and the civil
service that followed, focused the minds of patriots on military
problems. How could Italy generate an e ective national rising of
the kind that Spain had seen in 1808–12? The enduring status of
Spain as a beacon of liberal nationalism was shown by the
enthusiasm with which hundreds of Italians went o to ght for the
constitutional regime there in 1821–3. But it was the Greek war of
independence, waged by erce mountain klephts dressed in kilts
and by bands of peasant guerrillas, that most captured the
imagination of Italian liberals in the 1820s. Philhellenism, indeed,
became an important cultural movement in Italy, with ‘Greek
Committees’ appearing in Piedmont and Tuscany from 1823 and a
thousand or so volunteers crossing the Ionian Sea to help the Greek
freedom ghters.4 Dozens of articles appeared in the press and
periodicals such as the Antologia supporting Greece; Foscolo, Berchet
and others produced poems in honour of the insurrection; and one
of Hayez’s most successful paintings, The Exiles of Parga (1826–31),
was on a Greek theme. It depicted an episode in 1818 when the
inhabitants of a small town near Epirus were forced into exile after
the British had misguidedly sold their land to the Turks. A crowd of
men, women and children (among them Hayez himself, looking,
somewhat immodestly, like Raphael) were shown in the
(revolutionary) light of dawn, distraught but su used with patriotic
ardour, clutching at clods of earth and branches from a willow tree
beneath which their forefathers lay buried – an instance of the
poeticization of the ancestral landscape that Verdi was to give
supreme musical expression to a decade later in his celebrated
chorus of the Hebrew slaves in the opera Nabucco.
The fact that Greek independence was nally secured only with
the diplomatic and military support of Britain, France and Russia
provided an important lesson for Italian patriots, and certainly many
of those who took the road to exile after 1821 and ended up in Paris
or London – where Foscolo remained an important point of contact
until his death in 1827, welcoming among others Berchet,
Guglielmo Pepe, Gabriele Rossetti (father of the poets Dante Gabriel
and Christina) and Antonio Panizzi (creator of the British Museum
Library) – had some of their insurrectionary ardour softened by the
pragmatic liberalism of their new political surroundings.5 But the
mythic appeal of a Spanish-style popular rising remained strong,
and buoyed by the achievements of the Greek insurgents,
revolutionary sectarian networks continued to operate in Europe,
coordinated by the elderly Filippo Buonarroti, who in the 1820s
modi ed his organization of the Sublime Perfect Masters into a new
and less intricately Masonic society, ‘The World’, with a liates in
France, Belgium and also Italy.
Among the sectarians in Buonarroti’s orbit was Carlo Bianco di
Saint-Jorioz, a Piedmontese o cer who had participated in the
Piedmontese revolution of 1821 and fought in Spain. While in exile
in Malta, Saint-Jorioz wrote a treatise about guerrilla warfare, in
which he argued that the Spanish model of a popular national
insurrection might be applicable to Italy. He envisaged ruthless
bands of peasants in the countryside, conducting lightning attacks
on the Austrian forces and harrying them pitilessly, cutting their
lines of communication, wearing them down and bringing about
their demoralization, dispersal and eventual destruction. Perhaps
deliberately he minimized certain features that had been crucial to
the Spanish experience during the Peninsular War, notably the
leading role played by the local clergy and the support given to the
guerrillas by the British army. But despite these oversights, Saint-
Jorioz’s book was eagerly seized upon by Italian exiles, especially in
France, after it was published in 1830.6 Among those who took
rmly to heart its central idea of ‘insurrection by armed bands’ was
a young supporter of Buonarroti called Giuseppe Mazzini.
There was a weak link in Saint-Jorioz’s thesis, however, and one
which he himself acknowledged: Italian peasants, unlike their
Spanish (or Greek) counterparts, had to date shown no evidence of
national patriotic feelings, or even any serious signs of disliking the
existing governments. Years of servitude had made them cowed,
conservative and materialistic, he said; and while it was
undoubtedly ignominious for a man to ght for the formation of his
fatherland from any motive other than duty, the sad fact was that
the masses would only be roused to action by ‘personal nancial
gain’.7 He accordingly felt it necessary for there to be a social
dimension in the national revolution, and proposed that once the
war of independence was over the government should distribute
state land and property con scated from the enemies of the new
order to the peasantry. Whether such inducements would ever be
su cient to outweigh the counter-revolutionary pressures of local
priests and landowners, though, was unclear.
The issue of motives – economics versus ideals – was an
important theme of the Risorgimento and one of the main sources of
contention and debate before (and after) 1860. The great majority
of patriots, certainly those of a democratic persuasion, disliked
materialism, and maintained that action should spring from
unsullied faith and not from any desire for personal gain. They were
in uenced in this view by the emphasis that Romantic culture
placed on the sphere of the spirit as the highest arena of human
development and achievement and as the principal motor of history,
driving men on to ght and die, build vast cathedrals, compose
great poems or cover the ceilings and walls of churches with
masterpieces. They also had an acute sense that materialism was a
particular problem in Italy. It was often argued that the peninsula
had begun to decline when the pursuit of worldly goods permeated
Italian culture in the Renaissance, making men (and women) more
concerned with how they looked and what they owned than with
collective ideals such as freedom or independence. Mazzini was a
particularly stern critic of materialism. Central to his crusade for
Italian unity from the early 1830s was the belief that Italians must
ght for their nation from a sense of religious duty, and he
repeatedly fell out with those fellow patriots of a more pragmatic
turn of mind who wanted to emphasize instead economic and social
issues.
For, as Mazzini was well aware, the issue was not whether
Italians could ght or not: individually they were clearly every bit as
brave and aggressive as others – according to some even more so, if
the bloody history of banditry, revolts and jacqueries in the
peninsula was anything to go by. The key question was what they
would ght for. And here the great dream of patriots was to divert
Italians from thoughts of personal honour and private or factional
feuding towards collective action, and so achieve the supreme
expression of modern nationhood, the ‘nation in arms’, a mass
citizen army willing to sacri ce everything for the fatherland. As the
leading Tuscan democrat Giuseppe Montanelli wrote in his memoirs
in 1853, the mission of the Risorgimento was to make Italy one in
both war and peace: ‘Our wish is to free ourselves from the foreign
yoke, and give the nation a civil and warrior “I”.’8 More moderate
patriots harboured similar hopes. The Piedmontese Catholic
historian and politician Cesare Balbo said that he would have given
three or four Al eris, Manzonis or even Dantes ‘for one captain who
could lead behind him 200,000 Italians, to win or die’.9 And at the
other end of the peninsula the Sicilian historian Michele Amari –
who was continually scanning Italy for signs of military revival –
told a friend of his sadness when he heard of the assassination of a
leading politician in Rome in November 1848, not so much on
account of the victim, but ‘because people will start crying out again
about our stiletto knives; and because, to be honest, it is high time
that Italians threw away their daggers and wielded the bayonet
more manfully’.10
The key patriotic texts of the Risorgimento struggled to impart
the right military message; and it was a struggle, because so many
of the historical episodes chosen for their ‘national’ signi cance
were clearly open to very di erent, ‘non-national’ readings. This
was the case with the Sicilian Vespers of 1282 – the subject of two
paintings by Hayez, an opera by Verdi (though his libretto was in
fact adapted from a story set in Holland) and a major historical
study by Amari. The popular rising which broke out in Palermo on
Easter Monday 1282 and which led to the slaughter of some 5,000
Frenchmen was commonly seen as an instance of ‘Italian’ patriotism;
but the traditional strength of Sicilian separatism and the deep-
seated hostility of many islanders towards Naples suggested that it
was more likely to have been fuelled by much narrower, local
feelings. Indeed when his work was rst published in 1842 Amari
had to defend it against charges that it was ‘municipal’, saying that
‘provincial patriotism’ was not damaging to the interests of ‘the
great Italian family’ provided it was ‘sincere and enlightened’. He
was also taken to task for having referred at one point to mainland
Italians as ‘foreigners’, but he hurriedly changed this slip in later
editions.11
Another military episode that had to be shoe-horned with some
di culty into a national patriotic mould was the ‘duel of Barletta’ of
1503, the subject of Massimo d’Azeglio’s best-selling novel Ettore
Fieramosca (1833) and of half a dozen operas between 1839 and
1848 (Verdi was asked to do a version in 1849, but declined: it was
‘a beautiful moment’ in Italian history, he said, but had already been
overworked).12 The duel was an obscure event in the Franco-
Spanish campaigns fought in Italy at the beginning of the sixteenth
century and seems to have been occasioned by a French taunt about
the good faith or courage of Italians. Thirteen Italian knights did
battle with thirteen French knights somewhere in the countryside
near Barletta in Puglia to resolve the point of honour, and the
Italians won. In reality the ‘duel’ was probably little more than a
joust to help while away the winter months prior to the resumption
of serious ghting; and it is not even clear that anyone was killed.
But d’Azeglio seized on the episode in the hope that it would ‘put a
little re in the bellies of Italians’. He at rst thought of doing a
painting or a poem, but decided on a novel instead, ‘so as to be
heard in the streets and piazzas and not just on Mount Helicon’. He
was concerned with ‘national regeneration’, he said, and not with
historical veracity, and accordingly made the ‘duel’ into a metaphor
for Italy’s liberation from foreign oppression, casting the leading
Italian soldier, Ettore Fieramosca, as a heroic and sel ess patriot
and his fellow knights as symbols of ‘Italy’, natives of di erent
regions standing shoulder to shoulder against the enemy.13 A love
a air and a traitor added piquancy to the story. The novel, not
surprisingly, played down the fact that the Italian knights had in
reality been mercenaries in the Spanish pay.
REVOLUTIONS, 1830–31

On 27 July 1830 a revolution broke out in Paris. Tricolours and

trees of liberty appeared in the streets, barricades went up, and after
three days of ghting the conservative King Charles X was forced to
abdicate in favour of Louis-Philippe, who, in good liberal fashion
took the title ‘King of the French’ rather than King of France. The
waves of unrest fanned out across Europe. In Brussels on 25 August
the long-standing grievances of Catholics and French-speakers
against their Dutch Protestant rulers in The Hague came to a head in
mass rioting after a performance of Auber’s opera about the
Neapolitan revolt of 1647, La Muette de Portici (which ended in
suitably explosive style with the eruption of Mount Vesuvius), and a
few weeks later, with the support of Britain, France and Prussia, an
independent Belgian state was proclaimed. In November the Poles
rose against Tsar Nicholas I, but with far less favourable results.
Here there was no foreign assistance forthcoming, and after nearly a
year of often savage guerrilla and regular ghting, the insurrection
was crushed by the Russian army and tens of thousands of Poles
killed, imprisoned or driven into exile.
These events in Europe gave heart to Italian liberals and
sectarians. For a number of years the focus of conspiratorial activity
had been the Duchy of Modena; and oddly enough it was the duke
himself, Francesco IV, a reactionary prince with a Romantic
penchant for intrigue and grandiose ambitions of becoming king of a
much larger state, who pulled many of the strings. He hoped to
exploit the tensions that had arisen in Europe as a result of the
Greek war of independence to get Austria to withdraw from the
Italian peninsula, possibly in exchange for Turkish territories in the
Balkans; and his main agent was a mysterious gure called Enrico
Misley, a young law graduate and son of a distinguished professor of
veterinary studies in Milan, who had close connections with the
Carboneria and other secret societies. Misley spent several years
travelling round Europe, forging links with Italian exiles, French
liberals, and Greek and Russian emissaries, and preparing the
ground for an improbable-sounding rising, centred on the Papal
States, that would have as its nal aim the creation of an
independent and uni ed Italy with Francesco IV as its constitutional
ruler.
The July revolution in Paris frightened Francesco and he began to
back away from Misley’s intrigues; but Louis-Philippe’s accession
gave the Italian sectarians enormous encouragement, as they now
believed that a rising directed against the Austrians in Italy would
naturally be supported by a new liberal French king. Plans for an
insurrection accordingly assumed a momentum of their own
towards the end of 1830, with the duchies of Modena and Parma,
the city of Bologna and the Romagna (in the northern part of the
Papal States) serving as the focal points of conspiratorial activity.
Here the liberals could count on high levels of discontent among the
propertied classes, particularly those who had lost in the post-1815
settlement or who had been adversely a ected by tari s and other
impediments to trade. There was particular anger in the Romagna,
the most a uent part of the Papal States, where the wealthy laity
resented the stranglehold of the Church on the administration, the
tax immunities of the clergy and their ownership of the best land,
the byzantine complexity of the legal system, and the generally
obscurantist culture emanating from Rome.
The death of Pope Pius VIII at the end of November 1830 and a
period of two months’ interregnum that followed intensi ed the
insurrectionary atmosphere, and early in February risings broke out
in Modena, Parma and Bologna, and quickly spread throughout the
Romagna and the Marche and down Umbria. In Paris, Filippo
Buonarroti and other leading democratic exiles proclaimed their
support for their ‘friends and brothers… from the Alps to Etna’, and
urged them to take up arms, overthrow their rulers, expel the
Austrians and create an Italy that was ‘independent, one and free’. A
column of volunteers was assembled in Lyon and set o to attack
Piedmont: but it was halted by the French government, which
quickly showed itself to be much less sympathetic to the cause of
revolution in Italy than the sectarians had hoped. Meanwhile in
Bologna an assembly of delegates had convened and declared the
Pope’s temporal power to be at an end. It had also proclaimed that
those provinces that had risen up would form ‘one single state, one
single government and one single family’ – an indication as much of
insecurity as of intent, given the erce municipal rivalries that had
long beset this part of Italy and which would soon undermine the
revolution.14
Louis-Philippe watched the events in Italy with growing alarm.
Apart from fears that the revolution might take on a dangerously
republican complexion, he was also concerned by the presence in
Italy of various members of the Bonaparte family, including
Napoleon’s nephew, the future emperor Napoleon III, a former
Carbonaro serving with antipapal volunteers in the Marche.
Accordingly he indicated to Vienna at the end of February that
France would not intervene to stop Austria reasserting its control in
Italy. On 4 March Francesco IV – who had ed from Modena in the
face of the revolution a month earlier – crossed back into his duchy
accompanied by Austrian troops, and in the space of the next three
weeks the insurrections in both the duchies and the Papal States
were suppressed. Protests were voiced in France by opposition
deputies and sections of the public who maintained that the dignity
of the French nation had been compromised by its failure to halt the
Austrians, but by then it was too late.
The ease with which the Austrians regained control made clear
the weakness of the sectarians in Italy. The faith of Misley in
Francesco IV was shown to have been misplaced – just as
Santarosa’s hope in 1821 that Carlo Alberto would back a
constitutional movement in Piedmont and Lombardy had been
exposed as naive. With the Austrians so entrenched in the peninsula,
was it realistic ever to expect anything of an Italian prince? Belief in
the assistance of revolutionary France was also shown to have been
misguided. Even more disappointing was the absence of any serious
sign of national sentiment. Most of those who supported the
insurrections in 1831 wanted internal political and economic
reforms: not independence, and certainly not national
independence. And almost nobody was prepared to ght the
Austrians. Indeed there was only one signi cant clash between
volunteers and Austrian troops, near Rimini on 25 March, and even
this engagement was minor.

Finally provincial and municipal rivalries were as pronounced as

ever. The cities of Emilia, Romagna and the Marche displayed little
willingness to make common cause, and the leading role played by
Bologna in particular aroused strong suspicion. The frustration that
this gave rise to was evident in a letter that a Lombard liberal wrote
to a fellow sectarian in April 1831:
Ten years of shame and su ering have still not taught our people that there is no strength
without union, and that in order to be united we need to have respect for one another.
Many secret societies were formed in an e ort to stop certain personal vendettas and
extinguish provincial rivalries. But what was the upshot of some of these societies?
Unbridled ambitions were encouraged, the hatreds got worse, malicious gossip increased

and provincialism acquired greater strength than ever…15

MAZZINI AND THE DEMOCRATS

The events of 1831 were a major turning point in the national

movement in Italy. Many liberals now came to look on secret
societies and conspiracy with deep suspicion. There was simply not
enough support at a grass roots level – let alone from any foreign
governments – to sustain an insurrection. Far better, they thought,
to concentrate on improving economic, political and moral
conditions within the existing states and play down talk of
independence and unity. Newspapers, journals and books were the
way ahead, to mould public opinion and gradually pressurize rulers
into conceding reforms. And during the next decade and a half this
was the course that the so-called ‘moderates’ adopted. The more
radical liberals, by contrast, drew a very di erent lesson. They
believed that nothing good should now be expected of princes and
their governments, and certainly nothing that would help the cause
of Italy. The ‘people’ would have to act, and act alone. But in order
to do so they needed to feel stirred by passion, and that meant
shifting the focus of conspiratorial activity away from secrecy and
ritual towards overt education and incitement – by word and by
deed.
It was no coincidence that Giuseppe Mazzini – who was to
dominate the democratic wing of the Italian patriotic movement
over the next three decades – regarded Hayez’s painting Peter the
Hermit Preaches the Crusade as one of the most brilliant works of the
new school of what he called ‘the Precursors of National Art’.16 The
painting was rst exhibited at the Brera in 1829, and generated
enormous interest among the public, who immediately sensed its
daring political symbolism: according to one commentator the
viewers crowding in front of it seemed (quite appropriately given
the ‘civil’ mission that the Italian Romantics had set themselves) like
an extension of the work itself.17 What excited Mazzini in particular
was the totality of the religious feeling that permeated the canvas,
from the cloud-capped mountains in the background, through the
gure of Peter on horseback, contorted with energy and brandishing
a cruci x (‘pale and gaunt, but venerable in his enthusiasm and
conviction’), to the small crowd of ordinary men, women and
children gathered around him in enthusiasm and rapture:
‘Everywhere we are in contact with the in nite… [E]veryone is
driven on by a single, true and binding force, the thought that
pervades each mind: “God wills it, God wills it”… Unity is felt here,
without being seen.’18
Through his passionate preaching Peter the Hermit had incited
thousands of peasants across Europe at the end of the eleventh
century to abandon their homes and risk hardship and death in
order to liberate the Holy Land from the Turks. The potent mixture
of religion and politics that Peter and the crusading movement of
the Middle Ages had embodied fascinated Mazzini and many other
radical-minded intellectuals of his generation searching for an elixir
to convert aimless individuals into a single-minded army of
progress. The Crusades, indeed, became one of the major themes of
Italian patriotic art and literature from the mid-1820s, beginning
with Tommaso Grossi’s epic poem, The Lombards on the First Crusade
(1826) (which his friend Hayez illustrated with an important series
of lithographs)19 and Massimo d’Azeglio’s painting of the same year
of The Death of Count Josselin de Montmorency.20 In the 1830s and
1840s Hayez undertook two further works inspired by the Crusades,
Urban II Preaching the First Crusade (in which the Pope is shown in
the main square of Clermont surrounded by a seething crowd – a
response to criticisms that Peter the Hermit had been too restrained)
and a massive canvas, inspired by Grossi’s poem The Thirst Su ered
by the First Crusaders outside Jerusalem, commissioned by King Carlo
Alberto and promptly hidden in a corner of the royal palace in Turin
after the collapse of Carlo Alberto’s personal crusading hopes on the
battle eld of Novara in 1849.21
 The central position that Mazzini assigned to religion in his idea
of the Italian nation emerged in the wake of the 1831 debacle. As a
patriot and law student in Genoa in the 1820s and an enthusiast for
romanticism Mazzini had been naturally drawn to the world of
sectarianism, and in 1829 he became a Carbonaro. Betrayed by a
companion to the police, he was imprisoned for three months and
forced into exile, and in March 1831 he settled in Marseille. Here he
encountered a lively community of Italian liberals, many of whom
were followers of Filippo Buonarroti. Among them was Carlo Bianco
di Saint-Jorioz, the theorist of insurrection by guerrilla warfare and
leader of a recently formed paramilitary secret society, the
Apofasimeni, whose declared goal was to make Italy ‘one,
independent and free’. Mazzini entered this organization with the
rank of ‘centurion’ shortly after his arrival in Marseille; but a few
months later he decided to set up his own society, Young Italy
(Giovine Italia), not, it seems, to supplant the Apofasimeni and the
other societies linked to Buonarroti, but rather to secure greater
cooperation between them and establish an agreed agenda,
particularly now that the collapse of the revolutions in Italy and the
‘betrayal’ by France had left the sectarians confused about the way
ahead.22
But Mazzini’s initiative aroused suspicion, and in 1831–3 he
found himself facing growing criticism from the older sectarians and
was forced to de ne the position of Young Italy increasingly in
opposition to them. On the face of it Young Italy did not pose a
threat to sects like the Apofasimeni. It had the same goal of a
united, independent and free Italian republic, and looked to similar
means to achieve it – ‘education and insurrection’. Moreover
Mazzini’s programme for the insurrection was taken straight from
the pages of Saint-Jorioz’s treatise, with guerrilla bands being set up
to wage war on the enemy and furnish the nuclei of an eventual
national mass army. But in certain crucial respects Mazzini di ered
from the older sectarians. First, his focus was unequivocally on the
national redemption of Italy by Italians. Italy was not to be
subordinate to France in any way and not to look to Paris for its
cue. For ardent Francophiles like Buonarroti this line was di cult.
Secondly, the republic that Mazzini aspired to was very di erent to
that envisaged by the older sectarians. For the latter ‘equality’ was
to be crucial in any new regime, and this meant material equality,
with the property of the rich being expropriated and distributed to
the poor. Mazzini was certainly passionate about improving the
economic lot of the masses, but through mutual aid societies,
welfare, universal su rage and schooling, and not class warfare.
Mazzini was no Jacobin; and all his life he was to be an unremitting
enemy of socialism.
But it was the religious dimension of Young Italy – a dimension
that was to cast a long and in many ways problematic shadow over
the national question in Italy for more than a century – that
distinguished Mazzini most from the other sectarians. Not that the
earlier secret societies had been godless. Far from it: the rituals,
symbols and language of the Carboneria had been heavily imbued
with Christianity. But this religious freight had been largely formal
in character, a mechanism chie y for giving the sects an air of
gravity and ensuring that the a liates took their oaths and duties
seriously. What Mazzini aimed to do was to fuse God, the people
and the nation into a sacred trinity and make the pursuit of unity,
liberty and independence itself a religion. God, he claimed, had
ordained Italy to be a great nation with a great mission in the world;
and it was accordingly incumbent upon Italians to unify Italy and
implement his will, and be prepared, as true believers, to sacri ce
everything, if need be their lives, for the holy cause. As Mazzini
wrote some years later, looking back to 1831 in terms tellingly
reminiscent of a Damascene conversion (in reality his ‘conversion’ to
the new religion of Italy was more gradual than he cared to
suggest):
At that time even the immature conception inspired me with a mighty hope that ashed
before my spirit like a star. I saw regenerate Italy becoming at one bound the missionary of
a religion of progress and fraternity, far grander and vaster than that she gave to humanity
in the past. The worship of Rome was a part of my being… Why should not a new Rome,
the Rome of the Italian people – portents of whose coming I deemed I saw – arise to create
a third and still vaster Unity; to link together and harmonize earth and heaven, right and
duty; and utter, not to individuals but to peoples, the great word Association – to make

known to free men and equal their mission here below?23

Mazzini had come from a deeply religious family: his mother was
a passionate if unorthodox Catholic, of an austere and anti-
hierarchical persuasion, who was convinced that her only son had
been sent by God to raise humanity to new heights.24 But it was the
writings of the French philosopher and social reformer the Comte de
Saint-Simon (1760–1825) that appear to have been decisive in
shaping Mazzini’s central ideas, informing his belief in progress, in
the transition of modern society from an age of individualism to one
of collective action or ‘associationism’, and in the need for a civic
faith to heal the eighteenth-century fracture between reason and
religion. Such a faith was vital, for mankind advanced, according to
Saint-Simon, only when there was a guiding principle in which men
believed fervently (‘Remember that to do anything great you must
be impassioned,’ he told a friend shortly before he died). Many of
the key terms in Mazzini’s lexicon – words such as mission,
apostolate and faith – were common currency among the Saint-
Simonians in the later 1820s and 1830s.25
The nation for Mazzini was a community willed by God; and each
nation had a particular mission assigned to it. Exactly what these
missions were he never made entirely clear, though like Madame de
Staël he saw the ‘historic’ peoples of Europe as possessing distinctive
character traits that could indicate the special role providence had
ascribed to them. Germans, for example, were by nature given to
speculation and philosophy. Nor was he altogether clear about what
the political map of Europe should eventually look like. He did not
favour Irish nationalism; and he suggested on occasions that Spain
and Portugal should merge, and Holland and Belgium be absorbed
into Germany and France. He found Danish claims to nationhood
hard to swallow, and he thought that the Scandinavian countries
might form a single unit. But he was not dogmatic on these points,
partly because he accepted that practical politics might require
states to be grouped di erently at di erent times.26 However, on
one issue he was absolutely clear: the centrality of the national
question to the modern world. Each nation had to nd its own voice
and assert its freedom through the will of ‘the people’. And only
when every nation had been set up on an appropriate political
footing would God’s designs for humanity be nally ful lled and
universal peace achieved.
The vagueness of much of Mazzini’s thinking (not to mention
what often seemed his arrogance and self-righteousness) annoyed
many of the older sectarians and fostered the increasingly bitter
wrangles that plagued the democratic camp in the 1830s. But the
vagueness was largely deliberate. Mazzini’s aim was to generate
faith; and faith was a natural instinct (‘remember that religion is a
desire, a need of the people’)27 founded on hope and simple
precepts, not prosaic blueprints. Christianity had triumphed by
holding out to all the prospect of justice and happiness in the
afterlife; and this message had been spread from country to country
by men and women using the power of the written and spoken word
and the example of their own su ering and martyrdom. The
believers in the new gospel should do likewise. Their dogmas should
be clear – unity, independence, freedom – and their preaching and
actions radiate unshakeable conviction. They should be willing to
shed their blood for the cause (‘the tree of liberty grows stronger
when watered by the blood of martyrs’;28 ‘for in sacri ce there is
something sublime, that compels man born of woman to bow his
head before it and adore; because somehow he senses that from that
blood, as from the blood of a Christ, will come forth sooner or later
the second life, the true life of a people’).29 And the particular focus
of their national faith, Italy, should be made into an ideal onto
which men and women of all regions and classes could project their
longings.
Mazzini’s eclectic mixture of religion and politics was at one level
a natural outgrowth from European romantic nationalism, which
contained numerous mystical and messianic strands (in the 1830s
and 1840s the great writer Adam Mickiewicz preached the cause of
Polish independence in similarly messianic terms, seeing in the
country’s su erings a sign of divine favour and imminent
resurrection: Poland as the ‘Christ of nations’). But Mazzini also had
his eye rmly on the speci c situation in Italy, and his programme
was in important respects deliberately tailored to t the particular
needs of Italian nationalism. Italy had been fragmented since the fall
of the Roman empire some 1,400 years earlier: this disunity was to
be recti ed by means of a strong unitary state (he was rmly
opposed to federalism) and a capital city whose symbolic power
would give rise to cohesion and identity: Rome. Italians were by
nature individualistic and prone to factionalism: this problem would
be remedied by encouraging the establishment of associations and
the drawing up of clear agendas that could be agreed on by
everyone. The educated classes held France and French culture in
awe, while at the same time resenting deeply French arrogance:
such subservience would be countered by emphasizing Italy’s
magni cent past and its brilliant future, for according to Mazzini
the nineteenth century had been ordained by God to be the century
of Italy, just as the eighteenth century had been the century of
France.
But it was the nation as the focus of a new secular religion that
was the most important element for Italy in Mazzini’s programme.
This was partly because Mazzini believed that God was now
addressing humanity through the medium of ‘the people’ and
nations, and that the Church’s mission on earth, so important once,
was at an end. Italy, as the centre of Catholicism, accordingly had a
mission to bring to a close the Middle Ages by destroying the Papal
States and inaugurating on their ruins the age of nations: ‘Only from
Rome, for the third time, can the word of modern unity come, as
only from Rome can the nal destruction of the old unity begin.’30
However, precisely because Italy was the seat of the Church, and
Italian unity, it seemed, would only ever be secured in the face of
erce Catholic opposition, any popular national movement would
have to neutralize the moral power of the Pope and the clergy by
creating a rival religion powerful enough to win over the hearts if
not the minds of the masses.
Mazzini knew that this task would be Herculean. The Church was
rooted in the a ections of most ordinary Italians, and had at its
disposal a formidable army of secular and regular clergy. It was
strongly supported by the various governments in the peninsula,
who guaranteed it a stranglehold over education and censorship and
punished mercilessly anyone who dealt in dangerous ideas (‘Where
verbal apostolate leads to the gallows, you cannot hope to nd
apostles,’ Mazzini lamented to a friend in 1834 about the di culties
of reaching out to the common people).31 The Church also had in its
armoury a powerful tradition of ritual and spectacle, not to mention
some of the greatest art and architecture in the world. And the
emotional hold on the masses that this great aesthetic tradition
a orded gave the Church a huge advantage over its competitors.
The magnitude of the Church’s power was brought home to
Mazzini forcefully when he went to Rome for the rst time in his
life in March 1849. ‘Rome was the dream of my youth, the idea that
had guided and nurtured all my thoughts, the religion of my soul;
and I entered the city on foot in the evening… timidly, almost in
adoration. Rome was – and remains for me… the Temple of
humanity.’32 But despite his hopes that a new age would soon be
born, he could not ignore the fact that Catholicism was still a
supreme moral force, and as one of the rulers of the Roman
Republic during the spring of that revolutionary year, he felt unable
to oppose it. On Easter Sunday he stood in front of St Peter’s, with
Michelangelo’s great dome above him, watching as a priest blessed a
sea of thousands of faithful gathered between the colonnades of
Bernini’s piazza. He turned to the painter Nino Costa beside him and
said: ‘This religion is strong, and will remain strong for a long time
to come, because it is so beautiful on the eye.’33

Thanks to his strangely magnetic personality, which for many of

those who came into contact with him seemed to conform to
Romantic notions of a heaven-sent genius – passionate, single-
minded and somewhat tortured, by turns saturnine and mercurial,
with an almost mesmerizing facility with words (already in
Marseille devotees could describe him as ‘the most beautiful being,
male or female’ they had ever seen, or refer to his ‘divine eloquence
such as never before shone over Italy’)34 – and thanks, too, to the
clarity of his message, with its national focus and its elimination of
social egalitarianism, Mazzini quickly established Young Italy as the
most successful secret society. Like the older sects it had an
initiation ceremony and passwords, and pseudonyms to protect the
identity of its members, but it did away with the tiers of Masonic
grades that had in the past separated the enlightened elite from the
benighted rank and le. Its structure was simple, with central and
local committees, and it had a periodical, also called Young Italy,
mostly written by Mazzini himself, which was smuggled into Italy
by sympathizers. By early 1833 the society claimed, probably
accurately, to have over 50,000 members, mostly drawn from the
middle classes but reaching out in the cities to shopkeepers and
artisans, and even to sections of the poor. The main areas of
strength were in Liguria, Lombardy, Emilia and Tuscany. Piedmont
remained primarily Buonarroti’s domain. There was virtually no
penetration in the south.35
Mazzini’s immediate goal was insurrection, and his frenetic
conspiratorial work quickly had the authorities in Italy worried. By
1833 police reports regularly referred to him as the ‘famous’ or
‘infamous’ Mazzini, and from Vienna the Austrian chancellor,
Metternich, repeatedly urged the French government to hunt him
down and expel him. Perhaps deliberately, Metternich exaggerated
the strength and democratic appeal of Young Italy, saying it had
over 100,000 recruits, mostly from among ‘the lowest classes of the
population and dissolute young men’; but such talk did as much to
raise Mazzini’s already formidable standing in sectarian circles as to
induce greater vigilance and repression.36 Among those drawn to
Mazzini at this time were Vincenzo Gioberti, a priest who was to
play a leading role in the development of a moderate Catholic
programme for national uni cation in the 1840s, Luigi Carlo Farini,
a future Italian prime minister, Luigi Melegari, a future foreign
minister, and many others who as journalists, writers, academics,
deputies and civil servants would ensure that much of the spirit if
not the letter of Mazzini’s teaching was carried over into united
Italy after 1860.
Mazzini aimed to trigger a rising in Naples that would then
spread into northern Italy. But the Italian governments sensed
something was afoot and became acutely nervous, and when early
in 1833 plans for a military coup were uncovered in Piedmont, the
king, Carlo Alberto, insisted on exemplary punishments being meted
out. Twelve conspirators were executed in public and a hundred
others were sent to prison. Mazzini himself was condemned to death
in absentia, and was now forced to leave France. He went to Geneva,
from where he continued to correspond tirelessly with his followers
and prepare for revolution. He was convinced that Italy was a
powder keg and that a mere spark would unleash a general
con agration. One of his more desperate schemes was for an
invasion of Savoy (then part of the Kingdom of Piedmont–Sardinia)
by four columns of Polish, German and Italian volunteers led by
Saint-Jorioz and by a former Napoleonic o cer and veteran of the
1821 revolution in Piedmont. It proved to be a total asco. A
simultaneous rising was supposed to break out in Genoa, but almost
the only person who turned up for it was a young sailor from Nizza
(Nice), who had recently joined Young Italy, called Giuseppe
Garibaldi. He was sentenced to death, but not before he had
managed to escape across the border into France.
The failure of this insurrection resulted in harsh crackdowns
everywhere in the peninsula and the rapid break-up of Young Italy
as a revolutionary organization, and for a time Mazzini had to
accept that practical conspiracy was pointless. In the spring of 1834
he and a handful of other refugees founded a new association called
Young Europe to coordinate the national movements in Poland,
Germany and elsewhere; but it made little headway. Mazzini now
experienced a growing sense of desperation. For two years, amid the
snow and fog of the Jura mountains, living in poverty and on the
run from the police, he went through a profound spiritual crisis,
seeing all around him nothing but ‘scepticism’ and ‘mistrust’ and
‘the disintegration of that moral edi ce of love and faith within
which, alone, I could achieve the strength to ght’. But one day he
woke with his ‘soul at peace… and the feelings of one who has been
saved from an extreme danger’. His faith had survived – but in Italy
rather than Italians. Indeed his disillusionment with his compatriots
had seemed to intensify his love of abstractions (and animals): ‘The
company of a cat is much dearer to me than that of a man… I feel
hatred towards men! If you could see the satanic smile I have on my
lips for them! – and how they deserve it from me, my fellow citizens
more than all the others – yet my country… I still love her; indeed I
love her more truly, and with more nostalgia.’37
In 1837 Mazzini left Switzerland for England, and here he was to
spend most of the remainder of his life, living like many exiles on
whatever his family could send him, and on the meagre pickings to
be had from journalism, translating and the occasional business
venture. London was home to a large number of émigrés from Italy,
some of whom, like Antonio Panizzi, had access to the drawing-
rooms of the rich and powerful; but most of these Italians would not
associate with a republican like Mazzini, nor Mazzini with them.38
Of greater immediate bene t was the general current of sympathy
towards Italy in England – less powerful, perhaps, than it had been
in the 1820s, but still strong nonetheless, especially in radical
circles. The philosopher John Stuart Mill was very excited to meet
‘the celebrated Mazzini… the most eminent conspirator and
revolutionist now in Europe’, and promptly signed him up for the
Westminster Review.39 Other useful contacts soon appeared and,
though Mazzini disliked socializing, there was no shortage of
invitations from intellectuals and politicians. One of his closest
associates during his early years in London was the writer Thomas
Carlyle – and even more Carlyle’s wife, Jane, the rst of a number
of strong-minded middle-class women who were drawn to this
sensitive, passionate and rather solitary gure, who lived in near
squalor, smoked heavily and played the guitar beautifully.
MISSIONARIES

The failed risings of 1833–4 and the police repressions that followed
left the Italian democrats scattered and confused. Many sought
refuge in France, Switzerland or north Africa. Some like the
Piedmontese priest Vincenzo Gioberti settled in Brussels. Garibaldi
departed for South America, where he formed a Legion of Italian
Volunteers to ght for the independence of Uruguay, while a
number of sectarians, among them such in uential characters as the
Modenese revolutionary Nicola Fabrizi, went o to support the
liberal cause in the civil war that had recently broken out in Spain.
Economic hardship as well as disillusionment kept many of these
exiles away from serious political activity. Saint-Jorioz became so
burdened with debts that he took his own life, by gas, in Brussels in
1843. The patriarch of sectarian conspiracy, Buonarroti, attempted
to maintain his in uence in Italy by forming yet another secret
society, the True Italians, with an unashamedly Jacobin and
egalitarian programme. But his message was looking increasingly
dated, and his Francophilia was unappealing to a younger
generation of Italian patriots steeped in Romantic nationalism. By
the time he died in Paris in 1837 he was a somewhat lonely and
isolated gure.
While Mazzini’s political stock fell sharply in the wake of the
Savoy invasion asco, Young Italy had undoubtedly struck a
powerful chord in democratic circles. Over the years many of even
the most radical patriots were to nd Mazzini’s dogmatism and
stress on ‘God’ excessive, often intolerable, but they agreed with his
general premise that they should regard themselves as the
missionaries of a new religion and shape their thoughts and actions
accordingly. Though Francesco Hayez was primarily a professional
artist, willing to accept commissions wherever they came from –
and in the 1830s and 1840s he happily worked for the Austrian
Emperor, painting among other things a huge allegory for the Royal
Palace in Milan (destroyed by an aerial bombardment in 1943)
depicting the peace and prosperity that imperial rule had brought –
he was attuned to the mood of the patriotic elite in northern Italy.
In 1825–7, several years before Mazzini burst on the scene, he
executed a double portrait of Filippo and Giacomo Ciani for their
father, Baron Ciani, one of the wealthiest bankers in Milan. The
brothers had been involved in the 1821 risings and had gone into
exile in Switzerland, France and England. In the canvas they were
shown as the Apostles Saint Philip and Saint James, dressed in red,
white and green robes, sitting on a rock while ‘on their travels,
preaching’. In his memoirs Hayez said that he had wanted to suggest
that the two men were missionaries who were endeavouring to
‘convert the people into working to liberate their fatherland from
the foreigner’.40
This sense of being apostles of a new faith in uenced the mindset
of the democrats strongly. They saw themselves as members of a
tight-knit family and spoke of each other as ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’
(and not as ‘cousins’ as the older sectarians did). Their
correspondence was often pious in tone and full of fraternal
sentiments, and a typical salutation was ‘health and brotherhood’. If
they quarrelled, as they very frequently did, they would
nevertheless pull together in adversity, and they made a point of
giving emotional and material support to those who were in trouble
or to their relatives. Charity, sel essness and forgiveness were
highly regarded qualities, as were honesty and frankness (though
not of course to the police), disdain of money and worldly goods,
and stoicism in the face of adversity. Su ering was viewed almost as
a virtue in itself, and it found its supreme expression in a
willingness to die for the cause. A number of the most famous
democrats – among them the Bandiera brothers, Carlo Pisacane and
Felice Orsini – e ectively took their own lives by throwing
themselves into hopeless ventures. Su ering was also linked to a
vision of politics as struggle towards an ideal, and this attitude had
as an important consequence a tendency to be permanently
dissatis ed with the status quo and unwilling to compromise with it.
After 1860 the democrats were to fuel a culture of disparagement of
united Italy and a belief that the mission of the Risorgimento had
still to be fought for.
The bonds between the democrats were strengthened by the fact
that they came from similar backgrounds. Almost all (not
surprisingly) were from landowning or urban middle-class families.
A few, like the Sicilian revolutionary Rosalino Pilo, belonged to the
aristocracy (mostly younger sons); a handful, among them the
Sardinian rebrand Giorgio Asproni, had peasant origins. But class
was not in itself particularly signi cant, and did little to determine
friendships or alliances. And only occasionally (and usually as a
result of contact with French socialist ideas) did democrats think of
themselves and their politics in class terms: ‘the people’ was a much
more potent category for them, by which they meant anyone in the
nation who was politically aware. What was crucial to the formation
of democrats was the cultural environment in which they had been
brought up. Almost all belonged to families with Jacobin or liberal
Napoleonic traditions, where talk around the table would have been
of constitutions and Carbonari. And almost all were highly educated
– often because they were shouldering the burden of family
expectations of upward mobility.
The democrats might fall out over the means, but they all agreed
(as did most moderates) in seeing the nal goal as an independent,
strong and united Italy. More problematic, though, was the extent to
which ‘freedom’ should stand as a primary aim. Freedom from
foreign rule, certainly; but internal political freedom presented
serious di culties given the ignorance of the mass of the population
(‘the plebs’ as opposed to ‘the people’) and the anticipated strength
of opposition that any new state would face from reactionary
landowners and in particular the Church. The democrats all
subscribed to popular sovereignty; but they also believed (as they
had to in the absence of any empirical alternative) that the Italian
nation had an existence that was prior to and independent of the
will of the people. Accordingly they could argue that the rights of
the individual might have to be sacri ced to the rights of the nation;
and Mazzini’s political theology, with its emphasis on the divine
origin of nations, made this position easier to justify. Many
democrats foresaw a period of dictatorship after uni cation had
been achieved. How long this situation would last was inevitably
not speci ed.
The main battleground for the democrats, and also the main
source of division between them and the moderates, was over
exactly how independence, strength and unity would be secured.
Some, like Giuseppe Ferrari and Carlo Cattaneo, argued that Italy
would only ever be strong if the historical reality of regional
di erences was recognized in a federal structure. Many others
followed Mazzini in accepting that a centralized state was necessary
precisely so as to minimize the weakness that local feelings would
cause (though a degree of administrative autonomy was certainly
possible). Supporters of republicanism claimed that national unity
was incompatible with monarchy, given that princes only ever had
the interests of their dynasties at heart and would not support ‘the
people’ or oppose the Papacy. But some democrats, like Vincenzo
Gioberti, broke with Mazzini over republicanism on the grounds not
only that it was politically unrealistic but more importantly (and
pace Sismondi) that it would resurrect the communal chaos of the
Middle Ages and prevent Italy from emerging as ‘one, strong,
powerful, devoted to God, harmonious and at peace with itself’.41
These divisions in the democratic camp became more pronounced
from the mid-1830s as rival organizations to Young Italy and
Buonarroti’s True Italians began to appear. In Naples, Giuseppe
Ricciardi attempted to mobilize local radicals around a somewhat
shadowy body called the Central Committee, while from his base on
Malta the Modenese conspirator Nicola Fabrizi ran a paramilitary
association known as the Italic Legion, which aimed to make the
extreme south of the peninsula and Sicily the springboard for a
national guerrilla war. In Calabria, Benedetto Musolino, a young
and highly idealistic intellectual, formed a secret society, the Sons of
Young Italy, whose goal was a great military republic with a
supreme dictator in Rome. Its members were armed with a carbine
and dagger and wore black clothes like those of the local peasantry;
and they had a ag: a white skull on a black background.42 The
great importance that Musolino attached to social and economic
issues led Mazzini to dismiss him as a ‘materialist’ and a
‘communist’. Musolino retaliated by describing Mazzini as a corrupt
and sinister gure who was only interested in himself and not the
poor.43
The problem that all these democrats faced was how to reach out
beyond their various organizations to a wider audience. They could
communicate with each other well – in some ways too well: they
were generally proli c letter writers, eager to stay in close touch
with the members of their friendship group and nervous about their
standing with their peers and fearful of being cast out into the cold.
Mazzini’s surviving correspondence runs to some 10,000 letters, all
of them written in a crabbed microscopic hand; but his total output
was probably over 50,000. But communicating with the uneducated
was quite a di erent issue: they spoke (very often literally) a
di erent language. The aspiration of the democrats was to turn
‘plebs’ into ‘people’. As the novelist and politician Guerrazzi put it:
‘If a blacksmith… can write verses or prose, is a ne son, husband
and father, has genuine love for his country, abhors any kind of
tyranny, and shuns idiotic superstition, he is no longer plebs, but
people.’44 But to reach this situation, and so create the popular force
needed to destroy the existing order and unite Italy, the masses
would have to be receptive to the teachings of the democrats, and
currently, precisely because they were ‘plebs’, they were not.
Furthermore, until ‘Italy’ was made, the democrats would not have
the political space required to tackle the task of education seriously.
The paradoxes were well put by the leading Tuscan democrat,
Giuseppe Montanelli, in the mid-1850s (criticizing Mazzini):
We needed freedom to educate the masses; we needed the masses to win freedom. In order
to make the divided peoples of Italy conscious of their nationality they needed to be mixed
up so that they formed a de facto Italian reality, and to achieve this de facto reality the
peoples needed to feel they wanted it as a result of being conscious of their nationality.
How were we to get an insurrection without the people? How could we have the people
without having had an insurrection? The obsessive preachers who from their land of exile
thought it right to cry out, ‘If you wish to be free, rise up’, sounded exactly like somebody

saying to a sick man, ‘If you want to get better, be cured.’45

THE DEATH OF THE BANDIERA BROTHERS

In 1839 Mazzini set out to regain the conspiratorial initiative and

relaunched Young Italy. He was concerned that the appearance of
rival organizations would result in a dissipation of revolutionary
energy; and with the outbreak of Chartist agitation in England he
sensed that Europe might be about to enter a new phase of popular
unrest. Southern Italy seemed a likely site for insurrection – a
particularly brutal revolt, largely social and economic in character,
had swept through Sicily in 1837 in the wake of a cholera epidemic
– and Mazzini tried to persuade Nicola Fabrizi, the commander of
the Italic Legion, to work with him in preparing a concerted plan of
action. He was afraid that a southern rising might be too provincial
– and too material – in focus; and he was particularly worried that
an insurrection in Sicily would end up being directed towards the
independence of the island and not of Italy. However, Fabrizi was
less than enthusiastic about collaborating with Mazzini, and when
minor revolts broke out in the Romagna in the spring of 1843 and in
Calabria a year later, they owed rather more to the initiative of local
conspirators than to Mazzini or Fabrizi.
The rising in Calabria centred on the remote and mountainous
district of the Sila in the far south-west of the peninsula, an area
long known for its lawlessness and banditry. It had been planned for
some months with a number of liberals in Naples. At dawn on 15
March 1844 around a hundred armed men descended on the town
of Cosenza waving a tricolour ag and shouting ‘Long live liberty!’
They sought to break into the palace of the provincial governor, but
a posse of police appeared and shooting broke out, and the captain
of the gendarmes (the son of a famous Neapolitan philosopher,
Pasquale Galluppi) and four of the rebels, among them the leader,
were killed. The remaining insurgents managed to ee, but in the
days that followed dozens were rounded up, and under pressure
from the government the courts handed down exemplary
punishments. Nineteen conspirators were sentenced to death in
public by ring squad. In concrete terms the rising had achieved
nothing; but it had (and this was always one of the intentions)
shown that Italians could act bravely (‘better act and fail than do
absolutely nothing,’ said Mazzini).46 It had also secured a lot of
coverage abroad, especially in France and Britain, where the exile
community did its best to ensure that the press reports were
exaggerated. It was even suggested that the rebels had sparked o a
general insurrection and that much of southern Italy was in arms.47
Among those who read these in ated newspaper accounts were
two young Venetian noblemen and brothers, Attilio and Emilio
Bandiera. They had founded a secret society called the Esperia in
1842 to spread Mazzinian ideas in the Austrian navy, but had ed
abroad after being betrayed to the authorities, ending up on the
island of Corfu. Here they fell in with an ardent republican from
Forlì and member of Young Italy called Giuseppe Miller, who in the
spring of 1844 convinced them that an armed expedition to Calabria
stood a good chance of success. Eighteen other exiles were also
persuaded to take part, most of them from the Romagna, the Marche
and Emilia (including the splendidly named Anacarsi Nardi, a
lawyer whose uncle had been ‘dictator’ of Modena during the 1831
revolution). There was also a Calabrian with a rather fearsome
reputation called Giuseppe Meluso, a former seller of packed snow
(hence his nickname, ‘Snowy’) who had taken refuge on Corfu and
opened a bar there after having committed a murder. He agreed to
accompany the expedition as a guide.
Dressed in military-style uniforms with red, white and green
cockades, and armed with muskets, sabres and daggers, the twenty-
one landed at night on a beach near Crotone on 16 June. As day
broke a number of peasants came down to begin harvesting. They
were understandably alarmed by the presence of this exotic band of
‘foreigners’,48 and in a bid to reassure them and get their support
Miller suggested that Attilio Bandiera should give them the jewel-
encrusted sabre that he had been presented with by Sultan Abdul
Majid as a reward for his part in the Syrian campaign of 1840.
Bandiera thought this gesture excessive and instead handed over a
Persian dagger, urging the locals to go and collect men and arms
(which they would pay for) and telling them that they were honest
men, not bandits. This did little to allay the peasants’ suspicions, it
seems. The rebels heard to their intense dismay that there was no
insurrection in Calabria, and that foreign accounts of an insurgent
force of 600 men up in the mountains were unfounded. After taking
refuge in a wood a little inland they resolved to get a boat back to
Corfu as quickly as possible. But they were worried about retracing
their steps to the coast in case they had been reported to the police,
and decided to cross over to the other side of the peninsula and
embark there. On the evening of 17 June they set o and walked
through the night. The next morning they discovered that one of
their number, Pietro Boccheciampe, had gone missing.
Many Risorgimento accounts of key patriotic episodes – the
Sicilian Vespers, the duel of Barletta, the siege of Florence –
included a traitor in the narrative; not simply so as to provide added
drama, but also to de ect blame from others, o er a clear-cut
explanation for failure, and, by analogy with betrayals in popular
folk tales, epics and Bible stories (most obviously that of Christ by
Judas), to underline the heroism and saintliness of the protagonists.
And Boccheciampe was cast in this role for the Bandiera expedition.
Mazzini was later to be especially outspoken in his accusations of
treachery.49 But there is little to suggest that Boccheciampe
deserved such vitriol. He had decided to give himself up to the
authorities, and had gone to a café in Crotone, had a meal, paid for
it, and then walked into the local governor’s o ce. But he never
compromised his companions by divulging the real purpose of the
expedition; and the chief of police in Naples eventually got so
frustrated with his reticence that he had wanted him sent back to
Calabria to stand trial along with the others.50
Meanwhile the remaining band of twenty men approached San
Giovanni in Fiore, a town high on the densely wooded Sila plateau
cut o from the outside world for ve months of the year by snow
and dominated by the clergy and a handful of wealthy landowners.
Among the latter was Domenico Pizzi, the commander of the local
police guards, who summoned everyone to the main piazza, ordered
the women into church to pray for the salvation of the king, armed
the able-bodied men, priests included, and led them out to cries of
‘Long live the King Our Lord. God save him!’ They headed for
Stragola, where the rebels had found an inn and fountain and were
refreshing themselves and lling up their water bottles. On hearing
the cries of the posse from San Giovanni they rushed out into a hail
of bullets. Miller and another man were killed. Several others were
wounded. A few escaped but surrendered later in Crotone. The
remainder waved white handkerchiefs and were arrested without
resistance. They were bound, robbed of their possessions (including
75,000 lire in gold they had brought to pay for the expedition), and
led o to prison amid abuse and insults. The bodies of Miller and
the other dead man were left to rot in the sun and their remains
never found. The king rewarded the townspeople of San Giovanni
for their great loyalty by handing out eighteen knighthoods, forty-
three gold medals and eighty-six silver medals of the Royal Order of
Francis I, pensions, and a blanket exemption from land and mill
taxes (all of which caused some embarrassment after 1860).51
The trial of the remaining rebels was a foregone conclusion. The
defence of the Bandiera brothers was that they had not committed
treason, because they had come to Calabria believing reports they
had heard in émigré circles that King Ferdinand was secretly
planning to use the revolt in the south as a springboard for a
campaign to unify Italy. Their expedition was thus intended to help,
not overthrow, him. Rumours (quite unfounded) of Ferdinand’s
Italian ambitions had indeed been doing the rounds, but the judges
surmised, no doubt correctly, that the rebels had not taken them
seriously and were simply using them now to try to avoid the death
penalty. Their case was not helped by a violently republican
proclamation, found on Miller’s body, which the Bandiera brothers
had signed. In line with government instructions nine of the accused
were sentenced to death by ring squad. Their bravery at the last
was by all accounts exceptional and sealed their reputation as
martyrs of the national cause, both in Italy and abroad, much to the
annoyance (and alarm) of the authorities. As they were taken
through the streets of Cosenza to the place of execution on the
morning of 25 July 1844, bare-footed, dressed in black, their heads
hooded, they sang in rm voices a chorus from Saverio
Mercadante’s opera Donna Caritea:
Who dies for the fatherland
Has lived long enough
The leaves of the laurel
Will never fade away
Far better to perish
In the prime of life
Than languish for years

Under a tyrant’s yoke52

After the executions (at least according to an account by a

follower of Mazzini), the humble people who had been watching
collected the blood-soaked musket balls and divided locks of the
victims’ hair among themselves, ‘as if they were sacred relics’.53
7

Educators and Reformers: The Moderates

A confederation is the arrangement that is most suited to nature and the

history of Italy. Italy, as Gioberti has rightly observed, includes, from
north to south, provinces and peoples that are almost as di erent from
one another as the most northerly and southerly peoples of Europe.
Consequently, it always has been, and always will be, necessary to have
a separate government for all, or almost all, of these provinces.

Cesare Balbo, Delle speranze d’Italia (1844)

Scene 2

The banks of the Euphrates

Hebrews (in chains, at forced labour)

Fly, thought, on wings of gold;

Go settle on the slopes and hills,
Where, soft and mild, the sweet airs
Of our native land smell fragrant!…
Oh my fatherland, so beautiful and lost,
Oh, remembrance so dear and so fraught with despair!

Giuseppe Verdi and Temistocle Solera, Nabucco (1842)

PROGRESS

By the early 1840s there was a growing sense everywhere that

political and economic change was unstoppable. Georg Hegel’s
Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, published in 1840,
proclaimed the inevitable progress of society towards greater
subjective freedom, while in the same year Alexis de Tocqueville
issued the second volume of his study of Democracy in America, with
its central premise that the world was moving remorselessly towards
an era of the masses and egalitarianism. In England the Chartists
were organizing huge demonstrations in favour of broader political
representation, while the mood of nervous and at times almost
apocalyptic optimism (epitomized in the utopian schemes of Charles
Fourier and Robert Owen) was well caught by the young Alfred
Tennyson in his 1842 poem ‘Locksley Hall’, with its ‘vision of the
world and all the wonder that would be’, where airships thronged
the skies with commercial tra c, steamships and railways acted as
material counterparts to the ‘march of mind’, and ‘the nations’ airy
navies’ fought each other in the clouds, with ‘the standards of the
peoples plunging thro’ the thunder storm’, till universal and
enduring peace was nally sealed ‘in the Parliament of man, the
Federation of the world’.1
In Italy the sensation that the pace of change was accelerating in
Europe caused anxiety as well as excitement: conservatives were
fearful of the political consequences, while the liberal-minded were
worried that Italy might again miss its appointment with history and
be left behind. By 1843 the small state of Belgium had more than
300 miles of railways: Italy had less than fty. The manufacturing
sector was showing signs of progress, with the silk and cotton mills
of Lombardy and the textile and engineering workshops that the
Bourbon government was promoting in Naples. But these
developments were as nothing compared to the huge advances,
quantitative and qualitative, taking place in Britain, Germany and
France. Agriculture was a source of some pride, especially in
Tuscany and parts of the north, but as a whole the sector was
backward compared to most of northern Europe, with yields per
hectare in the south of the peninsula barely one-tenth those in
England.2 The cultural gap was similarly broad. The Habsburgs had
developed a good system of primary and secondary schools in
Lombardy and the Veneto, but elsewhere the situation was dire.
Associations were widely seen as a benchmark of modernity (‘The
need for associations to neutralize the individualism that works to
undermine the bonds of society is one of the most important
features of our age,’ wrote a Venetian publicist in 1843),3 but Italy
was making little headway here, even in the major cities, and those
societies that did exist were mostly just recreational circles for the
aristocracy.4
Progress meant the dissemination of knowledge and new ideas,
and in the years around 1840 there was a proliferation of journals in
cities such as Palermo, Florence, Bologna and Milan devoted to the
study of the economic, cultural and moral conditions of the
peninsula. For some years liberal debate in Italy focused largely on
Tuscany, where a group of enlightened landowners, led by Gian
Pietro Vieusseux, had taken advantage of the relatively lax local
censorship laws to produce such distinguished periodicals as the
Antologia, the Giornale agrario and the Guida dell’educatore. Milan
had also had an important forum of intellectual discussion in the
Annali universali di statistica, economia pubblica, storia, viaggi e
commercio, edited until his death in 1835 by the brilliant lawyer and
philosopher Gian Domenico Romagnosi. Among the contributors to
this publication was a young economist, Carlo Cattaneo, who in
1839 founded his own periodical, the Politecnico, arguably the most
in uential of the new crop of journals that did much to shape the
cultural landscape of the educated classes in the decade leading up
to the 1848 revolution.
 Cattaneo was heir to the empirical and rationalist tradition of
Pietro Verri and the Milanese Enlightenment, and he abhorred what
he saw as the rhetorical and mystical excesses of much romantic
nationalism. His patriotism was pragmatic and sober, and it was
informed by the reassuring knowledge that he came from the most
prosperous region of Italy (and indeed of the Austrian Empire). He
believed progress should be gradual, and should take place if
possible within the framework of the existing states, with
governments being pressurized by informed public opinion into
making reforms. The main architects of change were to be the urban
middle classes, for it was principally through trade and industry that
the cause of ‘civilization’ (as Cattaneo envisaged it) was advanced.
Above all progress should be grounded in diversity, for history
moved forward through the healthy and invigorating clash of
competing ideas: ‘Variety is life and inscrutable unity is death.’5 Like
many of his contemporaries, Cattaneo was an avid student of
history; but while others saw the fragmentation of medieval Italy as
having led to decadence, individualism and loss of independence,
Cattaneo believed instead that the rivalry of the ‘hundred cities’ had
resulted in the glories of commercial prosperity, well-planned streets
and double-entry bookkeeping. Not surprisingly he was to become a
passionate advocate of Italian federalism.
Academic debate was helping to create a national community (or
‘society’ to use Leopardi’s term) for Italian intellectuals. And the
process was furthered by the inauguration in 1839of a series of
annual congresses of Italian scientists to encourage reforms and the
exchange of knowledge along the lines of similar initiatives in
Britain and Germany. The rst congress was held in Pisa with the
blessing of Grand Duke Leopold, and attracted a good deal of
hostility (the Pope banned his subjects from participating): only 421
scientists turned up, of whom about half were from Tuscany itself.
But the ensuing congresses in Turin, Florence, Padua, Lucca, Milan
and Naples were much better attended, with a peak of 1,613
registrations in 1845. The meetings took care to maintain a strictly
academic pro le: they concentrated on discussing speci c economic
and social issues and then took forward their work by setting up
commissions to gather information. But it was hard to avoid
patriotic in ections altogether. In Florence in 1841the Marquis
Cosimo Ridol could not refrain from winding up proceedings (in
which the main theme had been the education of the rural masses)
with an invitation to the delegates to go home and tell their
compatriots ‘that mountains and seas no longer exist… [and] that
the various peoples now form a single family’.6
While economic arguments did not contribute signi cantly to the
development of the national debate in Italy, the establishment of the
German Zollverein (tari union) in 1834encouraged some discussion
about the possible advantages of increased commercial integration
in the peninsula. A leading Tuscan intellectual declared in 1843 that
the future of Europe lay with countries that were ‘great both
politically and economically’, and he called for a customs
confederation to increase the ‘wealth and power’ of Italy.7 The
potential of the railways to promote economic progress also
attracted attention, rst in a study of 1845by a leading Piedmontese
economist, Count Ilarione Petitti di Roreto, and then, more
provocatively (hence its publication in a French journal), in an essay
the following year by the young Count Cavour. Cavour’s arguments
were only in part economic. An extensive railway network, he said,
would bring in tourists who wanted ‘distraction from the boredom
fostered by the fogs of the north’, and more importantly would
make Italy into the fulcrum of international trade owing between
Europe and the East, and so enable it to ‘regain the brilliant
commercial position that she held throughout the Middle Ages’. But
it was the moral and political bene ts that most interested Cavour.
The railways would further ‘the progress of Christian civilization
and the spread of enlightenment’, and this would necessarily bring
about ‘the best possible future… and one for which we long with all
our heart… namely the national independence of Italy’.8

Like many moderates at the time Cavour had no clear sense of how,
or when, national independence would be secured, but he was
adamant that it should be the result of peaceful and not
revolutionary means. ‘The people’ needed to be educated morally,
within the framework of the existing social and political order, not
incited to violent action as Mazzini and his followers wanted. To
this end enlightened conservatives in the 1830s and 1840s produced
a steady stream of ‘popular’ journals, especially in regions such as
Tuscany, Piedmont and Lombardy where a strong tradition of
Catholic paternalism was accompanied by higher than average
levels of literacy. Their aim was to promote good economic
practices and a better lifestyle among the poor, encouraging the
virtues of hard work, honesty and sobriety, and attacking
superstition, poor hygiene and diet, and alcoholism. There was
always the fear that any kind of instruction, however restrained and
moral in tone, might undermine the docility of the masses and
unleash demands for radical social and economic changes; but it
was hoped that unrest could be avoided through the creation of
strong bonds of mutual a ection between employers and employees.
And anyway, if nothing was done, the risk was that the eld would
be left open to the revolutionaries, and their gospel of redemption
through a mass insurrection in the name of Italy might fall on
receptive ears.
Most of these publications adopted the almanac style of popular
literature that Benjamin Franklin had pioneered in the United States
a century earlier. Practical information about feast days, local
markets, lunar cycles, sowing and harvesting, of a kind that had
long circulated in rural areas, was mixed with poems, stories and
articles extolling the bene ts of industry, self-reliance and
religiosity. Some of the journals, such as Enrico Mayer’s Educatore
del povero (Educator of the Poor, 1833) in Tuscany and Lorenzo
Valerio’s Letture popolari (Popular Reading Matter, 1836) in
Piedmont, apparently reached quite large audiences, at least among
smallholders and artisans – though to what extent the political and
social message was absorbed is another matter. Such publications
certainly attracted more readers than Mazzini’s forays into popular
literature. Giovine Italia was only ever intended for the educated
middle classes, but in 1833 Mazzini produced three numbers of a
newspaper called Insegnamenti popolari (Popular Teachings), which
employed the question and answer form of Catholic catechisms to
try to get across his message about Italian unity and independence.
But sixteen pages of abstractions about duties, rights and the glories
of the nation were not calculated to strike a chord with most
peasants and workers. He tried again in the early 1840s with the
Apostolato popolare, this time placing the accent on the social gains a
national revolution would bring, but again he had little success.9
Some of the pedagogic initiatives undertaken by the moderates
aimed to be more enduring. In 1835a commission headed by two of
Florence’s most eminent liberals awarded the rst prize of 1,000 lire
for a book to ‘provide children with moral instruction as well as
practice in reading’ to a former Austrian censor from the Veneto,
Luigi Alessandro Parravicini. His Giannetto (revealingly described as
being ‘for the use of children and the people’) was to prove
enormously successful and went through sixty-nine editions down to
1910.10 Cesare Cantù and Giovanni Prati, both from Lombardy,
were proli c patriotic authors of prose and verse works intended for
largely popular audiences in which the virtues of rural life, work,
resignation and love of one’s fellow men were celebrated.
Paternalism was a major theme in the ction of Caterina Percoto,
‘the peasant countess’, a strong-minded woman who ran the family
estates in Friuli, smoked pipes and large cigars and from 1844
produced a string of highly regarded stories about the local
peasantry, in which the su erings of the main characters are always
relieved with the intervention of a benefactor or virtuous priest.11
The printed word was bound to have limited impact in a society
where there was so much illiteracy, and some moderates preferred
more visual media to try to bridge the gap to the masses. One such
was Niccolò Puccini, an energetic Tuscan landowner and patron of
the arts, who from 1824used his considerable fortune to turn his
eighteenth-century villa at Scornio near Pistoia into a beacon of
patriotism and a meeting point for the educated elite and the
working classes. The famous gardens – which were open to the
public – were an eclectic celebration of Italy’s past glories and an
exhortation to its future greatness. Set amid avenues of trees, in
bowers, small piazzas and temples, were statues of distinguished
gures, including Dante, Columbus, Raphael, Machiavelli,
Michelangelo, Tasso, Galileo, Muratori, Vico, Al eri, Botta and
Canova. A mock-Gothic castle (intended as a reminder of how the
Italian republics had built fortresses to defend themselves against
foreign oppressors)12 housed memorials to such ‘Italian’ warriors as
Castruccio Castracani, Carmagnola and Giovanni delle Bande Nere,
while outside on a column stood a large statue of Francesco
Ferruccio ghting his last battle. The main building was a Pantheon
dedicated to ‘illustrious men’, containing the busts of fourteen
eminent Italians (among them Napoleon) and an empty niche
reserved for ‘the future benefactor of Italy’. On the wall Puccini
placed an inscription warning any Italian who did not ‘tremble with
vendetta and love for Italy’ as he passed through the temple that he
would be ‘cursed on the day of its glory’ and deprived of the
‘sanctifying robe of citizen’.
Puccini was a close friend of many leading Italian patriots of the
1830s and 1840s, and among those who came to his villa were
Guerrazzi, Vieusseux, Gioberti, Leopardi and Botta. On 25 June
1836, the anniversary of the Peace of Constance in 1183between the
emperor Frederick Barbarossa and the cities of northern Italy, he
was host to the elderly Sismondi, who wandered around the garden,
inspecting the statues, reading the inscriptions and chatting to the
distinguished playwright Giovanni Battista Niccolini, while crowds
of admirers cheered ‘the historian of our Italian republics’.13 Like
Sismondi, Puccini was keen to highlight episodes from Italy’s past
that could serve as inspiration for the present generation, and
among the numerous paintings he commissioned were works
depicting the sixteenth-century Florentine republican leader and
martyr Niccolò dei Lapi (which the artist and writer Massimo
d’Azeglio promised him, but never delivered), the death of
Ferruccio, the Sicilian Vespers, the revolt of the Genoese against the
Austrians in 1746 (in which the instigator of the rising, the boy
‘Balilla’, is seen urging the frenzied mob forward like Delacroix’s
Liberty Leading the People), and the death of Filippo Strozzi (to show
‘how a beautiful death can cancel out a life of infamy’).14 Puccini’s
pictures (and the monuments in his garden) were often reproduced
as engravings and widely circulated.15
Puccini devoted huge amounts of energy to his friendships with
the liberal intelligentsia, but he also found time for other initiatives.
He promoted public works in the Pistoia area to improve
agriculture, set up welfare institutes, and took a particularly keen
interest in education, establishing a school in the grounds of his
estate to provide free instruction for local poor children (with a
characteristically strong emphasis on religious and moral teaching).
In 1842 he launched a series of carefully choreographed annual fairs
called the Festivals of the Ears of Wheat, held in the garden of his
villa, which brought together peasants and landowners in a mutual
celebration of the harvest. The rst day was devoted to sermons by
priests, extolling the joys of work, family life and agriculture, while
the second and third had a more bucolic tone, with games, music,
singing, eating and drinking, and the awarding of prizes to the most
successful farmers.16 There were also lectures by guest speakers. In
1846 the distinguished Sicilian exile Giuseppe La Farina gave a
passionate address on how the future progress of humanity
depended on the moral elevation of the people:
Oh! The masses are worth far more than those that calumny them think! Speak to them of
the fatherland, of religion, and their hearts will swell with generous feelings. But who is to
blame if the border of their fatherland is the hedge that girds their plot of land or at best
the cross that marks the end of their village, if they often feel that justice and prejudice are
the same thing, and if religion dissolves for them into a chaos of materialism, superstition

and errors? Who is to blame?17

The turbulent events of 1848–9 and the collapse of the hopes of a

national revolution were to leave Puccini deeply disillusioned. The
Festival of the Ears of Wheat was allowed to lapse, and Puccini
withdrew into the world of art and literature and comforted himself
with memories of Italy’s former glories. He spent the summer of
1851 at Gavinana, the small town in the hills high above Pistoia
where in 1530 Francesco Ferruccio had fought his last battle trying
in vain to defend the Florentine republic. The following year he
died.18 In the 1860s his villa and gardens were sold o and soon fell
into ruins, and his art collection was scattered. As a nal
humiliation a railway, the ultimate symbol of nineteenth-century
materialism, was driven through what remained of the estate. By the
end of his life Puccini had grown pessimistic about the potential of
the people for virtue, and his pessimism was shared by many
moderates and became an important point of di erence between
them and the democrats. As the Tuscan democrat Francesco
Guerrazzi told Puccini in September 1848:

You have no faith in the masses and you are wrong… When I think
about the masses I am always reminded of that charming picture of
Albano, of Love riding a lion and playing a lyre to spur him on.
Certainly much thought and much chiselwork will be necessary to
sculpt this marble to perfection; but one day a god will spring from
it.19
OPERA

One of the most potent vehicles for the spread of the national idea
in the early 1840s was music. Opera was a passion throughout Italy,
and attracted all classes, and the evening performances of the latest
works by Donizetti, Mercadante or Ricci were the only occasions on
which the authorities would regularly permit the public to manifest
collective feelings. Theatres were microcosms of urban society. The
boxes belonged to the aristocracy, and, like salons, had a strong
female presence. The stalls resembled the piazza: almost exclusively
male, and thronged with students, soldiers, merchants and middle-
class professionals. At the top, in the gods, almost out of sight, were
the poorer classes: the artisans, small traders, shopkeepers and
servants. The noise and bustle were constant, and there was no sign
of the reverential silence that was starting to become the norm at
symphony concerts in northern Europe. The German composer Otto
Nicolai was shocked to nd that the music and singing were almost
drowned out by the chatter, while Berlioz observed how members of
the audience argued and shouted and clattered their sticks on the
ground as freely as if they were on the stock exchange.20
The Restoration governments had been keen to encourage opera-
and theatre-going, and more than 600 new playhouses were built in
Italy in the decades after 1815, mainly in the north and centre. The
motive was partly civic, a continuation of the Napoleonic idea that
public entertainment was a good way of fostering social ties in a
controlled environment, and also of keeping young men o the
streets and out of the taverns at night.21 The censors made sure that
the works contained no subversive material, while the police
patrolled the stalls and upper galleries to prevent disorder.
Moreover the fact that the main theatres were usually dedicated to
members of the royal family and were patronized by the ruler and
his court was seen as politically bene cial: the prince united with
his subjects in pleasure. The problem was that an environment that
encouraged displays of public loyalty and obedience when times
were good, might just as easily in a less favourable climate become
a forum for protest.
Such an inversion occurred in the 1840s, when the growing mood
of con dent and assertive patriotism in Italy was perfectly caught by
the young Giuseppe Verdi. There is not much to suggest that Verdi
himself felt very strongly about ‘Italy’ – his main attachment all his
life was to the dull at farmland around the village of Busseto near
Parma, where he had been born in 1813 (technically, at that time, a
French citizen) – but he and his publishers had an acute sense of
what the public wanted and were accordingly wily in the strategies
they used to try to circumvent the censors. Nabucco (1842), with its
theme of an enslaved people yearning for freedom and its great
patriotic chorus of ‘Va pensiero’ (‘Oh my fatherland, so beautiful
and lost’), was spared the blue pencil partly by being given a ‘safe’
religious setting; and the same probably also applied to Verdi’s next,
and almost equally successful, opera, I Lombardi alla prima crociata
(The Lombards on the First Crusade, 1843), which he dedicated to
Maria Luisa of Austria, perhaps to make doubly sure that he was not
thought to be subversive.22 In the case of Ernani (1844) the
seemingly in ammatory story of a band of high-minded conspirators
setting out to assassinate Charles V (‘We are all one single family…
unavenged and neglected slaves we will be no longer’) was carefully
tempered by portraying the emperor as a magnanimous and noble
gure.23
It was not always easy to predict what the censors would or
would not allow. One problem was regional variations: Naples and
Rome tended to be more stringent than Lombardy and Tuscany,
especially when it came to issues of religion. Sometimes an opera
would be permitted if it was transposed. Thus Rossini’s last and only
seriously political opera, William Tell (1829), which he wrote for the
French stage, could only ever be performed in Italy in a cut version
set in Scotland and called Rudolph of Stirling.24 Verdi’s Giovanna
d’Arco (Joan of Arc, 1845) was problematic on two counts: rst, its
heroine was o cially a heretic, and second, it dealt with a people
(the French) ghting for freedom against a foreign oppressor (the
English). In much of Italy it had to be relocated to fteenth century
Greece with a heroine called Orietta of Lesbos. Sometimes the
problem was not so much the censors as the local theatre directors
and their sensibilities. Thus the nobles on the executive committee
of La Fenice in Venice refused to première Verdi’s 1844 opera I due
Foscari on the grounds that it showed two of their fteenth-century
predecessors in an unfavourable light.25
An important feature of Verdi’s early operas – which both
re ected and fed the charged political climate of the mid-1840s –
was their novel use of the chorus. In an essay of 1836 Mazzini had
lamented the lack of truly passionate and spiritual music in Italy
that would further the ‘religious and national education of the
masses’ and inspire young men to take up arms (Donizetti had made
a start with Marino Faliero, he said; but Rossini had simply
portrayed ‘man without God’); and he suggested that composers
should elevate the operatic chorus from its present largely passive
role into a dynamic embodiment of ‘the people’, united,
spontaneous and assertive.26 It is not known if Verdi was aware of
Mazzini’s ideas, but the chorus certainly assumed an increasingly
central position in his work from Nabucco to La Battaglia di Legnano
(1849), with the theme of popular struggle for freedom at the heart
of the most successful of them – even Macbeth, where the main
adversaries of the king and his wife are the chorus of Scottish men,
women and children rather than Macdu .27
But what made operas such a powerful vehicle for the di usion of
national feelings in the 1840s was not so much the intentions of
composers as the willingness of audiences (or sections of them) to
impose political readings on librettos and turn performances into
occasions for patriotic demonstrations. And there was little the
censors could do about this situation, especially in 1846–8 when
governments everywhere in Italy were being forced to bow before a
tidal wave of liberal euphoria. Already at the rst performance of I
Lombardi in 1843 the line with which the crusaders were incited to
battle against the in del – ‘Today the Holy Land will be ours’ – was
greeted with cries of ‘Yes! Yes!’ and loud cheering. And virtually any
allusion to ‘the fatherland’ or ‘war’ in the mid-1840s risked
triggering similar responses, even in works that had not previously
been seen as political – as with Bellini’s Norma (1831), which in
1846–7 suddenly became a ‘patriotic’ work (and in particular its
Druid chorus of ‘War! War!’), despite the fact that the oppressors
were Romans. On occasions enthusiasm could spill out of the opera
house onto the streets (probably with prior planning), as happened
in Palermo in November 1847, when an aria containing the words
‘you deprived me of heart and mind, fatherland, gods and liberty’ in
Donizetti’s Gemma di Vergy (1834) provoked a storm of applause
and violent clashes with the police. The censors had probably
overlooked the line because the context was one of love, jealousy
and revenge, and on the face of it not remotely political.28
MODERATE PROGRAMMES

Until 1843 the moderates lacked a clear programme to pit against

Mazzini and the democrats, but in that year Vincenzo Gioberti
published in Brussels a prolix hymn to Italian intellectual and
spiritual superiority called On the Moral and Civil Primacy of the
Italians. It proved an astonishing success, despite being banned in
parts of Italy, selling 80,000 copies in ve years. In a thousand
pages of dense adjectival prose Gioberti ranged over centuries of
cultural and religious life in Italy, which demonstrated, he said, how
the peninsula had been ordained to dominate the world through the
power of its moral leadership. The impact of the book was as much
psychological as political. As the Neapolitan liberal Luigi
Settembrini recalled:

We were slaves, divided, shattered, scorned by foreigners who said

we were a decadent race and that Italy was a land of the dead…
And we too saw ourselves as inferior to everyone else, having over
centuries of wretched servitude lost all sense of our own being. This
man then says: ‘You Italians are the world’s leading people.’ ‘We
Italians?’ ‘Yes, you have civil and moral primacy over everyone’…
The e ect of the book was extraordinary, and raised the spirits of a
prostrate people.29
At one level the book was a total repudiation of Mazzini. Gioberti
suggested that independence should be secured not through a
popular revolution and a republic, but by making the existing Italian
states into a federation under the presidency of the Pope. And while
Mazzini regarded the papacy as an insurmountable obstacle to
Italy’s rebirth, Gioberti saw it as integral to the nation’s identity, its
chief glory, and a guarantee of its future greatness. But Gioberti’s
di erences with Mazzini were less pronounced than at rst sight
appeared. Both saw the moral resurrection of Italy as their supreme
goal; both wanted the new nation to be powerful and independent,
and no longer culturally and politically subservient to other
countries, above all France; and both saw a resplendent and
regenerate Rome as the acme of their dreams. What principally
divided them were the means for achieving the regeneration.
Gioberti considered the Italian ‘people’ a mere abstraction, ‘a desire
and not a fact’, and it was pointless to imagine they could somehow
be conjured into being overnight and used as a basis for uni cation.
Italy was united by religion and a common written language, but
divided by ‘governments, laws, institutions, dialects, customs,
feelings and practices’, and any programme of moral revival had to
start from this harsh empirical reality.
But the appeal of Gioberti’s book was not just that it o ered a
conservative model of Italian uni cation: the princes, under his
programme, would keep most of their absolutist powers, diluted
only by local consultative bodies and a central Diet to decide on
national issues.30 It was also and quite deliberately mythopoeic, an
attempt to shake Italians from their lethargy by ‘stirring their
imaginations, in aming their hearts, entrancing their spirits with
the beauty and magni cence of the picture that I set before them’.31
Gioberti rmly believed that political redemption could only come
about after moral redemption had been achieved; and the starting
point for moral redemption was to make Italians aware of what they
had once been, and thus who they were today: ‘Italy cannot be
resurrected to new life unless it searches for the seeds within itself;
and its modern form must arise out of its past, and be its own and
national.’32 Hence his celebration of Italy’s glorious intellectual and
cultural traditions and his assertion that these were historically
quite inseparable from the papacy and Rome.
Underpinning this vision of Italy’s past was a suggestion of ethnic
continuity. Like Vico and Cuoco, Gioberti claimed a remote origin
for the Italian nation; but in contrast to their secular classicism
Gioberti preferred a foundation story that was rooted in the Bible,
thereby reinforcing his notion that the Italians were a chosen
people. Italy, he said, had begun with the ‘Pelasgians’, a population
descended from Japhet, son of Noah, which had colonized the
central regions of Italy and given rise to the Etruscan, Roman and
Italian civilizations. The de ning characteristic of this ‘race’ (stirpe)
was energy, as was suggested by the ancient name for Italy,
‘Vitellia’, or ‘land of bulls’. Three times in the course of world
history the Italians had shown their exceptional ‘creative potency’:
under the Romans (politically and militarily), with the papacy
(spiritually), and during the Renaissance (culturally). Now,
however, the natural ‘virile sexuality’ of the Italians had become
wasted. In recent centuries Italy had been ‘feminized by lax
education, leisure and softness’, and was treated as a ‘woman’,
‘honoured by poets… but in reality walked over and regarded as a
cipher’. Gioberti’s aim was to rekindle in his fellow countrymen a
desire for assertion and dominance.33

On the face of it Gioberti’s programme stood little chance of success.

The general assumption among patriots had always been that the
papacy would never back such a dangerously modern and
progressive idea as Italian national uni cation; and certainly, in
1843, the 78-year-old Pope Gregory XVI seemed far too reactionary
to have any truck with the views of an exiled priest who had once
irted with Young Italy. But the possibility of the Church taking up
the cause of progress did not seem totally far-fetched. Inspired by
the likes of Lamennais and Montalembert in France, a number of
Italian intellectuals had since the 1820s been trying to reconcile
liberty with Catholicism, among them the writer Alessandro
Manzoni and the philosopher Antonio Rosmini. In 1835 a well-
known scholar from Dalmatia, Niccolò Tommaseo, had published (in
Paris) an important book calling for the liberation of Italy by the
people in the name of a new evangelical and democratic
Catholicism. In the eld of history various so-called ‘neo-Guelph’
studies by the Neapolitan Carlo Troya and others had appeared, in
which the medieval papacy had been depicted as the heroic
defender of ‘the freedom of Italy’ against e orts by the German
emperors to crush the communes.
One of the most important of these neo-Guelph historians was
Cesare Balbo, a Piedmontese aristocrat and former Napoleonic
o cial, who had spent the 1820s in exile for his liberal views. Like
many of his background and generation Balbo cared deeply about
Italian independence and even more passionately about Piedmont
and its monarchy, and when On the Moral and Civil Primacy of the
Italians appeared, his cousin, Massimo d’Azeglio, urged him to go
into print with his own thoughts on the subject of Italy. This he duly
did, and in 1844 his book On the Hopes of Italy (Delle speranze
d’Italia) appeared, dedicated to Gioberti. It was a work that proved,
if anything, to be even more successful than Gioberti’s, though its
popularity was probably due less to its contents, which were neither
very hopeful nor particularly original, than to its succinct and
upbeat title. Indeed, the satirical press dubbed Balbo’s book, and not
without some justi cation, On the Despair of Italy (Della disperazione
d’Italia).34
Even more than Gioberti, Balbo considered Italy totally un tted
yet for real unity, and he dismissed Mazzini’s views as ‘puerile’ and
contrary to history and to common sense. The sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries had been times of terrible decadence, and
while Italians (and the Piedmontese in particular) had made some
advances in the eighteenth century ‘in industriousness, civic virtue,
national sentiment and the desire for independence’, there was still
a long way to go. Laziness was the most prevalent national vice – a
consequence of the climate and years of despotic rule – and Italians
needed to look abroad and gradually learn lessons from the
‘Christian progress’ made by other countries. Gioberti’s idea of an
outright Italian primacy was accordingly unrealistic, and it made
more sense (and here, ironically, he was echoing Mazzini) to think
of ‘multiple primacies’, with one nation taking the lead in industry,
another in science, another in African colonies, and so on. Italy
could recover its old eminence in the arts or in Mediterranean trade,
but its supreme mission would always be to protect and glorify the
papacy. But to achieve this position, it needed to be fully
independent; and since it was impossible for any kind of
insurrection to succeed, given the inability of Italians to work
together successfully, and since, too, the princes were unlikely to
cooperate with each other e ectively, the best hope lay with
international diplomacy.35 Balbo’s suggestion (and it was by no
means a new one)36 was that Austria might eventually be persuaded
to give up its possessions in Italy in exchange for territories in
eastern Europe taken from the disintegrating Ottoman empire.37
The obvious bene ciary of Austria’s withdrawal from Lombardy–
Venetia would be Piedmont, and one reason why Balbo’s book was
so important was because it indicated just how easily Italian
independence could be squared with the old dynastic ambitions of
the House of Savoy to dominate northern Italy. And Balbo provided
further encouragement for this line of thought in his extended
discussion of how Italians could be made ‘virtuous’; for while
diplomacy might remove the Austrians from the peninsula, the only
way that Italians could remain independent in the long run was if
they recovered the outstanding civil qualities (virtù) they had
possessed in the twelfth century (‘I can sum up all I have written…
in two words: one single goal, INDEPENDENCE; one single means,
VIRTUE’).38 In particular they needed to learn once again how to
ght, as the best remedy for the ‘e eminacy’, ‘weakness’ and
‘corruption’ that had taken hold of the Italian character as a result
of prolonged peace and sedentary living was military training. And
who better to educate Italians to martial virtue than the most
military people in the peninsula, namely the Piedmontese?39

While Gioberti’s book unleashed a erce debate among Catholics

about whether an institution as universal and timeless as the Church
should identify itself with such a narrowly political and ephemeral
issue as the Italian national question, Balbo’s work helped to train
attention on Piedmont. For many years this small state in the north-
west of Italy had been doggedly reactionary, and its king, Carlo
Alberto (who had succeeded his cousin, Carlo Felice, after the
latter’s death in 1831), had shown little inclination to break with
the obscurantist traditions of his forebears. By temperament austere
and almost insu erably religious (he would often turn up at court
dinners anked by two Jesuits for company), he made sure that
throne and altar were kept bound together in a tight alliance.
Ecclesiastical courts and religious censorship continued to operate,
and writers such as Machiavelli and words such as ‘nation’,
‘revolution’, ‘liberty’ and even ‘Italy’ remained banned. But from the
late 1830s the situation began to change. Under pressure from
public opinion, the last vestiges of feudalism were abolished, new
penal and civil codes were promulgated, and attempts were made to
modernize the economy by reducing tari s and promoting trade. As
a result silk, cotton and wool manufacturing expanded fast, and by
the mid-1840s Piedmont was emerging as a serious rival to
Lombardy in terms of its general prosperity.
But what was crucial about Piedmont from the point of view of
Italian independence was that it had an army. Piedmont was a
bu er state wedged between France and Austria whose security had
always been of paramount concern to its rulers, and with the
development of the road (and rail) network in northern Italy the
threat from Lombardy in particular was growing. Nearly half of total
government spending went on defence from the early 1830s, and as
a result of reforms the size of the army, reservists included, was
gradually raised to around 150,000 men by the mid-1840s. In terms
of training and equipment these Piedmontese forces were
impressive. They were also loyal: after the threatened coup in 1833
Carlo Alberto took care to foster the cult of the monarchy within the
army, creating among the o cer ranks especially what one senior
general described as a ‘veritable adoration’ of the royal family.40
The only other state in Italy with substantial military forces (around
80,000) was Naples, but while technically good, they had none of
Piedmont’s erce devotion to the ruling dynasty.
The pressure on Carlo Alberto began to mount. In the summer of
1845 one of the most distinguished Piedmontese aristocrats,
Massimo d’Azeglio, broke o writing his latest historical novel
(about the Lombard League in the twelfth century: ‘the most
beautiful and radiant period in our history’)41 to become actively
involved in politics. He made a secret tour of the Romagna, talking
to sectarians about their hopes for radical change in the Papal States
now that Gregory XVI’s ponti cate was nearing its end, their
disillusionment with conspiracy, and their dreams of possible
Piedmontese help. On his return to Turin d’Azeglio had an audience
with Carlo Alberto, and to his astonishment the king expressed a
willingness to give his support: ‘Let those gentlemen know that they
should wait quietly and take no action, since as yet nothing can be
achieved: but let them also know that when occasion o ers, my life,
the lives of my sons, my arms, my treasure, my armies – all will be
spent in the Italian cause.’42 A few months later d’Azeglio turned the
heat up further with a brilliant pamphlet entitled On the Recent
Events in the Romagna (dedicated to Cesare Balbo), a searing
denunciation of the brutality and backwardness of papal
government, in which he called for a halt to all attempts at popular
insurrection – they stood no chance of success given the almost
complete absence of ‘civil education’ among the masses – and
instead urged right-minded Italians to embark on a vigorous
campaign of peaceful protest (‘conspiracy in the broad light of day’)
that would raise awareness at home and abroad of their oppression
and of their rm desire to be liberated from foreign rule.43
Amid all the discussion about independence and how to expel the
Austrians from Italy, issues of constitutions, representative
government and individual rights took a back seat. In part this
omission was practical. ‘First independence, then liberty: rst I want
to live; afterwards I will think of how to live well,’ said Giorgio
Pallavicino-Trivulzio;44 and his pragmatism was shared by many in
both the moderate and democratic camps. But the failure to address
questions of internal freedom betrayed more than just a fear of
provoking serious rifts and fracturing the national forces before
uni cation had been achieved. There was also a sense that ‘nation’
and ‘freedom’ could not in Italy’s case automatically be combined,
because national sentiment was still very rudimentary and
representative institutions risked producing a babel of voices urging
private, sectional or municipal interests that would make coherent
government impossible. The ‘nation’ had to be imposed; it could not
as yet easily be linked to the defence of personal interests and rights
as most Italians understood them. There was also the spectre of
history to contend with. Memories of the licentiousness unleashed
by the Jacobin experiments of 1796–9 and of the chaos of the city-
states during the Middle Ages hovered over the idea of ‘freedom’.
Indeed, one reason why Italian liberals were to have so many
problems coming to terms with the practice of parliamentary
government both before and after 1860 was because parties were
often seen as synonymous with the factions and sects that had so
bedevilled the course of Italian history.45 Nation implied concord;
freedom almost suggested its antithesis.
These considerations, as much as a concern not to alienate the
existing absolutist rulers in Italy, was why moderate writers such as
Gioberti suggested that constitutional reform should be limited to
consultative assemblies of ‘men of truly outstanding character’.46
And although the democrats were generally more interested in
practical arrangements for safeguarding political freedoms, they too
tended to focus on the revolution to win independence and unity
and not on what might come after it (‘to tell you the truth, I am not
really fussed about matters of internal liberty, administration and
laws,’ Mazzini confessed to a friend in 1861).47 Those liberals who
did show an interest in constitutional problems had often developed
their ideas as a result of engagement in debates and polemics while
in exile or travelling abroad, particularly in France and Britain. But
most of them accepted that the application of liberal constitutional
government to Italy would be bedevilled by major practical
di culties.
One such was Giacomo Durando, a distinguished Piedmontese
o cer who had spent much of the 1830s ghting in the Carlist wars
in Spain and witnessing at rst hand the catastrophic regional
tensions in that country. In 1846 he published a major study of the
national question in Italy, arguing that the peninsula was much too
diverse still to be pushed into a single political straitjacket. He
suggested, on geo-strategic grounds, that it should be allowed to
evolve into two federated states, one in the north (‘Eridania’) and
one in the south (‘Apennine’), with the papacy having control of
Rome and perhaps of Sicily and Sardinia, too; but he stressed how
important it was to compensate the ‘sub-nationalities’ of Lombardy–
Venetia, Parma, Modena and the Romagna for their incorporation
into an eventual enlarged Piedmontese kingdom by setting up
representative institutions. Otherwise they would feel that they had
simply ‘exchanged being garrisoned by soldiers in white uniforms
for soldiers in blue’.48 For many observers, though, such an
arrangement ran the risk of perpetuating or even fuelling the very
divisions that had hindered the development of national sentiment –
a sentiment that was arguably itself indispensable to any successful
federalism. The conundrum of how to combine unity with freedom
in Italy was clearly di cult. The revolutions of 1848–9 were to
underline, brutally, just how di cult.
PART THREE

Poetry
1846–60

Revolution, 1846–9

If you return, I beg you, be the last to do so. We endure this harsh
separation patiently: but honour and duty are preferable to everything
else… If I followed my a ections alone I would summon you back
instantly to my side… But it is not for nothing that I have long made it
my life’s work to love Italy with faith, and to sacri ce everything to
duty. Do not think that I love you the less for not asking you to return…
But this is a time for sacri ces, and I nd in sacri ces a melancholy and
most holy delight.

Caterina Franceschi Ferrucci writing to her husband and son,

volunteers in the
Tuscan Battalion stationed in Brescia, from Pisa, 14 June 1848

We, though unworthy, represent on Earth Him who is the author of

peace and the lover of charity, and Our Supreme Apostolate obliges us to
love with equal paternal a ection all peoples and all nations… We must
reject the insinuations… of those who would wish the Roman Ponti to
be President of some new Republic to be created by all the peoples of
Italy together. On the contrary… we passionately exhort [the peoples of
Italy]… to remain faithful to their Princes… Were they to act otherwise,
they would not only be failing in their personal duty, but would also run
the risk of Italy ending up divided by discord and internecine
factions.                               Allocution of Pope Pius IX, 29 April
1848
‘O SOMMO PIO’

On 16 June 1846, after a conclave lasting just two days, Giovanni

Maria Mastai-Ferretti, bishop of Imola, was elected Pope and took
the name of Pius IX. The election had been rushed partly out of fear
that sectarians might take advantage of a lengthy interregnum to
launch another rising in the Romagna. The new pope had been a
compromise candidate and was something of an unknown quantity.
He came from an aristocratic family in the Marche and had a
reputation for amiability and good works, but as bishop he had kept
a low political pro le, and had avoided taking sides publicly with
either liberals or conservatives on the issue of reforms in the Papal
States. His elevation to the throne of St Peter accordingly received a
rather muted reception. But a month later he issued an amnesty for
political prisoners – a not unusual act for a new pope, but one which
in the febrile political climate of the time resulted in an
extraordinary explosion of excitement. On the evening of 17 July
crowds swarmed into the piazza in front of the Quirinal Palace. As
the democrat Giuseppe Montanelli recalled:
At that solemn hour, as if between two rmaments – between the brilliant stars of a
summer sky and the thousands of torches blazing in the huge piazza – we saw the Pope
come out onto his balcony dressed in a white tunic to address the vast and prostrate
multitude. The spirits of those present dissolved into an ocean of love; and every face was
etched with intense emotion; and for the rst time the cry was heard that was later to

accompany popular insurrections: ‘Long live Pius IX.’1

That evening of 17 July 1846 was for Montanelli an epiphany. A

young and idealistic professor of law at the university of Pisa,
strongly in uenced, like Mazzini, by Saint-Simon, he had for some
time been racked by the problem of how to draw the masses
emotionally into the campaign for Italian unity and independence.
Suddenly with the election of Pius IX such an involvement seemed
possible, for whatever Pius may have felt or believed in private,
there was every reason to imagine now that a frenzy of popular
enthusiasm could sweep the ponti ineluctably down the path of
reform, injecting the national cause with religious fervour.
Gioberti’s vision of Italy and the papacy rising together in unison,
like phoenixes, gloriously regenerate from the ashes of their
decadent pasts, appeared more than just an intellectual fantasy:

The utopia of a reforming papacy opened up before me as a

marvellous prospect… An Italian, I at last saw the scattered limbs of
my nation reunited in a single body, a body whose soul was in
Rome, and whose capital was capital not just of Italy but of the
whole of Christianity. In this way Italy would once again occupy the
rst seat in Europe, and would emerge as the high-priestess of
nations…2
The excitement generated by Pius’ amnesty spread swiftly
through the Papal States – and beyond – and jubilant crowds poured
into the streets to applaud the new pope. Special performances were
staged of Verdi’s Ernani, with the opening words of Charles V’s aria
of tribute to Charlemagne in the third act changed from ‘O sommo
Carlo’ to ‘O sommo Pio’ (‘O, supreme Pius’), and with the
conveniently appropriate line ‘perdono a tutti’ (‘pardon to all’)
eliciting wild cheering and cries of ‘Evviva’.3 In the months that
followed the sense of anticipation was kept simmering, as Pius,
quite unprepared for the furore that his election had generated, and
caught between liberal and conservative factions within the Vatican,
nervously edged his way forward with liberal reforms. In November
he set up special commissions to examine the judiciary, education
and the economy and con rmed plans to build a rail network
linking Rome to the outside world, while the following spring he
relaxed the censorship laws and established a governmental
consultative assembly, with representatives drawn from across the
Papal States. Such was the continuing air of expectation around Pius
that in September 1847 Mazzini wrote to him and urged him to
assume the lead in uniting Italy (‘with you at its head… the struggle
would take on a religious aspect and free us from many risks of
reaction and civil war’),4 and a few weeks later another erstwhile
enemy of the papacy and Catholicism, Giuseppe Garibaldi, o ered
his services and those of his Italian Legion to ‘the man who serves
the Church and the fatherland so well’.5
The atmosphere in Italy throughout 1847 was tense and
unsettled. As in other parts of Europe, the agricultural sector was in
serious crisis. The poor harvests of 1846 had been followed by
catastrophic crop failures and widespread famine, and as food
became scarce, prices rose and armies of starving peasants drifted
into the cities. Industry, too, was facing severe di culties, as
overproduction caused factories to close and unemployment to
increase. Everywhere public order was under threat, and there were
frequent riots and demonstrations; and even without the example of
the Pope to contend with, governments would have faced enormous
pressure to introduce reforms. Tari barriers were lowered and
demands for free trade grew ( ush from his victory over the Corn
Laws in Britain, Richard Cobden toured Italy triumphantly in the
spring of 1847); and in November the Papal States, Tuscany and
Piedmont signed a preliminary agreement on a customs league,
similar to the Customs Union that had been established by various
German states in 1834. Press laws were relaxed and steps were
taken to liberalize the judiciary, the police and public
administration – even in Piedmont, where a new local government
law in the autumn allowed for elected town councils.
Amid the unrest, moderates and democrats jockeyed for position.
Like many observers Mazzini sensed that revolution was brewing
throughout Europe, and while his supporters on the ground in Italy
– young men, often students, who aunted their radicalism by
openly defying government strictures on facial hair with thick
beards ‘Ernani style’ and owing ‘Nazarene’ locks6 – formed secret
‘committees’, wrote in ammatory pamphlets, and agitated on the
streets, he himself worked from his base in London to focus public
opinion on the national question and on the need to expel the
Austrians from the peninsula. Many moderates, on the other hand,
feared that the mounting chaos would spiral out of control and end
in a bacchanal of popular terror, as in the 1790s, and their goal was
to keep the turmoil in constitutional channels by ensuring that
governments pressed ahead with the necessary reforms. In July
Massimo d’Azeglio published a pamphlet calling on the princes of
Italy to work together in a ‘tight union’, move towards a common
political programme, and draw behind them all the ‘progressive
moderates’, who were now so numerous as to form ‘Italian national
opinion’.7
But the chances of keeping the unrest peaceful and reformist
looked slim. The Austrian Chancellor Metternich showed no
willingness to pander to Italian patriotic feelings. In April he
referred to Italy dismissively as simply a ‘geographical expression’,
and when in July he sent troops across the Po to garrison Ferrara in
the Papal States (as he was entitled to do under the Treaty of
Vienna), the response was a wave of ugly demonstrations in many
cities with anti-Austrian chanting and tricolour ags. Early in
September the mood of growing belligerence in the peninsula
reached new heights following the brutal suppression of an
attempted rising in southern Italy and clashes in Milan between the
Austrian police and crowds celebrating the arrival of a new Italian
archbishop in the city. Tuscany, the most liberal of the Italian states,
saw the largest outpourings of patriotic fervour. A huge rally was
held in Florence on 12 September in favour of a national federation
attended by thousands of liberal delegates from all over northern
and central Italy, with banners bearing slogans such as ‘Long live
Pius IX’, ‘Constitution’, ‘Italian League’, ‘Arms’ and ‘War against the
foreigner’.
There was often a strongly dramatic dimension to the rallies held
in these months – in part perhaps a spontaneous overspill from the
opera houses, where in the second half of 1847, as censorship grew
more relaxed, medleys of favourite ‘patriotic’ music were in
demand: Act Three of Ernani, the oath scene from Orazi e Curiazi by
Mercadante, arias from Ettore Fieramosca by Antonio Laudamo.8 But
theatricality was also quite deliberate, a means of reaching out to
the urban masses, for in Italy, according to Montanelli, the
imagination of the people was by instinct ‘poetic’, and ‘it is not right
to omit from political calculation the ights of the popular soul’.9
He himself rst experienced the power of ‘poetry’ when he stood on
the steps of Pisa cathedral on 6 September 1847 addressing a crowd
that was gathered to inaugurate the local Italian federation, and felt
‘intoxicated’ as the last words of his speech, ‘Italy has risen again’,
echoed back to him across the piazza from an ecstatic audience. And
later in the day he went further, administering the ‘national oath’ to
the new members of the federation from the terrace of his house in
a scene fully worthy of an opera:
The sky was stormy, and that magni cent amphitheatre of the Lung’Arno, in the midst of
which I lived, was completely festooned with banners. I had with me a black-bordered
national ag, which the Lombards had adopted as a symbol of mourning. I asked if we
would meet again in danger, just as we were now gathered in celebration. I asked the
mothers and fathers if they would send their sons to battle. And the answer came back:
‘Yes!’ I asked the priests if they would bless the armies as the bells were pealing out. And
again I received that sacred promise: ‘Yes, yes, we swear!’ Then I said: ‘We will all be
there!’ And with arms raised, hands outstretched and cheeks streaked with tears, the vast
crowd answered in unison, three times, with a mighty cry that still echoes inside me:

‘All.’10
REVOLUTION

January the 12th 1848 was a public holiday in Palermo. It was the
king’s birthday and people were out strolling in the streets or
gathered in the piazzas smoking and talking. Tension had been
running high in Sicily for months. Pamphlets and posters had been
appearing denouncing Bourbon rule and calling for the introduction
of sweeping reforms and the establishment of an Italian federation.
Doves dyed green, white and red had been seen ying around the
city, and rumours that secret revolutionary committees were at
work had been rife – and young men like the aristocrat Rosalino
Pilo and his lawyer friend (and a future prime minister of Italy)
Francesco Crispi had indeed been making plans with liberals in
Naples for an insurrection in Sicily. At the end of November a series
of patriotic demonstrations had taken place in the local theatres,
with cries of ‘Long live Pius IX’ and ‘Long live Italy’, and women in
the boxes had tied their scarves together to form a chain
symbolizing the union of Italy. Rioting had broken out, which the
police had brutally suppressed. So when on the morning of 12
January a popular preacher stood up in the market square of the old
quarter of the city and began haranguing the crowds, it did not take
much for a fracas to snowball into street ghting and then into an
all-out revolt, with barricades and pitched battles with police and
soldiers. The following morning gangs of crudely armed peasants
descended on the city from the small hill towns above Palermo, just
as they had done in the revolution of 1820, eager to join in the
melee and become the sans-culottes of any new political order, or
more often simply to loot, kidnap and pillage.
From Sicily the revolutionary waves rippled up the peninsula. On
29 January, following huge demonstrations in Naples and a peasant
rising in the Cilento, the well-meaning but staunchly conservative
King of the Two Sicilies, Ferdinand II (whose passions were for his
thirteen children and food far more than politics), reluctantly
granted a constitution (‘O sommo Carlo’ became ‘O sommo
Ferdinando’ in a performance of Ernani the next day). In Piedmont,
Carlo Alberto quickly declared his readiness to introduce a ‘statute’
(he bridled at the term ‘constitution’) and Leopold of Tuscany made
a similar announcement on 11 February. Pius IX set up a
commission to prepare institutional reforms and issued a
proclamation calling for calm and obedience which concluded with
the electrifying words: ‘Grant thy blessing, great Lord, on Italy.’
Then the initiative passed to the rest of Europe. At the end of
February a revolution broke out in Paris forcing King Louis-Philippe
to abdicate, and this sent shock waves travelling east, rapidly
engul ng the whole of Germany and central Europe. Metternich ed
Vienna in mid-March (and settled peacefully in a ne house
overlooking the Thames at Richmond in Surrey), leaving the way
open for risings to break out in Lombardy and Venetia. The
Milanese took to the streets on 18 March and drove the Austrians
out in ve days of erce ghting, while the Venetians followed suit
and proclaimed the re-establishment of the Republic of St Mark on
22 March.
The insurrection in Milan immediately brought the spotlight to
bear on King Carlo Alberto. Demonstrations in favour of war against
Austria broke out across Piedmont, and in Genoa the agitation
risked turning democratic and republican. On 23 March Cavour
published a portentous article urging the king to action: ‘The
supreme hour for the Sardinian monarchy has sounded… one path
alone is open to the nation, the government and the king. War!
Immediate war, without delay!’11 But Carlo Alberto, the ‘Italian
Hamlet’, was racked with doubts: to invade Lombardy would mean
violating the treaties of 1814–15, not to mention the Austro-
Sardinian alliance of 1831. Yet it was fast becoming clear that the
only alternative was to be swept from his throne. On 24 March he
announced his intention to intervene, and identi ed himself grandly
with the cause of Italy; but in the diplomatic notes that he sent the
great powers he claimed that he was acting primarily to prevent the
revolution in Milan from becoming republican – which was almost
certainly much closer to the truth.
Unfortunately no preparations had been made for the campaign.
The general sta was riven with rivalries and disputes, which was
one reason why there were no plans. There was also the problem
that the king insisted on acting as commander-in-chief, and his
inveterate indecisiveness transmitted itself downwards. The army
advanced only slowly into Lombardy (the absence of maps did not
help) and no attempt was made to open a front in the Veneto or to
occupy the Trentino and cut o the Austrians’ principal line of
communication over the Brenner Pass. This failure meant the enemy
forces were able to retreat safely to the powerful group of forts in
the lower Po valley known as the Quadrilateral. When the king
reached Milan (having at the last moment ordered seventy
tricolours, after the Milanese indicated that they did not want to see
Savoy ags in their city), it quickly became apparent that he was
more interested in securing the annexation of Lombardy and the
Veneto than pursuing a war of national liberation. Old dynastic
ambitions were clearly uppermost in his mind, as many democrats
had feared. He cold-shouldered the more radical Milanese patriots,
who had borne the brunt of the ghting, and gave a lukewarm
reception to soldiers arriving from other parts of Italy. And
throughout April he remained almost inactive, allowing the
Austrians to regroup and bring reinforcements down into the
Veneto.
Carlo Alberto’s declaration of war on Austria produced a rush of
excitement in patriotic circles. Exiles hurried back from abroad to
lend their support, and across Italy volunteer units assembled and
set o for Lombardy. There was a great deal of suspicion on the part
of the other Italian rulers about Carlo Alberto’s real ambitions, but
neither Leopold of Tuscany nor Ferdinand of Naples felt strong
enough to resist popular clamourings to go to his aid, and both
dispatched small contingents of regular troops. Even Pius IX
authorized the formation of an expeditionary force. Led by a
Piedmontese general, Giovanni Durando (brother of Giacomo), it
was supposed only to defend the northern part of the Papal States
against a possible Austrian incursion (or an internal revolt) and not
cross the frontier into the Veneto, but Durando and his principal
lieutenant, Massimo d’Azeglio, had higher hopes. They were aware
of how crucial papal support was for the success of the national
cause and were determined to manipulate public opinion to try to
drag Pius into a war, even though there were clear signs that he was
bridling at the prospect of con ict with Austria, a Catholic power.
Durando and d’Azeglio overplayed their hand. As the troops
advanced north from Rome, dressed like crusaders, with crosses
sewn on the front of their uniforms, a series of highly rhetorical
orders of the day (written by d’Azeglio) were released to the press
corralling Pius into the national camp. The rst was bold:
‘Militiamen and soldiers!… The glorious souls of those who fought
at Legnano smile upon you from heaven: the great Pius gives you
the blessing of the Almighty: Italy trusts in your courage… Long live
Pius IX! Long live Italian independence!’12 The second, issued on 5
April after the Piedmontese had crossed into Lombardy, was
reckless, and when Pius read it he was incandescent with fury at its
violent and presumptuous tone:

Soldiers!… We are blessed by the right hand of a great Pope…

[who] has had to recognize that Italy… is condemned by the
government of Austria to pillage, rape, the cruelty of a savage army,
arson, murder and total devastation… The Holy Father has blessed
your swords, which, united now with those of Carlo Alberto, must
move in concord to annihilate the enemies of God, the enemies of
Italy, and those who have insulted Pius IX… and assassinated our
Lombard brothers. Such a war of civilization against barbarism is
accordingly not just a national war but also a supremely Christian
one… Let our battle cry be: GOD WILLS IT!13

Just over three weeks later Pius issued an allocution repudiating the
war: the Pope was the head of all of Christendom, not just Italy, he
said. The hopes of those who had wanted the Italian nation
sanctioned, if not created, by the Church, were irrevocably dashed.

Pius’ defection was a body-blow to the national movement. Many of

the volunteers returned home disconsolately, while the princes
withdrew their support from the war against Austria and
concentrated instead on domestic political problems. In Naples
Ferdinand felt emboldened to ght back against the reformers, and
on 15 May he sent troops into the streets to clash with democrats.
He then dissolved the new parliament and revoked the constitution.
Everywhere from the early summer of 1848 the revolution began to
splinter into local protest movements, with regional rivalries and
economic and social grievances pushing to the fore. Sicily became
obsessed with its old aim of independence from Naples, and turned
its back on the rest of Italy, while in Lombardy mistrust of Carlo
Alberto developed steadily into deep resentment of Piedmont. And
everywhere rural workers agitated for land and lower taxes, while
urban workers went on strike and called for lower rents, shorter
hours and better pay. D’Azeglio, who had been so optimistic at the
start of the year, became increasingly frustrated with his fellow
countrymen: ‘God save Italy, not from foreigners but from
Italians!’14
Carlo Alberto’s plans for creating a north-Italian kingdom under
Piedmontese control took shape slowly in May and June. Despite
profound misgivings, Lombardy, Parma, Modena and the Venetian
mainland all voted with plebiscites in favour of annexation (hoping
thereby for military help). Only Venice held out. Resurrected
memories of former glories encouraged the Venetians, led by the
lawyer Daniele Manin, to dream of independence within an Italian
federation. But by the beginning of July the Austrians were
reasserting control across north-eastern Italy and the Republic of St
Mark had to swallow its pride, accept Piedmontese military support
and agree to be annexed. Three weeks later, after several days of
ghting around Custoza, near Verona, Carlo Alberto’s overstretched
forces were defeated by the Austrians. It was not a major reverse,
but his army was too demoralized to carry on. Carlo Alberto was
frightened that Milan might declare a republic, and he was keen to
fall back on the city as quickly as possible. The only military bright
spot that summer came with Giuseppe Garibaldi, who had arrived in
Italy from South America at the end of June aboard the aptly named
Hope, fourteen years after being sentenced to death. He enjoyed
some success against the Austrians around Lake Maggiore at the
head of a column of volunteers (Carlo Alberto would not allow such
a dangerous man to ght alongside the regular Piedmontese troops)
before taking refuge across the border in Switzerland.
The Pope’s allocution and now Carlo Alberto’s defeat took the
wind out of the moderates’ sails, and in the last months of 1848 the
initiative passed to the democrats. In other parts of Europe, though,
the tide of revolution was owing in the opposite direction, as
disorder in the towns and countryside in the summer of 1848
frightened middle-class liberals and pushed them into the arms of
the conservatives, who did not hesitate to suppress the working-
class movements brutally. As a result the drift towards
republicanism in Italy was out of kilter with events elsewhere, and
any hopes that the democrats might have had of securing foreign
support for Italian unity proved illusory. In Tuscany a wave of riots
and demonstrations in the early autumn led Giuseppe Montanelli to
call for an Italian constituent assembly (the people had so far fought
‘as Piedmontese, Tuscans, Neapolitans and Romans, not as
Italians’);15 and in late October he and the writer Guerrazzi were
carried to power at the head of a radical government. In Rome Pius
tried to keep the radicals at bay by appointing as his chief minister
Pellegrino Rossi, a liberal law professor of international distinction;
but on 15 November Rossi was assassinated, a knife thrust in his
carotid artery as he entered the parliament building for the rst
session of a new Chamber. A few days later Pius slipped out of the
Quirinal Palace disguised as a priest and ed to Gaeta, leaving the
way open for Mazzini and all the most passionate Italian patriots to
ock to the Eternal City. On 9 February a newly elected constituent
assembly proclaimed the formation of the Roman Republic and with
it the end of the temporal power of the Pope.

In Turin the upsurge of republicanism in central Italy was looked on

with horror. Gioberti, who had become prime minister in December,
hoped to salvage his dreams of an Italian federation by invading
Tuscany and Rome, restoring Pius and Leopold (who had ed his
capital just before the Roman Republic was declared) and then
waging a united war of independence against Austria. But Carlo
Alberto, who had never had much time for such grandiose national
programmes, wanted to concentrate instead on recovering
Lombardy – which he had abandoned altogether the previous
summer after deciding it was best to sign an armistice with the
Austrians and return to Piedmont – and towards the end of February
he dismissed Gioberti, replaced him with a nondescript general, and
made ready to resume hostilities and advance again on Milan.
For the leading moderate, d’Azeglio, the victory of the
republicans in central Italy was yet another sign of the democrats’
total lack of reality. Mazzini’s ideas, he said in a pamphlet published
towards the end of 1848, were typical of an exile who had no grasp
of the appalling reality of the situation on the ground.16 Republics
were for politically mature peoples with an overwhelming sense of
the public good and a deep respect for the law. For 90 per cent of
Italians politics meant at best either the Pope and the Austrians or
Freemasonry and the Carbonari, and until the country had been
through a profound process of moral and civil education it was
madness to think of entrusting the nation to ‘the people’. How much
patriotism was there in a country that could produce only 50,000
volunteers in a population of 25 million?17 ‘We need to change
ourselves… extricate ourselves from the mud in which we are
drowning, escape from our current profound ignorance of political
a airs, become, for God’s sake, a people with qualities, with good
qualities and virtues, and not a degraded, despised race, made the
laughing stock of the civilized world, as sadly we are!’18
 On 20 March Carlo Alberto resumed the war with Austria, but
most of his troops were su ering from severe demoralization,
unconvinced of the merits of the campaign and mindful of the
disasters of the previous year, when they had been beaten by the
Austrians and treated by the Lombard population as foreign
invaders. Nor did the king’s decision to entrust overall command to
a Polish general called Chrzanowski inspire con dence:
Chrzanowski’s knowledge of the terrain was almost as bad as his
Italian (and his eyesight). On 23 March, after a day of heavy
ghting around Novara, the Piedmontese were defeated by well-
ordered Austrian forces under General Radetzky. When it was clear
that the day was lost Carlo Alberto threw himself into the thick of
the ghting hoping to be killed. He had no luck, and later that
evening he abdicated in favour of his son, Victor Emmanuel, and set
o for exile in Portugal, where he died four months later in a villa
in Porto. Meanwhile in Genoa news of the defeat at Novara led to
fears of an imminent Austrian attack, and egged on by republicans
the city erupted into a full-scale revolt at the beginning of April. A
leading Piedmontese general (and future prime minister of Italy),
Alfonso Lamarmora, arrived swiftly with three columns of troops,
and perhaps feeling the need for some success after the humiliation
of Novara bombarded the city into submission. For thirty-six hours
the soldiers were allowed to ransack the city and rape the local
women almost at will.19 As Lamarmora marched into the Ligurian
capital with his men the Genoese retreated behind bolted doors and
windows as a mark of protest.
Everywhere in Italy (and Europe) the momentum of revolution
was dying out. After reasserting control in Naples, King Ferdinand
had dispatched an army to Sicily to bring the island to heel. Messina
had been captured after a particularly bloody siege early in
September. In Palermo the moderate leaders had done very little to
prepare to defend the revolution militarily, vainly imagining that
Britain or France would intervene at the last moment to save them
from the wrath of the Neapolitans. They had also, like Carlo
Alberto, appointed a Polish commanderin-chief, hoping thereby to
avoid disputes between rival Sicilian o cers. But by the middle of
April, Bourbon troops were in control almost everywhere in the
island. In Tuscany the triumph of the democrats had proved short-
lived. Leopold’s ight from Florence had been followed by loyalist
peasant risings and growing fears among the middle classes of social
unrest, and the calls of Montanelli and his supporters for a republic
and unity with Rome were rejected. On 12 April the moderates
invited Leopold back; and Leopold promptly asked the Austrians to
help him restore order. They obliged. The only vestiges of
revolution were in Venice – where the Republic of St Mark under
Daniele Manin held out resolutely against the Austrians until 24
August – and in Rome.

The brief but brilliant existence of the Roman Republic in the spring
and summer of 1849 ensured that Mazzini and the democrats
emerged from the year of revolutions with considerable credit. As in
Venice, and also brie y in Brescia and Palermo, the determined
resistance of the local population against the counter-revolutionary
armies helped to sanctify the forces of the left and ensure they were
given an honourable place at the table of the international working-
class movement. In the 1850s many Italian exiles in London and
Paris were viewed with a measure of benevolence that they had not
previously received. The martial exploits of the democrats also
served to allay the old cliché that Italians could not ght. As a
leading gure of the Roman Republic said to Carlo Cattaneo: ‘[T]he
royal armies are weak… It is we, and not Carlo Alberto’s men, who
have cancelled out those sinister words: Les italiens ne se battent
pas.’20 More troublingly, though, the Roman Republic gave the myth
of Rome – a myth which both the neo-Guelphs and Mazzini had
been trying with some success to harness to the national question –
a powerful new momentum. Henceforward it would be almost
impossible to separate Italian uni cation from the idea of the ‘new
Rome’, with all its accompanying rhetoric of messianic regeneration
and imperial glory.
 And this rhetoric could not fail to move audiences deeply imbued
with classical culture. Even those of quite modest learning had a
mental landscape peopled with ancient heroes – the Horatii, the
Scipios, the Gracchi – to whom they could feel heirs, and whose
robust civic virtues o ered a powerful template for political thought
and action. For Giuseppe Garibaldi, who told the enthusiastic
crowds that turned out to greet him on his arrival in the Eternal City
on 12 December 1848 that he had never, during all his time in
South America, ‘given up hope of kissing [the] august relics of
ancient Rome’,21 the aim of Italy’s Risorgimento was to ‘rejuvenate’
the nation and restore it to ‘the primitive era of Roman life’.22 And
it was Rome even more than the American or French revolutions
that led him to believe, like many democrats, in the need for a
dictatorship to accompany the national revolution. Indeed the rule
of a single man of great strength and virtue, like Cincinnatus or
Andrea Doria, brought in to help the country through a time of
acute crisis, was ‘the most glorious institution that had ever existed
in Italy’. And given the moral decadence pervading Italian society
after centuries of corruption he was rmly of the opinion that a
dictatorship would be needed for a long time before any kind of
parliamentary government could be risked.23
The Roman Republic was inaugurated amid huge emotional
excitement. On 27 January, Verdi conducted the premiere of his
new opera, The Battle of Legnano, in the Teatro Argentina. From its
stirring opening chorus (‘Long live Italy! A sacred pact binds all its
sons’) to its pathos-soaked nal scene, in which the mortally
wounded hero, who has personally slain Frederick Barbarossa in
combat and thereby ensured Italy’s liberation from the ‘barbarians’,
kisses the tricolour and dies to the strains of a Te Deum, the work
was rapturously received. A soldier sitting in the fourth tier was so
overcome at the end of Act Three that he ung his sword, coat and
epaulettes onto the stage, along with all the chairs in his box.24
Verdi (who had hurried from Paris specially for the occasion – and
returned there almost immediately afterwards) had to take twenty
curtain calls. A few days later, following extraordinary elections in
which 250,000 people had turned out to vote, the rst session of the
constituent assembly was held. In his inaugural address the veteran
republican Carlo Armellini reminded the deputies of the huge
weight of historical expectation that lay upon their shoulders as
they prepared to create a new Italy, the Italy of ‘the people’: ‘You
are sitting between the tombs of two great epochs. On one side are
the ruins of imperial Italy, on the other the ruins of papal Italy; it is
up to you to build a new edi ce upon those ruins.’25
The Roman Republic was a remarkable experiment in democratic
government – though the fact that Austria, Spain, Naples and soon
France all responded to the Pope’s appeal for help by sending troops
against it led in March to the establishment of a dictatorial (and
suitably classical) ‘triumvirate’ for the duration of what was rather
euphemistically called ‘the war of independence’. The most
authoritative of the triumvirs was Mazzini, and to the surprise of
many he wielded power with tact and moderation, earning
widespread respect and admiration, not least among foreign
observers. The death penalty, censorship and tari s were all
abolished, and during the spring and summer a highly progressive
constitution was drawn up which envisaged a democratic form of
parliamentary government, based on universal su rage and the
principles of liberty, fraternity and equality and committed to the
‘improvement of the material and moral conditions of citizens’. But
such radicalism did not stretch, as had been widely feared, to
attacks on the Church. Indeed everything possible was done to
guarantee the safety and independence of Roman Catholicism: there
was even an explicit ban on wood from confessionals being used in
the construction of barricades.26
But it was the defence of the Roman Republic that did most to
capture the imagination of contemporaries. From late April to early
July some of the best-known patriots of the Risorgimento –
Garibaldi, Pisacane, Bixio, Bertani, Medici, Nicotera, Sa ,
Belgioioso – took part in a desperate struggle against 40,000 French
troops sent to Rome by Louis Napoleon, the new president of the
Second Republic, in a cynical gesture to win over Catholic opinion
at home. Several thousand patriots lost their lives in the ghting,
among them the young poet Go redo Mameli, whose fervent wish it
had always been that Italians would learn to die as martyrs for their
nation (it had horri ed him to think that just a few thousand
Italians had been killed in all the wars of independence, ‘less than
Napoleon Bonaparte sacri ced in one day to win a battle’).27 But the
odds were heavily stacked against the Republic, and on 2 July, with
the French poised to enter the city, Garibaldi summoned his
remaining troops to St Peter’s Square and called on those who
wished to continue the struggle to follow him into the countryside,
where they might win the support of the rural masses: ‘I can o er
neither pay, nor shelter, nor food. I o er hunger, thirst, forced
marches, battles and death.’ Swords were brandished de antly, and
there were cries of ‘We will all come! You are Italy! Long live
Garibaldi!’ That evening a column of over 4,000 men slipped out of
Rome and headed north into the hills of Tuscany and the Marche;
but the peasantry showed no desire to ght for a Roman Republic,
let alone for Italy, and by the end of the month most of the
volunteers had grown disheartened, and they melted away.

Amid the wreckage of defeat the memory of those euphoric days

early in 1848 when it looked as if Italy might arise like some
glorious new Venus from the seemingly unstoppable ood of
patriotism was almost too painful to bear. ‘How marvellous to
behold those legions of volunteers,’ recalled Giuseppe Montanelli of
the time when he set o in March to ght the Austrians, ‘in which
doctors, lawyers, artisans, nobles, rich men, poor men, priests,
masters and servants marched together with a common cult of Italy!
O what joy to feel ourselves at last warriors of Italy!’28 But the great
hopes had faded, shattered by a papal allocution, military defeat,
foreign indi erence and hostility, rifts between moderates and
democrats, and regional rivalries. Searching for a metaphor of Italy
that would embody the feelings of disappointment experienced by
many patriots after 1848–9, Francesco Hayez lighted on the image
of a sensuous girl with long dark hair, sitting, slightly slumped, in
an upright chair, gazing out at the viewer with a brooding, almost
accusatory, expression. As with earlier revolutionary depictions of
the nation and liberty, her white dress was pulled down o her
shoulder to reveal a breast. But this was no con dent mother gure
ready to lead her sons on to victory. This was a woman who had
been abused, perhaps violated: her dress was dishevelled, and her
face blotched with patches of dark shadow, like bruises. In her lap
was a large book. When it was exhibited at the Brera in 1850 the
picture was entitled Meditation on the Old and New Testament. But a
close inspection of the spine of the volume shows that it is in fact a
‘History of Italy’. Hayez certainly wished to imply that the cause of
independence was a holy and God-given mission. But as an avid
student of Italian history was he also o ering a somewhat
melancholy re ection on the relationship between Italy’s current
desperate plight and the huge legacy of its past?
9

Piedmont and Cavour

Even in Piedmont, di erence of language is our great di culty: our three

native languages are French, Piedmontese and Genoese. Of these, French
alone is generally intelligible. A speech in Genoese or Piedmontese would
be unintelligible to two-thirds of the Assembly. Except the Savoyards,
who sometimes use French, the deputies all speak in Italian; but this is to
them a dead language, in which they have never been accustomed even
to converse. They scarcely ever, therefore, can use it with spirit or even
uency. Cavour is naturally a good speaker, but in Italian he is
embarrassed. You see that he is translating; so is Azeglio; so are they
all… Marchioness Arconati to Nassau William Senior, 6 November
1850

This is to tell you that I have enrolled the very beautiful Countess of
Castiglione in our diplomatic ranks and invited her to irt with and,
should it be expedient, seduce the Emperor [Napoleon III]. If she
succeeds, I have promised to give her father the post of Secretary in Saint
Petersburg.

Count Camillo Cavour to Luigi Cibrario, 22 February 1856

If we catch Mazzini, I hope he will be condemned to death and hanged in

Piazza Acquasola…                                 Count Camillo Cavour, 8
July 1857
CONSTITUTIONAL LEADERSHIP: PIEDMONT

As the revolutionary movement collapsed, everywhere in Italy

except in Piedmont the clocks were turned back. The liberal reforms
of 1847–8 had not brought the princes the respect and support of
their subjects they had hoped. Instead the oodgates had been
opened and a dangerous tide of social and political unrest
unleashed. In Lombardy press censorship was now tightened and a
huge collective ne of 20 million lire was imposed on those leading
families who were thought to have favoured the revolution, while in
the lower Po valley hundreds of peasants were hauled before
military tribunals and condemned to death for crimes against
property or persons. In Naples the liberals were harshly persecuted:
a number of gures of international standing, including Carlo Poerio
and Luigi Settembrini, were shipped to penal islands, clapped in
irons, while anyone suspected of being unsympathetic to the
Bourbons was subjected to police surveillance and debarred from
public posts and some professions. Even in Tuscany there was no
return to former tolerance. Guerrazzi was sentenced to hard labour
(commuted to exile), press freedom was curtailed and centralization
reinforced. In the Papal States, Pius IX had had his ngers badly
burned by his irtation with liberalism: never again would he have
any truck with such godlessness. But one or two things did survive
from the Roman Republic. The plan agreed by the constituent
assembly in April 1849 to adorn the Pincio gardens with busts of
great men was allowed to go ahead, but only after Machiavelli had
been recut as Archimedes, Leopardi as Zeus, Savonarola as Pietro
Aretino, and Gracchus as Vitruvius.1
In Piedmont the new king, Victor Emmanuel II – a blu , coarse-
mannered man, with a passion for the army and wild boar (and
women) but none for politics – was eager after his father’s defeat at
Novara to revoke the constitution and return to the absolutist
traditions of his forebears, but the Austrians were worried that this
might strengthen the liberals and even invite the intervention of
republican France. They therefore made him keep it. As it was, the
constitution (Statuto), which in 1861 became the legal basis of
united Italy, was a remarkably backward-looking charter that made
only minimal concessions to the principle of popular sovereignty. In
the preamble it was described as ‘the fundamental law of the
monarchy’, not the nation (indeed there was only one eeting
reference to ‘nation’ in the whole text),2 and throughout the
monarch’s powers were tightly protected. The king was head of state
and of the executive, and appointed his own ministers (who
answered to him, not parliament). He was commander of the army,
and foreign policy was his exclusive domain. Justice was said, in an
extraordinarily anachronistic phrase, to ‘emanate from the king’: he
chose the judges and had the right to overturn sentences he did not
like. The upper chamber, or Senate, was appointed by the king, and
while the Chamber of Deputies was elected (with a very limited
su rage), it was not at all clear how much power it really had: the
king could prorogue or dissolve it at will, and no law could be
promulgated without his consent. On paper the Statuto thus gave the
Piedmontese monarch the possibility to dominate and control
almost any aspect of the state that he wanted.
Nevertheless Piedmont was the only state in Italy that was to
preserve any form of constitutional government after 1849, and this
was one important reason why in the course of the next decade it
was able to present itself, both at home and abroad, as the logical
standard bearer of the national question. The fact, too, that
hundreds of exiles from all parts of the peninsula found a home here
in the 1850s also helped its growing identi cation with the cause of
Italy. Though many of these exiles struggled to make ends meet,
were often subjected to police surveillance and even from time to
time expulsion, some established themselves as respected journalists
and academics and used their positions to encourage debate about
uni cation. They also provided an important source of
misinformation. Very few Piedmontese had rst-hand knowledge of
central or southern Italy, and refugees like the Sicilian Giuseppe La
Farina were able to spread sometimes deliberately in ated accounts
of the political, economic or moral conditions of their native
provinces, and be believed. As Cavour, who came to rely very
heavily on La Farina for advice about southern Italy in the later
1850s, confessed, he knew considerably more about England than
he ever did about Naples.3
In national terms, though, Piedmont was not an obvious leader.
As Vincenzo Gioberti confessed, this small kingdom straddling the
Alps was the least Italian region in the peninsula. It had intensely
insular traditions and the educated classes regarded it as a nation in
its own right. But after the collapse of the neo-Guelph dream
Gioberti was forced to admit that there was now no other Italian
state that could spearhead the national movement. In his last major
work, On the Civil Renewal of Italy, published in 1851, he ascribed
the failures of 1848–9 to what he called the ‘puritanism’ of the
democrats and the weakness of national sentiment in Italy. But he
also believed that Italy needed to recover its martial spirit and,
though Piedmont was deeply provincial, it could at least claim to be
ethnically virile, as the etymology of Turin – from the Latin taurini
or ‘bull people’ – suggested. It was thus Piedmont’s role to furnish
Italy with military leadership.4 However, Rome was also needed for
moral hegemony; but if the papacy were to ful l this role it would
have to be reformed and free itself of the burden of the Papal States.
The Vatican did not take very kindly to this suggestion and placed
Gioberti on the Index of proscribed authors. A year later he died in
somewhat mysterious circumstances, in his room in Paris, where he
had been living in self-imposed exile, copies of the Imitation of Christ
and Manzoni’s I promessi sposi (The Betrothed) on his bed – in ironic
more than hopeful juxtaposition, now.
THE DEMOCRATS DIVIDED

While Piedmont had constitutional government (and an army), its

ambivalent behaviour during the year of revolutions still rankled
with the democrats, and for several years after 1849 many
continued to believe in the possibility of bringing about unity and
independence through a popular insurrection. But, as before, the
problem was how to persuade the masses to act. ‘Italy’ meant
nothing still to the great majority of peasants, but the social unrest
that had been such a marked feature of the risings in 1848–9 –
abroad as well as in Italy – showed that issues of land ownership,
taxation and wages could be used to galvanize the poor in both
town and countryside. Accordingly a number of leading democrats
peeled away from Mazzini after 1849 and struck out in the direction
of socialism. They included Montanelli and Pisacane and also the
Milanese Giuseppe Ferrari, who tried to persuade his fellow
Lombard Carlo Cattaneo to assume leadership of the democratic
movement. But Cattaneo preferred to spend his time in exile in
Switzerland quietly studying and writing, and declined – to the
considerable detriment of the cause of federalism, which in the
1850s steadily lost ground as a practical alternative to the
Mazzinian or Piedmontese options.
Another fault-line that became more marked within the
democrats after 1849 was over the relative merits of north and
south. In Sicily and in mainland regions such as Calabria, Basilicata
and Campania, there were enormous social and factional tensions
relating to land ownership, local resources and the control of
communal government, and with the appropriate leadership and
good organization it was widely believed that these could be
converted into raw revolutionary energy. In Sicily there was the
bonus of the paramilitary peasant squads, led by local ma osi, from
the hill-towns around Palermo, that could be mobilized in times of
crisis. Mazzini was sceptical about using the south as a springboard
for uni cation: the impulse to action had to be pure, not sordidly
materialistic; but for those of a more pragmatic cast of mind such as
Nicola Fabrizi or Pisacane the ‘southern initiative’ was highly
appealing. One important incidental advantage was that it would
allow the democrats to dominate the course of events without too
much risk of the Piedmontese at the other end of the peninsula
intervening to stop them. Already in 1850 the idea that a movement
for national uni cation might be started by sending an
expeditionary force of a thousand men led by a charismatic soldier
such as Garibaldi to link up with a peasant rising in western Sicily –
the winning formula in 1860 – was being widely discussed.5
The divisions within the democratic camp were to deepen sharply
in the course of the 1850s, but for a while the glorious after-glow of
the defence of Rome and Venice, together with the fact that France
was still a republic – and might yet intervene in Italy against the
Austrians – helped to keep the revolutionaries in a buoyant mood.
But a series of disastrous local risings in Sicily, Lombardy – Venetia
and elsewhere, followed by sweeping arrests and executions,
dampened their hopes, while the dream of French support died with
Louis Napoleon’s coup d’état of December 1851 and his proclamation
of an Empire the next year. Recriminations began to y in
democratic circles, and accusations of incompetence, of selling out
to the moderates or of betrayal to the police became commonplace.
The appalling poverty and insecurity in which so many of the
émigrés lived added to the pressures and poisoned the atmosphere
further. Exile could make Italy a mirage, a promised land of concord
and brotherly love; but the day-to-day reality of living with fellow
refugees was often a nightmare. As one émigré recalled: ‘Sons of the
same land, embittered by physical hardships, do not tolerate one
another. On the contrary they come to blows, they tear one another
apart, they detest one another with a vengeance.’6
Mazzini tried to keep the various democratic factions together.
For eighteen months after the fall of the Roman Republic he
remained in the relative safety of Switzerland, with occasional
forays to France and England, corresponding with fellow exiles and
preparing for what he believed would soon be a fresh round of
revolutions. In the autumn of 1850 he announced the formation of
an Italian National Committee, based in London and a liated to
another organization that he had set up with French, German and
Polish friends called the Central Committee for Democratic Europe,
through which he hoped to coordinate the activities of the exile
groups around Europe. Its programme was deliberately vague, with
no mention of republicanism, but despite this there was a great deal
of reluctance among many Italian democrats to throw in their lot
with a man who was widely seen as having an unhealthy obsession
with religion and a dangerous proclivity to dogmatism. Former
colleagues referred to him as ‘a new Mahomet’ or the ‘tsar of
democrats’,7 while the French writer George Sand, who had been in
close correspondence with him for several years, found his
intolerance of socialism too much to bear and denounced him as
having ‘the arrogance of a pope who proclaims: “Outside of my
Church, there is no salvation!” ’8
The Italian National Committee soon found itself up against a
rival, the Latin Committee, which favoured a federal republic in
Italy under French patronage, and Mazzini had to acknowledge that
his moral hold over the democratic movement was limited. Partly
for this reason, though, he pushed ahead with plans for
insurrections: blood, he always believed, was one of the best ways
of creating fraternal bonds. From his base in London he watched as
the Austrian authorities tortured and executed dozens of liberal
patriots, including priests, while reports suggested that 20,000
political prisoners were languishing in gaols in Naples and another
4,000 in Tuscany. In the Papal States the guillotine (a curious
concession by the Church to modernity) was used to impress upon
the Pope’s subjects the wages of political sin (the poet Robert
Browning was traumatized one day out riding near the Circus
Maximus when he came upon a still bleeding decapitated corpse).9
Such levels of persecution suggested to Mazzini that Italians would
be seething with anger and ready to rise up, and in this misguided
belief he gave his support to an insurrection planned to break out in
Milan on a Sunday in carnival in February 1853 and then spread
across Italy. It proved a asco: a handful of Austrian soldiers were
killed in the rst exchanges, but the ringleaders were swiftly
rounded up and sixteen executed.
The Milanese disaster did as much damage to Mazzini’s credibility
in Italian revolutionary circles as the Savoy invasion nearly twenty
years earlier, and many of his surviving followers now considered
the time had come to abandon him for good. In England, though, his
reputation remained remarkably high, at least for a while. He had
returned to London early in 1851 to great acclaim after his exploits
as triumvir in the Roman Republic, and found a new enthusiasm for
Italian independence among the British public. The appearance in
the late spring of William Gladstone’s searing letters to Lord
Aberdeen, in which the brilliant young conservative politician
denounced the Bourbon administration as ‘the negation of God
erected into a system of government’, created a sensation at home
and abroad, and added hugely to public support for Italy. Mazzini
took advantage of this climate by setting up a society called the
Friends of Italy to campaign for Italian independence. It attracted
800 members from all over Britain (200 from Scotland), and its
central committee contained several leading politicians and
newspaper editors and a host of eminent intellectual gures,
including the poets Walter Savage Landor and Leigh Hunt, Samuel
Smiles, Professor Francis Newman (the brother of the cardinal), the
historian James Froude and the writer George Henry Lewes (the
future partner of George Eliot, herself an enormous admirer of
Mazzini).10 As much as £20,000 was raised through subscription
funds in less than two years, with a large part of it coming from
ordinary factory workers and miners who were being encouraged at
this time by their radical leaders to identify their own political
aspirations with the emancipation of the oppressed peoples of
Europe in countries such as Poland, Hungary and Italy.11
Mazzini’s continued dabbling in ill-fated insurrectionary
movements, even after the Milan asco, his public opposition to the
Crimean War, and the emergence of Piedmont as the lodestar of the
Italian national movement under its energetic and Anglophile new
prime minister, Cavour, led to a drop in his popularity in Britain
from 1854. But he still felt more at home in England, ‘my second
fatherland’, than he ever did in Italy. In addition to pet projects such
as the school he had founded in Holborn in 1841 to provide free
education for the hundreds of poor Italian children who regularly
roamed the streets of London with barrel organs or trained mice,
begging, he enjoyed the unswerving friendship of what he referred
to as his ‘clan’, a close-knit group of devoted supporters, many of
them high-minded middle-class women, who met regularly at a
house in Muswell Hill to dine, talk, sing and play chess. When not
with this ‘family of angels’, he passed much of his time in small
rented rooms in west London surrounded by piles of papers and
books, writing, a cigar constantly in his mouth, and small birds
ying freely about his head (he could not bear to see them caged).12
CAVOUR

Far from Italy, amid the fog of London (which he loved),13 Mazzini
could keep his patriotic dreams alive, but for many of those who
had been caught up in the euphoria of the 1840s the chill encounter
with reality in the early 1850s brought a sense of disquiet, guilt and
even revulsion at the ease with which they had been deluded. Some,
like the exiled Milanese economist Pietro Maestri, turned to hard-
edged empirical scholarship in a bid to generate a more temperate
outlook: statistics as an antidote to rhetoric. There was a dangerous
chasm between real and imagined Italy, he thought:
[I]n every age Italians were condemned to have only an ideal fatherland. And that
separation between idea and history, theory and social reality, has given Italian thought an
anomalous and exceptional character. It is speculative and vague, lacks solid ground
beneath its feet, and avoids the lessons and restraints of facts. It will not allow caution of
any kind to intrude on the idealized destinies of the fatherland, and, as reality hurtles on

its fateful path, hope turns to disillusionment, utopia to cursing.14

After the collapse of such intense hopes, many patriots found

themselves wondering if history was not more powerful than they
had previously thought, and as so often in the past (and future) they
were inclined to see the root cause of their political problems as
lying in the character of their fellow countrymen. D’Azeglio
lamented bitterly to a friend in the spring of 1849 that the events of
the previous year had convinced him that 20 per cent of Italians
were ‘headstrong, roguish imbeciles’ and the remaining 80 per cent
were ‘good-natured, timid imbeciles’, and that together they had got
what they deserved.15 Another leading liberal, Michele Amari,
confessed ruefully in 1853 that he had been under the impression
until quite recently that it was just the Neapolitans and Sicilians
who were ‘in nitely more ckle and quarrelsome than the ancient
Greeks’, but his experience of living in exile with northerners as well
as southerners had persuaded him that history was right, and that
the problem lay with Italians in general (‘as we get closer to the
Alps the snow does not cure us of that nervous instability’).16 For
both these men the idea that Italy could trust to its own native
energies and ‘make itself’ seemed wholly unrealistic. And many
democrats were inclined to agree with them. A decade earlier Amari
had looked to the Sicilian Vespers as a model for political
redemption, but his interest was now in the tenth and eleventh
centuries, when Sicily had been turned into one of the most
prosperous and civilized regions in Europe under the enlightened
rule of the Arabs. Virtue, it seemed, owed from good (even
foreign) government rather than from self-determination.
In 1853 Amari was beginning to pin his hopes of national
uni cation on what many regarded as the least Italian state in the
peninsula, Piedmont; and Piedmont now had as its prime minister a
man who felt more at home in Paris, London and Geneva than he
did in the austere and claustrophobic surrounds of his native Turin.
Camillo Benso di Cavour was born in 1810 into an aristocratic
family. His father, Michele, had done well during the years of direct
French rule, rising to become Chamberlain to the governor-general
of north-western Italy, Napoleon’s brother-in-law, Camillo Borghese
(after whom Cavour was named). His mother, Adèle, was Swiss, and
the close ties that Cavour enjoyed with his relatives in Geneva were
to be of enormous importance in his cultural and political
development. As a young man Cavour served as an engineer in the
army, supervising the construction of forts on the French border, but
he was too much of an individualist, and too intellectual, to relish
military life, and much of his spare time was spent studying
economics (like Napoleon, he was an extremely good
mathematician), reading Guizot, Constant, Bentham and other
modern European writers, and gambling: all his life he was to
remain a passionate card-player and was never happier than when
sitting at a green baize-covered table enjoying what he called the
crispation – thrill – (his rst language was French, and he struggled
to write and sometimes even to speak Italian) of games such as go o
and whist.17
After extensive travels in Britain and France, which left him with
an abiding fascination with ‘progress’ (he loved looking around
factories, gas works, prisons and schools) and a conviction that the
best way to advance the cause of civilization was by steering a
middle path between political extremes (the juste milieu), he
returned to Piedmont, where he ran the family estates, helped
launch an Agricultural Association and a Whist Club and wrote
occasional learned articles. Only in the mid 1840s, following the
furore generated by Gioberti’s and Balbo’s books on the national
question, did he begin to get involved in active politics. Cavour does
not himself appear to have had any clear thoughts or even strong
feelings at this time about ‘Italy’. In later life he claimed to have
dreamed as a young man of a ‘great, glorious and powerful Italy’,18
but his pragmatic cast of mind always led him to distinguish sharply
between what was realistic and what was not, and unity, certainly
of a Mazzinian kind, was in his view no more than a dangerous
fantasy. He also, like most Piedmontese aristocrats, felt intensely
loyal to his own state and regularly spoke of Piedmont as a nation
and hankered after what he called its ‘aggrandisement’. What chie y
drew him into politics in 1845–7 was his sense as a gambler that a
major game was about to be played out in Italy, and probably also
in Europe as a whole, with high stakes and potentially enormous
winnings and losses. He did not want to be a mere spectator.
Piedmont lost in 1848–9, but not calamitously; and though
Cavour was devastated by the defeat at Novara, railing in his anger
at everyone from the king and his Polish commander to the rank-
and- le troops and the democrats, he had the consolation that the
republicans failed to capitalize on the disaster and also that the
constitution was kept by Victor Emmanuel II and with it
parliamentary government. Cavour had been elected to the Chamber
of Deputies in Turin in June 1848, sitting on the right with the
conservatives, and had quickly proved a very skilful debater. In
October 1850 the prime minister, Massimo d’Azeglio, rewarded him
with the portfolio of Trade and Agriculture and soon afterwards
with that of Finance, and Cavour energetically set about stimulating
the Piedmontese economy by lowering tari s and drawing up
commercial treaties. He also began manoeuvring against d’Azeglio,
who had little zest for politics and was seriously hampered by a
bullet wound in his knee he had sustained in 1848. Cavour aimed to
build a new centrist coalition that would provide a more stable
platform for reforms than the present parliamentary con guration
and prevent Piedmontese politics from careering to the far right or
the far left. Louis Napoleon’s coup d’état in December 1851 greatly
allayed the threat from the republicans, but it strengthened the hand
of the reactionaries – a very powerful group – and a few weeks later
Cavour revealed to his astonished cabinet colleagues that he had
made an alliance (connubio) with the centre-left. The underhand
character of this move caused ructions, and Cavour was forced to
resign. But he knew he was too talented to be overlooked for long.
He was right: in the autumn d’Azeglio had to step down and
magnanimously recommended to the king that Cavour should
succeed him.
Before he became prime minister Cavour went on a trip to Britain
and France. He had toyed with the idea of travelling around Italy,
but in the end considered he had more to gain by visiting the two
countries that he loved and admired most. One point of interest to
him was to get some sense of what the French President, Louis
Napoleon, was planning to do: was it possible to be a nephew of the
great Napoleon and not to have grandiose ambitions in Europe? In
England d’Azeglio’s success in keeping the constitutional experiment
going in Turin had won Piedmont widespread respect, and Cavour
had little di culty in securing audiences with the leading
politicians of the day, including Palmerston, Gladstone, Disraeli and
Clarendon. He went on a tour of the Woolwich Arsenal, inspected
the London slums, and travelled up to Scotland with a volume of
Walter Scott to see the lochs and mountains and experience
‘romantic emotions’.19 His enthusiasm for Britain was greater than
ever, and he thought of emigrating to London if the reactionaries
came to power in Turin. Paris he found a little disappointing, but he
saw Gioberti and Manin and had meetings with some of the key
gures in the new administration; and on 5 September he went to
Saint-Cloud to talk to the French President. With his reserved and
languid manner and hooded eyes Louis Napoleon was notoriously
inscrutable, but he revealed enough for Cavour to realize that if
Piedmont played its cards right it could win the support of France in
redrawing the map of Italy at Austria’s expense. As Cavour wrote
excitedly to a friend: ‘Our destiny depends above all on France.
Whether we like it or not, we have to be her partner in the great
game that sooner or later must be played in Europe.’20
When, in December, Louis Napoleon proclaimed himself
Napoleon III, Emperor of the French, there was inevitable
nervousness in London, Berlin and above all Vienna about the
prospects for the balance of power in Europe. For Cavour, though,
France was henceforth to be one of the twin pillars on which his
domination of Piedmontese politics was built – the other being the
centrist coalition that he had constructed in parliament. Victor
Emmanuel had little liking for his headstrong and energetic prime
minister, who dressed, as he put it, ‘like a lawyer’, regularly threw
ts, hurling abuse and kicking furniture, and who in 1854–5 pushed
through a bill to nationalize Church property that led to the king’s
excommunication by the Pope (particularly embarrassing for a
monarch one of whose proud titles was King of Jerusalem). But
Victor Emmanuel was prepared to endure almost any humiliation in
return for the prospect of making good on the eld of battle the
damage done to the prestige of the House of Savoy by the defeats at
Custoza and Novara (though he came perilously close to ghting a
duel with his prime minister when Cavour impugned his masculinity
by claiming his long-standing mistress was engaging in orgies with
other men).
The rst opportunity for war came in 1854. Russia had given
Austria a vital helping hand in eastern Europe during the
revolutions of 1848–9, and as a return favour it felt justi ed in
invading the Ottoman provinces of Moldavia and Wallachia
(modern Romania). Russia’s advance westwards towards the
Mediterranean alarmed the British, who saw the Tsarist empire as
the biggest threat to their global power, and in March 1854 Britain
declared war on Russia and dispatched its eet to the Black Sea.
Russia had hoped Britain would be isolated, and so unwilling to act.
But it had miscalculated, for Napoleon III was now on the lookout
for ways of unstitching the Vienna settlement and reckoned that, if
he allied with Britain against Russia, Britain would be obliged to
support France against Austria in western Europe. On the face of it
Piedmont had little to gain by involving itself in the Crimea,
especially when the Austrians agreed, after much prevaricating, to
refrain from going to the aid of Russia in return for a guarantee
from France to preserve the status quo in Italy. But the king was
desperate to prove the valour of his army, and secretly negotiated
with the French behind Cavour’s back to enter the war, forcing
Cavour and his cabinet colleagues to forgo their (considerable)
reservations, defy the hostility of much of parliament, and commit
Piedmont to a campaign in which Austria was, nominally at least,
now their ally.
Cavour had no expectation of any clear gain, but his hope was
that the 18,000 Piedmontese troops would distinguish themselves
su ciently in battle to provide him with a strong bargaining
counter in a future peace conference. Unfortunately General
Lamarmora’s soldiers were sidelined in Russia, and the only
engagement of any note in which they were involved took place on
the Tchernaya river on 16 August, and cost just fourteen lives. Two
thousand others died from cholera during the campaign. Victor
Emmanuel attempted to make amends for this rather desultory state
of a airs by proposing to the French and British that he should take
over as commander-in-chief of all forces in the Crimea, but his o er
was not surprisingly declined. In an alternative, and more realistic,
bid to raise Piedmont’s standing with his allies he visited Paris and
London in the autumn in the company of Cavour. D’Azeglio went
along, too, partly because his re ned patrician bearing was
guaranteed to go down well in courtly circles, and partly, too,
because he could write and speak good Italian and so mitigate the
embarrassment that might be caused by the leading members of a
delegation claiming to represent Italy having a weaker grasp of the
national language than did Gladstone or Lord Russell. The visit went
well, though the king’s brusque manners, coarse sexual remarks and
lack of political tact (‘Austria must be exterminated,’ he told a
terri ed Queen Victoria at a banquet)21 did cause eyebrows to be
raised. Queen Victoria forgave him, and even found his directness
refreshing, attributing his eccentricity, rather condescendingly, to
‘the low level of morality’ in Italy.22
Cavour went to the peace conference in Paris in February 1856
desperately hoping to win some territorial concessions for Piedmont
– Lombardy, perhaps, or the duchies of Modena and Parma – but the
British and the French were not prepared at this juncture to fall out
with the Austrians, and Cavour’s only success (though it was a
considerable one) was to have the Italian question formally
discussed by the delegates after the negotiations had been
concluded. There was some criticism of the Bourbons and of the
situation in the Papal States, but to Cavour’s chagrin not much
more. Before leaving Paris, Cavour had several meetings with
Daniele Manin, the hero of the Venetian Republic, who was fast
emerging as the leading spokesman for those exiled democrats who
had lost faith in a popular insurrection as a means to unify Italy and
were now looking instead towards Piedmont. Cavour said in a letter
that he found Manin ‘a little utopian’ and too concerned with ‘the
idea of Italian unity and other such nonsense’ (a remark that later
had to be expunged from the o cial edition of Cavour’s
correspondence), but he could see how useful the Venetian might be
for channelling Italian patriotic sentiment towards Piedmont –
sentiment that Cavour could then manipulate and use as a further
card in the increasingly strong hand he was accumulating. For his
part Manin remained suspicious of Cavour’s ‘Piedmontese’
ambitions, but he and his friends could see that Cavour might be
useful to them, as well.
 From the spring of 1856 the Italian national question gathered
momentum. A series of forceful letters to the press from Manin and
his friend, the distinguished exile Giorgio Pallavicino-Trivulzio,
denounced Mazzinian conspiracy (‘the theory of the dagger’) and
proclaimed the support of many former republicans for the House of
Savoy provided Victor Emmanuel committed himself unequivocally
‘to the making of Italy and not the aggrandisement of Piedmont’. In
a further attempt to shape public opinion Manin and Pallavicino
launched what became known in 1857 as the Italian National
Society, an organization that aimed to bring together all those who
wanted the ‘uni cation and independence’ of Italy under the
leadership of Piedmont. One of its most important early adherents
was Giuseppe Garibaldi. The Secretary was the pugnacious émigré
Sicilian Giuseppe La Farina, now living in Turin, and it was largely
thanks to his drive that the National Society became a major force
in Italian politics over the next three years, attracting several
thousand members, turning out countless newspaper articles and
pamphlets, and forging links with patriotic groups throughout the
country. Cavour worked closely with La Farina: indeed La Farina
was later to claim (rather improbably: he was prone to serious
exaggeration) that he had a secret meeting with the prime minister
every morning before dawn from September 1856.
The National Society was a major threat to Mazzini, in large
measure because it stole so much of his clothing. The Italian nation
was said to be a sacred entity, ‘an immutable law of nature’, before
which everything, ‘municipalities and provinces, individuals and
sects, traditions and hopes, dynasties and liberties’, had to yield.
Patriotism was a religion, open to everyone (‘no church is closed to
him who recites the symbol of the faith’; whoever enters ‘will nd
on the altar… that sacred image of Italy that he saw on the
pediment’), and Italians had a duty to work and if necessary die for
‘the independence and greatness’ of the fatherland.23 Where the
National Society di ered from Mazzini was in the much more
ruthless approach it took to means and ends. Mazzini hoped to
reconcile faith with freedom: to realize God’s designs through the
spontaneously expressed will of the people. For La Farina, Manin
and Pallavicino such a hope was illusory. Italians were the product
of centuries of division and decadence, and could not bring about
uni cation themselves. Force was needed, which in practice meant
the Piedmontese state and army. And uni cation, the National
Society repeatedly stressed, was fundamental and had to take
precedence over everything else, liberty included, because as history
had repeatedly shown, it was the fragmentation of Italy that had led
to its servile condition and hence all its ills.24
This uncompromising vision not surprisingly found plenty of
supporters even among conservatives in Piedmont, for it o ered a
justi cation for the domination, and even conquest, of the rest of
the peninsula by Turin. But to what extent Cavour himself was
convinced by it is uncertain. Like many northern Italians he
evidently thought that somewhere not far beyond Tuscany lay a
di erent order of civilization, more African than European in
character, and that uniting the corrupt impoverished south with
upper Italy was probably not only unrealistic but also undesirable.
Far better concentrate on creating a compact and homogeneous
state in the north of the country.25 La Farina did his best to
persuade Cavour that the south was less poor than he imagined, and
that the problems bedevilling the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies were
primarily the result of bad government – in other words that with
good Piedmontese rule the south would be restored to the
luxuriance of classical (and Arab) times. Conceivably such
arguments helped to bring Cavour round to the idea of unity in
1860; but if they did, they also encouraged him to see a strong
centralized regime as vital.
With Piedmont very much in the driving seat of the national
movement, Mazzini and his remaining supporters desperately
looked to regain some initiative. Precisely because they suspected
Cavour of having little serious interest in the south, the Kingdom of
the Two Sicilies became their main target from 1856. They were
helped by the fact that King Ferdinand was suddenly looking
exposed, for Russia had long been his close ally, and now, in the
wake of the Crimean War, Britain and France felt free to turn
against him. They urged him to make reforms, and when he refused
they broke o diplomatic relations in October 1856. Napoleon
began pushing the idea of getting his cousin, Lucien Murat, son of
the former king, Joachim Murat, onto the Neapolitan throne. Cavour
could see possible advantages in this move and indicated his support
for the idea (he was spinning an increasingly complex web,
negotiating with the di erent players in the ‘great game’ in ways
that left them uncertain of exactly where they – and indeed he –
stood) – much to the alarm of the members of the National Society
and also of the British government, which did not want a major
extension of French power in the Mediterranean. Indeed it was
partly in a belief that Britain might now support an ‘Italian’
insurrection in the south to forestall the French that Mazzini and his
friends backed plans for a revolution in Sicily (where an abortive
rising broke out near Palermo in November 1856) and Naples.
Cavour, too, had good reasons for encouraging the democrats in
the south – not because he wanted them to succeed, but because a
visible threat from republicans would enhance his negotiating
position as the respectable face of Italian nationalism – and there is
every reason to believe that the disastrous expedition of Carlo
Pisacane in June 1857 was planned and organized in collusion with
the Piedmontese authorities.26 The idea was for Pisacane and a
handful of men to sail from Genoa to Ponza, release the political
prisoners being held on the island, land in southern Campania, stir
up the local peasantry and then descend on Naples, which, in the
meantime, would have risen up. As ever with such ventures, there
were too many things that could go wrong, and Pisacane knew that
the chances of success were slim. But he was determined to act. The
hardship of exile had induced in him, as in many democrats, a
growing sense of desperation; and he believed that the only way the
downtrodden masses would be sparked into life and achieve
economic and political emancipation was if intellectuals abandoned
their ivory towers, mixed with the people and provided them with
resolute leadership. If he failed, he could at least feel he had
provided a heroic example to others.
Pisacane landed at Sapri on 28 June with some forty companions
and 300 prisoners liberated from the island of Ponza; but only a few
of these had turned out to be political prisoners and most of the
others proved to be unreliable and soon deserted. Of the thousand
or more armed men who were supposed to have arrived from Naples
to meet them, there was no sign. The small force marched north,
reading out a proclamation as they went calling for the overthrow of
the tyrant Ferdinand. But they received no support from the local
population. On 1 July they ran into several battalions of government
troops and gendarmes sent to intercept them, and over fty of their
number were killed. Pisacane and his remaining followers ed to
the town of Sanza, and took refuge in a monastery. But here they
were set upon by a furious peasant army, egged on by the local
arch-priest, and a further twenty-seven were murdered. Two dozen
others were arrested. Pisacane, it seems, took his own life.27
It was a fate that the rebels had predicted. Before landing at Sapri
they had issued a declaration saying that if their expedition failed
they would know how to die bravely and ‘follow in the footsteps of
our martyrs’.28 In addition Pisacane had left behind a political
‘testament’, which was released to the press shortly after his death.
In it he declared that the government of Piedmont was no better
than that of Austria and that the unity of Italy could only be
achieved by ‘conspiracies, plots and attempted insurrections’. But
most of the document was a pugnacious and rather ill-tempered
defence of his peculiar political creed (‘I believe in socialism, but in
a socialism di erent from the French systems’).29 Of far greater
value from a patriotic point of view was a poem about the
expedition, ‘The Gleaner’, written towards the end of 1857 by Luigi
Mercantini, which quickly became one of the most popular literary
works of the Risorgimento. In this simple elegiac ballad a peasant
girl standing on the seashore meets ‘the three hundred’(‘they were
young and strong, and now are dead’ – in fact none of the 284 who
eventually stood trial for the rebellion was executed) as they land at
Sapri and watches them kneel and kiss the soil. She goes up to their
handsome young leader, with ‘blue eyes and golden hair’ (Pisacane
was in fact dark; the same mistake was often made about Garibaldi),
takes his hand and asks him where he is going: ‘My sister, I go to die
for my beautiful fatherland.’ She follows the men as they march o
and watches them as they die heroically at the hands of the
gendarmes (the role of the local peasantry is obscured), all the while
praying for their souls.30
10

Unity, 1858–60

The populations of the Provinces of Parma wish to be united with the

Kingdom of Sardinia under the constitutional government of King Victor
Emmanuel II Plebiscite in Parma and Piacenza, August 1859
Yes: 63,107     No:504

Annexation to the constitutional monarchy of King Victor Emmanuel –

or – separate kingdom

Plebiscite in Emilia, March 1860

Annexation: 426,006          Separate: 756

Union with the constitutional monarchy of King Victor Emmanuel, or

separate kingdom

Plebiscite in Tuscany, March 1860

Union: 366,571         Separate: 14,925

The people desires Italy one and indivisible, with Victor Emmanuel,
constitutional king, and his legitimate descendants

Plebiscite in the mainland south, October 1860

Yes: 1,302,064            No: 10,312

The Sicilian people desires Italy one and indivisible, with Victor
Emmanuel, constitutional king, and his legitimate descendants

Plebiscite in Sicily, October 1860

Yes: 432,053               No: 667
Do you wish to be part of the constitutional monarchy of King Victor
Emmanuel II?

Plebiscite in the Marche and Umbria, November 1860

Yes: 232,017       No: 1,520

In practical political terms, the Sapri expedition may have

underlined the futility of insurrection as a method of achieving
uni cation and further convinced many Italian patriots to trust
instead to Piedmont and diplomacy. But the propaganda value of
heroic failure was considerable, and Pisacane’s sacri ce helped to
sanctify the cause of Italy in the eyes of much of the liberal
international community – especially in Britain, where enthusiasm
for Italian independence was fanned by hostility to the Catholic
Church and a belief that Austria had become the epitome of a brutal
and autocratic power. Another desperate gesture by a leading Italian
democrat a few months later raised the moral temperature still
higher. In January 1858 Felice Orsini, a disa ected Mazzinian and
author of a well-known memoir about his escape from imprisonment
in Mantua (published in English under the portentous title The
Austrian Dungeons in Italy),1 attempted to assassinate Napoleon III,
hoping the emperor’s death might trigger a revolution in France that
would then spread across the Alps. Three powerful pear-shaped
grenades (‘Orsini bombs’) were hurled towards the emperor’s
carriage as he drove to the Paris Opéra (appropriately enough to see
a performance of William Tell), killing eight people and wounding
more than a hundred others, but leaving Napoleon himself
unharmed. Orsini used his ensuing trial to air the cause of Italian
freedom and even wrote an impassioned appeal to Napoleon urging
him to liberate the peninsula. Orsini’s calm dignity as he went to the
guillotine was widely admired.2
Cavour was worried after the Sapri a air that Napoleon III might
think (with justi cation) that he had been in cahoots with the
insurgents and withdraw his sympathy for Piedmont; but a close
friend of Cavour’s taking the waters at the spa of Plombières in the
Vosges was informed in the strictest con dence by the emperor that
he needed a popular war to strengthen his own position at home
and that of France internationally. It was simply a question of
waiting for the most appropriate moment. Cavour was exhilarated:
‘The emperor is our best friend, the one important person in France
who supports the cause of Italy, the only sovereign in Europe who
has a genuine interest in the aggrandisement of Piedmont. If we
march in step with him we will reach our goal.’3 There was a
considerable price to be paid for this friendship, however: rmer
measures against the democrats in Piedmont and a reduction of
constitutional liberties. Cavour did what he could to maintain his
independence, but following Orsini’s assassination attempt the
emperor insisted that if Cavour did not comply with French wishes
fully, he would terminate his friendship and ally with Austria.
Cavour now felt he had no choice, and in the course of the next few
months many political refugees were expelled from Piedmont and
press and jury freedoms curtailed.
With Britain heavily committed in the Far East following the
outbreak of the Indian Mutiny in 1857, Napoleon considered the
time right to embark on a campaign against Austria, and in the late
spring of 1858 he sent his private doctor to Turin to inform Victor
Emmanuel and Cavour of his plans for Italy (which were to be part
of a broader struggle between the ‘Latin races’ and the Germans for
dominance in Europe) and to invite Cavour to talks in Plombières.
The two men met on 21 July, and in the course of a long drive
through the countryside of the Vosges in the emperor’s phaeton they
worked out the future of the peninsula. The Austrians were to be
expelled from Lombardy and Venetia and Italy would become a
loose confederation under the presidency of the Pope, with France
as its protector. Victor Emmanuel would acquire all northern Italy,
including Modena and Parma, and possibly the Romagna and the
Marche as well. There would be an enlarged Tuscan state (with a
ruler yet to be decided); King Ferdinand would be deposed in Naples
and replaced with Lucien Murat, if possible; and the Pope would
lose all his territories except for a small area around Rome. As for a
convincing pretext for war, one idea was that they should instigate a
revolt in Massa and Carrara and get the rebels to appeal to
Piedmont for help. Turin would then decline, but in terms that were
su ciently critical of Austrian rule to provoke Vienna into a retort
out of which a quarrel and then a con ict could arise.4
France would of course gain hugely from the war by replacing
Austria as the controlling power in Italy, but Napoleon also wanted
a marriage alliance between the king’s fteen-year-old daughter,
Clotilde, and his cousin, Prince Jérôme Bonaparte. Victor Emmanuel
found this very hard to swallow, not least because Clotilde was a
shy and deeply pious girl, Jérôme a dissolute and middle-aged
philanderer, but Cavour eventually managed to cajole the king into
agreeing (‘to achieve our holy objective I would confront greater
dangers than the hatred of a little girl and the anger of the court’).5
A potentially far more di cult problem was Napoleon’s insistence
that two of the historic heartlands of the Piedmontese state, Nice
and Savoy, should be ceded to France. Cavour knew that any
agreement on this point would not only be technically
unconstitutional but also hugely unpopular in nationalist circles.
Nice especially was widely regarded as much more Italian than
French, and it had been the birthplace of the most popular and
famous Italian patriot, Garibaldi. When the treaty committing
France to a war in alliance with Piedmont was signed in January
1859, Cavour had to make sure that the clause relating to Nice and
Savoy remained totally secret.
Engineering a con ict with Austria turned out to be much more
di cult than Cavour had imagined. As Piedmont embarked on a
programme of rapid rearmament and diplomatic initiatives to
isolate Austria intensi ed, rumours of an impending war escalated.
In January, Victor Emmanuel opened the new parliamentary session
with a belligerent speech in which he spoke of ‘the cry of anguish’
that was reaching him from across Italy. This provocative phrase
had been suggested by Napoleon, and accepted by Cavour and his
cabinet colleagues after much nervous deliberation, and as expected
it raised the temperature – but rather more than intended. At La
Scala cries of ‘Viva Verdi’ – standing for ‘Victor Emmanuel king of
Italy’ (Vittorio Emanuele Re D’Italia) – were heard,6 and in a
performance of Bellini’s Norma members of the audience leapt to
their feet and enthusiastically joined in the Druids’ chorus intoning
‘War, war!’7 Cavour had needed to create an atmosphere out of
which a con ict could arise but with Austria appearing the
aggressor and Piedmont the innocent victim and peace-loving
defender of Italian rights and liberties. It was a supremely di cult
juggling act, requiring the nerves, the instincts (and luck), of a born
gambler; and it was an act that subsequent Italian politicians were
to be tempted to emulate in a bid to realize the dreams of grandeur
created by the Risorgimento. More and more, though, it was looking
to the outside world early in 1859 as if Piedmont and France were
the real warmongers, not Austria.
Had there been signs of popular enthusiasm in Italy for a war, the
position of Cavour and Napoleon would have been much easier. As
it was, ‘the cry of anguish’ that Victor Emmanuel had spoken of was
turning out to be almost inaudible, and the attempts made by La
Farina and the National Society during the winter of 1858–9 to
organize revolutionary movements in accordance with the plans
made at Plombières met with little success. One reason for this was
that the instructions coming out of Turin were necessarily very
ambiguous, for what Cavour and La Farina wanted were controlled
risings that they could use as pretexts for a quarrel with Austria and
not full-blooded insurrections that might be hijacked by the
democrats and used to launch a popular war of liberation. In these
circumstances the various clandestine committees dotted around
Italy with whom La Farina was in touch were uncertain what to do,
especially when, as was often the case, they were also in secret
correspondence with exiled Mazzinians who had a very di erent
agenda.8 The absence of grass-roots initiatives was particularly
disappointing to Napoleon, who had been under the impression that
discontent was much more widespread in Italy than it actually was,
and without a moral shield to hide behind he was looking more and
more to the outside world like an unprincipled and dangerous
aggressor. To make matters worse his attempts to isolate Austria
diplomatically were not working out well, as the Prussians were
threatening to support Vienna in the event of any con ict with
France. With the cards stacking against him, Napoleon decided early
in March to postpone the war.
Cavour was furious, and when a few days later the Russians
proposed that a congress should be convened to sort out the
problems with Austria peacefully, and Britain and France agreed, he
was beside himself. He hurried o to Paris to see if there was
anything to be done, but found Napoleon deeply dejected and no
longer interested in war and most of the diplomats and politicians
he met angry with him personally and with Piedmont for having got
Europe into such an awful mess. He returned to Turin in despair,
and during the rst two weeks of April there was a urry of
diplomatic activity by the great powers designed to bring about the
disarmament of Piedmont and Austria and stop what the British
Foreign Secretary described as Cavour’s ‘violent policy which
threatened all Europe with war’.9 As international pressure on him
mounted, Cavour became increasingly prone to severe mood swings,
and when on 19 April he was nally forced to accede to
disarmament, he declared that there was now nothing left for him to
do except blow his brains out. He wrote to his nephew with
instructions about what to do after his death and shut himself in his
study with orders for nobody to enter and began burning his private
papers. Only the intervention of his oldest friend, it seems, stopped
him from carrying out his threat of suicide.10
What Cavour did not know was that Austria had in fact settled on
war. Convinced that Napoleon had now withdrawn his support from
Piedmont, but equally convinced that he was going to ght Austria
at some point soon; and convinced, as well, that Austria’s prestige in
Italy could not survive further provocations from Piedmont, Vienna
dispatched an ultimatum to Turin on 23 April. It could not have
been better timed. By agreeing to disarmament Cavour had
overnight made himself the toast of British liberals. Suddenly
Austria had cast itself in the role of the bullying aggressor. It was, as
Massimo d’Azeglio told him, a remarkable piece of gambler’s good
fortune, ‘one of those lottery jackpots that occurs once in a
century’.11 Cavour was euphoric. Piedmont was given three days to
reply, during which time nal preparations were made with the
army and full emergency powers granted to the king. Cavour was
nervous in case Britain tried to use its good o ces to restrain
Vienna, but his luck held, and on 26 April he was able to hand a
formal rejection of the ultimatum to the Austrian envoys waiting in
Turin. Turning to his colleagues he announced triumphantly: ‘Alea
jacta est; we have made history, so now we can sit down to
dinner.’12

History had indeed been made, but not quite as Cavour anticipated.
One of his big concerns was that the Italian contribution to the war
should be su ciently large to ensure that the French did not dictate
terms entirely. But the Piedmontese forces amounted to only about
60,000 men, less than half the size of the French army, which
accordingly bore the brunt of the ghting that took place in the
sti ing heat of the Po valley in late May and June. Furthermore the
organizational and structural problems that had undermined the
performance of the Piedmontese army in 1848–9 resurfaced in
1859. There were still no good maps of Lombardy and no proper
campaign plans, and it was extremely fortunate that the Austrian
commander showed little initiative at the start of operations and
failed to launch a serious attack on Piedmont, which could have
been overrun before the French arrived. There were also di culties
once again with the army leadership, as Victor Emmanuel insisted
on acting as commander-in-chief despite his lack of experience (and
penchant for outdated cavalry charges) and resented taking advice
from anyone, including his senior generals.13 The upshot was poor
communication and frequent arguments about tactics, which
contributed to several major blunders during the campaign,
including the failure of the Piedmontese forces to arrive until it was
almost too late at the Battle of Magenta on 4 June and the
unnecessarily high casualties in icted on the Piedmontese in the one
serious engagement in which they played a prominent role, at San
Martino three weeks later.14
No less disappointing to Cavour than the minor part played by
Piedmont in the ghting was the relative lack of national sentiment
on display during the war. This was politically very embarrassing, as
the principal justi cation for Napoleon’s intervention as far as the
rest of Europe was concerned was the need to liberate the people of
Italy from the oppressive and unpopular rule of the Austrians and
their satellite princes. Demonstrations did break out in the streets of
Florence on 27 April (instigated by eighty policemen from Turin
dressed as civilians) which caused the grand-duke to ee, but even
after the Austrians had been defeated at Magenta and the way
opened for the occupation of Milan, Modena and Parma, the large-
scale risings that La Farina and the National Society had con dently
told Cavour would break out showed no signs of materializing. The
northern part of the Papal States remained alarmingly inert after the
Austrians withdrew their garrisons from Bologna and Ancona,
leading Cavour early in July to complain to one of his con dants in
the Romagna, who had assured him that the local population was
enthusiastic in its desire for annexation to Piedmont, of ‘the very
meagre signs of patriotism displayed so far’ and of the burning need
that ‘the masses do something’ to show their hatred of papal rule.15
As with the campaign against Austria in 1848–9, part of the
problem was a widespread suspicion that Piedmont was more
interested in conquering than in liberating. The traditional mistrust
felt by many Lombards towards their ambitious neighbour was
evident in the cool and sometimes overtly hostile reception given
the advancing Piedmontese forces (in contrast to the French, who
were warmly received in Milan); and these old regional rivalries
were no doubt a factor in the conspicuous courage displayed by the
Italian-speaking units from Lombardy – Venetia that fought on the
Austrian side in the war (Cavour had hoped 50,000 Italians would
desert the Austrian colours; very few did).16 A similar wariness
about Piedmont’s motives may well have acted as a deterrent to
volunteers. In the months leading up to the outbreak of hostilities
thousands of young men arrived in north-west Italy to ght the
Austrians, but many were given a lukewarm reception by the
Piedmontese authorities, not least for political reasons, and in the
end only about 3,500 enrolled in the battalion of irregulars that was
placed under the command of Garibaldi. Not until Napoleon
complained bitterly that ‘showing you are ready to ght is the sole
way to prove your worthiness to become a nation’ did Cavour begin
to take a more positive attitude towards volunteers, but by then it
was too late as the war was nearly over. Karl Marx noted at the time
that the small state of Prussia had generated more enthusiasm and
more volunteers against France in 1813 than the whole of Italy
against Austria in 1859.17
The battle fought at Solferino, a few miles to the south of Lake
Garda, on 24 June was a major victory for the French and
Piedmontese armies, but it was immensely bloody. One chance
observer, a Swiss businessman called Jean Henri Dunant, was
inspired to found the Red Cross after witnessing the horri c
spectacle of the 30,000 dead and wounded lying strewn under the
blazing sun.18 The Austrians, however, were not decisively beaten,
and with little prospect of an immediate end to the war in sight,
Napoleon decided to press for peace. He was already alarmed by
Cavour’s attempts to engineer the annexation of Tuscany and the
Romagna to Piedmont, and he was worried that Prussia might be
about to enter the war on the side of Austria. He was also facing
opposition from Catholic opinion at home. The Austrians, for their
part, were concerned that any prolongation of the war might
unleash a wave of revolutionary nationalism in their empire. On 11
August, Napoleon and the Austrian emperor met at Villafranca and
agreed that most of Lombardy, but not Modena and Parma, should
be given to Piedmont, and that an Italian Confederation should be
established, with Austria as one of its members. Napoleon was
prepared to renounce his claim to Nice and Savoy, but insisted that
Piedmont should shoulder the full costs of the war. The terms were
then shown to Victor Emmanuel, who agreed to them. When Cavour
was told of this rather ignominious settlement he lost his temper
completely, hurled every manner of abuse at the king, who sat
quietly smoking a cigar, and resigned.19 Victor Emmanuel had never
forgiven Cavour for humiliating him over his mistress, and was
delighted to see the back of him.
THE THOUSAND

The war in northern Italy goaded the democrats into action.

Napoleon’s intervention was widely and largely correctly seen as a
cynical move intended not to advance the cause of uni cation but
simply to replace Austrian with French hegemony in the peninsula.
In July 1859 one of Mazzini’s more committed followers, Francesco
Crispi, travelled from London to Sicily to teach bomb-making
techniques to potential revolutionaries and pave the way for an
insurrection in the island on 4 October.20 Garibaldi still had a
substantial force of volunteers under his command near the papal
frontier, and Mazzini hoped he could persuade him to launch a
simultaneous attack on Rome. But Garibaldi would not proceed
against the wishes of Victor Emmanuel; and the king would not act
without the consent of Napoleon, who not surprisingly vetoed the
idea. Meanwhile preparations for the Sicilian rising continued, but
they were heavily undermined by con icting messages coming from
La Farina in Turin urging caution, and in the end the rising was
called o . But the leaders of the peasant squads had been alerted to
the possibility of a revolution in the island, and in the course of the
next few months they and their contacts in Palermo began making
plans and building up stashes of weapons in readiness for action.
Francesco Crispi hurried o to Turin.
In central Italy the provisional governments that had been set up
in Parma, Modena, Tuscany and the Romagna during the war
proceeded to elect representative assemblies, which, in de ance of
the terms of Villafranca, demanded annexation to Piedmont.
Napoleon had no wish to see Piedmont expanded on such a scale,
but by the autumn, with a new Whig government in London headed
by Palmerston and Lord John Russell favouring an arrangement of
this kind (precisely because it would help to curtail France’s
in uence in the peninsula), it was becoming clear that the emperor’s
alternative scheme of an Italian Confederation was unrealistic.
Napoleon now decided to agree to the annexations provided that he
received Nice and Savoy as compensation, and when Cavour
returned to power in January, his rst task was to sort out the
practical arrangements for this territorial resettlement. His chosen
tool was the plebiscite based on universal su rage, which, as
Napoleon had shown at the time of his ‘election’ as emperor in
1852, could easily be manipulated to achieve the desired result. On
11–12 March 1860 the people of central Italy went to the polls in a
staged carnival atmosphere with bands playing, ags waving and
landowners escorting their peasants, and since voting was in public
it was no surprise that very few ballots were cast in the ‘No’ urn.
Before the elections Cavour had promised that the former states
would be given a large degree of regional autonomy – a promise he
did not keep – and this pledge probably helped to win over many
conservative middle-class voters.21 A few weeks later Nice and
Savoy were handed to France with a similarly arti cial plebiscite.
Meanwhile in Sicily preparations were being made for a rising.
For months the island had been in febrile state, with subversive
lea ets and posters appearing, acts of terrorism being perpetrated
and countless rumours ying around, and when early in April a
revolt broke out in Palermo, it quickly spread across the island,
fuelled by peasant grievances over land and taxation, local factional
struggles and the widespread hatred that many middle- and upper-
class Sicilians felt for rule from Naples. On 10 April a leading
Mazzinian exile and a close friend of Francesco Crispi, Rosalino Pilo,
landed near Messina carrying a clutch of hand-grenades and
sporting an exotic beard and long hair (trademarks of the
international revolutionary), and travelled west from town to town
announcing as he went that the most famous Italian soldier,
Giuseppe Garibaldi, ‘the man who does not lose battles’, was about
to land in Sicily.22 His news was greeted with extraordinary
excitement: Garibaldi’s achievements in South America, in the
Roman Republic and in the war of 1859, his amboyant good looks
(studiedly similar to those of Christ: a point underlined in many
prints and paintings) and unconventional modest lifestyle, his
simplicity of manner and immense personal bravery, and his
seeming invulnerability on the battle eld had all combined to make
him a cult gure with unprecedented popular appeal.23
In fact Garibaldi had made no such agreement to land in Sicily.
Pilo and Crispi had been writing to him in February and March
urging him to ‘save the cause of Italy’ and head an expedition to the
island, but Garibaldi had refused to commit himself.24 The intention
was clearly to try to force Garibaldi’s hand by generating an
atmosphere of expectation. The news at the end of March that
Cavour had consented to give Garibaldi’s home-town of Nice to
Napoleon certainly increased Garibaldi’s desire to do something to
embarrass the Piedmontese prime minister (whom he had always
suspected of not having the interests of Italy at heart), but even then
he was reluctant to act until he had clear proof that the Sicilian
rising was so extensive as to make success almost certain.
Throughout April, Crispi and the other exiles gathered in Genoa
made it their task to convince Garibaldi to lead an expedition, using
what were often deliberately exaggerated newspaper reports and
anything else they could lay their hands on to suggest that the
Bourbons had totally lost control in Sicily. Garibaldi wavered and
wavered, and only at the end of April (when in reality the rising had
largely petered out in the island) did he make a nal decision.25 On
6 May two small steamers with just over a thousand men on board
set sail from Quarto, near Genoa, for Sicily.
Cavour was on the horns of a terrible dilemma. Despite the fact
that many of the volunteers with Garibaldi were Mazzinians or
former Mazzinians, ‘the Thousand’ announced from the outset that
their slogan was ‘Italy and Victor Emmanuel’. How could Cavour
possibly oppose openly an expedition, led by the most famous and
popular of Italian patriots, whose declared aim was to unite all Italy
under the king of Piedmont? Yet if Garibaldi succeeded in
conquering Sicily, crossed to the mainland and marched up to
Naples and then on to Rome, not only would there be a major risk
of Napoleon intervening (though Britain would have worked to
restrain him), but much more importantly Piedmont’s (and of course
his own) position as the guiding force in the Italian national
question would be destroyed. Cavour had to endure many sleepless
nights over the next ve months, but no image would have
disturbed him more than one of Garibaldi victoriously ascending the
Capitol in Rome amid cheering crowds, to the acclaim of millions
throughout the world, a new Bolívar or Washington.
On the face of it, Garibaldi’s venture stood very little chance of
success, and Cavour did what he could behind the scenes to make
the odds longer still. He made sure, for example, that the volunteers
did not have any decent weapons: they left with just a thousand
rusty smoothbore converted intlocks provided by La Farina (who
admitted he could have given them much better arms had he
wanted to) and no ammunition. But through a combination of
extreme good luck and inspired leadership Garibaldi’s men were
able to land safely at Marsala on the west coast of Sicily, advance
inland and defeat a force of Bourbon soldiers sent to block their
route at Calata mi. News of this success rekindled the stuttering
rising in the countryside, and local administration everywhere
began to crumble, with government o cials and unpopular
landowners being assaulted or even killed.26 The victory also
encouraged the local population, who up to this point had been
reluctant to help the expedition, to give their support. At the end of
May, Palermo was captured after three days of erce street ghting
and contrary to all expectations the expedition looked as if it might
succeed.
Cavour needed to stop Garibaldi before he got any further, and
early in June he sent La Farina to Palermo with several boxes of
posters bearing the words ‘We want annexation!’ These were quickly
pasted up around the city, and La Farina then set to work organizing
demonstrations and pressurizing members of the local ruling classes
into calling for speedy union with Piedmont.27 He was greatly
helped by the fact that law and order were breaking down across
the island, which encouraged many among the propertied classes to
feel that the sooner the Piedmontese arrived with some battalions of
regular soldiers, the better. There was also a widespread desire for
autonomy in Sicily, especially within the Palermo aristocracy, and
the prospect of being able to negotiate a favourable package of self-
rule for the island, under Piedmontese protection, was deeply
appealing. But Garibaldi and his chief political adviser, Francesco
Crispi, stood rm against La Farina, realizing that if they
surrendered Sicily they would no longer have a base from which to
launch the conquest of the rest of Italy. Early in July, La Farina was
expelled from the island, and the next month Garibaldi crossed to
the mainland and began a triumphal advance on Naples.
Cavour tried to seize control of the situation by staging an
insurrection in Naples ahead of Garibaldi. Agents were sent to the
city to make the necessary arrangements, and Piedmontese warships
with soldiers concealed below their decks were stationed o shore,
ready to land as soon as the rising broke out. But through a mixture
of poor organization and mistrust of Turin nothing happened, and
on 7 September, Garibaldi entered Naples, arriving by train well in
advance of most of his army, amid scenes of extraordinary
jubilation. He was careful to please the local populace by attending
a Te Deum of thanksgiving in the cathedral and visiting the chapel of
San Gennaro, and from a balcony he saluted the crowds that
gathered to greet him in front of the Royal Palace, proclaiming the
age of tyranny over, and holding his index nger aloft in a gesture
to symbolize the unity of Italy.28 Cavour was livid at the
‘ignominious’ and ‘disgusting’ conduct of the Neapolitans, calling
them ‘spineless chickens’, with ‘corrupt’ characters, who were as
‘incapable of rising up as they were of ghting’.29 In a last attempt
to gain the initiative, he was now forced to take one of the biggest
gambles of his career: an invasion of the Papal States.
His pretext was that he needed to stop Garibaldi reaching Rome
and thereby save the Pope from the clutches of an army of
dangerous revolutionaries, and the fact that Mazzini, Cattaneo and a
number of other leading republicans were assembling in Naples
gave some added force to his case. He told Napoleon of his
intentions; and the emperor consented, provided that an
insurrection were staged in advance in Umbria and the Marche to
make the attack on the Pope’s dominions at least look like a war of
liberation rather than one of conquest. But despite the best
endeavours of the National Society, no rising materialized, and the
Piedmontese army was forced to invade the Papal States in violation
of international law without any obvious moral smokescreen.
Meanwhile, Garibaldi was pinned down ghting the Bourbon forces
on the Volturno river and as Victor Emmanuel advanced south it
became clear that the political initiative was swinging decisively in
Piedmont’s favour. Crispi and a number of other democrats
desperately tried to salvage what they could by demanding elected
assemblies to lay down terms for the uni cation of the south with
the north. But the pressure on Garibaldi to concede annexation was
huge, and on 13 October he agreed to hold plebiscites. A week later
the voters of Naples and Sicily went to the polls to answer the
question: ‘[Do you want] Italy one and indivisible, with Victor
Emmanuel, constitutional king, and his legitimate descendants?’
1,734,117 said ‘Yes’, 10,979, ‘No’.
With the Bourbon army defeated Garibaldi crossed the Volturno
river at the head of several thousand soldiers on a pontoon bridge
that had been laid by British volunteers and rode north with
members of his red-shirted general sta to rendezvous with Victor
Emmanuel. At dawn on 26 October they encountered a column of
Piedmontese troops marching towards the small town of Teano.
Suddenly the cry went up, ‘The King! The King!’, and the strains of
the Royal March were heard. Victor Emmanuel rode up, dressed in a
general’s uniform and mounted on a dapple-grey stallion, escorted
by a retinue of o cers and courtiers. Garibaldi took o his hat, but
his head was still covered with a silk scarf knotted under his chin
that he had put on to protect his ears from the chill and dampness of
the autumn morning air. The king stretched out his hand. ‘I salute
you, my dear Garibaldi. How are you?’ ‘Well, Your Majesty, and
you?’ ‘Very well!’ Then turning to those around him Garibaldi cried:
‘Behold the king of Italy!’ ‘Long live the king!’ came the reply. The
two men rode side by side for a short distance, and then went their
separate ways.30 A fortnight later Garibaldi delivered to Victor
Emmanuel the results of the plebiscite in the throne room of the
Royal Palace in Naples, and the next day, his authority in southern
Italy now formally ended (and his request to remain in Naples for a
year as Royal Lieutenant declined), he sailed for his home on the
small island of Caprera, o the north coast of Sardinia. He had been
o ered money, titles, a castle and even his own private steamer, but
in true Roman republican fashion he had spurned them all, and he
departed on the Washington with just a few packets of co ee and
sugar, some dried cod and a bag of seeds. The following March with
an act of parliament Victor Emmanuel was proclaimed ‘King of Italy,
by the grace of God and the will of the nation’.

Italy, with the exception of the Veneto, Trentino, South Tyrol and
the city of Rome and its immediately surrounding territory, had
been united into a single kingdom. But the new state was far from
being the creation, or even expression, of a national will. Without
the armies of Napoleon III, the fortunate conjuncture of diplomatic
circumstances, the ambitions of Cavour and Piedmont, the
desperation of the Sicilian peasantry, and the determination of
Garibaldi and a handful of followers, uni cation would not have
occurred. The Risorgimento as a political and cultural movement
had been the work of a small minority of the population inspired by
a vision of the nation that owed much to literary and artistic fantasy
and to a willing suspension of disbelief in the face of the fractured
reality of much of the peninsula. For the overwhelming majority of
the twenty-two million people who suddenly found themselves
‘Italians’, ‘Italy’ had meant little or nothing. For many it had been a
wholly unfamiliar term. Listening to the crowds cheering ‘Viva
l’Italia’ in the streets of Naples in 1860 one French observer heard a
man turn to his neighbour and ask bemusedly: ‘What is Italy?’; and
in Sicily it was apparently quite widely maintained that ‘La Talia’
was the name of the new king’s wife.31 A major challenge facing the
country’s rulers after 1860 was how to give ‘Italy’ resonance in the
minds of a population that neither history, nor education, nor social
and economic interaction had prepared for political unity.
But the attainment of what contemporaries often referred to as
the country’s ‘moral unity’ was necessarily a much more
complicated process than the achievement of its ‘material unity’,
and it required as a guiding template a set of assumptions, both
negative and positive, by which the Italian nation could chart its
course. Most of these assumptions were formulated in the
Risorgimento and, with varying in ections and emphases, were
transferred to the political and cultural life of the new state after
1860. They included a sense that Italy had a great past to live up to,
and had a mission to ful l in the world, and should not content
itself with becoming merely ‘a large Belgium without industry’;32
that the peoples of the peninsula had a legacy of decadence and
corruption to shake o , and that national regeneration required the
emergence of Italians purged of their old vices and weaknesses and
educated to citizenship; that the abasement of previous centuries
had been due in large measure to fragmentation and discord, and
that the future of the country depended on creating internal
cohesion – particularly necessary for survival in a Darwinian world
where international con ict was inevitable and mass patriotic
armies indispensable; and that for this integration to be truly strong
and lasting Italians had to transfer a measure of faith and
enthusiasm to the secular sphere and so fashion the communion of
believers in ‘Italy’ that Mazzini and many other Italian patriots of
his generation had longed for.
Among those who had been caught up in the feverish excitement
of 1860 was a young student and passionate enthusiast for the cause
of Italian unity from the Veneto called Carlo Tivaroni. He had joined
a battalion of bersaglieri in Ferrara as a volunteer and saw action in
the last stages of the ghting against the Bourbons. Tivaroni was in
later years to become a prominent gure in radical journalism and a
deputy in parliament. His principal allegiance was always to the
democrats, and in particular to his great hero Garibaldi, but he
came to accept that the moderates, too, had played a crucial part in
securing the uni cation of Italy. And when in the 1880s and 1890s
he turned to writing a grand narrative of the events in the peninsula
since the French Revolution, he presented the Risorgimento as an
almost miraculous synthesis in which the various contending forces
had complemented one another perfectly (if unwittingly) in bringing
about the goal of national unity. But like many of his background he
regarded the attainment of material uni cation as merely one stage
in the Risorgimento. As he said towards the end of his monumental
work, in 1897:
Once material unity had been achieved, it remained to complete moral unity, without
which there is no nation, but simply a collection of individuals, easily dissolved… This is a
serious issue, as moral unity is a matter not of the form of the government… but of its very
substance, and is essential to a modern state… When the conscience of the ruling classes is
shared by everyone, when a sense of patriotism pervades the rural masses, when all the
provinces of Italy have these attributes in equal measure, then, and only then, will Italy be
able to look ahead with con dence and faith. Otherwise the work of the Risorgimento will
have been in vain and will have served no other purpose than to demonstrate the

physiological inability of Italy to be a nation.33

PART FOUR

Prose 1861–87

11

The New State

We have visited a number of towns in the province of Molise… Towns!

More like proper pigsties!… It will take many, many years, to bring these
places up to the level of civilization that we are familiar with. There are
no roads, no hotels, no hospitals – in fact none of the things you would
nd today even in the most backward part of Europe!… What kind of
government has God willed upon the people here? They have no sense of
justice or honesty – they lie constantly – they are as timid as children…
And then there are the terrible feuds. In these regions enemies or
opponents kill each other. But you don’t just murder an enemy: you have
to butcher him… In short this is a land that needs to be destroyed or at
least depopulated and its inhabitants sent to Africa to be civilized!

Nino Bixio, letter to his wife from San Severo, Puglia, 1863

What is the goal towards which we are all striving? To make Italy once
again into one body, one nation. Which is easier to unite: divided cities
and provinces or divided hearts and minds? In the case of Italy in
particular, I think the second is far harder than the rst.

Massimo d’Azeglio, speech to the Senate, 3 December 1864

PONTELANDOLFO, 14 AUGUST 1861

Prior to its annexation to the new Italian state with the plebiscite on
21 October 1860, the small walled town of Pontelandolfo, some
forty miles to the north-east of Naples, had been part of the Duchy
of Benevento, an ancient enclave of papal territory situated deep
inside the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and ruled over since the
Middle Ages by the local archbishop. Like countless other
settlements in the Apennines of central and southern Italy,
Pontelandolfo (or Polfo as it was often a ectionately known) was
accessible only with di culty. It was perched at a height of some
2,000 feet, with a steep precipice on one side and surrounded by
tracts of dense woodland, with the sheer Matese mountains
towering over it to the north and to the south rugged hills running
away down towards the Volturno river. The great majority of its ve
and a half thousand inhabitants were peasants, many of them
landless labourers, who before dawn would assemble in the Piazza
del Tiglio with their tools hoping to be hired for the day by an agent
of one of the small group of rich landowners or galantuomini who
dominated the political and economic life of the community and
who singled themselves out from the rest of the population with
their smart tailcoats and top hats and carefully groomed beards and
moustaches – the mosca or toothbrush up to 1860, thereafter the
more amboyant handlebar in imitation of King Victor Emmanuel.1
For most of the population of Pontelandolfo life was extremely
hard, and since the abolition of feudalism in 1806 the indications
are that it had been growing progressively harsher, as common
lands were enclosed by unscrupulous galantuomini and demographic
pressures resulted in local resources being spread ever more thinly
and wages being kept low: Pontelandolfo’s population rose sharply
in the rst half of the nineteenth century, perhaps by as much as 80
per cent, in line with much of the rest of southern Italy.2 The
average pay for sixteen hours of digging on parched rocky soil was
about one-third of a lira, enough to buy half a kilogram of bread
and a few vegetables; and since work was available for only a
hundred or so days in the year, those peasants who could not
supplement their incomes with produce from their own plot of land
or with milk and cheese from a goat were forced to forage in the
countryside, hunting for birds, hares, hedgehogs, wolves, wild boar
and other livestock in which the woods were relatively abundant
still, or simply stealing. Many families not surprisingly lived
perilously close to the breadline and su ered from poor health and
high death rates (life expectancy at birth was just over thirty for
Italy as a whole in 1861)3 and any additional nancial demands
that were made upon them – such as the local tax on land or the
much resented levy on goats – were very sorely felt.4
But severe material deprivation was in part redeemed by a strong
local patriotism that was to make it hard for many of the inhabitants
to develop a parallel loyalty to any broader geographical entity,
certainly one as unfamiliar and abstract as Italy. Pontelandolfo had
a well-developed sense of its own past, retold in songs and epic
poems chanted to large audiences by peasant bards and storytellers
on summer evenings after harvest or during the many festivals that
punctuated the year. It was a history in large part of a community
that had su ered repeatedly at the hands of forces from an
unpredictable and hostile outside world. According to legend the
town had been founded in remote antiquity by the Samnites in
honour of Hercules and had enjoyed great peace, prosperity and
happiness until conquered by the Romans at the beginning of the
third century BC. During the Dark Ages a Lombard bishop called
Landolfo had constructed a bridge in the area, from which the
settlement derived its modern name; but thereafter Pontelandolfo
had su ered a succession of devastating attacks and natural
disasters, including a raid by Arab invaders in 862, a terrible siege
and re at the hands of the Normans in 1138 and another at the
hands of the Aragonese in 1461, and catastrophic earthquakes in
1349,1456 and 1688. In 1806 it had been the turn of the French to
pillage and burn. So when in September 1860 Garibaldi’s troops
arrived in the area, followed shortly by the Piedmontese, it was easy
for the town’s inhabitants to feel somewhat sceptical about the
claims of their liberators that an unprecedented era of prosperity,
justice and freedom was about to begin.
To make matters worse, it was soon quite clear that the cultural
world of most peasants and even galantuomini in Pontelandolfo
would not attract much sympathy or understanding from their new
rulers. One obvious barrier was language: the local dialect was
almost incomprehensible to outsiders, and the soldiers garrisoning
the province of Benevento soon had a sense of living in a foreign
land, linguistically as well as emotionally. Illiteracy was universal
among the poor and knowledge of the broader world was restricted
to what the galantuomini or clergy cared to pass on to them or to
what could be gleaned from trips to neighbouring markets at San
Lupo, Cerreto, Guardia or Campobasso.5 Violence and murder were
common, and seemed to be regarded virtually as part and parcel of
everyday life, and the often close links that existed between bandit
gangs operating in the mountains around Pontelandolfo and the
townspeople (not least the landowners) was something that men
who had been brought up in Piedmont or Lombardy with a fairly
strong sense of the state found hard to stomach. Nor was it self-
evident that these links were simply the result of fear: the rich used
bandits to control their tenants and workers, police their estates and
conduct feuds with enemies in return for money, food and most
importantly protection from the law.
Religion might have been expected to provide some common
ground between Pontelandolfo and the Piedmontese, but in fact
many northerners were nauseated by what they regarded as the
superstitious character of much southern Catholicism with its belief
in demons, portents and miraculous interventions, its fertility
ceremonies and unorthodox rituals, its pomp and theatricality, its
veneration of relics and its cults of obscure local saints. The patron
saint of Pontelandolfo was San Donato, whose badly mutilated arm
preserved in a reliquary in a chapel on the outskirts of the town was
the focus of lavish celebrations held for several days each year in
the second week of August. The local archpriest, Don Epifanio De
Gregorio, probably viewed the pagan aspects of popular devotion in
his parish with some scepticism and alarm; and as the author of a
panegyric to the Bourbon king published in Naples in 1852 with the
title The Star in the Darkness, or the Immortal Ferdinand II King of the
Two Sicilies he must have hoped that his career would have taken
him to more elevated surroundings than this remote rural
community. But he had a duty to keep in with his congregation, and
his easiest course was to indulge them in their wishes, however
unorthodox they might be. It was also prudent to turn a blind eye to
witchcraft, which was as widespread in Pontelandolfo as it was in
most other rural settlements in Italy. The Church had often
condemned the use of magic charms and curses, amulets and
potions by wise women, but local people regularly employed them
to secure good luck or to ward o the e ects of the evil eye or, in
the absence of doctors, to cure illnesses.6

On the evening of 7 August 1861, as the annual celebrations in

honour of San Donato were beginning, some forty bandits rode
down from the mountains to the chapel on the outskirts of the town
where the people of Pontelandolfo had gathered to hear Vespers.
They were led by Cosimo Giordano, a former Bourbon soldier who
had taken to the hills the autumn of the previous year to avoid
being arrested by the Piedmontese and sent to one of the prison
camps in northern Italy where thousands of supporters of the old
order were being interned, often in atrocious conditions.7 His
followers included young men who had failed, either deliberately or
because they had not been told about it in time, to respond to a
government decree of December 1860 calling up all those in their
early twenties for service in the new Italian army. Since the
beginning of the year patrols of government troops had been
scouring the towns and villages of southern Italy searching for draft-
dodgers, and in some places, as at Agro di Latronico and Castel
Saraceno in Basilicata, anyone who was thought to be between the
ages of twenty and twenty- ve had been arrested and summarily
shot as a deserter.8
Giordano and his men (who had styled themselves the Fra
Diavolo Brigade in honour of the famous Bourbon bandit from the
beginning of the century) were warmly received by the peasants of
Pontelandolfo, whose relations with the authorities had been
deteriorating fast since the end of 1860 as it became clear that
‘Italy’ meant not just conscription but also higher taxes and the
anger of the Catholic Church: in March 1861 the Pope had publicly
denounced the ‘unjust and violent theft’ of his territories by
Piedmont and had refused to continue negotiations with Cavour for
a compromise settlement. It also meant an end to any hopes that
former common lands, illegally enclosed since 1806, would be
returned to the community, for the local galantuomini were now
sporting tricolour cockades and sashes in a clear sign that the
government in Turin had turned to them as its local representatives,
irrespective very often of whether they had been supporters of the
Bourbons or not. Indeed, one of the richest local landowners, Achille
Iacobelli, whose family had a long tradition of erce opposition to
any form of liberalism stretching back to 1799, quickly established
himself as a lynchpin of the new provincial administration (and
secured a satisfactory solution to a long-standing lawsuit with a
neighbouring town over the expropriation of land).9
Emboldened by the presence of Giordano the people of
Pontelandolfo, perhaps 3,000 in number, marched up into the town
and ordered Don Epifanio to go into the parish church and sing a Te
Deum in honour of the deposed Bourbon king. They then ransacked
the headquarters of the National Guard, smashing portraits of Victor
Emmanuel and Garibaldi and ripping the Savoy crest from the
national ag, and broke into the town hall, destroying the registers
of births (to make it hard to enforce conscription), pulling down and
burning the tricolour on the balcony and hoisting the golden lilies of
the Bourbons in its place. The inmates of the local gaol were
released, and the homes of the leading galantuomini, all of whom
had ed Pontelandolfo the day before, were looted. The tax
collector, Michelangelo Perugini, who had ill-advisedly returned to
the town hoping that he could save his skin (and his property) by
making public declarations of loyalty to the Bourbons, was
murdered and his house set on re, and a man popularly regarded
as a Piedmontese ‘spy’ was caught hiding under a pile of hay in a
stable and shot. Other scores were settled violently in the course of
the day, and by the time Giordano and his band slipped out of the
town on the night of 7 August, Pontelandolfo was a torrid cauldron
of opposition to the new state.
Matters might gradually have calmed down had a detachment of
bersaglieri not been sent from Campobasso to investigate rumours
that Pontelandolfo was in the hands of brigands. Unwisely and
contrary to orders the troops entered the town, where they
encountered the full force of local anger. After taking refuge in the
precincts of the medieval fortress, they decided to withdraw and try
to reach the safety of San Lupo, some three miles away, but as they
crossed the open countryside in the neighbourhood of Casalduni
they were set upon by armed peasants, and forty-one of their
number were killed.10 Who exactly was responsible for the attack is
unclear, but there are good grounds for believing that the
ringleaders were tenants of the powerful landowner Achille
Iacobelli, who was apparently engaged in a devious double game,
not uncommon in a world where the elites were used to
manipulating local violence to bolster their own political and
economic standing, stirring up unrest so as to discredit his
opponents and allow himself to pose as the guardian of law and
order. Indeed it was Iacobelli who drew up a lurid and apparently
highly in ated account of the killings and lawlessness in
Pontelandolfo, which he sent to the newly installed military and
civil commander of southern Italy, the Piedmontese general Enrico
Cialdini, urging him to make an example of the barbarous ‘nest of
bandits’, and show it no mercy.11
As soon as he received the report Cialdini summoned one of his
o cers, Carlo Melegari (who had been enjoying an evening out at
the opera), and told him to proceed immediately to Benevento. Here
he was to join up with Colonel Pier Eleonoro Negri, a tough-minded
soldier from north-eastern Italy who had distinguished himself
ghting in the Piedmontese army the previous year, march on
Pontelandolfo and Casalduni and reduce the towns to ‘a heap of
rubble’. Melegari and Negri set out from Benevento on the night of
13 August with 500 infantry and four companies of bersaglieri, and
as dawn broke they came in sight of their targets. Word had got
through to Casalduni of what was in store for them, and when
Melegari’s men arrived only three people were left. All were shot,
including one man lying on his sickbed.12 Pontelandolfo was less
fortunate, and as Negri’s bersaglieri raced through the streets
smashing windows and ring their ri es, many townspeople were
still asleep. The troops had been instructed to shoot everyone except
women, children and the in rm: but this was retaliation for the
murder of forty-one comrades, and the violence was allowed to
degenerate into a frenzy and became virtually indiscriminate. One
particular target was the priest, Don Epifanio, who was widely
regarded as being the main troublemaker in Pontelandolfo. Negri
gave instructions that he be hunted down and executed rst. Exactly
what happened to him is unknown: he may have been killed that
morning; he may have succeeded in escaping and been shot later; or
he may have got away altogether. At any event, he was not heard of
again.
During the ve or six hours that the troops terrorized
Pontelandolfo many atrocities were committed. Quite how many is
unclear. Some estimates put the number of those killed at between
one and two hundred, others much higher. A likely gure is perhaps
400, with dozens more being arrested and shot in the weeks that
followed.13 Negri’s men were encouraged to loot and pillage at will;
nothing was spared, and the scene in Pontelandolfo that August
morning rapidly came to resemble a kind of infernal Cockaigne,
with houses blazing and bodies lying in the streets, and gorged and
drunken soldiers grabbing money, jewellery and whatever else of
value they could nd, and raping any women or girls they could lay
their hands on. It was the intense heat, the screams of the dying and
the unaccustomed abundance of food that etched themselves most
on the memory of one bersagliere, Carlo Margolfo, a conscript from a
village high in the foothills of the Alps in northern Lombardy:
We entered the town and immediately began shooting the priests and any men we came
across. Then the soldiers started sacking, and nally we set re to the town… What a
terrible scene it was, and the heat was so great that you could not stand it there. And what
a noise those poor devils made whose fate it was to die roasted under the ruins of the
houses. But while the re raged we had everything we wanted – chickens, bread, wine,

capons. We were short of nothing.14

Towards noon the order was given to withdraw, and the troops
set o back to Benevento. The following day Negri sent a report to
the provincial Governor: ‘At dawn yesterday justice was done to
Pontelandolfo and Casalduni. They are still burning.’15 In the
months that followed many of those who had managed to avoid the
massacre on 14 August were rounded up and 573 were put on trial.
Of these 146 were sentenced to life imprisonment or to hard labour.
The bandit leader Cosimo Giordano succeeded in escaping justice
thanks largely to the protection of local landowners and politicians,
and after a few years spent in Rome he emigrated to Marseille with
a forged passport, where he opened a greengrocer’s shop. Negri
continued his successful military career and went on to serve in the
war against Austria in 1866, being promoted to the rank of major-
general.16 The towns of Pontelandolfo and Casalduni were for the
most part razed to the ground and some 3,000 people were left
homeless.

The events at Pontelandolfo formed part of what was

euphemistically referred to as the ‘war against brigandage’, which
scarred the experience of uni cation at the very outset for millions
of Italians. Well into the twentieth century local memories of what
happened in the early 1860s in communities throughout the
mainland south and Sicily remained raw and on occasions ared
into anger against the galantuomini and representatives of the state,
or else lay dormant and fuelled that most common of peasant
feelings, fatalistic resignation.17 The massacre at Pontelandolfo was
especially brutal and as such reverberated widely – though much of
the press coverage was extremely partial, with the emphasis on
what one Turin newspaper called the ‘acts of the most ferocious
barbarism’ perpetrated against ‘our troops’, which had now been
suitably punished.18 One member of parliament, the Milanese
democrat Giuseppe Ferrari, visited the town shortly after the events
and reported to the Chamber some of the horri c details he had
learned from the survivors. (Pontelandolfo found the courage to
name a street in his honour in 1973.) But revelations of this kind
were regarded as unpatriotic and potentially very damaging to the
fragile new kingdom’s international standing and when Ferrari went
so far as to suggest that what was going on in southern Italy was
tantamount to a ‘civil war’ he was angrily shouted down. The
violence in the south, he was reminded sharply, was due to
‘brigandage’ and nothing else.19
For political reasons the new rulers of Italy had little choice but
to present the unrest in southern Italy in the rst years of
uni cation as the result mainly of common criminality: what other
form of opposition could there be to a regime that had been brought
into existence by the will of the people and voted for
overwhelmingly in plebiscites? But the sheer scale of the unrest
belied such easy reductionism. By 1864 over 100,000 troops were
deployed in the south trying to keep order, nearly half of the entire
Italian army; and as the commanders on the ground repeatedly
lamented (and as Pontelandolfo showed), attempts to draw a clear
line between those who could legitimately be described as ‘brigands’
and other sections of the local population who were regularly in
contact with the bandits or themselves committed acts of violence
was extremely hard. To make matters worse, the army almost
everywhere had to contend with a wall of silence, and getting
reliable information about the movements of the enemy proved
virtually impossible. One reason for this was fear: peasants were
often terri ed of reprisals if they spoke to the authorities. But that
was only part of the explanation, as a report on the entry of the
bandit Nunziato Mecola and his numerous supporters into the small
town of Orsogna in the Abruzzi in January 1861 suggested:
On the morning of the 4th Mecola entered Orsogna in triumph at the head of a horde of
brigands and was received by… four galantuomini and the clergy carrying the statues of San
Nicolò and the Virgin and preceded by a band of musicians… A hundred or so men were
carrying ri es. More than two hundred were armed with pistols, knives, spits, sickles, axes,
scythes and pitchforks… But what really made the blood run cold was the disorderly crowd
of whorish women who were also armed and carrying sacks, an ominous and evil sign of
impending pillage. After assembling in the main piazza they went into the church of San
Nicolò where a solemn mass was celebrated and pictures of the Bourbon king and his wife

were displayed…20

Such scenes convinced many northerners that what they were

dealing with in the southern provinces was not simply a politically
backward population but a di erent level of civilization. The idea
that Africa began somewhere just beyond Rome was already a
commonplace well before uni cation, but the sudden arrival of
northern o cials in the annexed south produced an outpouring of
revulsion, with prejudice and intolerance giving rise to brutal
judgements and these brutal judgements in turn widening the chasm
of incomprehension out of which the prejudice had grown. The
Romagna politician Luigi Carlo Farini (who became Italy’s fourth
prime minister in December 1862) was one of many who found the
situation in the south repellent when he came there in October 1860
as the new viceroy of Naples. ‘But my friend, what lands are these!’
he wrote to Cavour. ‘… What barbarism! This is not Italy! This is
Africa: compared to these peasants the Bedouin are the very ower
of civilization.’21 Similar remarks about the ‘barbarism’, ‘ignorance’,
‘immorality’, ‘superstition’, ‘laziness’ and ‘cowardice’ of southerners
peppered the reports sent to Cavour at this time, and Cavour himself
not surprisingly concluded that the south was rotten to ‘the very
marrow of its bones’.22 Nor was it just northerners who were
disparaging. With a vehemence characteristic of converts, some of
the most scathing judgements came from exiles – men such as
Giuseppe Massari, a native of Puglia, who had ed to Turin after the
1848 Neapolitan revolution and now called for ‘a major onslaught
of Piedmontese morality’ to cleanse the ‘Augean stables’ of southern
corruption.23
Many of these near hysterical comments were fuelled by a
mixture of self-interest and fear: self-interest in that by depicting the
south as a land of backwardness and corruption the Piedmontese
created a moral climate in which the imposition of their own
constitution, laws and administrative system (not to mention
personnel) on the rest of the country appeared wholly justi ed; and
fear in case Italy, ‘one and indivisible’, was suddenly overwhelmed
by contagion spreading up through the peninsula, like disease
through a body. Indeed medical images abounded at this time in
reports, speeches and correspondence (and remained common for
many decades to come), with the south frequently being described
as a ‘wound’ or ‘gangrene’ that required urgent surgery or as a sick
patient that was in desperate need of a doctor.24 Massimo d’Azeglio
thought that uni cation with Naples was like getting into bed with
someone with smallpox (he was thus opposed to annexation
altogether), while Farini felt that although it would not be possible
‘to make a clean, deep cut in the wound overnight’ in Naples,
everything should be done to ensure that the south did not become
‘the gangrene of the rest of the state’ and cause the ‘moral break-up
of Italy’.25
But if the south was sick and riddled with corruption, what
should the remedy be? Cavour’s north European faith in the
therapeutic e ects of liberalism apparently assailed him on his
death-bed in June 1861 when he called for the Neapolitans to be
ruled with freedom, not martial law (‘I would show them what ten
years of freedom can do for those lovely lands. In twenty years they
will be the richest provinces of Italy’).26 And others, including
Garibaldi and many of the democrats, echoed these sentiments,
arguing that if southerners were backward then this was due to
centuries of despotism, and that the way forward was not yet more
repressive rule but education through the patient administering of
free government. But the sense of deep insecurity that seized the
country’s leaders from the end of 1860 made such views seem
mawkish or utopian, especially as there was evidence that the unrest
in the south was being whipped up by agents of the deposed
Bourbons (a Spanish o cer called José Borjes toured the south in
1861 in the name of the ex-king in Rome) and by the clergy.27
There were also fears that the democrats might take advantage of
the chaos to launch another attempt to march on Rome and so
complete the popular revolution out of which they had felt cheated
in 1860. In such circumstances force and repression prevailed.
Given that one of the strongest cultural strands running through
the movement for uni cation had been a desire to put an end to
centuries of con ict and division and create a nation that was bound
together by bonds of fraternal love and concord, it was bitterly
ironic that Italy was established amid so much bloodshed and ill-
will. Part of the problem – and it was a problem that was to unsettle
many Italians in the decades to come, especially those whose
background and upbringing predisposed them to look to an ideal,
perhaps in some cases as a substitute for conventional religion – was
the gulf separating the dream from the reality, or as contemporaries
put it, the poetry from the prose. And disillusionment all too easily
gave rise to anger. Carlo Nievo was a young democrat from north-
eastern Italy whose passionate love of the cause of Italy drove him
to join up with Garibaldi’s forces in the summer of 1860, but as he
marched through the squalid towns and arid countryside of southern
Italy he found the absence of any vestige of civilization, as he
understood it, almost too much to bear. In October he wrote to his
brother, the distinguished writer Ippolito (who had himself sailed
with Garibaldi’s Thousand in May) from the town of Sessa, to the
north of Naples:
I have been here since yesterday evening and have no idea when I will leave this appalling
place… I need to stay in a city that merits at least in part such a name, as up until now I
have only seen in the south towns that make you vomit simply entering them. Forget about
annexations and popular votes, I would burn alive all the people living between the Tronto

and where I am now. What a race of brigands!28

How many died in southern Italy in the rst years of uni cation is
unclear and is still a subject of acrimonious and highly emotive
debate. At the time governments were understandably deeply
embarrassed by the situation and refused to allow any general
discussion of what in private even the sober-minded Piedmontese
moderate Quintino Sella admitted was a ‘real civil war’.29 A
parliamentary enquiry was set up to examine the causes of banditry
in December 1862, but its focus was almost entirely on the socio-
economic conditions of the south, with little suggestion that the
unrest was being driven by a widespread rejection of the new
political order, and even then its ndings were kept as secret as
possible. One further problem was that the army resented any civil
intrusion into its a airs and did not feel itself accountable to
parliament (indeed under the constitution it was answerable only to
the king) and as a result the scale and horror of episodes such as the
sacking of Pontelandolfo went uninvestigated. Estimates based on
o cial gures for those executed or shot in engagements between
June 1861 and December 1865 suggest that around 5,200 were
killed, but other sources, including local anecdotal testimony and
reports in the foreign press, point to a much larger total, running to
tens, perhaps several tens, of thousands. Recently claims have been
made for 150,000 dead and even much higher.30 These latter gures
are unlikely but not impossible, for as at Pontelandolfo many of the
killings arose from the frustration of soldiers who were operating in
a world that eyed them malevolently and who in return regarded
those they encountered as merely a ‘race of brigands’. Killings of
this kind by their very nature do not make the o cial record.
PIEDMONT VERSUS ITALY

Central to the Risorgimento had been the idea of resurrection, the

revival of a glorious nation after centuries of decadence. But there
was a paradox as most patriots saw it: Italians would nd it hard to
win independence until they had recovered some at least of their
(alleged) past virtues; and yet without independence it was di cult
to see how these virtues could be acquired. After the trauma of
1848–9 many democrats had accepted that Italy was unlikely ever
to ‘make itself’ and had abandoned their faith in popular risings and
turned to diplomacy, foreign intervention and war. Garibaldi’s
astonishing achievements in southern Italy in 1860 had allowed ‘the
people’ to claim some credit for uni cation. But it was Piedmont
and France that had been largely responsible for the collapse of
Austrian power in the peninsula in 1859, not Italians as a whole;
and it was Piedmont that had emerged as the victorious player in
1860, as Garibaldi’s handshake with Victor Emmanuel at Teano and
his cession of all the conquered southern provinces had shown. But
Piedmont’s success brought with it a fresh paradox: now that
material unity had been completed (bar the Veneto, Rome and
Trentino), how could ‘moral’ unity be secured and Italy turned from
a geographical expression into a ‘nation’ if the country’s new rulers
were rst and foremost Piedmontese?
One man who was particularly alert to this problem was
Francesco De Sanctis, a literary scholar of great distinction and a
towering gure in Italian cultural life in the 1860s and 1870s, who
served as Minister of Education under Garibaldi and in four separate
Italian governments between 1861 and 1881. De Sanctis had been
born in a small town in the mountains to the east of Naples in 1817,
and like many of his generation he had been captivated as a young
man by romanticism and by the novels of Walter Scott in particular
(‘to us he seemed to open up a whole new world’).31 His liberal
sympathies and his participation in the revolution of 1848 had
earned him imprisonment by the Bourbons from 1850 to 1853,
followed by periods of exile in Turin and Zurich, where he had held
a chair in Italian literature. Absent-minded and unworldly, with ill-
tting clothes and a remarkable capacity to lose umbrellas, a shock
of grey hair and a cigar stub (which he was forever trying to relight)
protruding from beneath his unkempt walrus moustache, De Sanctis
was widely admired for his immense learning, high moral principles
and limpid character. Like Mazzini he loved to have his room lled
with canaries ying freely around (and he gave them literary names
such as Poliziano and Boccaccio, and chatted to them continually).
But unlike Mazzini he had very few enemies. Indeed when Cavour
was asked why he had made him a minister in the spring of 1861 he
said it was because he was the only Neapolitan that he had come
across about whom two compatriots did not have a bad word to
say.32
The dream of De Sanctis was to teach Italians how to be free. For
freedom, in his view, was not obtained simply with the introduction
of certain institutions or legal arrangements; it was a moral
condition, a set of beliefs, attitudes and practices that could only be
acquired through the patient education of the intellect and
emotions. It involved learning respect for the law, developing a
sense of duty towards the state, harbouring feelings of sympathy
and regard for all compatriots, and engaging actively and maturely
in the political life of the nation. As for the German romantics, by
whom De Sanctis had been strongly in uenced, true freedom
entailed the expansion of the self and a spontaneous identi cation
with the broader collectivity, so that personal, family or local
interests were willingly sacri ced to the greater needs of the nation.
It meant shaking o the corrupt habits of the past, dissolving the old
municipal and regional loyalties and becoming morally united as
Italians. As he told the inhabitants of his native province of Avellino
in October 1860, urging them (with strong echoes of Mameli and
Manzoni) to vote ‘Yes’ in the forthcoming plebiscite:
What have we been until now? A people divided into small states, incapable of defending
ourselves, invaded and trampled underfoot by the French, the Spanish and the Germans…
We will be a nation of twenty-six million people, one in language, religion, memories,
culture, intellect and kind. We will be masters in our own home. We will be able to
proclaim with Roman pride: ‘We are Italians.’ And foreigners who have ordered us around
and despised us will say: ‘This is a strong race. Twice it has been great, and when after so
many centuries of oppression we had thought it dead and buried, look how it raises its

head again, and is even greater than before.’33

For those, like De Sanctis, who saw the main task after uni cation
as being ‘to make Italians’, the new kingdom got o to an
inauspicious start. Mazzini and most of the democrats had never
been certain about what constitutional and administrative
arrangements they wanted, but they had been clear that ‘Italy’ must
be the expression of the whole nation, a synthesis of all its
constituent parts, and visibly di erent from what had preceded it. It
must not be the imposition of one state on the rest. During the
revolution in southern Italy in the summer of 1860, Piedmontese
laws and the Statuto had been introduced by Garibaldi in the
liberated provinces, but this had been essentially an emergency
measure and a tactical ploy (to reassure Cavour and international
opinion). Many imagined that once Rome had been taken a national
assembly would be convened and collective decisions made on such
key issues as the constitution, legal codes, regional autonomy and
local government. But the failure of Garibaldi to reach Rome and
the surrender of the south to Victor Emmanuel meant that the
initiative passed entirely to Piedmont in the autumn of 1860. And
the Piedmontese did almost nothing to allay the suspicions of those
who had always felt that this ambitious state was more interested in
its own aggrandizement than the cause of Italy.
In fairness to Cavour, there was a remarkable shift of opinion
among liberals throughout Italy during the autumn and winter of
1860. Before the plebiscites in October it had been generally
assumed that there would be a considerable degree of regional
autonomy in any new Italian state; and in fact a commission had
been set up in Turin in the early summer of 1860, with Cavour’s
approval, to look at plans for devolved power in the recently
expanded Piedmontese state. But the growing chaos in southern
Italy towards the end of 1860, with rural communities teetering
towards anarchy and cities buckling under the pressures of
economic and political dislocation, as armies of unemployed
workers, disbanded Garibaldian volunteers, sacked Bourbon
o cials, disillusioned democrats and supporters of the former
regime joined forces to riot and protest in the streets against the
new government, persuaded Cavour and his allies (including many
in the south) that decentralization could weaken the new edi ce of
Italy and bring about its rapid collapse.34 Sicily was a particular
worry: if autonomy was conceded here, might this not revive the
island’s old demands for independence?
But the introduction of centralization and the application of
Piedmontese laws and institutions to the whole of Italy were carried
out with so little consultation and such haste and insensitivity that
many local sensibilities and interests were left badly damaged.
Admittedly Piedmont was the only Italian state that had a
constitution, and so could claim a degree of moral superiority on
this score; but in many spheres – for example, education, local
government and justice – Lombardy, Tuscany and even the Kingdom
of the Two Sicilies could claim to have superior credentials to
Piedmont, which had only very recently shed its reputation of being
the most backward-looking part of the peninsula. In Lombardy the
process of what quickly became known as ‘Piedmontization’ was
pushed through by decree laws in the summer and autumn of 1859,
without any parliamentary discussion, and Milanese businessmen
suddenly found themselves saddled with the Piedmontese lira and
Piedmontese tari s, lawyers with the Piedmontese legal codes and
judicial structures, and teachers with the Piedmontese education
system – and this despite widespread agreement that the Austrian
system of schooling was quite outstanding, particularly at the
elementary level.
 Elsewhere in Italy ‘Piedmontization’ started in 1860 and gathered
pace during 1861, culminating in the autumn in a series of decrees
that transferred Piedmont’s administrative and political structures
almost in their entirety to the rest of Italy. As the prime minister of
the time, Bettino Ricasoli, explained:
The supreme and most urgent need at this moment… is to unify… A universal and, it
should be said, perfectly rational desire exists on the part of the Italian nation for a robust
central power that is able to carry out its activities in all areas and can everywhere impress

a uniform direction on public a airs…35

This was disingenuous, and was indicative of a dangerous capacity

on the part of Italy’s rulers to divorce the claims of the nation,
understood in an abstract, almost Platonic, sense, from those of the
people that constituted it; for the reality by the end of 1861 was
that there was deep anger throughout Italy at the application of
what one leading democrat called the ‘straitjacket’ of Piedmontese
uniformity.36 For example, in southern Italy the imposition of
military service was causing huge problems, especially in Sicily,
which had no previous experience of the draft, while Piedmontese
tari s were resulting in thousands of people losing their jobs as
workshops and factories that had depended under the Bourbons on
high protective tari s for their survival were forced to close down.
But in some ways even more damaging than the drive for
uniformity and centralization (and as the chaos and discontent in
the country grew, the government felt driven to tighten its grip from
Turin, in what risked becoming a vicious circle) were a number of
symbolic aspects of ‘Piedmontization’ that were harder to explain
away on the grounds of political necessity. One concerned the rst
Italian parliament. This met in February 1861 in a hastily built
structure housing 500 wooden seats ( fty-seven were left empty for
the future representatives of Rome and the Veneto) in the courtyard
of Palazzo Carignano in Turin.37 It was o cially described as the
eighth legislature, not the rst, thereby suggesting formal continuity
with the Piedmontese state going back to May 1848. Equally
insensitive was the title given to the new king. Many democrats in
particular felt that Victor Emmanuel should show from the outset
that ‘Italy’ was distinct from the Kingdom of Sardinia by changing
his numeral. Francesco Crispi wanted the royal formula to be simply
‘Victor Emmanuel, King of Italy’, pointing out (in a remark that
revealed something of his aspirations) that ‘Charlemagne, Napoleon
and all the founders of dynasties’ signed their laws and decrees with
their name alone.38 But the new parliament meekly bowed to the
king’s wishes and agreed that he should remain King Victor
Emmanuel II. Equally galling to many, certainly outside Piedmont,
was the formula to be used on o cial documents after the king’s
name: ‘by the grace of God and the will of the nation, king of Italy’.
The rst clause, ‘by the grace of God’, atly contradicted the second
clause and called into question the legal status of the plebiscite
votes. Furthermore ‘king of Italy’ was archaic: ‘king of the Italians’
would have been more modern and liberal. Victor Emmanuel was
clearly reluctant to break with the absolutist traditions of his
dynasty and so did nothing to allay suspicions that he saw Italy as
something he had in e ect conquered.
Indeed the monarchy was to make little e ort in the rst decades
of unity to identify with the nation and promote among the mass of
the population a sense of ‘Italy’ in the way that De Sanctis and
others wanted. Victor Emmanuel repeatedly made it clear that he
expected the nation to identify with him and not vice versa. He
resolutely refused to change his way of life, preferring to spend
much of his time as before hunting in the Alpine valleys of
Piedmont or consorting with his buxom mistress, Rosa Vercellana,
rather than applying himself to politics or travelling around meeting
his new subjects – which in some ways was just as well, as he often
ended up causing o ence with his impatience and bad language, or
worse still inviting ridicule, as when the shoe polish with which he
blackened his greying hair ran into his collar and shirt in the rain. In
due course his earthy and eccentric behaviour probably won him a
fair measure of popular a ection, no doubt helped by stories of his
sexual prowess (and attendant jokes about his being ‘the father of
the nation’) and even by the rumour that he was in reality a
butcher’s son who as a baby had been swapped for the true heir to
the throne.39 But in the short term he did little to endear himself to
the majority of Italians, especially in the south: the fact that the
peasants of Pontelandolfo went to the trouble of tearing out the
Savoy crest from the Italian ags indicates how much of their anger
following uni cation was directed at what was felt to be a usurping
monarchy. Nor was he helped by the sobriquet that Massimo
d’Azeglio had given him of ‘il re galantuomo’. If in the north
galantuomo signi ed a gentleman of integrity, in the south it was
generally synonymous with the reviled class of provincial
landowners.40

Far and away the most popular national gure in 1861 was
Garibaldi, and had Victor Emmanuel and Cavour been generous in
recognizing the huge contribution that he and his followers had
made to national uni cation, the new state would have been greatly
strengthened at the outset. But the events of the summer and
autumn of 1860 showed that the government in Turin looked on the
volunteer army in the south as a threat, to be neutralized as quickly
as possible; while Garibaldi, precisely because of his huge
popularity, was regarded more as a rival than an ally, to be hustled
into the wings at the rst opportunity. And it was not just the scale
of Garibaldi’s popularity that alarmed Victor Emmanuel and Cavour.
It was also its character, for Garibaldi was treated in southern Italy
as a divinity, feted by ecstatic crowds, with people kneeling as he
passed, straining to touch his clothes or stirrups or kiss his hand,
and thrusting their children forward to be blessed or even baptized
by the man who was frequently compared in songs and ballads to
the Archangel Michael or to Jesus Christ.41 Nor was this enthusiasm
con ned to Italy. In Britain during the summer of 1860 countless
pamphlets, poems and books appeared celebrating Garibaldi’s heroic
achievements. Subscriptions were raised, and volunteers ocked
from all over the country to join him – including a working-class
brigade from Glasgow and London that got a bad reputation for
unruliness and drinking and nearly shot Victor Emmanuel by
accident.42 And in other countries, too, Garibaldi quickly became a
living legend: in Russia the great anarchist Bakunin heard Siberian
peasants talking of being liberated one day by ‘Gariboldov’.43
The ingratitude and hostility displayed by Victor Emmanuel and
Cavour to Garibaldi and his volunteer army alienated many of the
most committed patriots from the new Italy and gave rise to the
enduring myth of a passive revolution. The nation had been severed
at the outset from the lymph of popular enthusiasm; another march
on Rome was needed to connect with the people and give the nation
true life. Mazzini was particularly disappointed at the outcome of
1860. It was a triumph for Piedmontese self-interest and for
materialism and force over faith, he believed: ‘I had thought to
evoke the soul of Italy; all I see before me is its corpse.’ He returned
to London, where he continued to work for a fresh revolutionary
initiative that would lead to the capture of Rome and the Veneto.
He could acknowledge that Cavour was a remarkable politician but
he regretted the statesman’s ‘Machiavellian calculations of
expediency’ that had thwarted the country’s spiritual regeneration
and risked leaving a legacy of corruption to Italy.44 And there were
plenty in England who shared his concerns. The writer George
Meredith produced a powerful defence of Mazzini and his views in
his 1866 novel Vittoria, while George Eliot’s remarkable parable
about the two souls of Italy – the Machiavellian and the austerely
moral – in Romola (1863) concluded with a thinly disguised lecture
to the new nation about its future (‘Mamma Romola, what am I to
be?’),45 in which she stressed the importance of choosing the path of
real virtue over narrow hedonism and sel shness. Mazzini read and
enjoyed the book.46
A number of other leading democrats followed Mazzini in turning
their back on united Italy, retreating into private life or else
conspiring in southern Italy against the new kingdom. But some felt
duty-bound to ght their corner from within the state. One such was
Francesco Crispi, who despite considerable government opposition
managed to get himself elected to parliament in January 1861 for a
constituency in his native Sicily. Crispi had spent more than a
decade in exile for his beliefs and had risked his life for the cause of
Italy, but that did not stop Cavour targeting him in the summer of
1860 as one of the dangerous ‘red republicans’ and ‘socialist
demagogues’ around Garibaldi who needed to be ‘thrown into the
sea’.47 Victor Emmanuel used far less polite language, and when the
two men met near Naples in November the king refused to shake
hands with this future prime minister of Italy. Crispi never forgot
the snub. Cavour, too, would not look Crispi in the face after he
arrived in Turin as a deputy.
This callous and impolitic lack of magnanimity extended also to
the troops who had fought in southern Italy. While many regiments
from the standing armies of the annexed territories in the north and
centre were welcomed into the Piedmontese forces in 1860–61,
those who had served under Bourbon or papal commanders were
looked on with grave suspicion and treated very di erently. Tens of
thousands were taken prisoner and sent o to penal islands or to
fortress camps in Lombardy and Piedmont (in one case high up in
the Alps), where many – precisely how many is still unknown – died
from disease, malnutrition and cold. The o cers generally fared
better, and over 2,000 were eventually admitted into the Italian
army – though less out of a desire for integration and more from a
concern to deprive the rebel population in the south of potential
leaders. And once in the army these southerners had a di cult time,
often facing severe discrimination from an institution that saw itself
still as Piedmontese and insisted on monopolizing the upper ranks
for many years to come. As the Minister of War explained to
parliament, though, the south had for long been culturally and
morally backward and therefore could not be expected to produce
good soldiers.48
There was even greater mistrust towards the volunteers who had
fought with Garibaldi. Undoubtedly the southern army was
something of a rag-bag, with many of the 50,000 who had ended up
on the pay-rolls having joined simply to get a job and boasting few
if any military (or patriotic) credentials. There were also numerous
irregularities, with soldiers listed as being in more than one
regiment and so claiming multiple daily allowances (the full extent
of the corruption is unknown as the southern army’s chief
administrator, the writer Ippolito Nievo, was drowned in mysterious
circumstances, taking all the accounts with him, in March 1861).
But from a political point of view Cavour’s decision to liquidate the
southern army in January 1861 and his reluctance to let the o cers
transfer to the Italian army was highly insensitive and resulted in
the former commander of the volunteers, General Sirtori, declaring
angrily in parliament in March that the Piedmontese had come to
the south as enemies, ‘in order to ght us who were Italy!’49 And
worse followed. On 18 April, Garibaldi turned up in the Chamber of
Deputies, wearing a red shirt and poncho, for a debate on how the
divisions in the country could be healed and accused the
government of having provoked ‘a fratricidal war’. Pandemonium
broke out and the sitting was suspended, and despite the best e orts
of the king at mediation, Garibaldi and Cavour refused to shake
hands. A few days later Crispi wrote to a friend saying that he was
planning to write an account of the revolutionary events of 1860
with the projected title: The Civil War.50
PARLIAMENT

The new Kingdom of Italy was a parliamentary monarchy and when

Cavour decided in December 1860 to hold elections he was
con dent of securing a safe majority. He was not disappointed.
According to the Piedmontese electoral law, which was hastily
extended to the whole of Italy, only those who paid forty lire a year
in taxes or who had a university degree or professional quali cation
were entitled to vote, and this resulted in an electorate of around
420,000, or about one in ten of males aged twenty- ve or over (in
Britain the gure was about one in ve). The rationale behind such
a restricted su rage was not so much to defend ‘property’ as to
ensure that the country was governed by people with su cient
education and nancial means to enable them to make informed
and independent political judgements. In practice, though, many
voters, especially in small rural communities like Pontelandolfo that
made up the backbone of Italy, were drawn almost instinctively into
supporting the government from considerations of material
advantage, especially when law and order was under threat or
breaking down, as was the case early in 1861. Consequently, when
the rst national elections were conducted at the end of January
and beginning of February 1861, more than 300 of the 443 deputies
returned to parliament were supporters of Cavour.
Having, unlike most of his fellow countrymen, studied
parliamentary practices in other countries, Cavour was able to
dominate the Chamber almost e ortlessly, and partly because of the
commanding position he had secured for himself in Piedmont
during the 1850s many new deputies were inclined to support him
unquestioningly. One such was Giuseppe Verdi, whose uncritical
romantic fondness for heroes led him to be a staunch admirer of the
Piedmontese prime minister (‘the Prometheus of our nationality’) as
well as of Mazzini, Garibaldi, Napoleon III and later Crispi.51 In
January 1861 Cavour asked Verdi to stand for the college in which
his home town of Busseto was located; and Verdi agreed, wishing, as
he said, to do all he could to help ‘our country for so long a time
divided and torn by civil discord’.52 But once elected to Palazzo
Carignano he felt rather out of his depth, and clung on to Cavour’s
coat-tails almost childishly. As he told a friend towards the end of
1861: ‘As long as Cavour was alive, I watched him in the Chamber
and stood up to approve or reject when he stood up, because I was
certain I would not go wrong doing exactly what he did.’53
Verdi’s jejune performance as a deputy (he soon stopped
attending the Chamber altogether) was perhaps forgivable for
someone who saw himself primarily as a musician (and increasingly
as a gentleman farmer wrapped up in the running of his estates,
autocratically, and quarrelling with the local town council),54 but it
was indicative of a more general problem facing Italy. Outside
Piedmont, experience of parliamentary government had been very
limited and there was little clear idea of exactly how national
politics were to be conducted under such a system. The fact also
that only 57 per cent of those eligible to vote in the 1861 elections
actually did so was a further cause for concern, not least because it
meant that in many places deputies were being returned to
parliament for colleges of 50,000 inhabitants with just a few
hundred or even a few dozen votes (Verdi got 339). Some of these
abstentions were caused by ideological objections, which was
worrying enough – Catholics angry at the invasion of the Papal
States and governmental anticlericalism, or loyal supporters of the
deposed rulers – but in many cases the main issue seems to have
been one of indi erence or scepticism towards an institution that
had no resonance for most of the population.55
Parliament, indeed, carried none of the glamorous freight that it
had in Britain, and even in Turin in the 1850s there had been a
strong vein of hostility towards an institution that was widely seen
as damaging to the prestige of the monarchy and as alien to
Piedmontese traditions. Parliaments had certainly existed in Savoy
and Piedmont in the Middle Ages (as one scholar noted in 1829 –
only to nd his book banned by the censors), but the founding
fathers of the Piedmontese state were gures such as Emanuele
Filiberto and Vittorio Amedeo II who were famous for having
centralized power and reduced the authority of representative
bodies such as the general congregations.56 Elsewhere in Italy some
fragmentary local memories existed of medieval assemblies and
councils, but the only region in which these had crystallized into a
serious historical tradition was Sicily, where the island’s struggle for
independence from foreign (usually Neapolitan) rule was seen as
closely linked to the assertion of parliamentary freedoms from the
time of the Normans down to 1848–9.
Another major problem facing representative government in Italy
was that parliament had never featured prominently in the context
of the ‘nation’. The struggle for uni cation and independence had
been viewed primarily in terms of ridding the country of foreign
oppression; and the means for achieving this were personal sacri ce,
education, solidarity, conspiracy, insurrection and war. Nowhere
was it suggested that freedom was to be won either by or for
parliament. Nor was there much room in the patriotic mythology
surrounding key historical episodes such as the Battle of Legnano,
the Sicilian Vespers, the duel of Barletta or the siege of Florence for
assemblies or collective decision-making: the focus was on
instinctive individual heroism and action. And even when it came to
the events of 1848–60, the role of the Piedmontese parliament was
entirely overshadowed by the campaigns of Victor Emmanuel,
Napoleon and Garibaldi, the secret diplomacy of Cavour and the
activities of the executive (which was responsible for the pivotal
constitutional arrangements, including the Statuto and the decree
laws of the autumn of 1859 which laid down the fundamental
administrative and legal structures of the new Italian state).
One important reason why parliament did not gure in the
national mythology was because it easily brought to mind discord,
division and weakness. The communes of the Middle Ages had
abounded in deliberative assemblies; but while such bodies had
permitted an exceptional degree of democracy they had also been
powerless to curb (indeed had arguably encouraged) the
factionalism that was ultimately to make the city-states
ungovernable and prey to foreign conquest. It was precisely to end
the internal con icts in his native Florence and other free Italian
republics that Dante, the supreme ‘patriotic’ poet, had invoked the
coming of an omnipotent emperor to crush the warring parties and
impose unity and order. Given that for patriots of the Risorgimento
concord was a supreme ideal, it is not surprising that they were
often uncertain whether parliament would be able to provide
appropriate leadership for the new uni ed Italy. The eminent poet
and former Mazzinian Giosuè Carducci o ered a model of how an
assembly should behave – unanimously and not adversarially – in a
poem written in 1876 to celebrate the seventh centenary of the
Battle of Legnano. Entitled Il Parlamento, it described how the
Milanese were summoned to a parliament to decide whether to
resume war against Frederick Barbarossa or sue for peace. Amidst
the thorn-covered ruins of the city, which some years earlier had
been razed to the ground by the German emperor, the knight
Alberto da Giussano reminded the crowds of the appalling
humiliation and su ering that had been in icted on them by the
foreigner. Parliament’s response to his speech was visceral and
unequivocal. ‘Through the whole parliament a spasm ran, almost as
if of wild beasts.’ On all sides the women stretched out their arms in
supplication to the men and cried: ‘Kill Barbarossa.’57
The issue of parliament also touched another sensitive nerve: that
of the consequences of Italy’s tradition of rhetoric on the national
character. In their analysis of Italy’s slide into decadence during the
Renaissance, Francesco De Sanctis and other commentators had
called attention to the corrosive e ects of literary humanism, with
its emphasis on style over substance and arti ce over truth. Italians,
they maintained, had become great talkers and wordsmiths, adept at
orid speeches and well-crafted sonnets, but prone to passivity and
scepticism – with fatal consequences after 1494. As De Sanctis put
it, the cultivation of rhetoric had resulted in a separation of thought
and action, thereby producing ‘that thinking which is not feeling,
that feeling which is not doing, that are characteristic of the Italian
race and its shame’.58 He argued repeatedly that Italians needed to
learn to reunite thought and action, and so produce the passion that
had inspired Alberto da Giussano and the people of Milan to go into
battle against the Germans and defeat them. From the outset, Italy’s
parliament, where speech and debate were inevitably paramount,
risked being viewed through this lter of patriotic anxieties and
disparaged as weak, lacklustre and ine ective. Already in 1862 a
leading democrat published a collection of pen-portraits of the new
deputies in Turin under the revealing title The Moribund Men of
Palazzo Carignano.59
One nal problem confronted the parliamentary system from the
start. If, as was widely accepted, ‘Italians’ had still to be made, how
could an institution that by its very nature was representative hope
to remedy the country’s defects? Would it not simply mirror them?
This was to be an issue of growing concern from the 1870s, but
already in the 1860s the tendency of deputies to cluster along
regional lines and to see parliament as a tool for securing jobs,
subsidies and contracts for their friends back home was causing
alarm. Ironically, one reason why there had been relatively little
opposition in the end from the propertied classes to rigid
centralization was probably because they could see in the Chamber
a way of safeguarding their local interests – and this despite article
forty-one of the Statuto speci cally stating that deputies represented
‘the nation in general’ and not their constituency and their voters.
And again rather ironically, the fact that the formation of parties
was positively discouraged in the interests of fostering a
disinterested ‘national’ spirit – ‘party’ still had very negative
connotations of factionalism – meant that deputies were accorded
freedom in parliament to allow their instinctive regional loyalties to
surface and nd expression.60
All this was deeply distressing to those patriots who had hoped
that parliament would be a major source of national education. De
Sanctis came to believe that the aversion to parties had to be
overcome and two powerful blocs formed, as in Britain, of left and
right (currently the labels ‘left’ and ‘right’ were applied loosely and
did not correspond to coherent groupings in the Chamber), each
with a clear and distinct national programme to which deputies and
ministers would be committed. In this way, he felt, politicians (and
hence voters) would start thinking in terms of ‘major political
battles’ fought on behalf of ‘Italy’ and stop the ‘sordid personal
squabbles and petty rivalries’ that were currently lacerating the
Chamber. As he said in a speech in 1864:
Today Italians see Italy through the prism of their province. It is thus not enough to shout
‘Long live Italy!’ and think that Italy has been made. I can see that everyone still carries
inside them something of their past, of their memories, of their traditions. Each of us,
though Italian, nevertheless still feels in some measure Neapolitan, or Lombard or Tuscan.

Could the legacy of the past be e aced, he asked: ‘Hoc opus, hic
labor’ (‘That is the task, the labour’).61
12

The Road to Rome, 1861–70

On the night of 30 December [Victor Emmanuel] arrived in Rome… No

Roman emperor ever made an entrance that was as great in its
simplicity!… The whole city grew excited and rejoiced at seeing him, and
expressed its enthusiasm and gratitude in a thousand di erent ways. The
city council and the o cers of the National Guard came to o er him
their thanks; and Victor Emmanuel addressed the following… forthright
and moving words to them, words that fully reveal his spirit: ‘We are
nally in Rome, as has been my heartfelt wish. No one will ever take it
from us.’

I. Ghiron, Il primo re d’Italia. Ricordi biogra ci (1878, popular

biography)

Never did such a momentous event attract so little attention. The king arrived in the evening, and
hardly anybody turned up to greet him outside the station. Those that had gathered were poor
wretches rather than respectable citizens… When the king got down from his carriage in the
atrium of the Quirinal Palace, he turned to Lamarmora in the fashion of a traveller bored by the
journey and muttered, in Piedmontese: ‘We are nally here.’

A. Oriani, Lotta politica in Italia (1892, eyewitness account)

ASPROMONTE

Rome had not been taken in 1860: the horri c prospect of Garibaldi
and his followers – no doubt joined by Mazzini – celebrating on the
Capitol together with the risk of French intervention had persuaded
Cavour that the city should stay in the hands of the Pope. But Rome
had been at the heart of the national question for nearly two
decades, elevated into a potent symbol of regeneration and unity by
Gioberti and Mazzini, and with patriotic fervour at fresh heights
after the remarkable events of 1860, it was almost unthinkable that
the Eternal City should not be proclaimed ‘Italian’ by the new state.
Apart from anything else, to renounce Rome would be to split the
moderates and democrats irreparably. So when in March 1861 the
issue was debated in the Chamber, Cavour got up and announced
that Rome had to be Italy’s capital for ‘great moral reasons’, as it
was the only city whose importance was much more than simply
geographical and whose memories were not ‘exclusively municipal’.
In return, as be tted a liberal state, the kingdom would guarantee
the Church in its spiritual mission: ‘We are ready to proclaim this
great principle in Italy: a free Church in a free state.’1
Pope Pius IX could not accept such a solution; and given the fury
of French Catholic opinion at what had happened to the Papal States
– the Marche and Umbria had both been annexed, leaving the
Church with Lazio – nor could Napoleon III. As a result a large
garrison of French troops remained stationed in Rome and the
Italian government was forced to defer occupying the city until a
suitable opportunity arose. But not everyone believed that Rome
should become the capital of Italy. Massimo d’Azeglio argued that a
city ‘impregnated with the miasmas of 2,500 years of material
violence and moral pressure in icted on the world by its successive
governments’ was a bad choice for a modern liberal state.2 His
preference – not surprising, perhaps, for an urbane artist and writer
– was for Florence. D’Azeglio’s father-in-law, Alessandro Manzoni,
was similarly repelled by the grandiose and sanguinary images that
Rome summoned up, and though he came to accept that for political
reasons the city had to be the capital, he never wanted to set foot
there.3 The leading Neapolitan moderate Ruggero Bonghi felt that
an ‘intoxicating breeze’ would inevitably waft from Rome across
Italy and that the new nation would do better to forget its past and
concentrate instead on the mundane problems that confronted it in
the present.4 For such reasons some people suggested that Italy
should follow the example of the United States and build a new
capital city from scratch, for example in the centre of the peninsula,
in Umbria, where it would be largely free from the deadweight of
unwelcome historical memories.5
But such views belonged to a minority, and even those who were
largely unmoved by the Eternal City’s past could nevertheless feel
drawn to it for what it might become in the future. Mazzini’s vision
of a Third Rome with a universal mission resonated far beyond
democratic circles and often in quite surprising quarters. The
Piedmontese wool manufacturer and economist Quintino Sella, who
as Finance Minister in the 1860s and 1870s wrestled sternly with
the country’s massive public debts, was not normally given to
rhetoric or poetry, but even he confessed that his old bones became
‘electri ed’ when he heard talk of Rome.6 He dreamed of making
the new capital into a great international centre for science – raising
the banners of positivism and progress triumphantly over the ruins
of the Pope’s temporal power – with a string of academies and
schools, institutes of chemistry, physics and biology, botanical
gardens and centres for the arts. Rome would thus become a
formidable moral and material symbol of the nation, uniting Italians
in a common purpose, with ‘the struggle for truth against ignorance,
prejudice and error’ giving rise to ‘the same unanimity as is to be
found in the days of ghting to defend the fatherland’.7
 Garibaldi shared Sella’s secular vision, and he too saw the
acquisition of Rome and its elevation into a great and modern
capital city as necessary to the moral unity of Italy. After his clash
with Cavour in the Chamber of Deputies in April 1861, his sense
that the cause of Italy had been betrayed by the opportunism of the
Piedmontese prime minister intensi ed, and he returned home to
the island of Caprera determined to resume the march on Rome at
the earliest opportunity. The satisfactions to be gained from leading
the life of a modern Cincinnatus, shing, farming, building walls
and reading, albeit interspersed with a steady stream of tourists
arriving by boat and seeking a lock of hair or some other souvenir of
‘the hero of the two worlds’, were necessarily rather paltry after the
heady poetry of the previous year. For a while he contemplated
accepting an invitation from the US government to serve as a
general with the Unionist forces in the Civil War (‘tens of thousands
of American citizens would glory in serving under the Washington
of Italy’),8 but only on the unlikely conditions that he was made
commander-in-chief and that President Lincoln declared the
complete abolition of slavery. In reality his sights were still rmly
set on Italy.
By the end of 1861 Garibaldi and his democratic friends were
toying with the idea of using the growing chaos in southern Italy as
the basis for a renewed march on Rome. Throughout the country
political associations sprang up to mobilize public opinion and
provide Garibaldi with a pretext for a fresh initiative and hopefully
too – and this was crucial – give the government grounds in the eyes
of the international community for standing aside and letting the
‘will of the people’ prevail. In June 1862 Garibaldi sailed from
Caprera to Sicily. He may not have known exactly what he was
going to do there, but such was the reception he received, with vast
crowds cheering him wherever he went and calling for ‘Rome and
Venice’ and ‘Rome or death’, that the pressure to act soon became
overwhelming. Volunteers began assembling – though for the most
part not the well-educated students who had made up the backbone
of the Thousand, but rather the unemployed and the hungry,
desperate for food and pay; and with rumours rife that Garibaldi
had a secret understanding with the king (and possibly Victor
Emmanuel had intimated something),9 the insurrectionary
momentum in Sicily fast became unstoppable. On 24 August two
steamers crammed with volunteers crossed to the southern tip of
Calabria, and Garibaldi began marching north.
Meanwhile the government in Turin had come under strong
pressure from the French to intervene. Already on 3 August the king
had issued a proclamation urging Italians not to support Garibaldi
and warning them of the dangers of civil war. But the hope had
been that this was merely a ploy to keep Paris happy and that Victor
Emmanuel was secretly planning to repeat the trick of 1860: let
Garibaldi advance and then step in at the last moment, take Rome
and ‘save’ the Pope from the clutches of the rebels. In reality,
though, the government was too frightened of Napoleon to risk such
a dangerous game. And perhaps just as importantly the Piedmontese
generals who were in charge of the regular army in the south,
Lamarmora and Cialdini, had no wish to see Garibaldi and his
loathsome volunteers win yet more plaudits. On 20 August martial
law was declared in southern Italy, and a few days later a column of
3,500 troops under Colonel Pallavicini was dispatched to halt the
rebels.
Garibaldi and his 2,000 men had wandered up from the Calabrian
coast onto the thickly wooded slopes around Aspromonte, hoping to
avoid a clash with the Italian army. On the morning of 29 August,
tired and hungry after two days of marching, they came in sight of
Pallavicini’s troops and took up a defensive position at the edge of a
pine forest. Strict orders were given to hold re: Garibaldi had no
wish to shed ‘fraternal blood’. But Pallavicini was a professional
Piedmontese o cer with instructions to treat the volunteers as
insurgents, and without pausing to parley he sent his bersaglieri into
action, shooting as they raced forward. A few of the volunteers lost
their nerve and returned re, and in the course of the next ten
minutes a dozen or so men were killed. Garibaldi was hit twice:
once, lightly, in his left thigh, a second time, far more seriously, in
his right ankle. Pallavicini approached and found Garibaldi lying
under a tree smoking a cigar. He asked him to surrender. The Hero
of the Two Worlds was then taken on a stretcher to a nearby port.
He asked to embark on a British ship, but General Cialdini would
not hear of it. He was conveyed to La Spezia and imprisoned in a
nearby fort, before being amnestied in October. Colonel Pallavicini
was promoted, and seventy-six of his men were awarded medals for
their gallantry.10

Garibaldi’s wounded foot was to cause him immense pain for years
to come and left him severely incapacitated. Doctors from all over
Europe hurried to o er him their services, and it was one of them –
the celebrated French physician Auguste Nélaton – who located the
bullet deep in the arthritic bone of his ankle. Once extracted the
lead ball quickly became the target of souvenir hunters willing to
pay huge sums for such a relic. As far as the international
community was concerned Aspromonte did nothing to diminish the
remarkable esteem in which Garibaldi was held. If anything it
reinforced his reputation as a simple, brave and sel ess patriot
willing to risk all for his nation, even against the chicanery of
professional politicians. Gifts poured in (Lord Palmerston sent an
invalid’s bed), subscriptions were launched, and prints, cartoons and
tributes, in verse and prose, rolled from the presses, with Italy (or at
least o cial Italy) almost invariably cast as the villain of the piece.
One popular lithograph in France showed Garibaldi as the cruci ed
Christ with members of the Italian cabinet standing at the foot of
the cross brandishing the tools of execution and casting lots for his
clothes, with Napoleon III and the Pope merrily dancing a jig
together in the background.11
In Italy, Aspromonte weakened the already tenuous position of
the authorities in the annexed regions, above all in the south. In
Sicily the imposition of martial law led to thousands of arrests and
dozens of summary executions. Demonstrations in favour of
Garibaldi, and even the singing of the eminently patriotic ‘Garibaldi
hymn’, were banned. Subversive violence escalated, and the forces
of law and order were left feeling ever more beleaguered and
paranoid – a paranoia fuelled by mysterious episodes such as that of
the pugnalatori in October 1862, when thirteen people were stabbed
on a single night in di erent parts of Palermo. Terms such as
camorra and camorristi were deployed in an attempt to explain such
lawlessness and invest it with a strongly criminal image (and so
conceal its political dimensions); and in 1865 a new word appeared
in government reports from Palermo: the ma a. While there was no
evidence for the existence of any formal association with this name
– which allowed Sicilians subsequently to claim with some
justi cation that the ma a had been ‘invented’ by northerners – the
idea of a large-scale secret organization certainly gave the
authorities the conceptual ammunition they needed to persist with
emergency measures.12
The heavy-handed methods used by the government in the south
put the democratic deputies in parliament in an awkward position.
Some felt that they should show their disgust by resigning their
mandates, but others like the Sicilian Francesco Crispi argued that
they should do all they could to support constitutionalism, stay put,
and ght their corner from within Palazzo Carignano. Matters came
to a head in December 1863 with a speech to the Chamber by a
senior Piedmontese general, Giuseppe Govone. Govone had been
sent to Sicily the previous summer with twenty battalions to round
up draft-dodgers and had used particularly brutal (and technically
illegal) means, including besieging towns, cutting o water supplies,
and seizing women and children as hostages. In an attempt to
defend his actions he foolishly let slip some remarks about the
uncivilized character of Sicilian society and the ‘barbarity’ still
prevailing in the island. Pandemonium broke out on the benches
(Crispi challenged one leading northern deputy to a duel – although
this too was technically illegal)13 and twenty-one democrats ended
up resigning. Among them was Garibaldi.
The government urgently needed to try to regain some moral
credibility, and the prime minister, the distinguished Bolognese
patriot Marco Minghetti – whose great erudition and urbanity had
not stopped him from wounding a former prime minister in a duel
in June 1863 following an altercation in the Chamber – looked to do
this by moving the kingdom’s centre of gravity away from Turin. As
Massimo d’Azeglio said, the biggest challenge facing the country
was to nd ways of making the rest of Italy hate Piedmont less.14
After hurried negotiations a convention was signed with Napoleon
III in September 1864 under which the French would withdraw
their troops from Rome in return for a guarantee of the Pope’s
remaining territories and the transfer of the capital to Florence. On
the face of it this looked like a renunciation of the Eternal City, but
the government hoped that Italians would see it as a step in the
right direction (at least geographically). Unfortunately for Minghetti
the ‘September convention’ unleashed a storm of anger in Turin
with three days of rioting in the streets, and he was forced to resign.
A new government was installed with the Piedmontese general
Alfonso Lamarmora as prime minister and with ve of the nine
cabinet portfolios also assigned to Piedmontese (two of the others
went to Lombards).
Under Lamarmora’s direction the drive towards centralization
was intensi ed. A series of laws in 1865 led to the uni cation of
Italy’s civil and commercial codes, though the extension of the
Piedmontese penal code to the rest of the peninsula proved
problematic, as Tuscany was proud of its enlightened traditions and
was deeply unhappy about introducing the death penalty. Some
regional variations in the criminal law were accordingly allowed to
persist, and uniformity was only nally achieved in 1889. The
Piedmontese administrative system had already been applied to the
annexed territories in 1859–61, but a law of 1865 made a number of
important modi cations and clari ed the role of the pivotal gure
in the system, the prefect. Prefects were appointed by the Minister
of the Interior and controlled the sixty or so provinces into which
the new kingdom was divided. They had wide-ranging powers,
including responsibility for public order, censorship of the press, the
monitoring of town councils (mayors were also centrally appointed)
and the conduct of elections – which in practice meant doing
everything possible to help government candidates. Not
surprisingly, a high percentage of prefects in the rst decades of
unity came from Piedmont, or at least from the north of the country,
and in the case of key posts such as Milan, Florence, Naples and
Palermo they were almost invariably friends of the minister.15
Administrative and legal unity, however, could not obscure the
deep moral fault-lines that ran through the country and made
something of a mockery of the idea of Italy ‘one and indivisible’.
Moderates and democrats were bitterly opposed; the old municipal
and regional rivalries were as pronounced as ever; north and south
were riven by mutual antipathy and virtual civil war; and Catholics
were being urged to boycott the new state (in December 1864 the
Pope racked up the tension further by condemning the central tenets
of liberalism in the so-called ‘Syllabus of Errors’). Surveying the
somewhat desolate scene a year before he died Massimo d’Azeglio
could not but conclude, as he told the Senate, that it was far easier
to unite ‘divided cities and provinces’ than ‘divided hearts and
minds’.16 He felt that if the nation were ever to become truly strong
then Italians would have to undergo a process of profound re-
education. As he said in his memoirs, written towards the end of his
life with the intention of helping his fellow countrymen to
understand the great task that lay ahead of them:
The struggle against the foreigner is largely completed. But this is not the principal
challenge… The most dangerous enemies of Italy are not the Austrians but the Italians… as
they have wanted to make a new Italy while remaining the Italians of before, with all the
in rmities and moral weaknesses that have been their undoing for centuries. For Italy…
will never become a well organized and properly governed nation, strong both against the
foreigner and internal sectarians, free and independent, until everyone, humble, middling
or great, each in his own sphere, carries out his duty and carries it out well… Italy’s most
pressing need is to mould Italians who are capable of doing their duty… Sadly we are each

day travelling in the wrong direction… 17

D’Azeglio longed for a race of new Italians possessed of ‘virile

qualities’, with ‘good blood’ owing in their veins instead of the
present ‘cream of vanilla’; Italians made of ‘strong and robust
material, not rags whose stitches fall out’ – like the British, whose
resolute national character had been forged in the crucible of war in
the seventeenth century. ‘Perhaps we will have such virtues in the
future. As for the present… Just look!’18
CUSTOZA AND LISSA, 1866

D’Azeglio died in Turin on 15 January 1866, and six months later

war broke out between Austria and Prussia, giving the young nation
a chance to put behind it the disappointments of the previous few
years and a rm itself on the battle eld. Tension between Berlin and
Vienna had been mounting for some months, and had it wanted to
Italy could have acquired the Veneto peacefully in return for giving
the Austrians a simple pledge of neutrality. But the mood in the
country was too bellicose for such an inglorious and mercenary
transaction. In February a former republican and follower of
Garibaldi, Antonio Mordini, had declared in parliament that Italy
would never be considered a great nation until it had fought and
defeated Austria with its own forces: ‘We must endure many
sacri ces and shed much Italian blood if we are to secure the place
in the world that we deserve.’19 And two months later Francesco
Crispi had called for ‘a baptism of blood’ in order to demonstrate to
the major powers of Europe that ‘Italy too is a great nation, with
su cient strength to ensure that it can make itself respected in the
world.’ His words were greeted with loud applause by his fellow
deputies.20
One of the attractions of war was the prospect of the rifts and
animosities disappearing in the face of a common enemy and bonds
of solidarity and brotherly love arising – as they had brie y in the
rst months of 1848. At the end of May, Francesco De Sanctis was
sailing on a ship full of volunteers and reservists, and experienced a
moment of joyous epiphany, a deep sense of romantic self-
realization, as the prospect of ghting for Italy bound men of
di erent regions and backgrounds together:
I have never felt ‘Italy’ so intensely as I do now. We were standing on the deck towards
midnight. The sky was starry… All of a sudden everyone linked arms. There was an
artillery captain from Turin, a lieutenant from Parma, two Neapolitans, eleven Sicilian
volunteers from distinguished Palermo families travelling at their own expense, and a
Florentine. And we were all there together, before the vastness of the sea, singing
‘Farewell, my lovely, farewell!’ And after we had nished that historic song, we sang others

– all the songs of’ 48 revived…21

Three weeks later, with hostilities imminent, De Sanctis was

thrilled to see how the Chamber and the Senate were burying their
di erences, ‘sacri cing all for concord’. It was deeply reassuring:
‘When it comes to ghting the foreigner encamped on our soil, Italy
is able to set aside personal and party interests and form into one
solid phalanx.’22
The declaration of war against Austria on 20 June was greeted
throughout Italy with extraordinary excitement. The writer
Edmondo De Amicis recalled the crowds milling excitedly in the
streets, the carnivallike atmosphere and the air of exultant
patriotism that seemed to have gripped almost everyone (‘These are
great days for Italy! A great war!… This is how nations are
made!).23 A young Tuscan student, Sidney Sonnino, who nearly fty
years later as foreign minister was to negotiate Italy’s entry into
another much larger con ict, wrote in his diary: ‘What a
magni cent day for Italy! For the rst time in its entire history the
whole country is rising up, on its own, to assert its rights! Never,
never before has anything similar been seen. How lucky we are to
witness it!’24 For Sonnino, as for so many others, defeat seemed
unthinkable – and not just because the consequences were too awful
to imagine (‘We must win, for a new nation like ours cannot
continue in a state of tension for so long without disintegrating…
We should remember how in 1793 an old nation, as France was,
came close to disintegrating as a result of the factionalism of the
Girondins and Jacobins – and how much more united they were
than we are!).25 The Austrians, after all, were ghting on two fronts;
their eet was half the size of Italy’s; and their forces in the Veneto
were heavily outnumbered by the 400,000 or so men that Italy
could mobilize. On paper at least Italy had every right to expect a
victory.
These expectations made the events of the next few weeks deeply
painful. The lessons of 1848–9 had manifestly not been learned and
again no adequate preparations had been made. Lamarmora had
rejected Bismarck’s request in the spring for a military convention,
and the Italian general sta were accordingly left in the dark as to
their Prussian ally’s battle plans. There was a hopelessly muddled
command structure, with Victor Emmanuel insisting on acting as
commander-in-chief but with de facto command divided between
Cialdini and Lamarmora (who was anyway thoroughly ill-prepared
for such a responsibility after serving for two years as prime
minister and foreign minister – he only stood down as prime
minister on 20 June). Garibaldi was given a separate command as
head of the volunteers. Cialdini and Lamarmora failed to
communicate with Garibaldi; worse still they hardly communicated
with each other, as both, it seems, were secretly hoping to take the
lead role. Consequently when they met at Bologna on 17 June to
sort out operational plans they did not clarify exactly what they
would do with their respective halves of the army.
The consequences were devastating. On 23 June Lamarmora
crossed the River Mincio seemingly unaware that the Austrians
would be waiting for him on the other side, as he had failed to get
hold of proper reconnaissance reports. The next day, with his troops
strung out across a broad front near Custoza, he came under attack.
When the king telegraphed Cialdini to say that serious ghting had
broken out, Cialdini was utterly incredulous: ‘Lamarmora had
promised me he would con ne himself simply to a feint.’26 Cialdini
was too far away to come to Lamarmora’s aid. With no plans and no
general sta , Lamarmora raced along the lines muttering to himself
‘What a defeat!… What a disaster!… Not even ’ 49 was this bad’,
desperately trying to locate his senior colleagues, and as a result
nobody, not even the king, knew where to nd him. By the early
afternoon he had ended up quite bizarrely at the town of Goito,
about twenty kilometres from the battle eld, something which
subsequently he was unable to explain satisfactorily, and in the
absence of anyone to provide coherent leadership, the confusion
among the Italian forces rapidly resulted in chaos. Had the king
possessed tactical ability, he might have rallied the troops and saved
the day. But he did not, and the army was allowed to fall back
towards Cremona in disarray. Cialdini still had his forces encamped
to the east on the River Po, but he too decided to retreat – despite
an explicit request from Lamarmora not to do so. The rout was
complete.27
For a couple of weeks after the defeat at Custoza the army
remained inactive as the king and his generals sought to recover
their nerve and decide what to do. In the meantime the Prussians
in icted a major defeat on the Austrians at the Battle of Sadowa,
and, backed by Napoleon, Austria now tried to get Italy to pull out
of the war in return for being given the Veneto. But this was felt to
be too demeaning without a victory. On 14 July, Victor Emmanuel,
Lamarmora, Cialdini and other senior generals and politicians met
at Ferrara and decided that the navy should be pressed into action.
The only problem was that nobody had much faith in the admiral,
Count Carlo Persano, who with characteristic insubordination had
already de ed instructions to hunt down and attack the Austrian
eet. Persano was well liked at court, which was the main reason
why he had risen so high; but he was not very competent and had a
track record of blunders to his name, including on one occasion
having run aground a ship carrying the king and the royal family
and nearly drowned them. It was suggested that he should be
replaced, but no address could be found for his successor. So he was
left in command and ordered to engage the enemy on pain of
immediate dismissal.28
The government had invested heavily in the navy since 1861, and
as a result Persano had an impressive eet, with thirty-two
warships, including twelve ironclads. The Austrians by contrast had
just seven ironclads. But even more than the army, the navy was
torn by erce internal rivalries among the o cers, mostly along
regional lines; and there was also a severe shortage of trained crew,
with three of the largest Italian vessels having just nineteen gunners
instead of the more than 230 they should have had.29 It was partly
because of these problems that Persano had been reluctant to
engage the enemy, but faced with the threat of dismissal he felt he
had no choice now but to act. He decided to attack the island
fortress of Lissa, to the south-east of Ancona, where his eet was
currently based. But there were no maps to hand and he failed to
agree an operational plan in advance; and when he unexpectedly
encountered the Austrians on the morning of 20 July his eet was
badly scattered (largely as a result of orders being disobeyed). To
make matters worse he had unaccountably decided at the last
moment to transfer ship, and since there was no admiral’s ag on
board to indicate the vessel’s changed status, confusion reigned over
who was in charge. During the battle – the rst of any signi cance
to involve ironclads; the last in which battering rams were deployed
– one Italian ironclad was rammed and sunk, another exploded and
caught re, and though it was not a heavy defeat, it was a defeat
nonetheless, and Persano was subsequently tried and found guilty
by the Senate of incompetence, negligence and disobedience. Many
others might have faced similar charges for their part in the events
of 1866, but it was politically convenient to have one scapegoat to
draw the re of public anger and indignation.30

The humiliation of Custoza and Lissa was made worse by the

armistice that followed between Austria and Prussia. The Austrians
agreed to give up the Veneto, but not to Italy. Instead they handed
it to Napoleon III, who, in truly imperial fashion, then passed it on
to Italy as a gift. It was all highly galling. Italy had hoped to emerge
from the war as a powerful and respected nation, able to assert itself
independently on the international stage, but instead found its face
being rubbed in the dirt. ‘To be Italian was something we once
longed for; now, in the present circumstances, it is shameful,’ wrote
Francesco Crispi to a friend.31 The catastrophic events of 1866 cast
a long and deep shadow over the next few decades – much longer
and deeper than has generally been recognized – not just because
they left a painful military insult to be avenged at the earliest
opportunity but also because they placed a major question mark
over the manner in which the settlement of 1860–61 had been
achieved and over the men who had been its principal architects –
the supposedly tough and competent Piedmontese. Writing more
than forty years later one of Italy’s most passionate and in uential
intellectuals, Giustino Fortunato, told a veteran of the Thousand just
how much he longed to talk to him about what had gone wrong
since the glorious events of 1860:
For then I will make you realize what kind of dull-minded cretins they were who in 1866
wasted the most marvellous moment that history had presented to Italy, the moment in
which for the very rst time since the dawn of its existence all the sons of Italy, from all of

its regions, were ghting for the Fatherland under one single banner…32

Custoza and Lissa also had the e ect of destroying most of the
remaining vestiges of optimism generated by the events of 1859–60.
The idea, so central to the national movement from the time of
Napoleon, that Italy needed to undergo a fundamental moral
transformation in order to shake o the legacy of centuries of
corruption and decadence, resurfaced and caused many to argue
that the Risorgimento, far from being concluded, had in reality yet
to begin. These sentiments were well expressed by the Neapolitan
historian Pasquale Villari in a famous article entitled ‘Who is to
Blame?’ published immediately after the war, in which he said that
the defeats had laid bare in brutal fashion the shortcomings of the
uni cation process. Had Italy been brought into existence through a
genuine national revolution, engineered entirely by its own people,
then a ‘new, young and warlike’ ruling class would have emerged
‘out of the crucible of a long and bloody struggle’, to replace the
ancien rágime elites and provide the nation with vigorous leadership.
But this had not happened, and instead Italy had been left ill-
governed and prey to all its ancient weaknesses: ‘In the heart of the
nation there lies an enemy more powerful than Austria: our colossal
ignorance, the illiterate masses, the dumb bureaucrats, the stupid
professors, the infantile politicians, the insu erable diplomats, the
incompetent generals, the unskilled worker, the authoritarian
farmer, and the rhetoric that eats our bones.’33
As if to underscore the point, an insurrection broke out in
Palermo in the middle of September just as the war ended, and for a
week the city was in the control of some 40,000 insurgents, many of
them belonging to the same peasant squads that six years earlier
had poured down from the hills in support of Garibaldi. The rising
was as much social as political in character, and lacked clear
organization, with republicans and separatists rubbing shoulders
incongruously with Bourbonists and clericals; but the government
was extremely jittery after the recent defeats and the army
leadership keen to highlight what it saw as one of the main sources
of contamination of the country’s moral bre, and a large force was
dispatched to Sicily under the Piedmontese general Ra aele
Cadorna, and Palermo bombarded into submission. Martial law was
declared, and there were sweeping arrests and numerous summary
executions (including of women). To justify the severe measures,
Cadorna drew up a list of atrocities that had allegedly been
committed by the Sicilians, including policemen being burned alive
and bitten to death, a soldier being cruci ed, and carabiniere esh
being sold publicly in the streets; and the government went ahead
and published these claims, even though Cadorna later confessed
they had been based on little more than hearsay.34 The Minister of
the Interior further stoked the ames by talking publicly for the rst
time about a deadly secret society called ‘the ma a’ which he
alleged had been largely responsible for the horrors in Sicily.35 The
demons within Italy were rapidly emerging as every bit as menacing
as those without.
THE TAKING OF ROME

The costs of uni cation had been very high, and Italy’s public
nances had been in a precarious condition for some time. The war
of 1866 was the last straw, and it left the country nancially as well
as morally prostrate. During the next four years the government was
forced to concentrate heavily on the prosaic business of staving o
bankruptcy, raising loans, issuing vast amounts of paper money,
selling o ecclesiastical property and increasing taxes. The rst of
the country’s major parliamentary scandals broke out in 1868–9 in
relation to the sale by the state of its tobacco monopoly to a
consortium of bankers for a seemingly paltry sum, with widespread
rumours that many deputies (and even the king) stood to make huge
personal gains from the transaction.36 On the left in particular there
were angry accusations that Italy was being dragged into a moral
morass, and metaphors of ‘mire’ and ‘mud’ began to be bandied
about freely in reference to the Chamber of Deputies. The image of
Italy as a modern-day ‘Byzantium’ – e ete, corrupt and decadent –
also began to circulate, and soon became common currency. To add
to the growing sense of despondency serious rioting broke out early
in 1869 – this time in the north rather than the south, in the
Romagna – following the introduction of a highly unpopular new
grist tax, and again martial law was declared and General Cadorna
sent in with the army.
The idea of a march on Rome to complete the country’s material
and moral uni cation remained in the air, and in the autumn of
1867 the elderly Garibaldi embarked on one last desperate bid to
seize the Eternal City. The prospect of a war with France did not
worry him. Indeed he welcomed it: it would be the making of Italy.
‘A few days of energetic action will serve to sort everything out and
win over the entire nation,’ he informed his friend Francesco Crispi.
‘… The whole population would rise up, women and children
included, and the world would see a demonstration of the will of the
people such, perhaps, as had never been witnessed before.’37 But his
hopes proved unfounded. Thousands of volunteers assembled in
Florence and again there were rumours of a secret understanding
between Garibaldi and the king; but the rising that was supposed to
have broken out in Rome to provide a pretext for armed
intervention failed to materialize, and although Garibaldi advanced
into papal territory, the government lost its nerve and refused to
send in the army to support him, thereby allowing the French to
land an expeditionary force at Civitavecchia unopposed. Without
assistance from the local population, the venture was doomed to
failure and on 3 November, demoralized by the cold and the rain,
Garibaldi and his supporters were defeated in a minor engagement
at Mentana. Far from being erased the humiliations of Custoza and
Lissa the previous year had been compounded.
Rome was nally acquired only in September 1870, and the event
was not the glorious culmination to the national movement that
many patriots had hoped for. The outbreak of war between France
and Prussia obliged Napoleon III to withdraw his garrison of troops
from the city in July, but the Italian government under the
eminently worthy but lacklustre Piedmontese doctor Giovanni Lanza
remained wedded to the idea that Rome should if possible be
secured peacefully, with the consent of France and the papacy, and
hesitated to use military action. It continued to hesitate even after
Napoleon had been defeated at the Battle of Sedan early in
September and been forced into exile; and it was largely only fear of
republicans seizing the initiative and increasing pressure from
public opinion, whipped up in the main by the patriotic democratic
press (even the king’s mistress got excited: she vowed never to sleep
with Victor Emmanuel again if he did not take the city),38 that
persuaded the government to move. On the morning of 20
September, Italian artillery punched a hole in the walls of Rome
near Porta Pia. The Pope had asked his soldiers to put up token
resistance – just enough to show that he was yielding to force – and
there were only a few casualties. A white ag was soon ying over
St Peter’s, and within a day all that remained of the temporal power
of the popes was the Vatican.
For those who had grown up under the in uence of Mazzini and
the other patriotic writers of the Risorgimento, the half-hearted
manner in which Rome was taken was frustrating. It seemed to
indicate a lack of faith in Italy as a nation: for if Italy had been
providentially ordained, as so many had wished to believe, then
surely it was entitled to seize what rightfully belonged to it, if
necessary by force, without having to worry about diplomatic
niceties? And if the country’s leaders displayed so little con dence
in the national principle, what hope was there that the rest of the
population would acquire any sense of patriotism? Even after the
city had been captured, the government remained nervous, almost
as if it was embarrassed by what had happened and was worried
about upsetting the Pope more than it already had done. Victor
Emmanuel only travelled to Rome for the rst time on 30
December, arriving discreetly in the middle of the night and staying
for just a few hours; and even then the o cial reason for the visit
was to o er sympathy to victims of a recent ood of the Tiber and
not for the king to set foot in his new capital. The gulf between the
poetry and the prose was horribly apparent; and in the decades to
come the anxieties and frustrations that this gulf engendered were
slowly to gnaw away at the moral foundations of the liberal state
and foster among the country’s leading intellectuals desperate, and
sometimes wholly unrealistic, schemes for rectifying the situation.
The writer Giosuè Carducci – the former Mazzinian who
dominated the Italian literary scene in the 1870s and 1880s – voiced
the sense of disappointment at the stark contrast between what
might have been and what was brilliantly. In a poem written in
1871, which con ated the city’s capture with Victor Emmanuel’s
eeting visit of three months later, he imagined ‘Italy’ creeping up
to the Capitoline Hill at night:
Be quiet! Be quiet! Why this commotion in the moonlight?
Geese of the Capitol, be quiet!
I am Italy, united and great.
 I come in the dark because Dr Lanza
Is afraid of the rays of the sun…
Please, geese, make less noise
Lest [the Pope’s minister] hears…
Forever on my knees…
Daughter of Rome
I plant my kisses on one foot after another
And down in the mud
I drag my turreted locks

With the star attached…39

In another poem, written to commemorate his friend the Romagna

democrat Vincenzo Caldesi, who had died in 1870, Carducci
provided what quickly became the literary locus classicus for
frustrated patriotic hopes – Italy as the new Byzantium:
Sleep my Vincenzo, sleep, furled in your cloak of glory:
We are living in an age of weak and devious men
When the strong are forgotten…
I would not wish to cry the name of Rome
Above your holy tomb
Yet, if I were to lean over your secluded grave
And say with heartfelt pride:
Vincenzo, we have ascended the Capitol once more…
You would spring from the earth
To behold and defend again that Rome
Whose liberty you invoked
And to which you sacri ced the best portion of your life.
But sleep on…
The burden of sin still weighs us down:
Italy, unprepared, demanded Rome –

They have given her Byzantium.40

How to turn ‘Byzantium’ into ‘Rome’ was to be the main problem

facing Italy’s political class now that the material unity of the nation
was to all intents and purposes complete.
13

The Threat from the South, 1870–85

I want to speak of the ma a. You say to me: what is the ma a? Perhaps

it is something that cannot be de ned, but all the many documents that
we have gathered indicate that it is a powerful and massive association,
it is a solidarity in evil, an association of the guilty for enjoying the fruits
of crime and ensuring that law remains beyond their reach.

Stefano Castagnola (Ligurian), speech to the Chamber of Deputies, 8

June 1874

The co-existence of Sicilian civilization and that of central and northern

Italy in the same nation is incompatible with the prosperity of the nation
and, in the long run, with its very existence, for it produces a weakness
that makes the nation vulnerable to disintegration at the slightest push
from outside. One of these two civilizations must therefore disappear…

Leopoldo Franchetti (Tuscan),

Condizioni politiche e amministrative della Sicilia (1877)

The ma a is neither a sect nor an association, it has no regulations or

statutes. The ma oso is not a thief or a criminal. And if the word’s
recent change in fortune has meant that the term ma oso has been
applied to thieves and criminals, this is because the ill-informed general
public has not had time to consider the meaning of the word properly or
bother to nd out that… a ma oso is simply a brave and assertive man
who does not tolerate insults.

Giuseppe Pitrè (Sicilian),

Usi e costumi, credenze e pregiudizi, del popolo siciliano (1887)
‘EXAMINING ITALY IN THE SPIRIT OF MACHIAVELLI’

In the summer of 1870 Francesco De Sanctis was working on a

monumental history of Italian literature. Since the disasters of
Custoza and Lissa he had turned away from parliamentary life in
order to concentrate on academic studies. Not in any spirit of
escapism or reclusive-ness: scholarship, in his view, needed to be
politically engaged and should seek to educate hearts and minds to
the responsibilities of citizenship in a modern state. As he ranged
over the vast corpus of Italian writings from the Middle Ages to the
present, he identi ed two archetypes of the national character,
which he wanted to hold up to his fellow countrymen as exemplars
of what to avoid and what to emulate. The rst was that of the
early-sixteenth-century historian Francesco Guicciardini, who had
viewed the world with scepticism and detachment, aware of what
was morally desirable but unwilling to do anything to achieve a
higher goal if this required personal inconvenience or su ering. The
spirit of this ‘Guicciardini man’, he believed, had in ltrated Italian
society since the Counter-Reformation and brought about the
country’s decline. The second archetype, and Guicciardini’s moral
antithesis, was represented by another early-sixteenth-century
writer, Niccolò Machiavelli. He had looked the world squarely in the
face, had analysed ruthlessly the weaknesses of the Italian people,
and (crucially) had believed that their vices should and could be
recti ed. ‘Machiavelli ghts the corruption of Italy without
despairing of his country… With Guicciardini we have the
emergence of a more resigned generation.’1
As he sat writing in his small house in the centre of Naples on 20
September 1870, just a stone’s throw from where the great
philosopher Giambattista Vico had been born 200 years before,
surrounded by cigar smoke and papers, De Sanctis could hear the
church bells ringing out to celebrate the taking of Rome, and he
hoped fervently that the collapse of the Pope’s temporal power
would usher in a new age for Italy – one grounded in the spirit of
Machiavelli, simultaneously scienti c and idealistic, in which the
polestars of both thought and action were nation, state, fatherland,
liberty and equality.2 But if Italy were to enter fully into the modern
world, it would rst have to undergo a process of rigorous self-
examination and discovery:
[Italy] now has to look into its heart and search for itself… Its life is still too external and
super cial. It must search with unclouded gaze, free of all lters and distortions, exploring
reality in the spirit of Galileo and Machiavelli… We must examine… our ways of behaving,
our ideas, our prejudices, and our qualities, both good and bad, and make the modern
world our world, studying it, adapting to it, and moulding it… We live to a large extent in
the past and rely heavily on the achievements of others: we have yet to fashion our own
life and our own achievements. And in our boastful claims can be glimpsed a sense of our

inferiority…3

The need to examine closely the moral and material reality of

Italy appeared all the more pressing in the light of developments
elsewhere in Europe. The Paris Commune of the spring of 1871,
with its mixture of socialism and insurrectionary violence, sent
shock waves through conservative circles, for it was widely regarded
as the work of the International Working Men’s Association (‘the
International’), an organization that had been founded in London in
1864 to coordinate the demands and activities of the working-class
movements of Western countries. On one level Italy seemed much
less vulnerable to socialism than more industrialized states: its rural
economy and mass of illiterate peasants meant that it was
historically still too immature for revolution, at least according to
the theories of Karl Marx and his followers. But the great poverty of
the countryside and the strong traditions of rural disorder – well
over a thousand people had been killed or wounded in the Romagna
riots of 1869 – led many to fear that the message of the
International might fall on receptive soil in Italy, particularly as the
poor had almost no national sentiment and little sense of loyalty
towards the institutions that could serve as prophylactics against the
new subversive doctrines.
Somewhat ironically, the introduction of liberalism in 1860 had
meant that the great majority of the population were economically
more vulnerable than they had been under absolutism. The ancien
rágime rulers had sought to safeguard the poor against the
uncertainties of the market place and the rapaciousness of local
landowners with price controls, protectionism, low taxes, laws to
promote land distribution and charity from the Church – whose vast
network of monasteries, hospitals, schools, orphanages and
charitable foundations and endowments a orded a crucial source of
welfare (not to mention employment).4 United Italy had brought
with it the chill winds of free trade, with particularly devastating
e ects on the fragile manufacturing sector in the south. It had also
given the propertied classes an unprecedented degree of power, for
town councillors and parliamentary deputies were elected by the
wealthiest social groups, and answered to them, and in e ect to
them only, rather than (as formerly) to a paternalistic monarch. And
in the absence of a strong national ethos to counter the moral
imperatives of self-interest, the ruling elites were able to use their
privileged position to feather their own nests, often quite
shamelessly.
The di culty the government faced in trying to legislate in
favour of the working classes was evident time and again in the
early decades of unity. Despite, in the 1860s and even more in the
1870s and 1880s, a number of major inquiries which revealed the
appalling scale of urban and rural deprivation in Italy, attempts to
introduce a fairer tax system, or increase the number of peasant
smallholdings or constrain employers to behave responsibly towards
their tenants and workers were blocked in parliament by ad hoc
coalitions of deputies eager to protect their interests. If a measure
did make it to the statute book that might in theory have helped the
poor, the realities of local life often served to hamstring it. This was
the case, for example, with the massive sale of more than 2 million
hectares of ecclesiastical and ex-feudal property by the state during
the late 1860s and 1870s. Despite a stipulation that it should be sold
o in small units in order to allow peasants to make purchases, the
absence of credit facilities, especially in the south, together with the
government’s desperate need for ready money meant that in the end
it was only the already well-o who were in a position to bene t.
Moreover the auctions were frequently rigged by the galantuomini,
who used intimidation to ensure that nobody dared bid against
them.5
The state’s need to raise revenue quickly in order to deal with the
huge public debt was one important reason why the burden of
taxation fell disproportionately on the poor after 1860. Piedmont
had run up a huge overdraft in the late 1840s and 1850s, well over
1,000 million lire, ghting the Austrians and constructing railways;
and when to this were added the debts that the new kingdom
inherited from the other Italian states at uni cation, the costs of
ghting banditry in the south and of the war of 1866, and the
expenditure incurred in setting up three capital cities in the space of
a decade, it is little wonder that united Italy imposed abnormally
high levels of taxation on its new subjects.6 By 1870 the national
debt had reached the dizzy heights of more than 8,000 million lire.
Revenue from direct taxes went up by 63 per cent between 1865
and 1871, but the di culties involved in getting accurate returns
for private income forced the government to fall back more and
more on easily levied consumer taxes – on salt, on tobacco, and
most notoriously on the grinding of wheat and other grains – which
hit the working classes particularly severely. Receipts from indirect
taxation rose by 107 per cent between 1865 and 1871.7 Local
councils were also entitled to impose taxes, for example on food and
livestock, and again it was the poor who were disproportionately
a ected. When the young Tuscan liberal Sidney Sonnino visited
Sicily in 1876 he found that mules and donkeys – which the
peasants owned – were much more heavily taxed than cattle, which
belonged to the large landowners.8
 Not surprisingly these enormous scal burdens were a source of
widespread popular resentment towards the state, and there were
growing fears that the gap between rulers and ruled – or what was
commonly referred to as ‘legal’ and ‘real’ Italy – might prove fatal to
the new kingdom. Already in the early 1870s great alarm was
caused by the presence of anarchist agitators among the peasantry,
especially in the Romagna (where an armed insurrection was
attempted in 1874) and in southern Italy. Fears for the future of
Italy were most acutely felt by those whose involvement in the
democratic movement since the 1840s had given them a sense of
responsibility towards ‘the people’ and a strong awareness of the
weakness of patriotic sentiment among the mass of ordinary Italians.
One such was Francesco Crispi, who in October 1873 travelled to
Tricarico, the constituency in the mountainous interior of Basilicata
that he had represented since 1870 and not visited before: it was
common for leading politicians to be returned in a college in
absentia. He was deeply shocked by what he found.
The journey involved a two-day trek inland by carriage from the
nearest railway station at Eboli over steep and ill-made roads. Of the
thirteen towns and villages that comprised the electoral college,
only two were connected to the outside world by road: the rest were
accessible by rough tracks that turned to quagmire in the winter
rains. The extent of the poverty was almost indescribable. The
peasants lived on a diet of beans or barley ground up into a coarse
our. But they were being bled dry by the grist tax, which the
government’s agents levied remorselessly; and in several places
Crispi was assailed by crowds of angry women protesters. The
landowners could not market their produce because of the high
costs of transport, and as a result their crops were being left to rot.
The levels of ignorance were dire, and in most places the welcoming
party had to consist largely of priests, who at least spoke Italian.
Crispi was pleased that in one town the streets had been given
‘Italian’ names – Plebiscito, Vittorio Emanuele, Garibaldi, Mille and
even Pisacane – but overall he had a sense of an angry and
subversive world that was still outside the con nes of the nation. As
he told his friend, the doctor and social reformer Agostino Bertani:
What has the national government done to bring civilization here and win over the masses?
Nothing. What it has done has been counter-productive… I will not tell you of the cries,
the abuse and the tears. I will tell you only that the Italian government is cursed and hated.
And if brigandage were to break out again, how could the government complain? And if

they threatened unity, would we dare to punish them? It is enough to drive you mad.9

The indications are that in the rst forty years of uni cation the
standard of living of the Italian population as a whole did not
improve at all – indeed in many cases it seems to have fallen – and
this at a time when almost everywhere else in Europe experienced
at least modest rises in prosperity.10 The 1880s did see a signi cant
expansion of industry, with the creation of state-sponsored iron and
steel production (a considerable achievement given the near total
absence of coal and other minerals), the establishment of new
engineering plants and sustained growth in the main manufacturing
sector, textiles (cotton, wool and above all silk, of which Italy was
the world’s leading producer after China). But these developments
were con ned almost entirely to the three north-western regions of
the peninsula and did not result in an industrial ‘take-o ’ of any
kind. Nor was it clear that factory workers were better paid than
their rural counterparts: the massive labour pool ensured that wages
were kept depressed. As it was Italy remained an overwhelmingly
agricultural country, with around two-thirds of the labour force
employed on the land in the 1870s and 1880s; and here the general
picture in the last two decades of the nineteenth century was bleak,
with low investment and falling prices leading to rising
unemployment and a general decline in living standards. Millions of
Italians voted with their feet and emigrated.
THE ‘SOUTHERN QUESTION’

It was the economic and social conditions of the south of Italy that
attracted most attention after 1870. The civil war that had raged in
the rst years after uni cation died down during the second half of
the 1860s, and though banditry remained an intermittent problem,
the main focus of government and academic concern moved away
from law and order towards examining the root causes of the
backwardness and poverty of the southern provinces. For in almost
every sphere the gap between north and south was wide, and
despite hopes that the introduction of political and economic
liberalism would soon reduce the de cit, the disparities in fact
showed every sign of growing. Apart from certain pockets of
intensive cultivation, as on the eastern seaboard of Sicily or the
coastal plains of Puglia, where citrus fruit, vines and olives
abounded, southern agriculture was characterized by poor yields,
limited investment and outdated farming methods. Income was
generally much lower and unemployment greater; mortality and
birth rates were higher; and illiteracy levels were nearly double
those of Piedmont and Lombardy. There were also major
discrepancies in the quality of civil society, with the north having a
far more vigorous and developed cultural life than the south.
Naples, for instance, had just ve bookshops in 1881, despite being
the largest city in Italy (Florence had twelve, Turin ten). Some of
the most striking di erences were to be found in the economic
infrastructure. In 1869 there were twenty- ve banking houses in the
north, and only three in the south; and a decade later the imbalance
had become if anything more pronounced: 193 as against thirty-
one.11
The problem was that the ‘southern question’, as it came to be
called in the 1870s, was from the start clouded by resentment and
prejudice, much of it fuelled by the highly insensitive fashion in
which uni cation had been imposed after 1860. This not only made
it extremely hard for discussions to be conducted in ‘the spirit of
Galileo and Machiavelli’, as De Sanctis had wanted, but also
in uenced the terms in which many of the arguments were framed.
Indeed the very idea of a ‘southern question’ derived more from an
old belief in a deep cultural and moral cleavage between the two
halves of the peninsula than from any self-evident fact: ‘the south’
was after all never a homogeneous entity.12 When northerners
attributed the south’s problems largely to the shortcomings of the
local landowners – their feudal attitudes, their ignorance, their lack
of entrepreneurial spirit – they were often drawing on long-standing
stereotypes. When southerners, by contrast, blamed the region’s
continued poverty on the new state – on free trade, on
centralization, on an inequitable tax system – they were often
re ecting resentment at what had seemed a Piedmontese ‘conquest’
(and forgetting that the south’s relative backwardness in fact long
predated uni cation).
The problem of prejudice in relation to the southern question was
nowhere more evident than in the question of ‘the ma a’. Sicily had
been the most disturbed region in Italy during the 1860s, and talk of
a sinister criminal organization had begun to surface in o cial
circles in 1865–6, especially in the wake of the Palermo rising.
Quite what the ma a was, was unclear, and there was a strong
suspicion in some quarters that the idea of a dangerous secret
society was little more than a canard being used to explain the
unrest and justify severe repressive measures. When in 1874,
following renewed fears of an insurrection, the government
announced that it would introduce exceptional measures to deal
with ‘the ma a’, there was an outcry in the island and accusations
began to y that the reputation of Sicily was being besmirched by
hostile and uncomprehending northerners. The issue was debated in
parliament in the summer of 1875, bringing ‘the ma a’ to
international attention for the rst time, but from the discussions it
was evident that nobody knew exactly what the phenomenon was –
and even if it existed. Indeed the prevalent view seemed to be that
‘the ma a’ was best understood not as an organization but as a form
of behaviour involving exaggerated notions of personal honour and
a willingness to deploy private violence.13
It was partly to nd out the truth about ‘the ma a’ that in the
spring of 1876 a young Tuscan intellectual, Leopoldo Franchetti,
travelled to Sicily with his friend Sidney Sonnino. The study that he
published later that year of the administrative and political
conditions in the island was at once brilliantly penetrating and
profoundly disturbing, for it revealed a world where the state had
failed almost entirely to establish its moral authority, leaving power
in the hands of men who could threaten and kill with impunity. ‘The
ma a’, he discovered, was not a secret society. There certainly were
criminal associations in Sicily with initiation rites and statutes; but
these were usually quite small in scale and tended to operate in
niche economic markets. The reality was that ma osi – men with a
reputation for violence – did not need a formal organization, for
they were operating in an environment (much of western and
central Sicily) where their authority was respected almost without
question and where nobody would think of denouncing them to the
police. They were pivotal to almost every aspect of life: they
dominated the land and labour markets, mediated with the
authorities, settled disputes, protected property and ran elections.
And since they were so pivotal, everyone (including state o cials)
ended up having dealings with them, whether they liked it or not,
and became in e ect their accomplices.14
Franchetti was deeply patriotic – he was to commit suicide in
November 1917 after learning of Italy’s disastrous defeat at
Caporetto – and he longed to see Sicily fully integrated into the
nation. But he found it immensely hard to see how this process
could be achieved. The problem was that the men who used private
violence, the ma osi, were deeply woven into the texture of society
and this made it impossible to nd a clear-cut answer to the ‘eternal
question’ haunting the mind of those who studied the island ‘like a
nightmare’: ‘Who is to blame?’ Everyone – from police and
politicians, to landowners and peasants – was in some degree
implicated and culpable. ‘When a drop of oil falls on a marble table-
top, it remains unchanged and can be easily wiped o , but if it lands
on a piece of paper it begins to soak in and spread, and becomes as
one with the material itself and inseparable from it.’15 The only
hope for Sicily was for the state to acquire su cient moral
ascendancy to deprive the ma osi of their authority. But he could
not see how this would be achieved, as there was no social group in
the island with su cient independence and in uence to spearhead
the task of regeneration. And if no solution could be found, he
concluded rather desperately, Italy should abandon Sicily ‘to its
natural forces and let it proclaim its independence’.16

One man who was rather more con dent that he had the answer to
Sicily’s – and indeed humanity’s – problems was a young Jewish
doctor from Verona called Cesare Lombroso. After graduating in
medicine from the university of Pavia in 1858, Lombroso had
travelled with the army in southern Italy during the campaign
against brigandage and had become fascinated by the issue of crime.
He had measured and examined some 3,000 conscripts and in 1864
had published a study of the links between soldiers’ tattoos and
deviancy. But his moment of epiphany came one day in 1870 when
he was carrying out an autopsy on a 69-year-old Calabrian thief and
arsonist, suspected of banditry, called Giuseppe Villella. While
examining the skull he noticed an anomaly: where the occipital
ridge should have been, close to the junction with the spine, there
was a depression, 34 mm long, 23 mm wide and 11 mm deep,
whose pro le suggested a deformation of the brain caused, perhaps,
by arrested foetal development. Similar occipital depressions were
known to occur in various species of monkey and lemur: ‘When I
saw that depression,’ wrote Lombroso a number of years later, ‘I
suddenly saw unfolding before me, like a vast plain stretching o
endlessly towards the distant horizon, the problem of the nature of
the human criminal, who in the modern age was driven to replicate
the behaviour of primitive man and of animals right down to
carnivores.’ Lombroso preserved Villella’s skull all his life, regarding
it, he said, as ‘the totem, the fetish of criminal anthropology’.17
Lombroso was to be the founder of a hugely in uential school of
criminology that attracted to its ranks some of Italy’s best-known
scienti cor ‘positivist’ intellectuals of the last quarter of the
nineteenth century, including several of the country’s leading
socialists. His most famous work, Criminal Man, rst published in
1876, went through ve editions in twenty years (expanding in the
process from 250 to more than 2,000 pages) and was widely
translated in Europe and the Americas. Though he never denied the
impact of environment and social conditions on criminal behaviour
(which was one reason why many socialists were happy to embrace
his teachings), Lombroso’s central contention was that the most
hardened and violent o enders were almost invariably the product
of a genetic throw-back or what he called ‘atavism’. And from the
start he saw the main determinant of atavism as race. Writing the
same year as his seminal dissection of Villella’s skull, and inspired
by the recent appearance of Charles Darwin’s ground-breaking The
Descent of Man, Lombroso argued that the di erent levels of
civilization in the world were to be explained in terms of degrees of
evolutionary development away from primates, with white
Europeans at the peak (their crania were perfectly proportioned)
and Mongols, bushmen and blacks at the base. Black people, he
claimed, resembled monkeys in the small size of their skulls, their
dark skin, curly hair, eye membranes and ‘particular odour’.18
It was a very small step from here to a racial reading of Italy’s
‘southern question’, for though criminal statistics only began to be
collected systematically from 1879, the overwhelming impression
given by the south from 1860 was of a region beset by crime,
especially violent crime – banditry, kidnapping, feuding and armed
robberies. And violence, according to Lombroso and his followers,
was a good indicator of barbarism, and barbarism of racial
degeneracy. Thus the high rates of murder around Palermo were to
be explained by the settlement there in ancient times of the
‘rapacious Berber and Semitic tribes’, while the generally lower
incidence of killings in the eastern half of the island was the result
of the richer mixture of ‘Aryan blood’.19 The existence of criminal
organizations such as the Neapolitan camorra and the Sicilian ma a
was also evidence of a greater level of atavism in the south, for
secret societies, he said, were frequently to be found among
primitive peoples – as, for example, the Mumbo Djembo of
Senegal.20 Lombroso was dismissive of claims by certain Sicilian
ethnographers and others that ma osi were in fact ‘men of honour’
who embodied a distinctive set of traditional local values: ma osi
were just ‘vulgar criminals’, as was clear from their jargon, their
clothes and their liking for expensive rings.21
Lombroso held a number of distinguished academic posts at the
universities of Pavia and Turin, and the school of criminal
anthropology that he built up in uenced Italian intellectual life
heavily in the last quarter of the century – and continued to do so
for many years after his death in 1909. He believed strongly that he
was engaged in a patriotic mission, writing in 1879 of how he felt
inspired ‘not by love of a sect or a party, but of the nation’, and was
thus driven to do everything in his power to combat ‘the tide of
crime that is always rising and rising, threatening to submerge as
well as disgrace us’.22 And his contention that criminality posed a
deadly and growing threat to the country was widely accepted
(despite the problems of getting hold of any reliable statistics) and
became something of a national obsession in the course of the
1880s, with the prominent Neapolitan jurist Ra aele Garofalo
claiming that Italy had sixteen times as many murders as Britain and
a prison population that was twenty times greater, and with a young
Milanese lawyer and future leader of the Italian Socialist Party,
Filippo Turati, announcing in 1882 that the country enjoyed a ‘real
primacy’ in Europe, but unfortunately not that ‘dreamed of by
Gioberti’, namely in crime.23
Lombroso had no doubt that he and his followers were acting in
the ‘spirit of Machiavelli’: his numerous books (more than thirty)
and articles were packed with data drawn from a huge array of
sources, and studded with statistical tables, charts, photographs and
diagrams. And it was their voguish scienti c quality, as much as the
fact that they seemed to o er an answer to the nagging question of
who or what was to blame for Italy’s ills, that helps explain their
remarkable appeal to contemporaries. In reality, though, their use of
evidence was extremely crude, with the taxonomy of features of
‘born criminals’ – narrow foreheads, thick black hair, hirsute limbs
and torso, wispy beards, prominent jaws, large canine teeth and jug
ears – providing an object lesson in the power of prejudice to shape
‘impartial’ observation (Lombroso, though, was proud that his
ndings tallied with popular stereotypes: ‘the knowledge of a
criminal physiognomic type… is often instinctive in the common
people’).24 And the idea that the north–south divide in Italy could
be accounted for largely in genetic terms, with northerners
descended from a European Aryan race, southerners from a Semitic
or Mediterranean race that had emerged from Africa, had even less
empirical substance.

Yet racial explanations for the southern question proved surprisingly

enduring, despite the obvious fact that they risked creating a
permanent fault-line through the nation. One reason for this was
that they dovetailed with the old preoccupations about the
degeneracy of the Italian character. Another was that they provided
ammunition for those – and they were fast growing in number in the
1870s as the full extent of the country’s economic, social and
political problems became apparent – who felt that the existing
political and legal structures were ill-suited to Italy’s needs.
Lombroso himself believed that the basis of the entire judicial
system had to be shifted away from the classical liberal concern
with the o ence to dealing with the o ender if the nation were to
protect itself adequately against the corrosive e ects of atavism:
punishment had to be tted to the criminal rather than the crime,
with ‘born criminals’ facing the death penalty (to hasten evolution
through natural selection) and lesser felons being subjected to the
appropriate corrective and educational measures. And since there
were major disparities in the levels of atavism between north and
south, Italy needed to be less centralized and have penal codes more
nely attuned to local conditions.
The danger that investigations into the southern question,
whether from the angle of crime or of socio-economic
underdevelopment, might weaken the credibility of liberalism
became increasingly apparent in the 1880s and 1890s. While some
of the most eloquent spokesmen for the south – such as the
distinguished politician and scholar from the Basilicata region
Giustino Fortunato – argued passionately that progress could only
be achieved if Italy remained strong and fully united, with
parliament legislating to rectify the disparities between the two
halves of the peninsula, others came to the conclusion that much
more radical and authoritarian approaches were needed. And the
fact that successive governments failed from the 1870s to come up
with laws that made any serious di erence to the south, despite
numerous inquiries and reports (a commission created in 1877 to
look into agricultural conditions in Italy delivered its ndings in
fteen weighty volumes in 1885),25 added to the growing stridency
of the debate. Indeed most observers found it hard to see what
material improvements, if any, there had been in the south during
the rst decades of unity, apart from in railway building: thousands
of kilometres of new track were laid down, though the government’s
motives here were as much military as economic.
A good example of how discussions about the nature of the
country’s socio-economic problems and fears of racial degeneracy
began to call liberalism into question is provided by an important
book, rst published in 1882, by a Neapolitan sociologist and
former follower of Garibaldi, Pasquale Turiello.26 The central thesis
of his lengthy study, Government and Governed in Italy, was that the
political and administrative system that had been introduced in Italy
after 1860 had been much too doctrinaire and foreign (French) and
had failed to take su cient account of the Italian character. Race,
climate, geography and history had all combined over the centuries
to make Italians strongly resistant to authority and prone to intense
individualism, or what he called scioltezza (‘in their decisions and
actions the “I” is more apparent than the “we” ’).27 And these traits
were especially pronounced in the southern half of the country, as
the high levels of crime, especially violent crime, there indicated.
Although the fundamentals of the Italian character could not be
altered they could be modi ed with the appropriate external
controls, and in the Middle Ages institutions such as guilds, citizen
militias and navies had been used by the city-states to keep Italians
on a tight rein. This was why they had managed to achieve great
things. But after 1500 the external controls had dwindled and
Italians had slipped back into scioltezza.28
The mistake in 1860, according to Turiello, was to give Italians
too much freedom and to believe that progress went hand in hand
with a relaxation of central controls by the state. As a result
scioltezza had been allowed to ourish as never before, especially in
the south, and the new liberal institutions had simply encouraged
sel shness and individualism. He felt that parliamentary
government was highly problematic, as deputies were forced to
pander far too much to the local interests of their electors; but it
was not necessarily irredeemable, provided that the nation was
subjected to a process of education that forced Italians to think less
of their private needs and more of the collectivity. Among the
various educational measures he proposed were the creation of
distinctively ‘Italian’ institutions to foster social and political
cohesion, an increased presence of the monarchy in public life, the
building of gymnasia, the introduction of compulsory tness
programmes in every town and village, and the promotion of group
and military activities among children (‘from parades to target
shooting, our schools, from primary to university level, are totally
without attractive structures for encouraging Italian youth to feel
“we” rather than “I” ’).29
But it was the army that Turiello looked to most to overcome
scioltezza and restore the moral bre of the nation. Schools were too
poorly funded and ill-attended to have very much impact on the
national character; and parliament, with its ‘sordid disputes between
the petulant egos of deputies’, o ered no guide to behaviour in the
new Italy. It was military service that would do most to correct the
indiscipline of Italians; and the spectacle of serried ranks of well-
drilled young men parading through the streets would provide an
uplifting model for the values that citizens should aspire to, while
simultaneously raising the prestige of the state (how much, he
wondered, of the dispute with the Pope would be resolved by the
sight of several thousand students marching silently and austerely at
public ceremonies through Rome, ‘consciously re-enacting the
[military rallies] of their forefathers in the Campus Martius’?).30 But
for the army to realize its full educational potential it needed to be
invested with the glory of success. And a great national military
victory was accordingly the key to Italy’s future:
[A] new, mighty and virile o ensive, a second test of arms and blood, [will] restore to Italy
the strength that it now seems to lack… From 1866 until today we have returned a third
time to a period of prolonged peace, which, as history shows, can only be endured by
Italians at the cost of their being ruined… Our character, which becomes weak in
peacetime and is only strengthened in the crucible of war… compel[s] us today to accept
any opportunity to ght… Italy can continue to be at peace, but only at the price of
gradually slipping back to the moral condition into which the protracted periods of peace
had led us in 1494 and 1792… When the army and the nation have been reinvigorated by
a great and glorious war, well planned in advance, the damage that is being done [to the

state by its enemies] will be reduced to almost nothing.31

14

National Education

When he had stretched his legs out, Pinocchio began to walk by himself
and to race round the room; until he slipped through the door, leapt into
the street and took to his heels…
‘Catch him! Catch him!’ shouted Geppetto: but when the people in the
street saw this wooden puppet running like a racehorse, they stopped in
amazement to watch him, and laughed, and laughed and laughed, such
as you could not imagine.
In the end, as luck would have it, a carabiniere turned up… who
seized him cleanly by the nose (and it was an enormous nose, that
seemed to have been made specially to be grabbed by the carabinieri)
and handed him back to Geppetto. And Geppetto straight away wanted
to give him a good tweak of the ears by way of a punishment. But
imagine his surprise when he looked for the ears and could not nd any.
And do you know why? Because in his haste to carve him, he had
forgotten to give him any.

Carlo Collodi, Le avventure di Pinocchio (1883)

I know, too, that Italy has been reunited for only ten years and is not
rmly established; our common people are ignorant… and the army
remains the great crucible in which all the elements are fused into Italian
unity… I have always said that even if it had no other purpose, the army
would always be a great school of Italian-ness.

Nicola Marselli, Gli avvenimenti del 1870–71 (1871)

PRIMARY SCHOOLS

It was not just the educated elites who had had such high hopes for
uni cation. One reason, presumably, why there was so little grass
roots support for the ancien régime states in 1859–60 was because
some of the aura surrounding ‘Italy’ had spilled over from the towns
and cities into the countryside. Patriotic landowners, schoolmasters,
local érudits, travelling musicians playing snatches of Verdi, former
volunteers from the campaigns of 1848–9 and even parish priests
were among the many possible conduits through which
Risorgimento rhetoric could trickle into rural backwaters. Popular
expectations attaching to the national movement were echoed in
baptismal registers. Names such as Italia and Roma enjoyed a
certain vogue among the peasantry in the 1860s. Variants of
Garibaldi – Garibaldo, Garibalda, Garibaldino, Garibaldina
–were also quite common, especially, it seems, in parts of central
Italy. Anita (after Garibaldi’s rst wife) and even Mentana featured,
too. In regions such as Liguria and the Romagna, where
republicanism had struck a chord with sections of the working
classes, Mazzini left a nominal imprint in Mazzino, Mazzina and
Mazzinia.1
It was probably in Tuscany where the poor had been most
exposed to the language and sentiments of patriotism, for this was a
region that had long been proud of the paternalistic bonds between
landlord and peasant fostered by the agricultural system of
sharecropping and the educational initiatives of enlightened
reformers such as Vieusseux, Capponi, Montanelli and Guerrazzi. So
when on 1 January 1863 a daughter was born to a humble brush-
maker called Gaspero Donati, in a crowded two-storeyed farmhouse
on the outskirts of the village of Cintolese in the marshy countryside
between Florence and Lucca, a few miles to the south of Pistoia
(where Niccolò Puccini had built his famous villa and garden), it
was not altogether surprising that she should be baptized Italia.
About Gaspero very little is known, but he must have had some
hopes that his children would rise in the world, as both Italia and
her elder brother, Italiano (born in 1851), received a sound
education (though Gaspero’s other son, Gabbriello, remained
illiterate, and after years of struggling to make a living as a labourer
he emigrated to America, like so many others, abandoning his wife
and two small daughters). Italia showed su cient academic promise
to aspire to the position of a teacher, and in 1882, at her second
attempt, she passed the necessary qualifying examination and was
awarded the title of ‘primary schoolmistress, lower grade’.2
She was appointed to a post in the hamlet of Porciano, some ten
kilometres to the south-east of Cintolese and a short distance from
the little town of Vinci, where more than 400 years earlier one of
the most learned men of the Renaissance had been born and
educated. Her annual salary (in keeping with national guidelines)
was 550 lire, about as much as an agricultural labourer or an artisan
might hope to make in a year, and out of this she was expected to
pay all her living costs, including her accommodation. Such a
situation was quite normal. A recent reform of 1877, the Coppino
Law, had endeavoured to raise the pro le of primary education and
teachers in Italy; but it had left responsibility for the hiring and
remuneration of sta in the hands of the local councils; and even in
a region of relatively progressive traditions like Tuscany the
landowners who typically comprised the councils were rarely
willing to spend more than the bare minimum on educating the
peasantry. To make matters worse, schoolmasters, and even more
schoolmistresses, had almost no protection against their employers
(as Italia was soon to discover to her terrible cost), and requests for
improved pay, a bigger classroom, or even basics such as chalk,
inkwells or a blackboard would be greeted with a deaf ear or
sometimes with a contract being terminated.
When Italia arrived in Porciano, a naïve and vulnerable 23-year-
old, she immediately came under enormous pressure from the
mayor, Ra aello Torrigiani, an autocratic man and notorious
womanizer who was living openly with his mistress as well as his
wife, to accept an o er of free accommodation in one of his houses.
The prospect of avoiding rent and being able to send a larger part of
her salary back to her elderly parents in Cintolese was attractive;
but what drove her to accept in the end was the realization that a
refusal would lead to her being forced out (as had happened with
the two previous schoolmistresses), for Torrigiani ruled the town as
if it were a personal efdom and had a majority of the councillors
rmly under his thumb. But once she had taken up the o er Italia
not only had to fend o the mayor’s advances – which she
succeeded in doing – but much more insidiously she had to contend
with the maliciousness of a community that now regarded her as not
much better than a whore.3
Like many elementary schools, the school at Porciano consisted of
a single room, ill-lit and poorly furnished, rented by the council,
into which some fty boys and girls ranging from six to twelve (or
sometimes older) were expected to squeeze. A map of Italy and a
portrait of the king were probably the only hangings on the wall.
Under the Coppino Law education was free and compulsory up to
the age of nine, and strict provisions were in place for enforcing
attendance. Article three, for instance, said that parents who kept
their children at home and could not provide the mayor with a
satisfactory explanation were to be ned 50 cents in the rst
instance and up to 10 lire for subsequent infractions.4 But as with so
many Italian laws the gulf between intent and practice was huge
and this measure was largely unenforceable. Even if the mayor
bothered to chase up o enders, few would have been able to pay
the nes; and anyway peasants needed their children to work in the
elds, especially in the spring and summer months, and almost
nothing would make them forgo this. A survey of a province in the
Romagna in 1886–7 found that in only three out of the forty
communes had attempts been made to impose nes for truancy; and
in only ve had proper lists been drawn up of those who were
absent.5 In these circumstances it is hardly surprising that
attendance in primary schools in Italy was patchy and that most
children, certainly in places like Porciano, emerged at the age of
nine still functionally illiterate.
A di culty that Italia Donati did not have to face was a
communication barrier with her pupils. During the 1860s the
government had embarked on intensive discussions about what form
of Italian should be adopted as the national language, and the view
that came to prevail was one championed by the elderly writer
Alessandro Manzoni, namely that it should be contemporary spoken
Tuscan. There was a strong feeling in o cial circles that linguistic
centralization was needed to complement political unity, and
Manzoni wanted the authorities to use schools to stigmatize dialect.
He and his followers even went so far as to suggest that teachers
should be recruited from Tuscany only.6 But there were huge
practical problems with such a draconian approach – not least the
fact that the vast majority of the population, certainly outside
Tuscany and the principal cities, had almost no contact with ‘Italian’
in their daily lives, and to try to impose it in such circumstances was
virtually impossible. In the early 1870s a prominent philologist
called Graziadio Isaia Ascoli made a passionate plea for dialects to
be respected and for any standardization of the spoken idiom to be
allowed to occur spontaneously as communication and culture
gradually spread. And some in uential gures, including Francesco
De Sanctis, were inclined to agree with this sensible view. But the
o cial line remained that Italian should as far as possible be
enforced, with ‘Italian’ texts being used in schools and dialect
literature (of which there was a distinguished tradition in many
regions) being discouraged.7
But the linguistic problems facing teachers in primary schools
were as nothing compared to the moral di culties that they
frequently encountered. If they were local (and the government’s
initial policy of trying to ensure that schoolmasters came from
outside regions soon had to be relaxed for practical reasons) they
could always fall back on dialect to get their message across: a
national enquiry in 1908 found that half of all teachers regularly did
so. Much more di cult to bridge was the huge cultural gap
separating the ‘priests of the new Italy’, as Agostino Bertani
optimistically called them,8 from the mass of the peasantry. Over
the centuries the Catholic Church had learned to adapt its teachings
and practices to the everyday needs of the poor, and the clergy had
thus managed in most places to secure a position of considerable
authority and respect. Schoolmasters, with their new doctrines of
secular positivism, faced a harder task. As a primary schoolteacher
working in rural Romagna explained in 1872:
The teacher tries to destroy the errors, prejudices and superstitions regarding the rotation
of the sun around the earth, the unlimited powers of the moon, witches, Fridays, spirits
and so on. But when the child goes home and relates what the teacher has told him at
school, these truths are refuted with false arguments and a string of facts that appear to be
correct because they are backed up with the names of the family members who witnessed

them, and the circumstances, place and time when they are said to have occurred.9

Equally problematic, as Italia Donati found, was that teachers

were dependent on the mayor and his councillors, and could thus
seem to many peasants to be part of the intimidating world of the
state, with its tax collectors, recruiting o cers and policemen. And
ironically the fact that Italia was herself of very humble origins may
have added to her di culties, depriving her of authority and
making her appear in the eyes of the poor something of an
opportunist, even a traitor. Certainly in the months after she arrived
in Porciano the whispering campaign against her among the
villagers gathered pace, despite every indication that she was a
conscientious and e cient teacher, and in the summer of 1884 an
anonymous letter was sent to a magistrate in Pistoia alleging that
she had procured an illegal abortion with the assistance of the
mayor. The author of this attack was never unearthed, but in all
likelihood it was one of the mayor’s political opponents, who saw in
Italia’s increasingly equivocal position a good means of discrediting
him; and Torrigiani was in fact eventually forced to resign.10
But for Italia the consequences of the allegation were devastating.
Though the police found not a shred of evidence against her, the
hostility of the townspeople was now unbounded. She begged to be
allowed to undergo a medical examination to prove her innocence,
but neither the judicial authorities nor the town council would give
their permission. She appealed to the regional inspector of schools,
the well-known writer Renato Fucini, but he handed the matter over
to the sub-prefect, who then took no action. She moved into a new
house, but the campaign against her continued unabated; and as the
strain took its toll on her health, the rumour spread that she was
again pregnant – her sweats and pallor were proof. She asked to be
moved to another school in the neighbourhood, and in the spring of
1886 the town council agreed. But her reputation had proceeded
her, and the new community made clear its anger at having such a
shameless woman foisted on them. Those that could sent
anonymous hate-mail.11
On the evening of Monday, 31 May, Italia penned a brief note of
apology to her parents, protesting her complete innocence. To her
brother, Italiano, she wrote:
I am totally innocent of all the accusations made against me… I beg you, on my knees,
with all my heart, my only brother, to do whatever it takes to bring back my honour.
Please do not be alarmed by my death, and be comforted by the thought that it will restore
the honour of our family. I am the victim of public vili cation and my persecution will end
only with my death. Take my corpse and with an anatomical inspection clear up this

mystery. Let my innocence be proved…12

She told him she wanted to be buried in her native village of

Cintolese, but knew that her family would probably not be able to
a ord the costs of transporting her body there: ‘If it cannot be done,
leave me in this wretched place and on my tombstone write these
words: Here lies the unfortunate victim Italia Donati, schoolmistress
of Porciano.’13
She walked in the dark to the race of the old watermill on the
Rimaggio river, a little way out of the town, secured her skirts
tightly with two safety pins (she did not want the humiliation of
being found with her legs uncovered), and jumped. The autopsy
con rmed that she had died a virgin. When the press got wind of
the suicide, a reporter from the leading Milanese newspaper, the
Corriere della Sera, was sent to investigate and published a detailed
account of all that had transpired. There was a public outcry. The
Neapolitan writer Matilde Serao wrote an impassioned article,
denouncing the terrible plight of schoolmistresses in Italy and
chronicling other recent instances of suicide. A subscription was
launched to pay for the expense of reinterring Italia in her native
village, and on 4 July her co n was exhumed and transported to
Cintolese in great solemnity, with a cortege of dignitaries, and amid
huge crowds of local men, women and children, standing by, silent
and contrite. An elegant black stone, inscribed with gold lettering,
and costing 110 lire, paid for by the Corriere della Sera, was placed
on her grave: ‘To Italia Donati, municipal schoolmistress of
Porciano, as beautiful as she was virtuous, forced by vile
persecution to seek in death peace and proof of her honesty.’ The
stone, along with the grave, has long since vanished.14

At the heart of the Italian government’s approach to primary

schooling was a huge dilemma. Should the masses be instructed or
educated? A degree of instruction was clearly desirable in a modern
state – though quite how much was debatable given that the great
majority of Italian men and women found little need for literacy or
numeracy in their adult lives. Moreover if they did learn to read and
write, what was to stop them using such skills to air their political
and social grievances or to imbibe and pass on the dangerous ideas
of the Internationalists, anarchists or republicans? The real
requirement, it was generally believed, was education – to mould
the character of children so that they grew up obedient, respectful,
truthful, hardworking, patriotic and accepting of their station in life.
As the author of the 1877 education reform, Michele Coppino,
stated, primary schools should ensure that the masses were ‘content
to remain in the condition that nature had assigned to them, and not
encourage them to abandon it’. And he added that the general aim
of elementary education should be to ‘create a population that is
instructed as far as can be, but which is rst and foremost honest
and industrious, useful to the family, and devoted to the fatherland
and the king’.15
This preoccupation with morality was re ected in the texts used
in primary schools. In the rst few decades after 1860 there was an
outpouring of books devoted to the formation of the Italian
character, many of them modelled on the Englishman Samuel
Smiles’s immensely popular work, Self-help (1859); and the
pedagogic principle behind most of these texts was that of
‘example’: models of good behaviour, it was believed, would help
train the will and encourage the poor to make virtuous choices in
life. Supporting the search for an Italian version of Self-help in 1867,
the prime minister, Luigi Menabrea, spoke of the enormous bene ts
that such a work would bring, ‘for once this book was distributed
among the masses it could not fail to excite emulation and drive
them to follow the examples that are set before them’.16 The most
widely read imitation of Samuel Smiles was Michele Lessona’s Volere
è potere (Will is Power, 1869), whose thirteen chapters o ered potted
biographies of distinguished Italian men (no women) from all over
the country – artists, musicians (among them Verdi and Rossini),
writers, soldiers, industrialists and academics. Another of the same
genre was Paolo Mantegazza’s Glories and Joys of Work (1870),
whose gallery of illustrious men to be imitated (again women failed
to secure a mention) included Galileo, Alberti and Melchiorre Gioia.
It went through thirty-four editions.17
Probably the most famous writer of educational books for
children was Carlo Lorenzini, a former Mazzinian and volunteer in
the campaigns of 1848 and 1859 (and 1866) who adopted the pen
name Collodi after the little town in Tuscany, near to Cintolese and
Porciano, where he had spent much of his childhood. Lorenzini was
acutely conscious of the vast gap separating the ideals of the
Risorgimento from the realities of united Italy, and of the pressing
need to transform the rough and ill-educated peasants that he had
known well when he was young into mature, dutiful citizens of a
modern state; and in the 1870s, after many years of journalism and
humdrum work in local government o ces in Florence, he decided
to turn his hand to children’s ction. In 1876 he published the rst
of seven volumes of stories about a boy called Giannettino, a
picaresque, red-haired, blue-eyed character whose rumbustious
comic adventures were interlaced with suitably improving
pedagogic maxims (‘for every school that opens there is a prison cell
that closes’). But it was the tale that he began writing rather
grudgingly for a magazine in 1881 (‘Do what you like with this
infantile piece,’ he told the editor, ‘but if you print it, pay me well
so that I’ll have an incentive to carry on with it’)18 that proved to be
by far his most successful work.
Pinocchio works on numerous levels, which helps to explain its
universal appeal, but the story of an ill-disciplined puppet-child,
hewn from a coarse piece of wood, who abjures the restraints of
duty, education and hard work for a life of pleasure re ects many of
the anxieties of Italy in the early 1880s: the Italy of Turiello’s
Government and Governed, with its central theme of how to curb the
natural tendency of the Italian people to unruliness. Collodi’s
message is bleak: the path to redemption lies through toil and self-
sacri ce, and those who fail to appreciate this risk ruin (‘Everybody,
whether they are born rich or poor, is obliged to do something in
this world, to be employed, to work. Do not fall prey to idleness!
Idleness is a dreadful illness that must be cured immediately, when
you are young…’).19 But Pinocchio does not gain salvation from
self-growth alone. He also needs the love and guidance of his father
and surrogate mother, the good fairy – an implicitly monarchical
arrangement of a kind that many on both right and left were coming
to embrace as their disillusionment with parliament grew. Indeed in
1882, a year before Pinocchio rst appeared as a book, the one-time
republican Giosuè Carducci wrote a famous tribute to the new
Italian queen, the young and beautiful Margherita, hailing her as the
‘regal eternal feminine’ and Italy’s hope for the future.20 Collodi’s
fairy, ‘the lovely girl with blue hair’, is endowed with similarly
charismatic (and redemptive) qualities.
 The torrent of pedagogic literature in the decades after 1860 bore
witness less to any well-thought-out educational agenda for the
masses and more to the concerns of the patriotic middle classes at
the weakness of the new national edi ce. The obsession with work
and self-improvement was of course common to many European
states at the time, but it acquired additional urgency in Italy from
the belief that the country’s backwardness was essentially moral in
character and that the process of regeneration started by the
Risorgimento had only just begun. As Lessona (a leading exponent
of Darwinism) explained in Will is Power, a major reason why the
British had been so successful was because they had learned self-
su ciency, whereas the Italians had developed the fatal habit of
blaming the government for everything and not taking personal
responsibility themselves. But this was one of many vices to be
purged:
We are still a long way from having ful lled all our duties. We have other more di cult
victories to win – and this cannot ever be emphasized enough. Ignorance, superstition,
horror of work, glori cation of idleness, errors, lack of concern for personal dignity and
good reputation, discord, envy, partisan anger and municipalism are all much more

dangerous and terrifying enemies than Austria ever was.21

The chances of this pedagogic literature having much impact on

working-class children were slight: most pupils did well in the short
time they spent in a cramped schoolroom with an ill-paid (and
sometimes incomprehensible) teacher to secure basic numeracy and
literacy, and the prose of Collodi or Lessona was in all likelihood far
beyond them. Nor was it probable that any of these books would
nd their way into peasant homes given that on average about 80
per cent of rural income in the later nineteenth century went on
meeting essential food needs: clothes (heavily recycled, rarely, if
ever, new) and other basic requirements accounted for most of the
rest.22 If anything was left over for leisure it would probably be
spent at a local inn – there were growing concerns about the levels
of alcoholism among the poor in the 1870s and 1880s, especially in
northern Italy, where cheap spirits and strong and often adulterated
wines were becoming increasingly available.23 Books extolling the
virtues of hard work and holding up the lives of Galileo, Rossini or
Melchiorre Gioia as models of where diligence and study might take
you were unlikely to be high on most peasants’ wishlists.
MILITARY SERVICE

Since education was more important than instruction, and since

schools could have only a limited impact on the masses, it was to
the army that politicians of both right and left principally looked to
‘make Italians’. As a well-known writer and devoted friend of
Garibaldi, Giuseppe Guerzoni, explained at a conference in Padua in
1879, the army was ‘the main primary schoolmaster of the nation’
and its ‘chief educator’:
The ambition of the army is this: to take a man from society and leave its imprint on him
for his entire life. To turn a ru an into a gentleman… an anarchist into a citizen, a coarse
peasant or uncouth worker into a person of breeding, honesty and civility… Living
continually with men who all dress identically, all obey the same rules, and all answer to
the same superior… who gradually instils in him a sense of discipline, a respect for
hierarchy and a feeling for true equality; moving periodically from one end of the
peninsula to another;… enjoying the constant comradeship of people speaking di erent
dialects from every region of Italy;… seeing just one ag, the revered symbol of the
fatherland and the king – … everything works to engender a universe of new and better
feelings and a ections and so create a di erent man. And in this way the by now
proverbial saying is becoming a strict reality: having made Italy the army is making

Italians.24

The elderly Francesco De Sanctis was in agreement. The previous

year he had decided to mark his third term as Minister for Public
Instruction by introducing a bill that would assist the army’s
educational mission. For the biggest problem with Italians, he told
the Chamber, was not their lack of knowledge – indeed they often
knew too much – as their inability to convert knowledge into action.
It was a matter of character. ‘We must educate the will,’ he
announced to cheers from his colleagues: ‘… To regenerate the
country properly, we need to mould the imagination, train the will,
and ensure that everything that is in our brains exercises a
bene cial e ect on all our faculties.’ This was why he had decided
to make gymnastics compulsory in primary schools. A strong
physique would not only induce physical bravery, but also, and
more importantly, give rise to moral courage, to open and honest
behaviour, and to a hatred of those ‘sly and underhand practices…
that darkened the history of Italy in its decadence’. He quoted with
approval the remark of the great Prussian general Helmuth von
Moltke that learning on its own did not prepare a man to lay down
his life for an idea or the honour of his nation. And the reason, he
said, why the German and the Anglo-Saxon races had been so
successful in recent decades was because of their physical training
programmes: ‘A virile education from early childhood creates the
moral energy out of which springs a sense of initiative, tenacity and
seriousness of purpose…’25
Parliament gave almost unanimous backing to De Sanctis’s bill
and the only serious note of dissent came from a deputy on the far
left who suggested that a better way to improve the physique of the
masses would be to get them to eat more and pay less in taxes.26 But
improving the health of the nation was not the underlying purpose
of the new law – though the fact that 28 per cent of army recruits
had to be rejected in the early 1880s because they were too short
(under 1.56 metres) or had a disabling illness showed that there was
a major problem that badly needed to be addressed.27 What really
concerned politicians was that since the Franco-Prussian war of
1870 it had become clear that modern armies had to be mass
armies, the ‘nation in arms’, and that success on the battle eld
depended on having huge supplies of well-trained and patriotic
citizen-soldiers of the kind that had beaten the French so decisively
at Sedan. Gymnastics in schools would be a step in the right
direction. As the parliamentary commission reporting on the bill
said, Italians had to be prepared from an early age for military
service, particularly as the country had a long and dangerous
tradition of prizing intellectual and artistic achievements over
physical ones: ‘What happens to peoples who are re ned in spirit
and forget the rigours and disciplines of military life is shown by the
fate of the ancient Greeks when confronted by the Romans, the
Greek empire when faced by the Turks and Italy itself from the
seventeenth century to the present.’28

Getting Italians to think positively about military service was

di cult. Though a series of reforms in the early 1870s reduced the
amount of time most conscripts spent in the army from ve to three
years (with a longer stint in the reservists – in line with the Prussian
model), the naja, as the draft was commonly called, remained
something to be avoided if possible. Selection was by lottery. The
military authorities decided each year what percentage of the
eligible young men would have to serve the full term, and the
higher the number drawn out of an urn the better the chances of
securing exemption. Charms, amulets and prayers (particularly to St
Michael and St Sebastian) were regularly used to bring good luck,
while those who wanted to evade the draft at all costs resorted to
self-mutilation: rubbing caustic materials into the eyes, burning the
scalp to simulate the e ects of ring-worm, applying tight ligatures to
the toes. A doctor observed in 1875: ‘The majority resign themselves
to carrying out the most holy of duties that the law demands, but
they try every means they can to escape it.’29
Propagandists did their best to endow military service with a
romantic aura, and their writings certainly touched a chord with
middle-class audiences, particularly in northern Italy, where the
army was for the most part held in high esteem. Probably the most
famous of these publicists was the proli c Piedmontese author
Edmondo De Amicis, whose best-selling Military Life (1869) painted
a glowing picture of patriotic peasant soldiers bound together in
fraternal comradeship, of indulgent and fatherly o cers, of proud
parents, adoring sweethearts and an admiring and grateful general
public. ‘The life of the camp is sometimes tough, sometimes
uncomfortable, but always beautiful and heart-warming. Does
anyone who has experienced it not love it, not recall it with delight,
not long for it passionately?’30 This theme was continued by De
Amicis in several other works written in the 1870s and 1880s,
culminating in his phenomenally successful novel Cuore (Heart),
which sold a million copies in thirty years. The book was set in a
primary school in Turin, and its central message was that the army
was the paragon, crucible and embodiment of the nation, mixing
men of all classes and regions into a harmonious, caring family. As
such it was to be revered and cherished:
Yesterday an infantry regiment went past, and fty boys began skipping and dancing
around the military band, singing and beating time with their rulers on their packs and
satchels. We stood in a group on the pavement watching… The soldiers marched by, four
by four, covered in dust and sweat, their ri es glinting in the sun. The Headmaster said:
‘You must love the soldiers, boys. They are our protectors, men who would lay down their
lives for us, if a foreign army threatened our country tomorrow. They are boys, too, not
much older than you. And they also go to school. There are poor and rich among them, as
with you, and they come from every part of Italy. Look, you can almost recognize them by
sight: there are Sicilians, Sardinians, Neapolitans and Lombards… Do something for me,
my sons. When the three colours go by, raise your hand to your forehead and give a child’s
salute.’ The ag, carried by an o cer, passed in front of us, torn and faded, with medals
hanging on the sta , and we put our hands to our foreheads and saluted, all together. The
o cer looked at us, smiling, and returned our salute… Meanwhile the regimental band
turned the corner at the end of the street, surrounded by a throng of children, and a

hundred joyful cries accompanied the blasts of the trumpets as if it were a battle song.31

Quite possibly such celebrations of the army and army life ltered
down and gave the naja positive connotations in the eyes of the
poor, and certainly from the 1870s the draft came to acquire
something of the status of a rite of passage for those who happened
to be chosen. As one peasant recalled: ‘You had to do what you
could to avoid becoming a soldier, but if you couldn’t, you had
stories to tell, because it was man’s stu !’32 Selection for military
service was widely regarded as an a rmation of virility (‘Who is no
good for the king is no good either for the queen’ was a common
bawdy saying), and while there were many popular songs
expressing sorrow at leaving behind loved ones and going o to a
life of hardship, there were others that spoke of the joys of male
comradeship and of the sexual conquests that lay in store.33 It was
apparently a standard practice for new recruits to mark their rst
day as soldiers with a visit to a brothel in the nearest town – for
many of them their rst experience of sex.34
Life in the barracks was certainly not easy and many found it
di cult to adjust to the harsh discipline, to being thrown together
with men from di erent regions, and to being largely isolated from
the rest of society. On average military tribunals had to deal with
between 3,000 and 4,000 cases of insubordination each year (twice
this gure in the 1860s), while a survey in the 1870s found that
suicide rates in the army were running at nearly ten times the
national average.35 In the 1880s several particularly high-pro le
episodes underlined the sometimes grim realities of the naja, most
notably in the case of a Calabrian, Salvatore Misdea, who on Easter
Sunday 1884 barricaded himself in his dormitory in the
Pizzofalcone barracks in Naples and let o some fty rounds from
his ri e, killing ve soldiers and wounding seven others seriously. A
commission of psychiatrists headed by Cesare Lombroso found that
he had been reduced to insanity by repeated abuse and bullying,
and was not responsible for his actions; but a military court thought
otherwise and called for the death penalty. The king ignored appeals
from the public for clemency and Misdea was shot.36
The general tenor of military life was probably no harsher than in
many other countries, but the policy of sending recruits outside
their native region does seem to have generated particular problems
of social isolation, at least for the rank and le. While o cers
regularly enjoyed close links with the leading local families,
attending receptions, giving riding lessons, and going to theatres
and clubs, ordinary soldiers found very little to do outside the
barracks except head straight for the nearest brothel. (Venereal
disease was a constant concern for the military authorities, with
average monthly infection rates running at more than one per cent
in the 1860s.) Middle-class conscripts probably fared better than
their working-class and peasant counterparts, as they could often get
themselves posted close to home in return for paying for their
upkeep.37 For the great majority, though, the naja must have been a
far cry from the rich and rewarding experience that De Amicis
described, and for many the principal consolation was probably the
kudos (not least sexual) that they acquired on going back to their
native village – like the character Turiddu Macca in Giuseppe
Verga’s celebrated short story ‘Cavalleria rusticana’, who every
Sunday ‘strutted in the piazza in his bersagliere uniform and red
beret, with all the girls eating him up with their eyes’.38
Was the army the ‘school of the nation’ as was widely claimed?
The evidence suggests that its impact on Italian society was much
more limited than hoped. Recruits often acquired the rudiments of
reading and writing (especially after 1873, when a ministerial note
said soldiers were not to be discharged until they were literate); and
many no doubt absorbed at least some patriotic ideas regarding the
ag, the monarchy, and the history and politics of Italy. But
teaching in the barracks was hampered by a lack of central planning
and support from the Ministry of War, and also by a marked anti-
intellectual culture.39 And the o cers were generally not of much
help. They were often sharply divided from the rank and le by
language and a rigid sense of hierarchy (Lamarmora claimed that
the absence of mutual trust between o cers and men was one of the
main reasons for the disasters of 1866)40 and most seem to have
believed it was not their business to provide conscripts with
anything other than basic technical training. As an institution rooted
in the old Piedmontese state and answering to the king, the army
did not always feel obliged to do what civilian governments wanted.
One of the peculiarities of the Italian army was the obsession with
trying to minimize municipal or provincial loyalties by shifting
regiments around the country (on average every three to four years
in the 1870s and 1880s), posting recruits outside their native region
and making sure that each regiment was made up of troops drawn
from all over the peninsula. The intention, it seems, was twofold: to
‘nationalize’ the conscripts and to try to make certain that they
would not fraternize with the enemy if called on to sort out local
unrest of the kind that had blighted the south and the Romagna in
the 1860s. Whether soldiers really did feel more ‘Italian’ as a result
of being thrown together with men from other provinces is
extremely questionable. There are good grounds for believing,
indeed, that the policy had exactly the opposite e ect, with soldiers
from the same region ganging together and ‘whiling away the
boredom and tedium of barracks life by persecuting, harassing and
tormenting… soldiers from another region’, as one observer noted,
with ‘quarrels, brawls and bloody scenes’41 (Salvatore Misdea was
apparently the victim of such behaviour). Nor is it clear that
stationing recruits outside their native regions did very much to
‘nationalize’ them given the limited contact that most of them had
with the local population.
Nevertheless the army remained for virtually all members of the
ruling classes the ‘great crucible’ that would fuse Italians into one
unit,42 ‘the steel thread that had sewn Italy together and was
keeping it united’, as the veteran Risorgimento patriot Luigi
Settembrini told the Senate in 1876.43 And as parliament became
ever more tarnished with decadence, corruption and factionalism in
the 1870s and 1880s, so the army’s reputation as the school of the
nation grew (‘The army remains… the most Italian institution we
have, much more than parliament,’ a leading conservative politician
con ded to his diary in 1877).44 The armed forces, it was felt,
embodied those qualities that the nation lacked and needed to learn:
discipline, cohesion, patriotism, respect for authority, sel essness
and a willingness to die for an ideal – thought and action blended
perfectly. And until these qualities had been instilled into the people
it seemed to a growing number of observers that liberalism might be
a luxury that the country could ill a ord, certainly in an age of
growing international rivalry. For as one of De Sanctis’s most
in uential students, the writer and politician Nicola Marselli, said,
Italy had introduced freedom before it had educated the masses,
ignoring the lesson of nations such as Britain where the process of
education had come rst. He argued that the present political
system was failing to provide ‘the force of cohesion needed to turn
Italian society into an organic body’; and like others, he looked to
the army to ‘make Italians’ and ‘militarize’ society.45 He also wanted
a much stronger state, educative and ethical; and a di erent kind of
representative assembly: one that was less fractured and better
quali ed, both morally and technically.46
It was somewhat ironic that in being looked to as the ‘school of
the nation’ the army was rendered less e ective as a ghting force.
The fear of having regiments of local soldiers meant that in the
event of war mobilization would be slow, as reservists had to criss-
cross the country to link up with their companies. Furthermore, the
disparate composition of regiments almost certainly reduced their
potential cohesion and morale: revealingly the two most famous and
highly decorated Italian units of the First World War were made up
almost exclusively of regional troops: the Sassari from Sardinia and
the Alpini from the mountain valleys of the far north.47 Nor, despite
the best endeavours of the propagandists, does the army seem to
have been held in much esteem or a ection by the mass of the
population. Certainly the involvement of troops in aid work during
cholera epidemics and natural disasters helped to bridge the gap to
the masses; but in general the armed forces appear to have been
looked on as remote and as inhabiting a di erent sphere, that of the
state (doing military service was sometimes referred to as ‘going o
to Italy’) – and the state had been responsible for the violent
suppression of many riots and disturbances, not to mention the
brutal operations in the south in the 1860s. It also had the ascos of
1866 hanging round its neck. For these reasons there was a growing
feeling in many quarters from the 1870s that the best hope both for
the army and for Italy lay in a great military victory that would
expunge the past, heal the rift between government and governed,
cement the prestige of the monarchy and the institutions, and nally
secure the moral unity of the nation.
SYMBOLS AND FESTIVALS

One of the awkward legacies of the Risorgimento was that the cult
of Italy had been most closely identi ed with Mazzini and his
democratic followers. This created a problem after 1860. Should
Italians be encouraged to focus their loyalty rst and foremost on
‘the nation’, with the risk thereby of highlighting the role that had
been played by the far left in the uni cation process, or should they
be steered towards the safer conservative ground of ‘the king’? It
was not a clear-cut dichotomy, of course, in so far as the monarchy
could always allege (and an army of propagandists worked hard to
support the claim) that it had been in the vanguard of the national
movement, at least since 1848. But it was not a position that would
stand up to too much scrutiny, and the fact was that ‘Italy’ conjured
up more images of conspiracies, republican martyrs and barricades
than it ever did of the House of Savoy. The con ict between ‘Italy’
and ‘the king’ was rarely, if ever, openly addressed, but it hovered
in the background and from the start weakened attempts to forge a
strong iconography of the nation.
In contrast to Marianne in France or the gure of Germania, the
female image of ‘turreted Italy’ that had been given currency in the
Risorgimento by the likes of Canova was never strongly encouraged
after 1860. Instead it was the head of the king and the cross of
Savoy that dominated sites such as postage stamps and coins: not till
1908, amid growing pressure from nationalists for a more aggressive
foreign policy, did the personi cation of Italy feature on a coin,
standing on a chariot and wearing the helmet of Minerva (but
clutching a suitably emollient olive branch as well).48 Even public
monuments celebrating the architects and martyrs of Italian
uni cation were surprisingly bereft of images of Italy. The main
exception was the imposing gure of ‘turreted Italy’ on the
memorial inaugurated in Milan in 1880 to those who had died
 ghting with Garibaldi at Mentana in 1867 to liberate Rome
(signi cantly, though, its sponsors came largely from the far left).
Not even the monument to Victor Emmanuel in Piazza Venezia in
Rome (the so-called Vittoriano), the most colossal and ambitious of
all the national memorials constructed after 1860, had a
representation of Italy. The central female gure below the
equestrian statue of the king is the goddess Roma, not Italia.
No less striking was the absence of any new national holidays
after 1860. Just as Victor Emmanuel remained Victor Emmanuel II
and the parliament that convened in 1861 was o cially the eighth
legislature – to underline the formal continuity of Italy with the
Piedmontese state – so the only public holiday after uni cation was
one that had been introduced in Piedmont in 1851 to celebrate
Carlo Alberto’s concession of a constitution, the ‘Festival of the
Statuto’. Though its title was extended by law in 1861 to ‘Festival of
the Statuto and of National Unity’, this was, quite predictably, too
much of a mouthful to have any chance of sticking and it quickly
reverted in general parlance to ‘Festival of the Statuto’. The one
lasting change was to move it from the rst Sunday in May to the
rst Sunday in June, primarily so as to ensure better weather for the
parades and reworks.49 The failure to establish a genuinely
national holiday in Italy comparable to Memorial Day in the United
States (1868), Sedan Day in Germany (1871) or Bastille Day in
France (1880) was a re ection of the deeply contested character of
uni cation and the resulting impossibility of reaching any consensus
among politicians and the general public over which particular
episode to celebrate.
There was also a big fear after the events of 1848–9 and 1859–60
of crowds in public spaces: what could be more humiliating than to
have tens of thousands of angry Italians in Naples, Palermo or some
other southern city using a national holiday as an opportunity to
protest against the new regime under the gaze of foreign tourists
and reporters? This was one reason why the Festival of the Statuto
was kept to a Sunday, when church-going and other traditional
social and leisure activities would dispose people to calm. Indeed
the whole character of the festival was such as to avoid exciting
political passions, keeping the public rmly in the role of spectator
and eliminating opportunities for popular enthusiasm (in Piedmont
in the 1880s the holiday was ironically known as the Festival of the
Staciuto or ‘Be quiet!’).50 And what was on display was essentially
the authority of the state. In the morning there would be artillery
salvoes and military parades with plenty of martial music and
renditions of the national anthem, the old-fashioned, jaunty Royal
March. Dignitaries would process in carriages along streets lined
with carabinieri, and there would be a prize-giving ceremony for
local schoolchildren with the mayor distributing money, medals,
bank saving books or whatever was deemed appropriate (in the
south often shoes and clothes).51 Only in the evening were the
proceedings less formal, with races, regattas, bands, gas
illuminations, lotteries and rework displays, which in Rome, where
the population had been used to lavish spectacles under papal rule,
were often quite dramatic, with the Castel Sant’Angelo decked out
in lights and with giant images or allegories of the king and Italy,
and patriotic slogans, projected against the sky.52
Otherwise, though, the state did little in the way of celebrations
or festivals to etch the reality of the new Italy into the hearts and
minds of the public. The two most important ‘national’ events of the
1870s and 1880s both involved the monarchy: the funeral of Victor
Emmanuel in 1878 and the ‘pilgrimage’ to his tomb six years later.
Only in 1895 was a second o cial holiday instituted, 20 September,
to commemorate the taking of Rome in 1870. As a result the way
was left open for the Church to continue its traditional domination
of public spectacles – with its galaxy of feast days and the elaborate
processions and ceremonies that accompanied them – and for local
initiatives to outstrip national ones. Many of the most lavish
celebrations, indeed, were narrowly communal, whether for patron
saints (Santa Rosalia in Palermo, San Gennaro in Naples, San
Giovanni in Florence) or (rather ironically) for episodes from the
Risorgimento, such as the revolutions of 1848: 12 January in
Palermo, 11 February in Padua, 29 May in Florence, 8 August in
Bologna. Even the twenty- fth anniversary of the expedition of the
Thousand in 1885 became a predominantly Sicilian event.
For those many Risorgimento patriots who had imbibed the
central lesson of Mazzini that the nation, to be strong, needed to
become the focus of a secular religion, the failure of the liberal state
to capture the popular imagination through spectacle, imagery and
display was a source of deep disappointment. It was also, from the
late 1870s, a cause of rapidly growing anxiety as Catholicism
embarked on a vigorous campaign to mobilize Italians behind the
Church and as socialism started to percolate through regions such as
Lombardy and Emilia Romagna with its heady doctrines of
emancipation. As a leading article in a newspaper owned by the
man who was to dominate Italian politics in the last years of the
century, Francesco Crispi, said in 1882:
We need to make this religion of the Fatherland, which must be our principal if not only
religion, as solemn and as popular as possible. We all of us, servants of Progress, have
gradually destroyed a faith that for centuries su ced our people, precisely because through
the ritualized forms of its displays it appealed to the visual senses, and through the visual
senses to the minds of the masses, who are impressionable, imaginative and artistic, eager
for shapes, colours and sounds to feed their fantasies. What have we substituted for this
faith? As far as the masses are concerned, nothing. We have closed our new Gods of Reason
and Duty within ourselves… without adorning them with the external trappings of religion
that still today, in the absence of an alternative, draw to church people who are nostalgic
for beauty at a time when beauty is tending to disappear. We must address this, as the

character of a people is not changed overnight…53

The Risorgimento ought to have provided the principal foundation

myth for the new Italy, but the bitter divisions that had been
created between the various strands of moderates and democrats in
the 1840s and 1850s took time to heal, and it was only in the 1880s
and 1890s that passions abated su ciently for a degree of consensus
to be reached. The winning formula was a providential one: that
whatever their declared di erences republicans and monarchists,
federalists and unitarists, conservatives and radicals had all
contributed to the remarkable alchemical mix out of which
uni cation had miraculously sprung in 1860. The two poles around
which this new synthesis came to rotate were Victor Emmanuel and
Garibaldi, whose deaths in 1878 and 1882 respectively marked the
beginning of an extraordinary cult, with a torrent of hagiographic
literature and a proliferation of public statuary. The deep fractures
of the uni cation movement were eased from the o cial record,
and the Risorgimento was reborn as a serendipitous coming together
of state (Victor Emmanuel) and nation (Garibaldi), diplomacy and
popular initiative, war and conspiracy, monarchy and people.
The cult of Garibaldi was not hard to foster given the remarkable
reputation that he had enjoyed in his lifetime, but after 1882 it
received massive o cial encouragement, with towns and cities
across the country vying with one another to provide tributes to the
Hero of the Two Worlds. Some 300 statues and 400 busts and
commemorative inscriptions were unveiled in the years following
his death, and any place he had visited or building he had slept or
eaten in or stopped at was graced with a suitably solemn memorial
plaque (though bathos was not always absent, as at Casamicciola:
‘Returning from Aspromonte – in this chamber – Giuseppe Garibaldi
– took a bath’).54 His image circulated freely through a huge variety
of media – postcards, prints, magazines, paintings, banners, medals,
cups, plates, gurines, posters, banknotes and food-packaging
(Garibaldi biscuits were rst manufactured in England in 1861) –
and his heroic qualities and achievements were celebrated in
countless speeches, poems, memoirs, biographies and newspaper
articles.
One of the most striking features of the cult was the extent to
which Garibaldi was invested with saintly, even divine, attributes.
This had already been an important aspect of his appeal at a popular
level during his lifetime, but after 1882 it was strongly encouraged
by exponents of high culture as well. Sometimes market forces may
have been at work: books portraying a radiantly handsome (often
blue-eyed and blond-haired) and in nitely virtuous hero were
probably guaranteed to sell better than more sober and judicious
accounts. But among democrats in particular there was also a desire
to capitalize on popular credulity to strengthen the political position
of the left. Thus when Giuseppe Guerzoni published a serious
biography of Garibaldi in 1882, his colleague, the republican
journalist and deputy Achille Bizzoni, criticized it for being too
re ned and quickly wrote an alternative short version ‘for the
people’, full of fantastic legends, in which Garibaldi featured as a
Christ-like gure, simple, courageous and just, a martyr to his cause
and a long-su ering victim of ingratitude, jealousy and betrayal.55
Another prominent gure of the left who like Bizzoni had known
Garibaldi well (and who in private had often been critical of his all
too human failings) was Francesco Crispi. He, also, could see the
enormous political value of a sancti ed patriotic hero – the nation
desperately needed secular saints – and after 1882 he became one of
the leading exponents of the Garibaldi cult. And as he told a student
audience at Bologna university in 1884, the preservation of this cult
was a sacred duty:
It would seem there was something divine in the life of this man. He was superior to
Heracles and Achilles in the ancient world. If he had been born in Athens or Rome, altars
would have been raised to him… [I]n certain periods of history… it happens that
Providence causes an exceptional being to arise in the world, whose deeds and qualities are
out of the ordinary. His marvellous exploits capture the imagination, and the masses regard
him as superhuman. I have said it already and I say it again: if Garibaldi had been born in
Athens or in Rome, the people would have made him a demigod and erected temples in his
honour. In our times we are more modest: the altar of Garibaldi is in the heart of every
patriot, without distinction of party or class. Those who wish Italy to be united from the
Alps to the two seas, in accordance with the plebiscites, and those who love the fatherland,
strong, great, prosperous and respected – all these hold the hero in veneration and harbour

his cult.56

The apotheosis of Garibaldi was part of a broader attempt in the

1880s to celebrate all aspects of the Risorgimento. During the 1860s
and early 1870s Italian governments had been dominated by men of
the right, who had encouraged a ‘moderate’ and Piedmontese view
of uni cation centred on Cavour and Victor Emmanuel. In 1876 the
left came to power, bringing to o ce those like Agostino Depretis
and Francesco Crispi who had been active in the democratic world
of conspiracy in the 1840s and 1850s, and this opened the way to a
more ecumenical reading of the national movement as well as to a
new determination to reach out to the masses. In 1881, as part of
the planning for the building of the Vittoriano in central Rome, a
questionnaire was sent out to every province enquiring how many
statues had to date been erected to Victor Emmanuel ‘and the
principal gures of the Italian Risorgimento’. Fully a quarter said
that none had been built or were even projected.57 With o cial
encouragement this situation was remedied in the course of the next
twenty years, with monuments to the architects of national unity
springing up all over the country. In Florence, for example, six
statues were unveiled in the 1880s and 1890s (to Victor Emmanuel,
Garibaldi, Daniele Manin, Bettino Ricasoli, Ubaldo Peruzzi and
Cosimo Ridol ) and in Rome ve (the Cairoli brothers, Terenzio
Mamiani, Cavour, Minghetti and Garibaldi). The most striking
omission was Mazzini, whose republicanism and opposition to the
new state after 1860 still made him largely anathema. Crispi
secured agreement from parliament in 1890 for a monument in
Rome to Mazzini (who had died, incognito, in a friend’s house in
Pisa in 1872, lonely and demoralized), but it was to be more than
fty years before it was nally completed.
National exhibitions were another vehicle for disseminating the
sense of a shared past. The most famous of these in the rst decades
of unity was the General Italian Exhibition held in Turin in 1884,
which was primarily intended as a showcase for the country’s
scienti c and industrial achievements since 1860 but also contained
ve rooms dedicated to the Risorgimento. In between o cial
documents, ags and posters were such eclectic relics as the socks
Garibaldi wore at Aspromonte, Gioberti’s dog-collar, Cattaneo’s hat,
Cavour’s handkerchief, Mazzini’s guitar, a lock of Mameli’s hair and
the embalmed hand of a young female patriot, Colomba Antonietti,
killed by a cannon-ball while defending Rome in 1849. The aim, as
the president of the organizing committee said, was to induce
feelings of reverence and dispel all spirit of factionalism among
visitors (‘Before the majesty of this spectacle parties do not exist’).58
Whether this was achieved is not known, but the authorities
certainly strove hard to encourage popular attendance, providing
discounts on rail tickets and o ering a major prize for the best
description of the exhibition by a ‘worker’. A foreman from the
Naples dockyards said that he felt ‘proud of our past’ when he
visited the Risorgimento rooms, and was ‘overcome by a sublime
and religious awe’. Perhaps he was, or perhaps he guessed what the
judges wanted to hear.59
In schools the government hesitated to allow Risorgimento
history to be taught, not least because priests were often employed
as teachers in many small towns (particularly before the Coppino
Law); and they were unlikely to speak well of those who had
worked to destroy the Pope’s temporal power. In 1867 a decree
stated that Italian history should not be studied beyond 1815, at any
level, secondary or primary; and only in 1884 was this relaxed for
secondary schools and the date moved down to 1870. When
Francesco Crispi was prime minister in the late 1880s a major drive
took place to ‘nationalize’ school curricula, and the Risorgimento
now featured much more heavily than before. In the third year of
primary school children were to be given a simple ‘narrative of
certain key facts relating to the formation of the Kingdom of Italy’,
while in the fourth and fth years they were to be introduced to the
whole gamut of Italian history from the founding of Rome to
uni cation. In the scuole normali trainee teachers were to study the
Risorgimento for a full year; and were told to make sure that their
future charges absorbed from Italy’s history a ‘love of the
fatherland’.60
Potentially, of course, the history of the Risorgimento was a
mine eld and great care was needed over how it was presented in
school texts and other books. The reputations of the main characters
had to be carefully safeguarded: to suggest that Cavour, or worse
Victor Emmanuel, had been anything other than a sel ess patriot
was unacceptable. For this reason access to documentary material
was very carefully controlled after 1860, and though the study of
Italian history was encouraged through the establishment of a
network of national archives in 1875, the creation of numerous local
institutes and academies, and the publication of learned journals
such as the Rivista storica del Risorgimento (1895), no o cial papers
were available for consultation after 1815. Particular pains were
taken to shield the monarchy, and when a major political gure
died his papers were generally searched and his private
correspondence with the king and anything else that might be
compromising removed to the safety of the royal library.
Occasionally a trusted scholar was allowed into the Savoy archives
and given permission to publish a documented (but carefully vetted)
history of recent political events. But this was exceptional. A similar
near paranoid approach was taken to Cavour’s reputation, and only
heavily expurgated versions of his correspondence were published
with his sceptical comments about uni cation, his vicious hostility
to Garibaldi and his democratic followers in 1860, and his often
deeply o ensive remarks about fellow Italians all carefully excised
from the public record.61
15

Sources of Authority: King, Church and Parliament,

1870–87

I wish the Pope would leave Rome, because I can’t look out of the
windows of the Quirinal Palace without seeing the Vatican in front of
me. And it always strikes me that both Pius IX and I are prisoners.

Victor Emmanuel II to the Queen of Holland, November 1871

The vast majority of the population, more than ninety per cent,… feels
entirely cut o from our institutions. People see themselves subjected to
the State and forced to serve it with their blood and their money, but
they do not feel that they are a vital and organic part of it, and take no
interest at all in its existence or its a airs.

Sidney Sonnino, speech to the Chamber of Deputies, 30 March

1881

The Chamber of Deputies no longer has the slightest popular support. On

the contrary, it is generally laughed at and despised.

Corriere della Sera, 1879

CHURCH AND STATE: THE QUESTION OF ROME

After the capture of Rome in September 1870 Italy’s leaders had two
choices. They could confront the Catholic Church head on and
a rm the lay values of the state aggressively, or be conciliatory and
hope that tact and implicit contrition would draw papal anger. In
practice they chose the latter course. In the spring of 1871 the Law
of Guarantees was passed by parliament, which laid down the
prerogatives of the papacy and the relationship of Church and State.
It was highly generous. The Pope was given the full status and
honours of a sovereign and his person was declared inviolable. He
was allowed to keep armed guards and have his own diplomatic
representation; and he was guaranteed freedom of the postal and
telegraphic services. The state renounced many of its rights of
control over the appointment of higher clergy, and bishops were no
longer obliged to swear an oath of loyalty to the king. As critics
pointed out, this in e ect established a state within a state, and left
Italy disarmed in the face of the most powerful moral force in the
peninsula; for the Pope could now legally fulminate against the
liberal regime and deploy his vast panoply of priests, monks, nuns,
congregations, private schools, colleges, hospitals and welfare
foundations to spread his message. And the hostility was real: the
hopes of many moderates that the Pope would accept that he was
better o without the burden of his temporal power proved
unfounded, and on the same day the new law was published Pius IX
issued an encyclical rejecting the settlement scornfully and
demanding the restoration of his dominions.1
In the years that followed, the Church remained resolute in its
opposition to the Italian state, and though informal accommodations
and compromises often occurred at the local level it was only
towards the end of the century that the Vatican began to soften its
line, realizing that with the spread of socialism liberalism was the
lesser of two evils and might be a useful ally in the war against
godless materialism. In the meantime it set out to strengthen its
already massive presence in Italian society, encouraging the faithful
to be active in local government (Catholics were formally debarred
by the Pope from national not municipal politics) and promoting
mutual aid societies, rural banks and cooperatives as instruments for
maintaining the loyalty of the masses and countering the doctrines
of individualism and class con ict. In 1874 it created a major
organization, the Opera dei Congressi, to coordinate these initiatives
at a national level.2 Every now and then there was talk of a possible
conciliation, and secret negotiations sometimes took place, as in the
summer of 1887, but the Pope was fully aware of the mobilizing
power of con ict and the propaganda value of his being ‘the
prisoner of the Vatican’, and felt under no great pressure to come to
terms with the state.
But it was at the level of symbols that the Church tended to be
most in exible, and it was here that much of the friction with the
state occurred – and here, too, that the weakness of the state
following the Law of Guarantees was often highly visible. A typical
episode was described to parliament by the distinguished democrat
Agostino Bertani in 1877. It concerned a young patriotic Roman
student whose dying request had been that a tricolour should be
carried in his funeral cortege. However, when the parish priest saw
the ag he announced that he would not accompany the body as
long as ‘that thing [was] there’; and despite earnest appeals from
friends and relatives of the deceased he remained adamant,
repeatedly referring to the tricolour as ‘that thing’. A university
professor stepped in and declared: ‘Our standard will not be hidden
or lowered in front of any cardinals or popes or tyrants. It will stand
rm and triumph with that patriotism that the Catholic clergy
knows nothing of.’ But it was to no avail and the priest got his way,
with the cortege split in two and the tricolour carried along a
di erent route to the church by the student’s friends, apart from the
co n.3
 The Minister of the Interior con rmed that no action could be
taken against the priest – only ‘moral force’ could be used, he said –
and Bertani was left to voice his frustration at the huge damage that
he felt was being done to the authority of the state:
I ask the Government and the Chamber: is it tolerable that there should exist in Italy a class
of citizens, who occupy positions of intimate, exceptional and widespread in uence, who
use every subtle art to place themselves between heaven and earth, at one moment
accommodating, at another aggressive, but always conspiring against the national
institutions, and who remain subject to two powers, the one infallible and absolute, the

other the political and civil authority sanctioned by the plebiscites?4

Given the fragility of national sentiment in Italy, Bertani’s anger was

understandable, but relatively few politicians after 1870 displayed
any stomach for a ght: many, especially on the right, were
themselves conscientious Catholics; and many feared that a tougher
line against the Church would only alienate the masses still further
from the state. Their preference – perhaps like the ‘Guicciardini
man’, excoriated by De Sanctis, who failed to act resolutely on
issues of principle – was for a quiet life: not to aunt ‘Italy’ in the
face of the Pope and thereby keep to a minimum the chances of
friction.
Victor Emmanuel, too, had no wish for a ght – certainly on this
front. As a member of a staunchly Catholic dynasty he had always
been uncomfortable about attacking the Church. And it was
probably his Catholic sympathies as much as his Piedmontese
loyalties that kept him (and the court – itself a bastion of deeply
conservative religiosity) out of Rome. He felt extremely uneasy
about staying in the Quirinal Palace, which had formerly belonged
to the Pope (he would have preferred Palazzo Barberini, but it was
not for sale);5 and after his rst brief visit to the Eternal City at the
end of 1870 he returned only intermittently, usually just for the
state opening of parliament in November or when his mistress was
in town (he bought a villa for her outside Porta Pia and could often
be seen driving back dressed in rough outdoor clothes, with a
couple of gun dogs, looking for all the world it was said like ‘a good
country merchant’).6 In November 1871 the government arranged
for the purchase of a large hunting estate at Castel Porziano, for the
huge sum of 4.5 million lire, hoping that this would encourage him
to spend more time in the city. But to no avail.
The absence of the king and the court weakened the symbolic
power of Rome as the kingdom’s new capital, and despite the hopes
of men like Quintino Sella that it might become a great modern
metropolis, the city struggled after 1870 to emerge from the shadow
of the papacy and establish a new identity for itself. It was almost,
as Carducci scathingly suggested, as if Italy felt embarrassed to be
there. The Chamber of Deputies was housed in Montecitorio, a large
but undistinguished seventeenth-century building with few
historical resonances tucked in the heart of Rome, out of sight of the
Vatican; and though some patriotic politicians called for something
grander and more conspicuous like the Capitol in Washington or the
Palace of Westminster in London, nothing was in fact done.
Garibaldi thought that a tting way for the new kingdom to stamp
its mark on the city would be to divert the course of the River Tiber
and bring an end to the oods and miasmas that had for centuries
plagued Rome – a massive engineering project that would
simultaneously alter the capital’s physiognomy and trumpet the
superiority of science over superstition. But again, and despite
enormous e orts by Garibaldi in the last years of his life, the idea
came to nothing.7
The 1870s witnessed a frenzy of property sales in Rome, as
dozens of monasteries, convents and other religious houses were
taken over by the state and sold o . The nancially hard-pressed
government managed to raise nearly 13 million lire in this way.
Among the principal purchasers were members of the Catholic or
‘black’ aristocracy – distinguished families such as the Odescalchi,
Barberini and Doria Pamphili – who no doubt felt entitled to ‘save’
the property from the hands of godless liberals. There were also
rumours that the Pope had authorized a leading Belgian prelate to
acquire land and buildings, on the understanding that they would be
returned to the ecclesiastical authorities once the Papal States had
been restored.8 Though the physical presence of the Church in Rome
was reduced by these measures, the city remained heavily clerical in
character, with many of the religious orders managing to secure
exemption from closure or surreptitiously reconstituting themselves
after they had been shut down. A survey conducted for the
government in 1895 found that there were still 160 Catholic
monastic communities and nunneries in the city – only about forty
less than there had been in 1870 – housing nearly 4,000 members,
male and female.9
After the left came to power in 1876, the pressure to transform
the face of Rome increased, and banks poured huge sums of money
– often given, with very few questions asked, to anyone claiming to
be a property developer – into building projects. By the mid-1880s
the city was awash with some 80,000 construction workers, and
everywhere there was sca olding and the sound of hammering and
falling masonry as old streets, palaces and classical ruins made way
for new public buildings and residential quarters. To the west of the
River Tiber the Prati district was converted into a strident symbol of
the Third Rome, with the massive Palace of Justice, government
o ces, barracks, up-market housing, and broad streets and piazzas
with suitably pagan, anticlerical and liberal names – Seneca,
Cicerone, Gracchi, Cola di Rienzo, Risorgimento, Cavour – intended,
as the planners said, to engulf the neighbouring Vatican and ‘bury’
it.10 A major thoroughfare, the Via Nazionale, was driven into the
heart of Rome, while to the north and east of the old city famous
villas and gardens, such as those of the Ludovisi and Capranica
families, were sold o to developers and destroyed. The city council
did what it could to control the banks and private speculators with
planning schemes, but to little avail, and in many areas, especially
the suburbs, building went ahead without any regulation.
From an aesthetic point of view the consequences were deeply
dispiriting to many observers. The distinguished travel writer
Augustus Hare claimed in the early 1880s that ‘twelve years of
Sardinian rule [had] done more for the destruction of Rome, with its
beauty and interest, than the Goths and Vandals’,11 while the
brilliant young poet and novelist Gabriele D’Annunzio was horri ed
by the barbaric dis gurement of the city by sordid pro teers in the
years after he arrived there in 1881. Looking back in 1893 he wrote:
‘Along with clouds of dust a kind of building madness spread…
Everywhere seemed infected by a contagion of vulgarity at that
time… The struggle for riches and power was waged with
implacable ferocity, with no respite, and the weapons were the pick-
axe, the trowel and bad faith.’12 Francesco Crispi, whose Mazzinian
background had given him an acute sense of the symbolic
importance and potential of Rome, felt that the city resembled a
‘cheap hotel’ – second-rate and tawdry; and he called repeatedly in
parliament for a capital worthy of the new nation: ‘We must build
Italy in Rome if we wish to remain in Rome, and in such a way that
the third life of this great city should be commensurate with its
past.’13
It was perhaps only inevitable that the city of Rome should fail to
match up to the Risorgimento’s grandiose dreams of regeneration,
but this did not help to assuage the anger of disenchanted patriots,
who turned the shortcomings of the capital into a potent symbol of
all that was wrong in their eyes with united Italy. The constant
wrangles between clericals and anti-clericals, moderates and
democrats, centralizers and de-centralizers over the identity and
status of Rome, the inability to enforce any coherent plan for urban
redevelopment, the ugliness of many of the public buildings, and the
anarchic speculative boom that ended in a hideous crash in the late
1880s served to underline for them the fractured, unprincipled and
materialistic character of the new society. The poet Carducci, who
was a central gure in the culture of dissatisfaction in the last
decades of the century, repeatedly compared the sordid and petty
character of the present (‘the farce of the in nitely small’, as he put
it in a speech in 1886)14 with the glorious ideal of ‘Rome’. As he
wrote in a famous poem of 1881 – with a sarcastic swipe at two of
the most important political gures of the day, Agostino Depretis
and Quintino Sella (and implicitly, thereby, at parliament as a
whole):
Rome, into your air I release my lofty spirit:
Receive my spirit, O Rome, and envelop it in light.
I come to you with no interest in little things:
Who looks for butter ies beneath the arch of Titus?
What do I care if the spectral bearded vintner of Stradella
Blends Gallic pleasantry with inertia in Montecitorio?
And if the long-toiling weaver of Biella gets entangled
In his own webs – a spider spinning in vain?
Surround me, O Rome, with blue, with sun illumine me, Rome:

The sun that shines through your broad heavens is divine.15

Aesthetic repugnance and a longing for some poetic ideal to raise

what was disparagingly referred to as ‘Italietta’ out of the mire of
mediocrity developed into a powerful theme in late-nineteenth-
century Italian literature. ‘Oh, God! The kingdom of Italy ushered in
the reign of universal ugliness,’ wrote Carducci in 1881. ‘Ugly even
are the overcoats and caps of the soldiers, ugly the coat of arms of
the state, ugly the postage stamps. You could contract a jaundice of
ugliness.’16 And the following year he called for some noble
enterprise, however desperate, to prise the Italian masses from their
wretched, uninspiring lives: ‘Oh, take them at least to die with glory
against the cannon of Austria or France or whoever the devil
brings!’ Another leading writer, Carlo Dossi – who in the late 1880s,
as a private secretary of the prime minister Francesco Crispi, was to
be closely involved in schemes for the spiritual regeneration of Italy
through a major European war – felt that the prosaic designs on
Italy’s coins revealed something of the country’s profound moral
decadence, recalling as they did the debased currency of the
Byzantines, with their ‘gangling gures, all the same’. And this was
particularly regrettable, he thought, given that the Italian soul was
highly artistic by nature and required little more than a ‘tiny spark
to burst into ame’.17
The ‘Third Rome’ failed to establish itself as a potent and
integrating symbol of the new Italy. It was the centre of national
administration and government – and of the Church; but Milan
claimed to be the country’s ‘moral’ capital, the pre-eminent city of
business, nance, publishing, journalism and in due course industry;
while other cities clung to their historic status and remained
powerful cultural and political hubs in their own right. Rome grew
fast after 1870, more than doubling in size to over half a million by
the First World War, but it remained smaller than Milan and Naples.
Furthermore its population lacked cohesion and a strong sense of
civic identity, and there were marked divisions between Catholics
and liberals, indigenous inhabitants and northern (and later
southern) immigrants – dismissively referred to by locals as
‘foreigners’, ‘Piedmontese’ or ‘chestnut sellers’ (buzzurri). As a result
the city found it hard to fend o the images of corruption and
decadence that were applied to it with mounting frequency from the
1870s – as in the playwright Luigi Pirandello’s description of the
political life of Rome in the 1890s: ‘Slime was pouring everywhere;
and it seemed that all the sewers of the city had broken open and
that the new national life of the Third Rome would be drowned in
that dark putrescent ood of sludge…’18
KING UMBERTO

At the end of December 1877 Victor Emmanuel learned that Alfonso

Lamarmora was dying. He had never forgiven the old general for the
disaster of Custoza and for over ten years had refused to have any
contact with him. Painful memories of the summer of 1866 no
doubt came ooding back to him, and when a deputation of
politicians came to salute him on New Year’s Day he was in a
particularly bullish mood and told them that Italy needed to be
‘strong, feared and respected’ (though according to the Times his
exact words were too extreme to be reported).19 The news of
Lamarmora’s death on 5 January visibly shook him, and though he
was feeling unwell – he had a fever and was shivering – he
summoned up the strength to send o a telegram of condolence. He
then took to his bed. The fever – which was probably malarial in
origin – worsened dramatically, and it soon became apparent that
his life was in danger. Victor Emmanuel wanted to die a good
Catholic – his wife would never have forgiven him if he did not, he
said – and after much resistance the Church authorities agreed to
administer the last rites. The king’s mistress wanted to visit his
bedside, but the government ordered she be stopped: scandal had to
be avoided at all costs. On the morning of 9 January, with the end
approaching, a steady stream of dignitaries led silently in front of
the king, propped up semi-conscious on pillows. Every now and
then a faint smile ickered on his lips. At two-thirty the royal doctor
placed his ear to the chest of the 57-year-old monarch and
pronounced the rst king of Italy dead.20
In life Victor Emmanuel had been a rather poor national symbol;
in death he was to make amends. He was to be buried in Rome: the
delegation from Turin asking that his body be laid to rest with his
ancestors was given short shrift, and the capital of Piedmont had to
be content with his sword, helmet and medals. The funeral was a
magni cent public spectacle, carefully designed by the Minister of
the Interior, Francesco Crispi, as a moment of supreme national
synthesis. Huge crowds poured into Rome – perhaps as many as
200,000 – attracted by the heavily discounted rail tickets, and the
gilt funeral carriage drawn by eight crape-covered horses wound its
way slowly through the streets from the Quirinal Palace down to the
Pantheon amid a sea of onlookers, with owers and wreaths falling
silently on the co n. The martial note was pronounced: thousands
of troops headed the procession, and every minute from dawn to
dusk a cannon boomed out across Rome. Victor Emmanuel’s aide-
de-camp rode in front of the funeral carriage, bearing his sword;
behind walked the old charger that he had ridden at the Battle of
San Martino in 1859. But great care was also taken to underline that
Victor Emmanuel had been a constitutional monarch and the
embodiment of the entire nation. The co n was anked by the four
most senior gures from the Chamber and the Senate, and the
cortège included representatives from almost every section of the
state and civil society: deputies, senators, prefects, policemen,
mayors, town councillors, judges, doctors, engineers, businessmen,
landowners, academics, artists, teachers, students, artisans, workers
and even Alpine guides.21
The funeral marked the beginning of the apotheosis of Victor
Emmanuel – his elevation into the immortal ‘father of the
fatherland’ – and the process continued with a great torrent of
tributes and commemorative books, pamphlets and prints, and a
magni cent performance of Cherubini’s Requiem in the Pantheon on
16 February. Some 300 deputies packed the interior, along with
ministers, ambassadors and numerous other dignitaries, including
members of the court and foreign royalty (there were three empty
seats for the deposed king of Naples and his family). The great
cupola had been transformed into a shimmering rmament, with
140 star-shaped boxes covered with white muslin set into the co ers
and lit by gas jets, while on the walls were the arms of the nation’s
principal cities and inscriptions glorifying the king and his role in
uniting the Italian people: ‘Healer of Italian discords’; ‘Son of the
Martyr King – who took holy vengeance for his father – and founded
the union of Italy’. A massive star of Italy had been placed over the
central aperture; and below it towered the catafalque, covered in
gold and black and anked by four lions and statues of faith, hope
and charity. The co n itself was now empty as the embalming
process had gone badly wrong, requiring the body to be interred
hurriedly in a side chapel.22
The death of Victor Emmanuel was something of a watershed for
liberal Italy. Many politicians felt grave forebodings for the future:
who would now have the moral authority to save Italians from their
factiousness, hold back the clerical and socialist tides, and prevent
the fragile edi ce of the new state from crumbling? Victor
Emmanuel had had his faults – many of them – but at least he had
possessed the prestige that came from securing national uni cation
and ghting (if not always winning) battles; and though he could be
rude, undigni ed and politically inept, he had had a certain
simplicity and earthy panache that had probably endeared him in
the end to the majority of his subjects. Would the new king, his
eldest son, be able to ll his shoes? The signs were not good.
Umberto (who wisely chose to be Umberto I, resisting pressure from
the Piedmontese lobby to be Umberto IV) was a colourless and
physically unimpressive man, of limited intellect, who was to nd
consolation for his deep feelings of inadequacy in serial
philandering. His main asset was his wife (and cousin), the fair-
haired and blue-eyed Margherita, a woman of strong character and
cultural interests. And it was to her (and the dead Victor Emmanuel)
that royal propagandists were mainly to turn in a bid to invest the
Italian Crown with a suitable aura.
And the need for mystique was great. Most Italian politicians,
including many former republicans, recognized after 1860 that the
crown o ered the best hope of safeguarding Italian unity. ‘The
monarchy unites us, a republic would divide us,’ Francesco Crispi
declared in parliament, to loud applause, in 1864. And the reason
lay chie y in the yawning abyss that was felt to divide the mass of
the population from the ruling classes. As the philosopher Angelo
Camillo De Meis argued in a well-known essay of 1868, the spheres
of the educated (‘those who think’) and of the uneducated (‘those
who feel’) were poles apart in modern society, and particularly so in
Italy, where the credulous Catholic poor could not be expected to
identify with the godless abstractions of liberalism. The only way of
bringing the two camps together and preventing a bloody civil war
from tearing the country apart – as had happened in southern Italy
during the Napoleonic period and again in the early 1860s – was
through ‘a glorious national dynasty’ that would embody
simultaneously ‘the religious and conservative instincts of the
people’ and the constitutional aspirations of the elites.23
But the Savoys were not particularly glorious, and the limit of
their mystique was underlined on 17 November 1878, when a
young anarchist tried to assassinate the new king in Naples.
Umberto was saved in part thanks to his prime minister, the former
republican Benedetto Cairoli, who lunged at the assailant, grabbing
him by the hair and parrying the knife blow. ‘The poetry of the
House of Savoy is destroyed,’ commented the queen ruefully.24 In
the days that followed, a series of terrorist bombings in Florence
and Pisa, in which several people were killed, reinforced the general
feeling that the nation’s institutions were in jeopardy, threatened by
subversives, and more generally by the resentment and anger of
millions of poor Italians. As the authoritative and usually restrained
Nuova antologia commented in the wake of the attacks:
How can one not re ect that if this Italy, hitherto protected by providence, had been
unlucky, and the blow aimed at the king had not missed, we would immediately have
found ourselves engulfed in the ames of a great con agration, which only a miracle has

prevented from breaking out, but which is smouldering hidden beneath our feet!25

Many, including con rmed democrats like Francesco Crispi, felt that
the time had now come to curtail political freedoms. Italy, he told
parliament, could not a ord to be as liberal as Britain, ‘where
respect for the monarch and religious sentiment are so deeply
rooted in the hearts of the people that nobody dares to insult them
or puts up with their being insulted. Every meeting ends with the
celebrated anthem, “God save the Queen!” ’ In Italy, by contrast,
patriotism and loyalty to the monarchy were skin-deep.26
In the course of the 1880s and 1890s enormous e orts were made
to turn the monarchy into an authentic symbol of national cohesion.
In Rome the massive marble monument to Victor Emmanuel, the
Vittoriano, began to rise slowly above Piazza Venezia, alongside the
Capitol (after some initial delays: the international competition for
the design, launched in 1880, was won by a Frenchman; there was
an outcry and the competition had to be re-run on a strictly national
basis).27 In January 1884 a ‘pilgrimage’ (as it was o cially termed)
was staged to mark the sixth anniversary of Victor Emmanuel’s
death, and tens of thousands of visitors ocked to the Pantheon to
pay their respects to the late king, whose body was exhumed for the
occasion and placed on a large catafalque beneath the rotunda. The
event was accompanied by a fresh wave of commemorative
literature with Victor Emmanuel, the bringer of ‘concord’, as the
main theme.28 Politicians, writers and artists glori ed the monarchy
in speech, print and paint, trumpeting the devotion of Victor
Emmanuel and his father, Carlo Alberto, to national unity and
claiming the dynasty had for centuries been committed to the Italian
cause. Musicians, too, played their part. When Verdi revised his
opera Simon Boccanegra he added a new section in which the
fourteenth-century Doge of Genoa calms his unruly subjects and
halts their inveterate factional and class struggles with the exercise
of his regal authority: ‘Fratricides! Plebeians! Patricians! People
with a savage history… While brother tears brother apart in civil
strife… I cry: peace!, I cry: love!’ The scene was rapturously
received at its premiere in March 1881.29
There were serious limits, though, to the capacity of the
monarchy to serve as a symbol of cohesion in Italy. Umberto
certainly adopted a less forbidding and martial image than his
father – though he loved army manoeuvres and military parades. He
was described as ‘the good king’, and toured the country with his
glamorous wife, handing out prizes to schoolchildren, meeting the
poor, and o ering comfort and support to victims of natural
disasters and epidemics (as with his acclaimed visit to Naples at the
time of the cholera outbreak in 1884). But the Crown was not above
politics, and this made it vulnerable. The king chose the prime
minister, and if he so wanted he could on occasions go against the
wishes of parliament – as happened with the appointment of
Giovanni Giolitti in 1892 – with potentially embarrassing results.
More importantly the monarch was seen as having an intimate
relationship with the army and this meant that controversial
measures, such as the introduction of martial law in times of civil
unrest – Sicily in 1894, Milan in 1898 – could rebound against him
personally. More generally the prestige of the dynasty was very
closely linked to the conduct of foreign policy, which was one
important factor behind Italy’s increasing bellicosity and
assertiveness on the international stage from the 1880s. The rewards
of military success could be huge for Italy’s fragile and lacklustre
monarchy – which is why prime ministers, like Crispi, were willing
to play with re, egged on by Umberto. But it was a high-risk
strategy and the price of failure could be no less great.
PARLIAMENT

The cult of the monarchy during the 1880s and 1890s was in part a
response to the waning prestige of parliament. Representative
assemblies had never been viewed with unalloyed enthusiasm by
Risorgimento patriots: for democrats especially they had often
seemed instruments for the furtherance of sel sh sectional interests
by the propertied classes, and thus inimical to ‘the people’ and ‘the
nation’. Universal su rage was a possible solution, and many on the
left certainly aspired to this in principle. In practice, though, it
hardly seemed feasible to give the masses the vote while they were
under the thumb still of priests and oppressive local landowners.
Parliamentary government thus began in Italy amid considerable
scepticism, and it was perhaps not surprising that as soon as
evidence surfaced of corruption or abuse of privilege – as with the
great tobacco monopoly scandal of 1868–9 (when a number of
deputies were accused of fraudulently lining their pockets) –
pessimism should quickly turn into generalized disdain and disgust.
‘Parliament,’ wrote a leading member of the far left to a friend in
1873, ‘is a sordid pigsty, where the most honest man loses at the
very least all sense of decency and shame.’30 And another in uential
democrat published a major study of Italy’s political system the
same year dismissing the Chamber as just a collection of ‘angry sects
ghting one another for control of government… factions, not
parties, secret camarillas, motivated solely by personal interests’.31
The advent of the left to power in 1876 did not alter the negative
assessments of parliament. Indeed they soon intensi ed, as
conservatives became afraid that the extension of the su rage
promised by the governments of Agostino Depretis and Benedetto
Cairoli would open the doors to the unruly masses. Already, before
the passing of electoral reform in 1882, many on the right claimed
to detect a coarsening of the parliamentary fabric, as Montecitorio
became crowded with new men – a third of those returned in the
elections of 1876 had never sat in the Chamber before – with few
party ties and limited political experience whose support for the left
had been motivated more by a desire to be spared the austere scal
policies of the moderates, it seemed, than any genuine concern for
greater democracy or freedom. No doubt there was much snobbery
and prejudice in the scorn of many older liberals for the new intake;
but the perception of a qualitative decline may have been well-
founded. A Tuscan, Ferdinando Martini, was horri ed by the
ignorance of his fellow deputies and recalled an occasion when the
Minister of the Interior, Giovanni Nicotera (a southerner and a
former Mazzinian revolutionary), repeatedly referred to ‘King
Teodoro’ of England in a speech after misreading a note that had
been slipped to him about ‘the Tudors’.32
Worries about parliament in the age of the masses were common
to many Western democracies in the late nineteenth century, but in
Italy they gained particular momentum by feeding on a dark
hinterland of anxieties. Indiscipline and division had dogged the
past: very little, it seemed, had now changed, despite all the hopes
of the Risorgimento. And if Italians were still beset by the vices that
had brought them centuries of decadence, how could a political
system founded on representation do other than re ect back those
vices and produce a degenerate assembly? ‘Today Italy is like a ship
in a mighty storm,’ wrote a leading moderate with a
characteristically Dantean note, surveying the situation in
parliament in November 1876. ‘Where is the pilot? I cannot see
one.’33 And many other observers on both the right and the left
similarly found themselves viewing the present through the
disquieting lter of history. The growing anarchy in parliament, De
Sanctis told an audience in 1880, recalled the chaos of the Middle
Ages, when factionalism had led to endless turmoil. ‘How many
ministries have fallen since 1860, how much passion and private
ambition has been fomented, how many dissident and personal
groups have arisen! Ah! This tale of groups and crises is not new; it
is the ancient illness that gnaws at Italy…’34
Finding remedies for the shortcomings of parliament was very
di cult, as problems seemed to beset almost every level of the
political system, beginning at the base with the electorate. As De
Sanctis pointed out, it was normal for voters in all liberal regimes to
give their backing to a candidate from a mixture of private interests
and general political concerns; but it was the balance between the
two that was crucial, and in countries such as Italy where people
had had little experience of freedom the claims of the collectivity
were widely regarded as little more than ‘a passport to personal
ends’. People, he said, pledged their support to whoever o ered the
best prospect of securing money, jobs or assistance with some court
case for themselves or their local community, and as a result they
voted ‘not for the most honest and talented man, but the man who is
deemed to be most in uential’. Fine principles were all very well
where such principles were generally respected and upheld; but if
lip-service alone were paid to the rules of the game, who would be
so foolish as to put the requirements of something so remote as
‘Italy’ ahead of the interests of his family and friends? It was the old
problem of thought and action. Everyone, according to De Sanctis,
solemnly proclaimed that deputies represented the nation, but each
then added quietly to himself: ‘This ought to be the case; but
between what ought to be and what is, there is an enormous gap.
And so we are back to square one.’35
Local in uence was a problem. The great majority of rural
communities were dominated by a few wealthy individuals or
families, who used their prestige, contacts, and social and economic
muscle to control the elections. Bribery of all sorts was
commonplace – money, food, o ers of jobs, loans – and in many
parts of the south men with a reputation for violence – bandits or
ma osi – were widely deployed to intimidate the voters. Election
days were frequently turned into carnival occasions with
landowners marching their supporters, as if they were a feudal
army, o to the polling station accompanied by musicians, priests
and dignitaries. And if there was some uncertainty as to whether the
electors would actually vote as expected of them – ballots were after
all secret – there were a variety of mechanisms for ensuring the
desired outcome. Ballot papers could be procured in advance, lled
in and handed to the voter (who would then bring back the blank
ballot paper as a form of receipt). Individuals might be instructed to
write a version of the candidate’s name, perhaps with a spelling
mistake, on the ballot paper in a way that would ‘personalize’ it and
enable checks to be made later. And the tellers could be pressurized
into nullifying votes cast for an opponent on a technicality.
Francesco Crispi was incensed to nd that he had lost in the college
of Castelvetrano in western Sicily in 1870 after all the ballot papers
with ‘Francesco Crispi’, ‘Crispi’ or ‘Grispi’ (‘C’ and ‘G’ were often
interchanged in Sicily), rather than his full name and lawyer’s title,
were declared void.36
When De Sanctis travelled back to his home town of Morra Irpino
in 1875, for the rst time in forty years, to ght an election that had
to be rerun after the initial result was contested, he did so with the
full con dence that his fame and national standing would cause
factional disputes to melt away and bring him a near unanimous
vote. But to his intense disappointment all his passionate speeches
about concord and unity seemed to fall on deaf ears and he picked
up just twenty fresh votes as a result of his campaigning. The
trouble was, as a local priest explained to him, that his talk about
transcending petty municipal disputes for ‘Italy’s’ sake meant
nothing to most townspeople:
You see, in these small places, the world begins and ends here. The church tower is the
brightest star in their little rmament. And there is as much passion in these rivalries and
squabbles – what you call local tittle-tattle – as there is, let us say, between France and
Germany. Everyone has his own personal epic. The epic of a child is his house of cards.
And their epic is the campaign to win control of the town hall. You call this tittle-tattle,
and want to be the deputy of everyone: but that means being the deputy of no-one… Moral
enthusiasm is just ignis fatuus. Brute passions and interests are the stu of mankind, and

that is where your campaign must start.37

 Nor were irregularities in elections the product simply of
unbridled local in uence and factionalism. The government, too,
played its part, with the prefects and sub-prefects who were its
agents in the provinces intervening in often blatant fashion to help
friendly candidates and damage opponents. This could be done in a
variety of ways, including harassing or arresting opposition
supporters, banning opposition rallies, sequestrating opposition
newspapers, and instructing state o cials, the police included, to
use their authority to secure votes for the government. A
particularly powerful tool of manipulation lay in the drawing up of
the electoral registers. Literacy and a tax threshold were the two
principal criteria of eligibility for the vote, but literacy in particular
was hard to de ne, and this led to a great deal of blurring at the
edges. Until 1894 town councils were responsible for compiling lists
of voters (with all the attendant risks of partisan interference) and
the prefect then vetted them and added or subtracted names at will.
Thus in 1867 the prefect ensured the election of a certain Ippolito
Masci in the run-o for the twelfth college in Naples after removing
204 names from the list submitted by the local council and adding
187 entirely new ones.38
Appeals against irregularities could be made, and a parliamentary
commission would investigate; and it was not uncommon for
elections to be quashed and re-run (though sometimes parliament
upheld elections even when the irregularities had been transparent:
an indication of yet another tier of impropriety in the system).39 But
despite such checks there remained a widespread feeling that the
electoral process in Italy was deeply awed and increasingly
unworkable, and by the early 1880s writers and journalists were
denouncing it with at times near hysterical vehemence. The
popularity of anti-parliamentary novels (several dozen appeared in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries), high-pro le
journals, including the Cronaca bizantina and Nabab, and
newspapers such as the Forche Caudine – a broadsheet written
almost entirely by one man, Pietro Sbarbaro, whose splenetic
denunciations of political scandal and malpractice earned it sales of
around 150,000 in the mid-1880s – bore witness to the general
public’s appetite for a negative and often scabrous vision of Italian
liberalism. Political theorists also joined in the attacks. In 1884 the
Sicilian Gaetano Mosca wrote a scathing denunciation of
parliamentary government as the tyrannical imposition of a self-
serving minority on the majority after witnessing the ‘thousands of
iniquities, abuses and brutal acts’ that regularly attended Italian
elections.40
Why were governments unable to curb electoral corruption? In
part because they thought they could not. While commentators
happily denounced parliament and politicians, often in the harshest
terms, they conveniently overlooked the part they themselves
played in generating and sustaining the system (‘It is you who are
responsible for your problems, electors,’ said De Sanctis in 1880,
with rare frankness. ‘It is you who are making the new history of
Italy’).41 Governments also believed that they had a right, a duty
even, to intervene on behalf of their own candidates (and here they
were following the model of French liberalism), not least because
they had no permanent party machinery that they could fall back
on. Paradoxically, though, one of the biggest reasons for
governmental interference in elections derived from an acute sense
of the fragility of liberalism in Italy: given the threat posed by
reactionaries and subversives (clericals, republicans, radicals and in
due course socialists), how could the values of constitutional
freedom be upheld if the authorities did not do everything in their
power to ensure that their men were returned to parliament? Of
course they risked shooting themselves in the foot with their high-
handed behaviour: but as long as the rules of the liberal game were
widely ignored, they faced an almost impossible dilemma.

The new electoral law of 1882 was the product of several years of
di cult deliberation. For the right in particular extending the
su rage did not seem the answer to the problem of how to bridge
the gap between government and governed, ‘legal’ and ‘real’ Italy:
to enfranchise those who had not yet acquired a ‘sense of the state’
was simply to ‘endanger the institutions and the monarchy’,
according to Ruggero Bonghi.42 The main fear for conservatives was
radicals, republicans and socialists – which was why a few of them
went so far as to argue for universal su rage, on the grounds that
the illiterate rural masses would provide a ballast of safe, Catholic
docility. But the left was more concerned about the pernicious
in uence of the Church and was thus wary of giving the vote to the
peasantry. And though worries about the ignorance and lack of
patriotism of the working classes were almost as pronounced on the
left as the right, there was a general feeling that the social question
was now so insistently discussed throughout the Western world and
so pressing that it would be political suicide to hold out against
democratic reform. Furthermore, could the masses ever be educated
to a ‘sense of the state’ if they were not entrusted with political
responsibility?
The man who dominated Italian parliamentary politics from 1876
to 1887, Agostino Depretis, was a reluctant reformer. Cautious,
a able and Piedmontese, with a long white beard periodically dyed
grey for added gravitas, he entered o ce on a platform of free and
compulsory primary education, increased local self-government,
administrative decentralization and an extended su rage. But he did
not embrace change out of conviction or principle – indeed his lack
of strong views meant that most people came away from talking to
him feeling that he agreed with them – but rather from a sense that
something needed to be done (and preferably the less the better) to
prevent discontent boiling over in the country. In 1879 he brought
in a measure that would roughly double the electorate. But this was
widely considered inadequate, and two years later he submitted a
more radical proposal to the Chamber giving the vote to all males
over twenty-one who had completed two years of primary schooling
or military service, or who paid at least 19.80 lire annually in direct
taxes. This bill was passed, and the Italian electorate more than
trebled from 620,000 to over 2 million. Education rather than
wealth now became the principal criterion for enfranchisement:
previously about 80 per cent of all voters had quali ed on the basis
of taxation.
Central to the new law was the introduction of the electoral
system of scrutin de liste. Instead of 508 constituencies, each with a
single deputy, there were to be 135 larger colleges with between
two and ve deputies chosen by preference voting from competing
lists. The aim was partly to ensure that urban working-class districts
were diluted with conservative rural votes. But the main hope of the
scheme’s proponents – principally Francesco Crispi – was that larger
territorial units and lists of candidates would break the stranglehold
of local interests on elections and encourage the creation of
organized parties appealing to voters with ‘national’ programmes.
As Crispi said:
I believe we must compel voters to look beyond the con nes of their town and study the
country on a broader basis… It is possible to suborn 400 voters, but not thousands; it is
possible to intervene within the limits of a small constituency, but not of a province… I
want scrutin de liste in order to nationalize the Chamber, by which I mean, gentlemen,…
that those who in future enter this hall should forget where they were born, their parish
pump, their local ties, and the wishes, the needs and the demands of the region of their
birth, and should instead be inspired by a single idea, a sole concept, that of the good of

the nation.43

The hopes surrounding scrutin de liste were not realized, and Italy
was to revert to a system of single-member constituencies in 1891.
Bribery and corruption continued unabated, and far from reducing
the predominance of local interests in elections, the expanded
su rage simply meant that candidates (and deputies) now had to
devote more time than ever to satisfying the demands of their key
constituents. As in the past, o ers of jobs, promotions, medals,
pensions, loans, licences and contracts were the staple of a
politician’s life; and huge amounts of e ort had to be expended
answering the constant stream of ‘letters of recommendation’ that
poured in from local supporters. Ful lling promises was not
imperative; but keeping clients in hope was. Nor did the enlarged
electoral colleges encourage politicians to compete on the basis of
rival programmes, as had been anticipated: instead candidates
looked to avoid the lottery of an open contest by negotiating with
rivals, carving up the territory and the votes in an often complex
process of horse-trading. As one leading newspaper lamented in
1891, the shortcomings of the parliamentary regime were evidently
due more to the fact that united Italy had failed to reform Italians
than to any structural problems with the state: ‘These defects in our
country can only be resolved through the furthering of our political
education, which, to be honest, shows no sign of taking place.’44
With politicians heavily dependent on meeting the demands of
constituents, parliament became weighed down with often petty
local business, and rather than give their allegiance to a government
on the basis of the merits of its programme, many deputies preferred
to ‘trade’ their vote, moving between ministers and would-be
ministers, seeing who would o er them the most favourable terms.
As a result parliamentary votes were unpredictable, which was one
important reason why governments fell so often: Italy had thirty- ve
administrations between 1861 and 1900. It also helps explain why it
was so di cult to get major reforms through parliament, and, once
passed, why they frequently showed signs of incoherence: they were
usually the product of a good deal of convoluted bargaining. One
deputy described the frenetic cattle-market atmosphere of
parliament in a speech in May 1886:
You should see the pandemonium in Montecitorio when the time approaches for an
important vote. Government agents run through rooms and up and down corridors trying
to secure support. Everything is promised: subsidies, decorations, canals, bridges, roads;

and sometimes a long-withheld legal decision is the price of the parliamentary vote.45

The magnetic pull of constituency interests – discernible, for

example, in the unnecessarily circuitous paths followed by many
railway lines built in these years – was not just the result of
electoral expediency. The fact was, most deputies felt emotionally
rooted in their home territory in ways that constantly cut across
their national obligations. There was widespread absenteeism from
the Chamber, as the press continually lamented, and in the rst
decades of unity barely half of those elected to parliament ever
bothered to turn up. As a result the Chamber was frequently
inquorate (under 50 per cent plus one of all deputies) and many of
the votes taken were technically invalid (this was the case with 90
per cent of the decisions made in the 1870–71 legislature).46 Some
deputies may have stayed away from the capital as a gesture of
protest, and some may have had nancial reasons for not attending
given that there was no parliamentary stipend; but most seem
simply to have felt little inclination to bother themselves with a airs
outside their home province – like Marco Miniscalchi Erizzo, whose
meagre contributions to the life of parliament in the 1880s and
1890s consisted of suggesting to the Minister of Public Works that
the question of the trunk line from his home town of Verona to
nearby San Giovanni Lupatoto needed to be examined, and that any
further development of the station at Porta Vescovo in Verona might
be shelved until plans for the station at Porta Nuova had been
studied more thoroughly.47
For some high-minded politicians such as De Sanctis and Crispi
the answer to deputies’ lack of commitment, rampant municipalism
and horse-trading lay in the creation of disciplined parties, and
periodically they issued impassioned pleas for Italy to emulate the
British parliamentary model and give the labels of ‘left’ and ‘right’
real political substance. But their calls fell largely on deaf ears. One
reason for this was that parties continued to be seen, as in the
Risorgimento, as inimical to national unity and synonymous with
the violation of individual and collective liberty by factions. There
was a widespread (and well-founded) fear that organized parties in
Italy would simply fragment the constitutional terrain, give voice to
anti-system forces – clerical, regional, republican, socialist – and
return the country to the chaos that had bedevilled it in the past. As
the eminent constitutionalist Domenico Zanichelli said in 1900,
parties ran the risk of ‘reproducing in the new Italy that sad and
distinctive feature of medieval Italy, paid for with centuries of
martyrdom and oppression’.48 But it was also the case that most
politicians could not see what they stood to gain from being
subjected to party restraints, as their power rested heavily on having
their hands free to manoeuvre within the Chamber in order to meet
the clientelistic demands of their voters.
In the early 1880s the situation appeared to be getting worse. The
introduction of electoral reform aroused much anxiety on both sides
of the Chamber, and there was talk of the need to ‘transform’ the
old groupings of left and right and create a broad centrist alliance
that would protect the institutions from the rising tide of ‘seething
demagogy’ (as Marco Minghetti called it in a letter of 1881).49 What
came to be called ‘transformism’ was certainly not new (Cavour had
done something similar with his connubio in the 1850s), nor was it
con ned to Italy: ‘opportunism’ in France was comparable. Nor,
initially, did it have negative connotations: the distinguished Swiss
political scientist Johann Kaspar Bluntschli had made centrism
theoretically fashionable in the 1870s arguing that it was inherently
progressive, like evolution.50 But the problem in Italy was that it
coincided with a general revulsion towards parliament and growing
anxieties about the country’s ‘decadence’ – hugely fuelled by the
government’s failure in the spring of 1881 to stop the French
occupying Tunis. ‘Transformism’ thus quickly became sucked into
the vortex of execration and used as a further stick with which to
beat the ruling classes. As Carducci wrote early in 1883:
Transformism is an uglyword and even more ugly thing. To transform oneself from left into
right, and yet not become fully right nor remain fully left. As in Dante’s infernal circle of
thieves, where men are neither men nor serpents, but unquestionably reptiles, and
monstrous reptiles in which the two forms are merged into one and which instead of

uttering rational speech su er from dyspepsia and spit.51

The blurring of party lines and the sense that the Chamber was
dissolving into a quagmire of unprincipled factions held together
only by the bargaining skills of the pliable but personally honest
Depretis (one leading contemporary compared him to an English
water closet that stayed clean despite the lth passing through it),52
led a string of leading intellectuals and politicians – Bonghi,
Minghetti, Jacini, Lombroso, Orlando – into anguished analyses of
Italy’s parliamentary system. In the 1880s there was a feeling that
the shortcomings might yet be recti ed; but by the 1890s residual
optimism was fading fast as new and disturbing ideas about the
nature and evolution of society gained widespread currency, fuelled
by Darwinism and in uential studies such as Hippolyte Taine’s
history of contemporary France. What if nations evolved only
slowly, like natural organisms, in a realm beyond human reason?
Could a state that had been drawn up largely in accordance with
abstract principles and imposed on a population, as in France in the
1790s or Italy in the 1860s, be expected to function? Should not
institutions be adapted to suit the particular character and
psychology of a people? Parliament, with its ‘anaemic, pointless and
pernicious existence’, as one leading newspaper put it,53 was
proving incapable of educating Italians and creating the new Italy
that had been dreamed of in the Risorgimento. But what might be
put in its place?
PART FIVE

War 1887–1918

16

Francesco Crispi and the ‘New European Order’, 1887–

91

The eyes are piercing, intelligent, expressive and changeable; the eyes of
a man who is very strong, very wily, very cunning. But they are missing
something! M. Crispi has no eyebrows. And as soon as you realize what
his physiognomy lacks, you discover whom it is M. Crispi resembles: he
resembles Bismarck without eyebrows… Very re ned… very Italian and
very much a lawyer, he does not need the eyebrows that give his
counterpart a very strong, very brutal, very German and very military
appearance! M. Crispi strikes me as wanting to charm his interlocutors;
Bismarck wants to terrorize them.

Jacques Saint-Cère, Le Figaro, 29 September 1890

The great ambition of Signor Crispi, and perhaps the mainspring of his
actions, is to obtain a military success for Italy, no matter where or
how… He believes himself now to be acting in Italy the part undertaken
by Prince Bismarck in Germany before the events of 1866 and 1870. If
once victory should crown the Italian army, Signor Crispi would feel sure
of maintaining the dictatorship which he has assumed but which has not
yet been assured him by his fellow countrymen.

British chargé d’a aires to Lord Salisbury, 24 December 1888

DOGALI

On 26 January 1887 a column of some 500 Italian soldiers was

surprised by a force of 5,000 Ethiopians in the rocky hinterland of
Massaua on the shores of the Red Sea and annihilated. News of the
disaster took a week to reach Rome, and when it did the Secretary-
General of the Foreign Ministry could not make out from the
telegram the site of the battle. He suggested it was something like
‘Dogali’, and though no such place could be found on the map, the
name stuck. When the prime minister, Depretis, walked into the
Chamber (carrying an old atlas) to report the tragedy he was visibly
shaken: according to one observer he had aged ten years.1 The
announcement was greeted with uproar. ‘Persons not familiar with
the energy of Italian rhetoric,’ wrote the British politician Charles
Wentworth Dilke, ‘would imagine that a dozen duels next morning
must be the result of a heated debate in the Chamber, unless indeed
they were anticipated by a free ght on the oor of the House. The
scenes which took place on the reception of the bad news from
Massowah were of this description…’2 Similar scenes were repeated
across the country as demonstrators took to the streets in anger.
The Italian government had been lured to Massaua two years
earlier after a succession of setbacks in foreign policy. In 1878 at the
Congress of Berlin it had failed to win compensation for Austria’s
occupation of Bosnia–Herzegovina: Britain by contrast had picked
up Cyprus, while France (though this was still secret) had been
given a free hand in Tunisia. ‘Victor Emmanuel would not have
allowed this if he had lived. We are truly decadent,’ Crispi wrote
indignantly to a friend.3 Three years later the French duly invaded
Tunisia, a region in which Italy had powerful economic (and
strategic) interests, and the government fell amid a torrent of
censure and anger at its inability to prevent this fresh humiliation.
There were fears now of ‘encirclement’ in the Mediterranean, and in
1882 Italy abandoned its traditional policy of neutrality and entered
a defensive alliance with Austria and Germany, the Triple Alliance.
And when at the end of 1884 London indicated that it would be
happy to see Italy installed in Ethiopia (mainly to avert a possible
French challenge in the upper Nile valley), the Foreign Minister,
Pasquale Stanislao Mancini, seized the opportunity to send a
contingent of troops to Massaua, without telling parliament. He
later tried to justify his decision by declaring enigmatically that ‘the
keys of the Mediterranean’ lay in the Red Sea, but in truth he
appeared to have acted precipitately (and contrary to his earlier
aversion to colonial ventures) in a desperate attempt to make up for
the recent reverses.
Dogali was a disaster: but it was converted into a glorious
disaster. The fact that the Italian troops had apparently fallen in a
straight line facing the enemy was quickly seized on, and
comparisons were drawn between the bravery and discipline of the
dead in Africa and the craven irresponsibility and inertia of
parliament. Ruggero Bonghi suggested that the heroes of Dogali
were worth far more than his 500 fellow deputies, while a popular
verse ran: ‘This mourning garb you wear / Signals life not interment
/ The ve hundred dead / Are sitting in parliament.’4 An obelisk
that had recently been unearthed near the church of Santa Maria
sopra Minerva was converted into a large monument to the fallen in
front of the central railway station in Rome and inaugurated in a
lavish ceremony in the presence of the king (it was removed in
1925: the fascist government preferred to celebrate victories, not
defeats). The piazza was renamed ‘Piazza of the 500’. The artist
Michele Cammarano was commissioned by the Minister of
Education to paint a huge canvas of Dogali to ‘record in the Gallery
of Modern Art the heroic virtues of Italian soldiers’. Cammarano set
o for Massaua, where he spent ve years working on the picture,
at great government expense, in a specially constructed studio. The
nished piece, more than nine metres by four, was unveiled in
1896, unfortunately a few months after another, more calamitous
defeat in Africa.5
The disappointments in foreign policy, the plummeting prestige of
parliament, the sense that Italians were still profoundly vitiated, and
mounting fears of popular unrest (a revolutionary socialist party
appeared in Lombardy in 1885 – soon suppressed – and strikes and
violent clashes with the authorities were becoming ever more
common as the agricultural recession bit deeper) resulted in a
growing belief that only something drastic – a great military
success, perhaps – would cement the nation morally. And the idea
was common to both left and right. In 1881 the brilliant young
radical poet and deputy Felice Cavallotti told the Chamber that
‘some bloody baptism’ was needed to give Italy the ‘position among
the nations appropriate to its new destiny’,6 while the following
year a well-known journalist, politician and former Garibaldian,
Rocco De Zerbi, called famously for a ‘warm steaming bath of blood’
to sort out the country’s problems. The well-connected conservative
Marquis Alessandro Guiccioli wrote in his diary in 1882: ‘When will
we be able to celebrate a great victory won by the valour of
Italians?… That day I would happily breathe my last. A new nation
can only be properly consecrated with a baptism of blood.’7 And in
May 1883 another leading conservative, Ruggero Bonghi, told
parliament how he longed to see Italy militarily victorious so as to
expunge the dreadful memories of Custoza and Lissa, which ‘were,
and remain, the principal reasons for our weakness’.8 A left-wing
deputy, Abele Damiani, wrote to his close friend Francesco Crispi
(also in May 1883) about the ‘decadence’ into which the country
was sliding. But he was hopeful that this situation would not last,
‘above all if the guardian spirit of our fatherland should bring us
swiftly into a new and heroic period, or else into a war’.9 Damiani
was to be Crispi’s Under-Secretary at the Foreign Ministry from
1887 to 1891.
CRISPI AND THE ‘NEW EUROPEAN ORDER’

The disaster of Dogali catapulted Crispi back into power. Ever since
his resignation as Minister of the Interior in 1878 on a (well-
founded) charge of bigamy, the former Mazzinian and Secretary of
State of Garibaldi had been calling vigorously from the back-
benches for a more assertive foreign policy and rearmament. He
claimed that Italy faced a major external threat from France: the
French had never forgiven Italy for achieving unity and destroying
the temporal power of the papacy, he said, and since their defeat by
Prussia they were looking to dominate the Mediterranean – at the
expense, inevitably, of Italy. Domestically, Crispi was deeply
worried about the challenge of the Church and the far left and the
absence of national sentiment in the country; and he repeatedly
spoke of the urgent need for ‘moral unity’ to complement ‘material
unity’ and nish the work of the Risorgimento. Although he
believed passionately that political and social reforms were required
to help draw the masses inside the framework of the state, he had
come increasingly to recognize that these would be ine ective in
themselves without an accompanying process of ‘political
education’.
Crispi entered Depretis’s eighth and nal government in April
1887 as Minister of the Interior; and when Depretis died less than
four months later he assumed the mantle of prime minister almost
without discussion, retaining the interior ministry and adding the
foreign ministry as well. For over two decades he had been a major
gure on the Italian political stage, excluded from the highest o ce
on account of his strongly democratic views, his background (he
was a Sicilian) and his irregular private life. But the country was
now demanding energy and a change of direction; and though some
Piedmontese and Lombard politicians were alarmed at the prospect
of a southern prime minister and tried to block his appointment,
Crispi was adamant that his premiership would be ‘national’ as no
other before it. As he told Ferdinando Martini:
To exclude me, who had already been designated as prime minister, simply because I was a
southerner would have been a mistake. We must put a stop to this regionalism. From the
Alps to the sea there are only Italians. And, to be honest, is there anyone who could claim
to be more of a unitarist than me? To my mind, my whole life is proof of it, from Palermo
to Turin. I am here to work for the country, to give it all my time, all my remaining energy.
I hope that I will be able to do something good. I belong entirely to Italy, believe me. I feel
as if I am back in 1860.

Crispi’s eyes, according to Martini, were glistening with tears as he

spoke these words.10
His rst task was to sign a military convention with Germany.
The situation in Europe was deeply unstable and there was talk in
many quarters of an imminent con agration. Austria and Russia
were locked in dispute in the Balkans, while relations between
Germany and France, irreconcilable enemies since the events of
1870–71 and the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine, had grown
severely strained of late as a result of the in ammatory rhetoric of
General Georges Boulanger and his bellicose nationalist supporters.
The elderly German Chancellor, Bismarck, had no real stomach for
any hostilities: as he informed the Italian government early in 1888
he had engaged in two major campaigns in 1866 and 1870 out of a
sense of necessity – to secure German uni cation: ‘But what could
Germany gain from a war now? We have more Poles than we need,
and more Frenchmen than we could ever digest.’11 However, he
faced strong opposition from the young Prince, and soon to be
Kaiser, Wilhelm, and from a powerful group of senior generals who
believed that Germany would have to ght a preventive war quickly
before the rearmament programmes of France and Russia gave them
a decisive advantage over the combined forces of the Triple
Alliance. Crispi, too, was keen on a war, but not so much for reasons
of security: he wanted a glorious victory over France to consolidate
the Italian nation and establish it as a great power, much as Sedan
had done for Germany. The rst step that he needed to take was to
strengthen the hand of the so-called ‘war party’ in Berlin.
At the end of September he set o for Friedrichsruh to see
Bismarck. He travelled with his three private secretaries: young men
he could trust who shared his ambitions for Italy (one of them a
distinguished writer, Carlo Dossi); he had no con dence in the
cautious bureaucrats of the Foreign Ministry. The visit was kept
secret until the last moment, and when news of it broke there was a
urry of speculation in Europe and consternation in Paris: Crispi
had been an outspoken critic of France in recent years, claiming
repeatedly that it was incorrigibly aggressive and bent on crushing
Italy in the Mediterranean. Why, then, such a baldly provocative
gesture at the start of his premiership? Crispi claimed that he was
simply paying a courtesy visit to an ally: in fact, aside from cranking
up tension with France, he wanted to sort out practical
arrangements for a war. Italy could not a ord to repeat the
disastrous mistakes of 1866, when nothing had been coordinated in
advance with Prussia.
Bismarck was hoping for peace, but he was not inclined,
particularly given the precarious situation in Europe, to turn down
something as practical as a military convention with an ally.
Moreover the German General Sta were very keen on the idea.
Field Marshal Moltke (‘the strategist before whom the whole world
bows’, as Crispi described him)12 was invited to draw up the rst
draft, and after a month of negotiations the agreement was signed in
Berlin on 28 January 1888. The main aim of the convention was to
make a war as attractive as possible to Germany, and under its
terms Italy agreed to send more than 200,000 men (six army corps
and three divisions of cavalry) by train over the Brenner Pass and
through Austrian territory to link up with the German left ank on
the Rhine. This was a huge undertaking and it was premised largely
on fears that an Italian o ensive in southern France – which was
still planned to take place – had little prospect of succeeding given
the strength of the French Alpine forti cations. Better instead to
concentrate on the principal front. And of course Crispi could not
risk the humiliating scenario of France being overrun by Germany
while Italy was pinned down or even defeated in the Alps (as
happened in 1940).13
Crispi calculated – and it was a fair calculation – that, if it came
to a war with France, Britain would not allow Italy, Germany and
Austria to be beaten by France and Russia, especially if France had
appeared the aggressor. Accordingly from the end of 1887 he
embarked on a programme of systematic provocation, helped by the
heightened mood of nationalism in France resulting from General
Boulanger’s bellicose posturing and the forthcoming celebrations for
the centenary of 1789. He regarded the French as incorrigibly
arrogant, and believed that with su cient needling they could be
induced to react: as they had, fatally, in 1870. Hence a succession of
carefully orchestrated quarrels over trade tari s, rearmament, army
manoeuvres, espionage, consular rights, the taxation of French
subjects in Massaua, plots with the Vatican, the future of Tunisia;
and these, in amed by the press (on both sides of the Alps),
produced a state of mounting tension and mutual suspicion. Lord
Salisbury explained the situation to the new British ambassador in
Rome at the end of 1888:
If there could be war, Crispi hopes for Albania certainly, Nice possibly, and perhaps Tunis
and Tripoli. There is some promise as to the two rst, I am pretty certain… If there is to be
war at all, it is Italy’s interest to have it as quickly as possible. I am told that… Damiani,
the Under-Secretary, [has] been heard to say as much. The consequence is that Crispi has
been perpetually getting up little quarrels with the French… We have… declined to
pronounce ourselves in his quarrels with the French; or to give him any assurances as to
the future… My impression is that if France attacked Italy gratuitously by sea, the English
would be in favour of going to her assistance, but that if a war were to arise out of one of
Crispi’s trumpery quarrels, England would certainly stand aloof. I confess I should be very
glad to see Crispi disappear – spite of the German fondness for him… Of course we are
externally the best of friends – and you will give him the most loving messages on my

behalf.14

Crispi pressed hard for war in the early spring of 1888, but at the
last moment he pulled back, telling Germany that it might be wise
to wait until Italy had completed a further round of rearmament
(spending on the army and navy was subsequently raised to over
560 million lire in 1888–9, higher than at any other time since
1860, and this despite the country facing a severe economic
recession). In the meantime Crispi sent an emissary, Lieutenant-
Colonel Goiran, to Berlin to put to Bismarck an idea of the Chief of
General Sta , Enrico Cosenz, a Garibaldian veteran of 1860 with
military ambitions similar to those of the prime minister. The
following year at the time of the celebrations and Exhibition to
mark the centenary of the French Revolution, the Kaiser should send
a sudden invitation to the Italian king to review troops in
Strasbourg, in annexed Alsace. The prime minister would advise the
king to go. News of the visit would cause alarm in Paris, ‘just as
excitement at the Exhibition was reaching fever-pitch, and spark o
the gunpowder’. Goiran added that General Boulanger wanted war
and should be given a chance to declare it and that the Russians
would be reluctant to mobilize their army during the revolutionary
celebrations. ‘The idea is not a bad one, but it needs to be thought
about,’ said Bismarck.15
In truth, Bismarck was as averse as ever to a war, and the
Austrians did not seem very keen on one either (‘In Vienna there
exists… a kind of sentimental and philanthropic love of peace,’
noted Goiran ruefully); and Goiran’s general conclusion was not
particularly comforting: ‘It seems to me that it will be very di cult
for us to be able to provoke a war simply for our own interests.’16
But the accession of Wilhelm II in June tipped the balance in favour
of the ‘war party’ in Berlin and o ered renewed hope, and when in
October the young Kaiser paid a state visit to Italy he was in a
brazen and bullish mood, touring barracks, arsenals and ports,
expressing pleasant surprise at the preparedness of the Italian army
and navy and telling Umberto that they would meet again in Paris
at the heads of their triumphant armies. ‘Then you will return to
Italy with your 300,000 victorious men and kick parliament out of
the door. Crispi is a man with energy: he could help you.’ Umberto
professed to be rather shocked by the Kaiser’s high-handed view of
parliament, but admitted to a friend that he might have a point,
given that Italy’s current political system was not working: ‘If we
carry on as at present, in twenty years’ time it will be very di cult
to govern.’17
In the spring of 1889 Umberto paid a return state visit to
Germany. He reached Berlin on 21 May, and the following evening,
at a court banquet, the Kaiser turned to him and asked if he would
like to review some troops in Strasbourg. Umberto accepted. The
news was leaked to the press and a furore erupted. But it quickly
became clear that the gesture was too baldly provocative to achieve
the intended e ect, and with the value of Italian stock plummeting
on the exchanges and pro-French demonstrations breaking out,
Bismarck moved to calm things down, announcing on the 25th that
the Kaiser had ‘spontaneously’ decided to give up on the idea. In a
speech at a Reichstag dinner that evening Crispi talked of the
common destinies of Germany and Italy, of how they had been
united under the leadership of ‘two strong warrior dynasties’, and of
his lifelong commitment to the ‘independence and brotherhood’ of
nations; and he dismissed the allegations that were circling that he
was deliberately looking to start a war as ‘calumnies’ on the part of
his enemies:
Nothing could be further from the truth. I want peace and peace alone. I strive for nothing
else. There have been necessary wars, holy wars. But we have fought these, and the prize
for them has been this Italy of ours and this Germany. Any other war would be a crime.

Whoever provoked it would be committing an o ence against humanity.18

Crispi was growing impatient: he feared that the French

government would remain impervious to his provocations. But he
had another card to play, this time involving the papacy–an
in ammatory topic for millions of Frenchmen. On 9 June a statue to
the sixteenth-century heretic Giordano Bruno was inaugurated in
the Campo dei Fiori in Rome amid huge Masonic and anti-clerical
celebrations, and as expected Pope Leo XIII was morti ed. It was the
latest of a string of insults deliberately directed by Crispi at the
Vatican; and at a consistory summoned three weeks later Leo told
the cardinals that this ‘naked challenge by the Italian government to
the Holy See’ made it almost impossible for him to feel safe any
longer in Rome. Most observers agreed that Leo had no intention at
all of leaving the Eternal City and that his cris de coeur were merely
histrionic and intended simply to rally Catholic support and
sympathy throughout Europe. But Crispi looked to exploit the
charged atmosphere to trigger a con ict, this time to coincide with
the centenary of the storming of the Bastille.
On 13 July, Crispi told the king that he had received unequivocal
intelligence of a French plot to remove the Pope from Rome and
attack Italy by sea. He urged immediate defensive measures. A
council of war was set up and mobilization begun. And in the next
few days Crispi did all he could to rack up the tension, dispatching
alarmist telegrams to ambassadors around Europe, sending a special
emissary to Lord Salisbury (‘Tell [him]… if war comes I will be
drawn into it against my will’),19 getting the king to leave Rome
hurriedly for northern Italy, and insulting the Pope with accusations
that he was recklessly endangering the peace of Europe. Critical was
the response of Berlin. Crispi had already sent one agent to the
German capital at the end of June; and on 14 July he sent another.
And it seems that the o er of a casus belli on a plate split the
German leadership badly, with the newspapers full of speculation in
late July of a serious rift between the Kaiser and the ‘war party’ on
the one hand and Bismarck on the other. But it was Bismarck and
the ‘peace party’ who prevailed. In all likelihood what tipped the
balance was the imsiness of the pretext, for as Bismarck told
Crispi’s agent it was just not credible that France would bring about
a European war (and its own destruction) with ‘an action worthy of
bandits’. He added that from a purely pragmatic and military point
of view he almost wished the French would indulge in ‘such a mad
act of aggression’: ‘The upper tiers of the army in Germany would
prefer a war right now, or next spring, rather than in two years’
time when France will have lled its o cer cadres, and completed
its armaments and forti cations.’20
 So, despite Crispi’s best endeavours, the situation in Europe
remained calm. The French government refused to rise to the bait
and the French public continued to focus on the centenary
celebrations. To make matters worse Italy’s military machine barely
moved during the crisis. Crispi had always been acutely conscious of
the weakness of the Italian state and of the tendency of ministers,
diplomats and other senior civil servants to pursue their own
political agendas. This was why he relied on a secretariat of
committed supporters and kept his cabinet colleagues in the dark as
to what he was up to. And the army was particularly resistant to
executive control, as it was largely a royal preserve and was sta ed
with the king’s friends and relatives – many of whom had no wish to
help someone like Crispi (a radical southerner). Those that did
cooperate with the government, like the Chief of General Sta ,
Cosenz, could nd themselves marginalized by their colleagues.
When Crispi bumped into Cosenz outside Rome railway station on
the evening of 18 July and asked him how mobilization
arrangements were coming along, Cosenz said that he had no idea
as the Minister of War only talked to him about such matters when
he believed there was a threat.21
‘THE CRISPI PHENOMENON’

Crispi was not to get his war in Europe and thereby ful l ‘the
destiny assigned to Italy within the projected new European order’,
as a senior colleague put it.22 At its best that new order would have
seen a territorially enlarged Italy replace France as the dominant
power in the Mediterranean, with Germany and Austria supreme on
the continental mainland and Britain the ruler of the high seas (and
much of the rest of the globe). It would also have created an Italy
that was securer at home, for apart from the prestige accruing to the
institutions from victory Crispi would certainly have seized the
opportunity to tear up the Law of Guarantees and strengthen the
state against the Church. But it was not to be, and though Crispi
continued to try to engineer diplomatic and military openings –
including in the summer of 1890 using a rumour of French plans to
annex Tunisia as a pretext for a general war or an Italian invasion of
Tripoli – he had to accept that Italy could not hope to achieve
anything without greater support from its allies. He felt resentful
towards Britain and bitter towards Germany, and in 1890 he put out
feelers secretly to France, o ering to abandon the Triple Alliance in
return for the concession of Tripoli. This alarmed the king greatly
and was one of the principal reasons why Crispi was forced out of
power early in 1891.
But Crispi’s assertiveness on the international stage earned him
many plaudits. The hopes of greatness that the Risorgimento had
engendered were resurrected, if only brie y, and old friends and
colleagues were e usive in their praise. Antonio Mordini, one of the
architects of the revolution in southern Italy in 1860, wrote to him
in July 1889 of the ‘honour’ and ‘glory’ that his foreign policy had
brought the nation, while another well-known elderly democrat,
Luigi Orlando, spoke in the same year of Italy’s new-found ‘dignity
and power’. For some the foreign policy simply underlined the
prime minister’s status as a great patriot. Giuseppe Verdi told Crispi
in November 1889 of the pride that he felt in ‘the man who controls
the destinies of our beloved country with wisdom and so much
energy. Glory to you!’; and in 1893 he sent him a photograph
inscribed with the simple dedication, ‘To Francesco Crispi. The great
patriot.’ The poet Carducci was lavish in his praise. In an open letter
of February 1889 he called Crispi ‘the grand old patriot’ who had
salvaged the dignity of Italy, and a few years later in another open
letter he described him as ‘the only truly Italian minister since
Cavour’, a man who, like Mazzini, Victor Emmanuel and Garibaldi,
had wanted Italy to be ‘strong and respected’: ‘For otherwise, what
was the purpose of uni cation?’23
Crispi dominated the Italian political scene for nearly a decade,
returning for a second term as prime minister in 1893–6, and
though he faced erce opposition from some quarters, particularly
on the far left, his popularity in the country was quite astonishing.
No other prime minister, not even Cavour, had succeeded in
exciting the public imagination to such a degree. The distinguished
sociologist Guglielmo Ferrero –whose own sympathies were with
socialism, not Crispi – was fascinated by the ‘almost regal aura’ that
surrounded this elderly energetic man with a huge walrus
moustache (the resemblance to Bismarck was striking and far from
accidental), immaculate dress sense, colourful domestic life, and
penchant for rings and jewellery (and a small horn of coral to ward
o the evil eye). Writing in 1895 he said:
The Crispi phenomenon will remain among the strangest and most curious aspects of
Italian history this century; and his dictatorship will be one of the problems that will most
occupy historians in the future. No man this century has ever enjoyed as much power in
Italy. Nobody has been able to impose his own personality on the entire country as he has,
or stamp the political life of the nation so forcefully with his character, or arouse such
enthusiasm, such hopes, such hatred. Nobody has so completely eclipsed the political world

around him.24

Like many other contemporary observers Ferrero sought to

explain Crispi’s success in terms of the immaturity of Italian society
and the failure of parliament to provide leadership for a population
that was still vitiated by centuries of servility and unsuited to the
rigours of freedom. Crispi was authoritarian and conducted politics
‘as a poet writes or a musician composes, through impulses and
ashes of inspiration’. Everything about him was emotional. ‘Su ce
it to see him when he makes a speech: his face grows bright, his
eyes blaze, his gestures become taut, his curt and unadorned
language bursts into ashes of true eloquence…’ He appealed to the
primitive ‘messianic illusion’ of ordinary people, with their longing
for salvation in times of di culty (‘that tendency to trust to miracle-
workers’), and he had a particular attraction to the country’s middle
classes, who lacked independence and strength and were prone to
throw themselves into the arms of someone who could save them
from their fears, real or imaginary. And at the root of Crispi’s
success lay the fact that he was unrepresentative: he was energetic,
passionate and resolute where most Italians were lazy, indi erent
and sceptical. Above all he had ‘will’: the average Italian was
‘listless’.25
Crispi’s towering stature and huge following in the country,
together with the febrile anticipation that surrounded his high-wire
foreign policy, guaranteed him a huge majority in parliament
between 1887 and 1891 and enabled him to push through a
remarkable programme of political, administrative and social
reforms. After several years of inertia, the Chamber suddenly
acquired new energy; and with the prospect of momentous
international developments as long as Crispi was at the helm
politicians were inclined to relax their usual obsession with horse-
trading and pandering to their leading constituents in order to keep
him in power. Among the landmark reforms in these years were a
law that nearly doubled the number of local government voters to 4
million and allowed mayors of larger towns to be elected (formerly
all mayors had been centrally appointed); a new penal code that
abolished the death penalty and recognized the right to strike; a
public health law that greatly increased the state’s responsibility for
controlling disease and monitoring local hygiene; a law setting up
an independent tribunal to protect citizens against abuses at the
hands of public o cials; and a law that brought the country’s
20,000 or more independent charitable bodies (opere pie) under
local government control – a major step towards a welfare state.
For all his authoritarian instincts Crispi was a democrat who
believed strongly in the need to defuse the social question by
making sure that the masses had a stake in the life of the nation. But
like many of his background he had lost his old Mazzinian faith in a
decentralized liberal state as it became increasingly apparent that
the threat of subversion was great – and growing. The Italian state
needed to be strong in order to control, curb and educate. Hence the
law extending the local government su rage – which many
considered to be a terrifying gamble, in that it opened the door to
extreme left-wing and Catholic administrations – was accompanied
by an increase in the tutelary powers of the authorities, with
prefects being given the right to dissolve town councils that were
felt to be acting irresponsibly or incorrectly. Crispi was apologetic,
but as he explained: ‘People are as they are and not as they must be
the day the education we are planning has been completed.’26 And
soon the new powers were being widely invoked, above all in
regions such as the Romagna and Lombardy where socialist and
republican administrations started to mushroom from the early
1890s.
AFRICA

Without a successful war in Europe, Crispi turned somewhat

reluctantly to Africa. He had initially been swept into power on the
back of public calls for revenge for the massacre of the ve hundred
at Dogali, but he had skilfully allowed Ethiopia to slip into the
background after he became prime minister, so enabling him to
focus instead on a possible con ict with France. However, during
the course of 1889 Africa began to o er new and exciting
opportunities, following the death in battle of the Ethiopian
emperor at the hands of a local warlord called Menelik, whom the
Italian army had been supporting. Menelik assumed the imperial
title and promptly signed a treaty with Italy (the Treaty of Uccialli)
recognizing its right to large swathes of territory inland from
Massaua and agreeing – or so article 17 seemed to state – to an
Italian protectorate over Ethiopia. In return Menelik was guaranteed
Italy’s assistance in bringing the empire fully under his control. King
Umberto enthusiastically wrote to Menelik to con rm the alliance,
informing him that a new cache of arms was on its way.27
Excitement over Africa began to soar in Italy. Former opponents
of Italian colonialism such as the upcoming Piedmontese deputy
Giovanni Giolitti changed their tune. So, too, did the poet Carducci:
he had been unmoved by Dogali, but by the time he published his
ode ‘La Guerra’ (‘War’) in 1891 he had grown almost exultantly
jingoistic. The king and his senior army generals were excited by the
prospect of cheap and (seemingly) easy victories; while a swelling
chorus of economists and sociologists argued that colonies would
provide a solution to the country’s grave agricultural problems, and
in particular create an alternative outlet for the tens of thousands of
impoverished southern peasants who were currently crossing the
Atlantic each year in search of a better life. Even the radical and
republican far left was divided, with Giovanni Bovio and others
trumpeting the virtues of Italy’s civilizing mission in the Dark
Continent.28 When in October 1889 Crispi delivered a major speech
in Palermo, it was the section on Africa that won some of the
loudest applause:
Like the human body, nations need air that they can breathe in order to survive. Without it
they would grow weaker and eventually perish. And as far as we are concerned we have
understood this, and have secured the air for Italy’s lungs… Today Italy is on the march
and is asserting itself. Listen to the voice that rises from our colonies: they are exultant!
‘Italy!’ is the cry that comes from the shores of the Mediterranean and echoes back from
the most distant oceans… Africa, mysterious and awesome, opens up to us, trusting and
friendly… Ethiopia, now almost entirely paci ed, reaches out its hand to us in the person

of a sovereign desirous of civilization…29

But Menelik turned out to be less eager for Italian ‘civilization’

than Crispi hoped. Ethiopia was an ancient state with a long and
proud history, and glib assumptions about the country’s barbarism
and backwardness proved misplaced. In the second half of 1889
Italian forces advanced inland from the Red Sea and early in 1890 a
royal decree proclaimed the formation of a new Italian colony of
Eritrea. Crispi wanted to push further west towards Sudan and take
the town of Kassala and thereby get access to the lucrative trade of
the upper Nile valley; but this was in the British sphere of in uence,
and after all the headaches that Crispi had caused him in the last
three years Lord Salisbury was in no mood to concede anything to
Italy. After being rebu ed by the British, Crispi was promptly
upstaged and humiliated by the ambitious Menelik. According to the
Italian version of the Treaty of Uccialli signed the previous year the
Ethiopian emperor had ‘agreed to use’ the Italian government in all
his dealings with foreign powers; but in the autumn of 1890
Menelik announced that the original Amharic text in fact said
‘could’ and not ‘agreed to’. Ethiopia was therefore not an Italian
protectorate. Crispi’s African plans for the time being lay in ruins.30
17

The Fin de Siècle Crisis

The situation in Sicily is becoming ever more alarming. In Monreale,

Giardini, Lercara and Valguarnera people are looting, burning and
killing. Town halls are being ransacked. The watchword is: Long live the
king, down with taxes! But those behind the violence are after something
very di erent. They are probably being driven by French money. It is a
new kind of cut-throat war that is being waged against us by our beloved
Latin brothers!

Domenico Farini, Diario di ne secolo, 26 December 1893

Crispi: We have fallen far, and I do not know if we will be able to

pick ourselves up again… The morphine of cowardice has been injected
into every citizen, and nobody believes any more in the power of the
nation… A country of 32 million people has been brought lower in
Europe than San Marino… The king must be a king, and correct what
his ministers do.
Queen Margherita: And parliament?
Crispi: It is just a rudderless crowd… The parliamentary system is not
suited to the Latin peoples after the levelling of classes brought about by
the French Revolution.

Francesco Crispi talking to the queen, 2 January 1897

THE SICILIAN FASCI

Crispi was replaced as prime minister by a re ned Sicilian

nobleman, Antonio di Rudinì, but neither he, nor his successor,
Giovanni Giolitti, could prevent the country lurching into what was
generally considered the worst crisis the state had faced since 1860;
and by the time Crispi returned to power in December 1893, Italy
appeared to many on the brink of collapse. Writing to the Foreign
Secretary early that month the British chargé d’a aires in Rome said
the nation was gripped by a ‘feeling of almost despair’ – though he
thought that this despondency and the accompanying desire to look
to a miracle-worker for salvation were themselves a large part of the
problem:
[F]ollowing their tendency to exaggeration which is so compatible with their excitable and
somewhat weak temperament, many Italians are to be found, belonging to all classes of
society, who are ready to prophesy the not far distant disrupture of the Kingdom… The
eyes of… all [are] turned now to Signor Crispi, as the one man willing to undertake the
task of guiding the country through her di culties and possessing su cient abilities to
justify the universal hope that he would succeed.

He regarded Italy’s political and economic problems as undoubtedly

very serious; but he suggested, with characteristic British
moralizing, that Italians might do well to examine their own
conduct rather than heap all the blame on the king or parliament, as
they tended to do. He had heard it said, for example, that 75 per
cent of all taxes went unpaid as a result of ‘false declaration and
corruption of tax gatherers’, and though this was probably an
exaggeration it was certainly true that tax avoidance ‘is not
considered in this country to be a dishonest action nor even an
evasion of a patriotic duty’.1
 Since the late 1880s the Italian economy had been sliding into
deep recession. A raft of new tari s had been introduced in 1887 on
a variety of agricultural and industrial goods, and this had been
followed by a vicious trade war with France, which had damaged
Italian commerce badly – not surprisingly given that nearly half of
the country’s exports (for the most part primary commodities such
as raw silk, wine and food) were destined at the time for French
markets.2 Many farmers, especially in southern Italy, su ered
severely as a result. Industry, such as it was – and it was still
con ned chie y to small and medium-sized workshops in
Lombardy, Piedmont and the Veneto, with textile production
predominant – was also in serious di culty from the late 1880s
after enjoying several years of signi cant growth in sectors such as
engineering and chemicals (Milan had become the rst European
city to have a central electricity generating plant in 1883, while the
rubber manufacturer Giovan Battista Pirelli had pioneered the
production of submarine telegraph cables in 1886). Construction
had experienced a similar fate with a major boom followed by a
disastrous crash, and rioting in the streets of Rome by laid-o
workers in 1888 and 1889.
But the biggest crisis involved the banking sector. Italy had six
banks of issue, all regionally based, privately administered, and
closely tied to powerful local interest groups, which in the course of
the 1880s had got sucked into dangerously speculative ventures.
The most compromised was the Banca Romana, which had loaned
huge sums, with far too few questions being asked, to a string of
property developers only to be left with a mass of worthless bits of
paper once the housing market crashed. It had also lent enormous
amounts of money to politicians and journalists, often with no
guarantees of repayment, in order to help them with the soaring
costs of elections and running newspapers. The king had been a
major bene ciary of the bank’s largesse, too.3 A government
inspection, carried out in 1889, uncovered a mass of irregularities.
The ndings were known to Crispi and his Treasury Minister,
Giovanni Giolitti, but otherwise they were kept secret. In May 1892
Giolitti was appointed prime minister, at the king’s (not
parliament’s) instigation, and a few months later he tried to get the
governor of the Banca Romana appointed a senator (which would
have given him immunity from prosecution). But before he could do
so a copy of the 1889 report was leaked to a republican deputy, who
promptly divulged its contents to a stunned Chamber. This
unleashed the Banca Romana scandal, which over the next few
years threatened to discredit the entire political establishment in
Italy, the monarchy included.
To make matters worse the country seemed to be slipping
towards revolution. Encouraged by the establishment of a new
nationally based socialist party in 1892, militant labour
organizations were springing up across northern Italy among the
agricultural workers of the Po valley, while in Sicily a movement
known as the Fasci (from the word fascio, meaning ‘bundle’,
indicating strength through solidarity) was mobilizing the peasantry
and staging increasingly unruly strikes and demonstrations. In
August 1893 a wave of rioting spread through the country. Initially
triggered by the murder of a number of migrant Italian workers in
the salt-pans of Aigues-Mortes in southern France (in Genoa and
Naples trams owned by a French rm were set on re; in Livorno
the same fate befell Belgian vehicles), it quickly escalated into a
more generalized working-class revolt, fanned in many places by
anarchists. In Rome three days of turmoil culminated in the
occupation of the Trastevere, and barricades soaked in petrol were
thrown across the Ponte Sisto and set on re when the cavalry
arrived. In Naples the chaos continued for ve days, and it needed
12,000 troops to restore order.4
Against this backdrop money began to pour out of Italy, and the
banking sector entered free fall. In Sicily clashes between the
security forces and the peasant Fasci became increasingly violent
and there was talk of the island being ‘in ames’ and dissolving into
anarchy. There were even allegations, widely believed, that the
disorders were part of a general plan to spread socialist revolution
throughout the peninsula. On 20 December, Crispi announced to the
Chamber the formation of his new government and appealed to
deputies to bury their di erences and unite behind him in resolving
this unprecedented crisis. ‘To this end we ask of you the truce of
God!’:
When danger threatens we must all be united in the collective work of defence (Hear!
Hear!)… Between 1859 and 1870 we endeavoured to secure the material unity of the
fatherland. Now we must endeavour to bind it together morally and ensure that the edi ce,
for which the blood of our martyrs was shed, is made strong… The hour has struck to ask
the country to make some sacri ces… Today I remind you that the fatherland is superior to

all…5

At the beginning of 1894 martial law was declared in Sicily and

40,000 troops were despatched to the island. Military tribunals were
instituted, and by the end of the month over a thousand suspects
had been sentenced to deportation. Public meetings were banned,
press censorship was introduced and weapons were con scated. To
use repression on such a scale against his native region was deeply
distressing to Crispi, not least because he had begun his own
political career in 1848 struggling for freedom on the barricades of
Palermo. But he felt he had little choice. And anyway, he could
claim that he was still ghting for ‘Italy’. ‘Who loves, fears. I love
Italy greatly and my fear is that it could break up.’ The problem, he
told parliament, was that the nation had not been fused into a
proper unit, and the ‘seams’ were showing from where the old states
had been stitched together in 1859–60. And in reply to those on the
far left who claimed that the use of martial law in Sicily was illegal
(as technically it probably was), he said that Italy had a duty to
protect itself against its enemies, within or without, and that he
could always justify the harsh measures by appealing beyond human
law to a higher law, ‘an eternal law, the law that demands that the
existence of nations be guaranteed’. His old friend Mazzini would
have struggled to disagree with him.6
It was crucial for Crispi to try to get the country united behind
him. The far left was a source of major concern for, although the
radicals, republicans and socialists were a relatively small force still
in the Chamber – some fty deputies – they had a large and growing
popular following, especially in the Romagna and Lombardy. And
their leaders included men of cult status, such as the hard-drinking
poet, playwright and inveterate dueller Felice Cavallotti, the so-
called ‘bard of democracy’, whose pugnacious and often highly
abusive rhetoric generated enormous enthusiasm in audiences.
Lombardy was a particular worry: not only was it the centre of the
new socialist party led by an able young lawyer, Filippo Turati, but
it was also home to Italy’s leading manufacturers and industrialists,
who were growing resentful that the fruits of their success were
being siphoned o in taxes by a corrupt political establishment in
Rome led by an elderly Sicilian with expensive tastes in foreign
policy. Milan had never been very enthusiastic about united Italy,
and in the 1890s it became even less so; and calls for federalism and
even for outright secession became insistent.7
Crispi knew that the disorders in Sicily were essentially socio-
economic and spontaneous in character, but politically it suited him
to suggest that they were the result of a conspiracy – and preferably
a foreign one. Nothing was likely to engender national solidarity
better than an external threat, and in the wake of the Aigues-Mortes
murders there were plenty of people willing to believe that France
had had a hand in the unrest.8 Crispi claimed that the leaders of the
Fasci had been in league with French republicans and radicals; that
French gold and weapons had been smuggled into Sicily; that a
French vessel, the Hirondelle, had been spotted making secret night-
time signals o the coast; that the nal preparations for the rising
had been drawn up in Marseille; and even that the revolution was
planned to coincide with a French invasion of Piedmont, followed
by a Russian invasion of Sicily, and nally a French attack on Rome.
The far left repudiated these allegations vehemently, and in the
Chamber there were heated and increasingly disorderly exchanges;
but in the country as a whole many were quite prepared to
subscribe to them, it seems, and Crispi won great support for his
handling of the crisis. The Times’ correspondent in Rome claimed in
March 1894: ‘If he wanted to make himself Dictator for life, this
country would vote it readily in its present mood. Anarchism,
revolution, chaos in government and out, has created a longing for
stability which no-one knows where to look for except in him.’9
Against this backdrop Crispi and his Treasury Minister, Sidney
Sonnino, were able to push through a series of major tax rises to
stabilize the economy and plug the massive budget de cit of more
than 150 million lire. German banks were also induced to help, and
thanks to their intervention the value of Italian government stock
rose steadily in 1894 and the banking sector began to be
successfully reorganized. Other measures were taken to deal with
the threat from the far left. Although claims of revolutionary
conspiracies were exaggerated, political violence by anarchists and
other extremists was a frightening everyday reality, with
assassinations and assassination attempts common (Crispi sustained
two – and carried a revolver) and bomb attacks frequent (a large
device exploded outside Montecitorio in March 1894). Laws were
passed tightening press censorship and giving prefects powers to
ban associations or meetings that seemed subversive and arrest
anyone ‘who had shown the deliberate intention of committing acts
of violence against the social order’.10 And in a move intended to
weaken the electoral base of the socialists the literacy test for voting
was tightened up and the electoral registers (which were widely
known to be fraudulently in ated) were revised and some 800,000
names struck o , mostly in the south.11
But opposition to Crispi in parliament began to mount. A radical
bill to tackle the agricultural problems of Sicily by distributing land
to the peasants was denounced by conservatives as ‘socialist’ and
blocked; and with discontent increasing on the right of the
Chamber, Crispi’s enemies manoeuvred against him. Among them
was the former prime minister, Giolitti, who had been made to fall
on his sword in 1893 (with a strong push from Crispi) in order to
de ect blame from the king over the Banca Romana scandal. He
soon sought to turn the tables, and on 11 December 1894 he
melodramatically walked down from his seat in Montecitorio and
placed before the President of the Chamber a le of documents
purporting to show that Crispi himself was implicated in the scandal
(and that his wife was immoral: there were 102 stolen private letters
from her to a male con dant). The far left, headed by the ‘bard of
democracy’, Felice Cavallotti, clamoured for a debate. But Crispi
promptly asked for parliament to be prorogued on the grounds that
the Chamber was being sabotaged by ‘a handful of rabble rousers’
and that the prestige of the institutions needed to be protected.12
The king happily signed the decree: he did not want Cavallotti and
his republican colleagues probing and insinuating. Giolitti,
meanwhile, was indicted on fourteen counts, including defamation,
but ed to Germany before he could be arrested.
Outside the radical heartlands of Lombardy and the Romagna, the
proroguing of parliament met with little surprise or opposition. The
reputation of the Chamber had been sinking in the 1880s; by the
early 1890s it had reached its nadir. ‘Parliament is a real cesspit of
baseness and immorality,’ a distinguished historian, senator and
former Education Minister, Pasquale Villari, admitted to a friend in
September 1892, ‘and if the head of state were to kick out the
occupants of the lthy stable of Montecitorio tomorrow, the whole
nation would applaud.’13 There were calls from a number of
authoritative gures for a return to the letter of the Statuto, with the
executive answering to the king, not parliament; and Crispi even
suggested abolishing the Chamber altogether and replacing it with
the non-elective and purely consultative Senate. ‘The parliamentary
system is not suited to the Latin peoples,’ he told the queen, echoing
fashionable sociological views about the tendency of assemblies and
crowds to accentuate the excessive individualism and emotionality
of southerners.14 And foreign observers were inclined to agree. The
British ambassador in Rome felt the proroguing of parliament was
‘thoroughly justi ed’ given the ‘scandalous scenes’ taking place in
the Chamber, while the Times’ correspondent was so disgusted by
the ‘wrangles and intrigues… and want of all principles and
patriotism in Italian politics’ that he thought the only hope for the
country was ‘ten years of a dictatorship’ under Crispi.15
Elections were held in May 1895. In a bid to weaken the far left
Crispi had opened up secret channels of negotiation with the
Vatican, and had even called on the ‘civil and religious authorities’
publicly in a speech to close ranks in the face of socialism and
together ght the ‘villainous sect’ that was leading the masses
astray.16 He had also made a point of staging a magni cent church
wedding for his daughter in January, with two cardinals present.
But the Pope had refused to relax the ban on Catholics voting, at
least formally, and the support of the Catholic hierarchy for liberal
candidates was therefore negligible. Nor did the heavily pruned
electoral lists generate the desired outcome. Though the government
secured more than 300 seats, the radicals won some forty- ve, only
slightly less than before, while the socialists went up from ve to
fteen. And when parliament reopened in the summer of 1895, the
far left was more con dent than ever and the personal attacks on
Crispi, led by Cavallotti, intensi ed. Barracking, shouting and
suspended sessions were the order of the day.
THE BATTLE OF ADUA

Shortly before he died in 1901, despondent and growing blind,

Crispi scribbled down his re ections on what had gone wrong with
Italy on hundreds of small scraps of paper. In the absence of any
memoirs he probably intended them as his intellectual legacy. Time
and again in these jottings he returned to the theme of Italy’s failure
to produce a genuine national revolution of the kind that Britain
had achieved in the seventeenth century, or France in 1789–1815 or
Germany, much more succinctly, in 1870–71:
Italian unity was the result of a mere aggregation of seven states, and not of a revolution.
Apart from the wars of 1859 and 1866, fought to drive out the enemy princes, there was no
violence, no change. The people remained as they were prior to the constitution of the new
kingdom, with their former practices and their faults, tenaciously holding on to their local
traditions, with no fusion or mingling of races… without any hope of nationalizing those

characteristics that act to keep the peoples of the peninsula divided.17

In the autumn and winter of 1895–6 he pressed, as he had in 1887–

90, for something cataclysmic: a military victory to furnish the
‘baptism of blood’ he had longed for in 1866.
The Eastern question provided one opportunity. By the late
summer of 1895 there were growing fears that Russia was about to
seize Constantinople. Crispi wanted Britain and the Triple Alliance
to make a stand, and began pressing for a joint naval operation in
the Dardanelles. The Italian eet was readied and emergency
measures taken to defend the Alps against a possible French attack.
On 15 November one of the navy commanders made an appeal to
deputies in Montecitorio: ‘Give the ministry your rm support. With
Crispi in power we feel con dent, and if war breaks out we will win.
Avenge 1866.’18 The following day Crispi instructed the eet to
seize Tripoli immediately if it came to hostilities and a scramble for
the remaining pieces of the Ottoman Empire. But Britain again
contrived to dash Crispi’s hopes, with Lord Salisbury saying that he
would only breach the Dardanelles with a rm guarantee of French
neutrality. Crispi became increasingly impatient and at one point
summoned the Navy Minister and ordered him to send the Italian
eet to Trebizond. The minister said that this would instantly mean
war with Turkey and probably Russia, too, and refused.19
As in 1889–90, Crispi had to be content with seeking in Africa the
military success that eluded him in Europe. In the course of 1894
Italian forces had been pressing south and west from Eritrea,
capturing the town of Kassala in July; and by the beginning of 1895
there was a possibility that the whole of the province of Tigré might
be taken (‘If only we could win! To turn this Italy, sunk in gossip,
sordidness and partisan hatreds, towards an ideal of glory and
power!’ wrote the Prefect of Rome, Alessandro Guiccioli, in his
diary. ‘For that I would sacri ce many years of my life’).20 But
Italy’s growing ambitions in the region drove the local warlords into
the arms of the emperor, Menelik, and by the end of 1895 Italy
found itself facing an all-out campaign against a powerful and
united African state with a huge army at its disposal – and one that
was being supplied by the French, who were shipping in large
consignments of weapons for Menelik through the port of Djibouti.
The warning signs were clear in December when a column of 2,000
Italian and native troops was massacred by a force perhaps twenty
times its size. But Crispi was now too committed to back down. The
commander in Africa was General Oreste Baratieri, a former
member of Garibaldi’s Thousand, and Crispi wanted to have him
replaced, as he was clearly not up to the task of heading large-scale
operations. But the king intervened, and Baratieri stayed.21
Crispi craved a victory, and not just to save his government and
help the beleaguered monarchy. As his newspaper, La Riforma,
explained in January 1896 in a leading article entitled ‘L’Italia
nuova’ (‘New Italy’), Italians had to be educated, and shake o the
pusillanimous behaviour of the past and become a strong,
disciplined and united people. And there was no better way of
achieving this than through war:
In the meantime we should register the great victory we have secured over ourselves…
When we remember how Italy seemed yesterday and how it appears today, we cannot
avoid repeating just once – and let it be only once – the hymn that was raised to war one
day in the Reichstag by Marshal Moltke, like the priestly evocation of the cult of Odin in
the depths of the forests of Germany. ‘War,’ said the marshal, ‘has been instituted by God,
and is a principle of order in the world. In it, and through it, the noblest human virtues are
enhanced: courage, sel essness, devotion to duty, love of sacri ce. Without war, the world
would slide into putrefaction and drown in materialism.’ And look, indeed, at how many
cubits the Italian people has grown by since the war in Africa began… No, this people is no
longer the starving eunuch, forced or condemned, as some would have liked, for ever to
watch over the harems of French policy… Rather, this is a people of mature political
conduct, conscious of its rights and duties… Oh, what good blood, good blood that does
not lie, is Latin blood! And so it is that… the primal and essential element of our race has
triumphed… and the new Italy has begun to be formed… When the moment of truth, the
supreme test, arrives… we nd ourselves… a serious and mature people, a truly superior
people… May victory soon shine on the heroes of Africa… But in the meantime let us note
that, thanks to them, the old wish, too often made a mockery of since 1860, can now be
said to have been ful lled. With pride, we can now claim that not only Italy, but also

Italians, have been made!!22

Six weeks later, driven to the brink of nervous collapse by a

ceaseless barrage of telegrams from Rome pressurizing him into
action, Baratieri ordered his troops to advance towards Menelik’s
army. He had heard that a large part of the Ethiopian forces were
away, foraging, but this turned out to be quite untrue, and his three
columns of some 17,700 soldiers marched towards as many as
100,000 men. To make matters worse, his orders had been unclear,
and the sketch map he had made of the terrain was incorrect. As a
result one of the three columns got completely separated from the
rest of the army and blundered into 30,000 Ethiopian troops
deployed on higher ground. The Battle of Adua, on 1 March 1896,
was the worst defeat ever in icted on a colonial power in Africa.
Around 5,000 Italians and 2,000 native auxiliaries were killed,
including 289 o cers. Many more were wounded. The dead and
some of the prisoners were castrated. Casualties on the Ethiopian
side were estimated at 12,000–14,000. Baratieri himself survived
the engagement. With appropriate symbolism, he was unable to see
very much of what happened as he had lost his pince-nez in the
confusion. He had to be led from the eld of battle on a horse.23
ASSASSINATION AT MONZA

Crispi resigned in the wake of this disaster, and the new government
made peace with Menelik and scaled down Italy’s military presence
in Ethiopia. But the change of direction in foreign policy did not
lead to greater stability at home. On the contrary, the humiliation of
Adua, and the well-founded suspicion that the king had been in
some measure to blame for it (he, like Crispi, had been desperate for
a victory and had ill-advisedly protected Baratieri), gave the far left
fresh ammunition; and as the socialists and radicals gained rapidly
in strength in regions such as Lombardy and the Romagna, Italy’s
leaders resorted nervously to repression to try to stem the tide. The
Socialist Party, reconstituted after its dissolution in 1894, faced
severe persecution in 1897; and when early in May 1898 major
rioting broke out in Milan, triggered by high food prices and the
recent outpouring of popular grief following the death of Felice
Cavallotti – killed ghting his thirty- rst duel, caught in the carotid
artery by his opponent’s sword – the government responded
brutally. The army was sent in and opened re with artillery, and
according to o cial estimates eighty people were killed and 450
wounded – though the real gures were probably more than twice
these. Thousands of arrests were made; newspapers were closed
down; and ‘subversive’ associations were dissolved. And as if to
underscore the huge chasm that now, more than ever, divided
political and real Italy, the king decorated the general commanding
the troops in Milan for ‘the great service… rendered to our
institutions and to civilization, and to attest to my a ection and the
gratitude of myself and the country’.24
In the wake of the disorders the government tried to pass a series
of bills to tighten up on public security and curtail the freedom to
strike. But in parliament the far left embarked on a campaign of
libustering, delivering interminable speeches and raising countless
points of order, and in the summer of 1899 the prime minister, a
Piedmontese general, Luigi Pelloux, attempted to force some of the
measures through by royal decree. This was blatantly
unconstitutional. Unruly scenes erupted on the oor of the Chamber
with the voting urns at one point being knocked to the ground. The
following spring Pelloux looked to solve the impasse by introducing
a ‘guillotine’ motion: this was passed but only after the radicals and
socialists had walked out of parliament in protest. Pelloux now
appealed to the country, and in the elections that followed the
radicals, socialists and republicans together won nearly 100 seats,
some thirty more than in the previous parliament. The message was
clear: repression alone could not stop the forward march of the far
left. But there was a further message, too: that by operating within
the framework of parliament and the law, and seeking to block the
unconstitutional behaviour of Pelloux, the far left could win support
in the country.
On 29 July, some six weeks after the elections, King Umberto was
attending a display by the ‘Forti e liberi’ (‘Strong and free’)
gymnastics association in a stadium in Monza, north-east of Milan.
In the crowd was a tall, smartly dressed, thirty-year-old man who
had recently arrived back in Italy from the United States. Gaetano
Bresci was a skilled textile worker who in 1895 had been deported
to the penal island of Lampedusa after becoming involved with
anarchist groups in his native Tuscany. Early in 1898 he had
emigrated to the United States, where he had set up home with his
young Irish wife in Paterson, New Jersey, a silk-manufacturing town
with a large community of Italian émigrés, many of whom, like
Bresci, were anarchists.25 Bresci had been deeply shocked by the
repression of the Sicilian Fasci and horri ed when in 1898 the king
had ‘decorated the authors of the slaughter of May, instead of
hanging them’.26 The spirit of the Risorgimento, embodied by
warriors of freedom such as Garibaldi – the inauguration of whose
statue in Bologna he had attended shortly before travelling to
Monza – had been betrayed. At 8.20 in the evening, after the
presentation of prizes to the athletes, Umberto stepped into an open
carriage, ready to return to the royal villa. He saw a friend in the
crowd and stood up to wave. Bresci red four shots. ‘I don’t think it
is serious’ were the king’s last words.27 Bresci was sentenced to life
imprisonment, but according to o cial reports he hanged himself in
his cell in May 1901. The les that could con rm that it was indeed
suicide are missing.
18

Rival Religions: Socialism and Catholicism

The great error… relates to the idea that class is naturally hostile to
class, and that the working men and the wealthy are intended by nature
to live in mutual con ict. So irrational and false is this view that the
precise opposite is the truth… Capital cannot do without labour, nor
labour without capital… [and] the Church, with Jesus Christ as her
Master and Guide… seeks to bind class to class in friendliness and good
feeling… God has not created us for the perishable and transitory things
of this world, but for things heavenly and everlasting…

Pope Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, 1891

For us, ideas are not abstractions but physical forces. When the idea
seeks to become rei ed in the world it does so through manifestations
that are nervous, muscular and physical… The idea of Christianity, the
liberation of the Holy Sepulchre, expressed itself in the gigantic military
expeditions of the Crusades and in a prolonged period of warfare. In the
same way the socialist idea – in other words the new form of society
based on a radical change in the current relationships of property – will
be realized through violent and revolutionary manifestations.

Benito Mussolini, La Lima, 11 April 1908

SOCIALISM

Like Felice Cavallotti, the writer Gabriele D’Annunzio was an

inveterate duellist. He admired Nietzsche, and self-consciously
strove throughout his life to make himself the embodiment of an
Übermensch: unconventional, unpredictable, combative, cruel,
artistically proli c and sexually predatory. He had fought his rst
duel in September 1885, at the age of twenty-two, outside the
railway station at Chieti, near his home town of Pescara in the
Abruzzi, with a part-time local journalist who had referred to him
teasingly in a newspaper article as ‘the small Gargantua of Italian
poetry’. Despite his reputation as a skilled swordsman, D’Annunzio
had managed to get himself slashed on the head by his opponent’s
sabre, and the attendant surgeon had poured a bottle of iron
perchlorate over the three-inch gash to staunch the ow of blood.
D’Annunzio later alleged (implausibly) that this had been the reason
for his premature baldness – a baldness of which he became ercely
proud, claiming that it was a sign of a higher stage of evolutionary
development, as hair no longer served a useful function in modern
civilization. When a French woman once asked him if his lack of
hair troubled him, he replied: ‘Madame, the beauty of the future
shall be bald!’1
In the 1890s D’Annunzio enjoyed prodigious literary success, with
a string of novels, poems and plays in which the themes of heroism,
love, decadence and death were interwoven with a characteristic n
de siècle obsession with aestheticism and cruelty; and on the strength
of his fame he stood for parliament in 1897 as the so-called
‘candidate of beauty’, delivering orid electoral speeches decrying
the decadence of the new Italy, its failure to avenge the massacre of
Adua, its inability to live up to the glorious legacy of ancient Rome,
and the reduction of the heroic ideals of the Risorgimento through
anti-intellectual materialism to a ‘thick grey slime where an ignoble
multitude tosses and turns and tra cs as in its natural element’.2
Quite what the provincial voters of the Abruzzi constituency of
Ortona a Mare made of D’Annunzio’s often obscure rhetorical ights
is not clear, but newspaper reports spoke of large crowds and copies
of his speeches being stuck on poles and carried in triumph through
the streets to cries of ‘Long live D’Annunzio! Long live the Abruzzi
poet!’3 He was elected, and took his seat on the far right in the
spring of 1898, surviving attempts by his opponents to get his
election quashed on the grounds that he was an adulterer. But he
was not a conscientious deputy: indeed the only word he uttered in
the Chamber in the next two years was giuro (‘I swear’), when taking
the parliamentary oath.4
On the evening of 23 March 1900, after one of the many stormy
debates over General Pelloux’s public order measures, D’Annunzio
made a dramatic gesture. He walked into the Red Room in
Montecitorio, where the radical and socialist deputies were gathered
in an emergency meeting, and delivered a carefully prepared
statement:

I convey my congratulations to the far left for the fervour and the
tenacity with which they are defending their ideas. After the
spectacle witnessed today, I know that on the one side there are
many dead men who shout and on the other a few who are alive
and eloquent. As a man of intellect I go towards life.5

Cynics maintained that D’Annunzio’s ‘conversion’ was little more

than a publicity stunt to help the agging sales of his latest novel, Il
fuoco. But there was no question that it was an enormous coup for
the far left, a con rmation of their greatly enhanced status in recent
years among Italian intellectuals in particular but also in the
country as a whole. The statement was greeted with loud applause,
and the socialist leaders Filippo Turati and Leonida Bissolati came
forward and embraced D’Annunzio warmly.
Socialism, anarchism, radicalism and republicanism, in a variety of
forms and with di ering degrees of organization and militancy, had
been growing in strength in the peninsula for several decades.
During the 1870s it was anarchism that had made most of the
running. The great Russian revolutionary Mikhail Bakunin had
identi ed Italy as a potential powder-keg, with its millions of
impoverished peasants and its deep-seated traditions of rural
violence, and in the years immediately following uni cation he had
built up a substantial following among a younger generation of
intellectuals disenchanted with Mazzini’s remorseless insistence on
progress and redemption through God, national unity and class
collaboration. Freedom for the masses, Bakunin had argued, in
language often no less messianic than Mazzini’s own, could only
come with a social revolution that would sweep away the
bourgeoisie and overthrow the oppressive state. Talk of the
‘fatherland’ and the ‘nation’ was sentimental moonshine:

Mazzini is frightened of civil war and the destruction of national

unity… [He] claims that the 25 million people who form the Italian
nation are ‘brothers’ with the same faith and common aspirations.
Do I need to prove to you that this is a brazen or stupid lie?…
‘Fatherland bequeathed by God! Holy historical mission! Cult of
tombs! Solemn memories of martyrs… Ancient Rome! Papal
Rome!… Dante!… Rome of the people!’ It was all so nebulous, so
beautiful, and at the same time so absurd, that it was enough to
deceive and hoodwink young men whose minds were more inclined
to enthusiasm and faith than to reason and argument… Today, dear
friends, it is your duty to organize a campaign of intelligent, honest,
caring and above all persistent propaganda… to explain [to the
masses] the programme of the International… And if, in order to
achieve this, you organize yourselves throughout Italy, and do it in
harmony and fraternity… I swear to you that in the space of one
year there will no longer be any Mazzinian and Garibaldian
workers, but all will have become revolutionary socialists… You
will thus have laid the indestructible foundations for the
forthcoming social revolution, which will save Italy and restore to
her the life, the intelligence and all the initiative she is entitled to as
one of the most advanced and humane nations in Europe.6
Such language, not least because it echoed much of the
redemptive idealism of the Risorgimento, had fallen on receptive
soil, and anarchism had begun to spread swiftly in regions such as
the Romagna and Campania, especially after the Paris Commune of
1871 and the Spanish revolution two years later had indicated the
insurrectionary potential of the International. In 1874 a band of 150
anarchists had set out from the town of Imola, hoping to stir up a
rising among the local peasantry (who had recently been involved in
agricultural strikes and food riots) and capture the city of Bologna.
But the police had stopped them with little di culty.7 In the spring
of 1877 two of the most prominent young anarchists, Errico
Malatesta – a diminutive former medical student from the province
of Caserta – and Carlo Ca ero – a wealthy Apulian landowner, with
a deeply mystical and religious turn of mind who was later to die
incarcerated in a lunatic asylum agonizing about whether he was
getting more than his fair share of sunlight through the window –
had tried to lead a rising in the Matese mountains to the north of
Naples. Twenty-six anarchists had gone to the small town of Letino,
burned the tax records, proclaimed the social republic, and handed
out a few old guns to the bemused peasants (though one local priest
had apparently tried to help by explaining that socialism and the
teachings of Christ were much the same thing). But nothing had
happened, and the insurgents had quickly been rounded up by
troops.8
The failure of the Matese rising and the governmental crack-down
that followed had severely weakened anarchism, and during the
1880s and 1890s it was ‘legalitarian’ socialism that had ourished,
with the emphasis not on immediate insurrection but on preparing
the ground peaceably for a working-class revolution through
education, organization, and economic, social and political reforms.
In 1881 a charismatic former anarchist, Andrea Costa, had founded
the Revolutionary Socialist Party of Romagna to help spread
‘socialist consciousness’ in the region, and a year later he had
become the rst socialist deputy in parliament.9 In 1885 an Italian
Workers’ Party had been launched in Lombardy to press for
universal su rage, the creation of trade unions and the right to
strike. And in 1892, in an e ort to pull together the various strands
of the Italian labour movement, a congress of more than 200
delegates representing 324 left-wing associations had convened in
Genoa (taking advantage of cheap rail fares that were being o ered
as part of the city’s celebrations of the 400th anniversary of
Columbus’ discovery of America) and created a national Party of the
Workers. Three years later this became the Italian Socialist Party.10
By the time D’Annunzio made his dramatic move ‘towards light’
in 1900, the Italian Socialist Party had grown into a powerful
political force in the country. Its main strongholds were in the Po
valley, where the protracted agricultural crisis of the 1880s and
1890s had resulted in worsening conditions for many rural workers
as landowners cut back ruthlessly on their labour costs – but it also
enjoyed signi cant support in the central share-cropping regions of
Tuscany and Umbria and in parts of the south (Puglia and Sicily
especially). It had its own daily newspaper, Avanti!, a string of party
o ces, run typically by a local teacher, lawyer or journalist, and a
dense network of economic organizations including cooperatives,
mutual-aid societies and Chambers of Labour. Trade unionism
developed swiftly from the turn of the century, and by 1902 there
were nearly a quarter of a million industrial workers enrolled in
socialist-a liated craft federations. In 1906 these unions and the
Chambers of Labour came together to form the General
Confederation of Labour (CGL). The party also advanced rapidly in
the polls in the rst decade of the century: in the general election of
1900 it gained 216,000 votes and thirty-two deputies; by 1913 the
tally had gone up to seventy-nine deputies and nearly a quarter of
all votes cast.11

The spread of socialism was partly due to economic developments.

Between 1896 and 1908 Italy enjoyed its rst period of substantial
growth since uni cation. A number of factors combined to produce
this boom: the end of the world agricultural depression and the
consequent upturn in prices and demand; protectionism and state
support for sectors such as steel and shipping; the overhaul of the
nancial sector and the introduction of ‘mixed’ banks, with German
and Austrian capital, specializing in entrepreneurial investment; the
creation of hydro-electric plants in the Alps and the provision of
plentiful supplies of energy (so helping compensate Italy for its
relative disadvantage in coal); and the huge sums that were being
sent back as remittances from overseas – the United States especially
– by the hundreds of thousands who emigrated in these years,
mostly from the south. Between 1896 and 1908 the value of
industrial output in the country almost doubled, with especially
strong levels of growth in such ‘newer’ areas as engineering, rubber,
chemicals and metal-making: production of steel, for instance, rose
from 140,000 tonnes in 1900 to 930,000 tonnes in 1913. However,
textiles (silk in particular: Italy accounted for about a third of the
world’s silk market still on the eve of the First World War) remained
the bedrock of Italian manufacturing, with one quarter of all the
jobs in industry in 1911 in this sector.12
One striking indication of Italy’s sudden irtation with economic
modernity was the emergence of the automobile industry. The
combination of Piedmontese and Lombard engineering traditions
with the establishment of electrical, steel and rubber manufacturing
(Pirelli had founded his cable and tyre rm in Milan in 1872) led to
a surge in car production from the turn of the century. After a
period experimenting with motorized tricycles, a young
Piedmontese cavalry o cer called Giovanni Agnelli helped in 1899
to set up the Fabbrica Italiana Automobili Torino (FIAT); and his
example was followed by a host of other entrepreneurs, who
established such well-known companies as Isotta Fraschini (Milan,
1904), Lancia (Turin, 1906) and ALFA (Milan, 1906). By 1907 there
were sixty-one companies, turning out 18,000 vehicles a year; and
though recession forced many of these to close soon afterwards,
there were still six major car producers in Turin alone in 1911,
employing more than 6,000 workers. By 1914 FIAT was the clear
market leader, accounting for about half of Italy’s vehicles. But the
Italian domestic market remained weak and would not support the
dramatic levels of output – half a million cars – that the USA
achieved at this time. It was only after the Second World War that
FIAT could begin to contemplate mass production.13
The economic developments of these years – the growth of
industry and the enormous surge in transatlantic migration in
particular – had a marked e ect on popular aspirations. After
centuries of eking out a precarious existence in small rural
settlements, beholden to local landowners and priests, and
constrained by geography and climate, millions of peasants could
suddenly glimpse the hope of change. Many moved into the cities –
net annual immigration into Milan stood at around 14,000 in these
years and its population nearly doubled between 1880 and 1914 to
600,000 – and the encounter with a modern industrial environment
was often quite exhilarating. The young Benito Mussolini was
deeply struck by the iron railway bridge that spanned the River
Lamone when he arrived in the town of Faenza in the 1890s from
his native village of Predappio (understandably, perhaps, given that
his father was the local blacksmith);14 and when in 1902 the
Neapolitan socialist Arturo Labriola moved to the Lombard capital,
he was thrilled by the city’s economic dynamism. ‘For me, coming
from an area of old-fashioned artisan production… that class of
industrial entrepreneurs, especially in Milan, with its business sense
and audacity, was hugely attractive.’15
Overseas emigration, whether seasonal or permanent, had long
been a notable feature of Italian economic life, but the combination
of agricultural recession, cheap fares on steamships and relatively
well-paid work on South American farms or North American
construction sites led to a rapid rise in the volume of emigration
from the end of the nineteenth century. Prior to the 1880s most
emigrants had been small farmers or artisans from the northern
regions crossing the Alps or sailing to Argentina or Brazil; thereafter
it was southerners who made up the backbone of the emigrants,
young men, usually rural labourers, red by the possibility of
earning as much in a few weeks in La Merica as they could back
home in a year. Between 1900 and 1915 more than 8 million
Italians went overseas, nearly half of them from the southern
regions. Most set o with the intention of staying for a few years
and then returning to their native village, paying o their debts, and
buying a plot of land; but many ended up settling permanently in
the United States. Sadly the dreams of most of those who came back
remained unful lled, as the few hectares of soil that they managed
to acquire with their savings often turned out to be little more than
a barren handful of dust.16
Nevertheless the industrial boom and mass emigration of the
early years of the century did much to erode the secular fatalism of
the poor, and this, far more than any structural changes in the
economy, encouraged support for socialism as the movement for
working-class advancement. One sign of growing expectations at
this time was an increase in school attendance, as it became clear
that education was a valuable instrument for upward mobility and
not just a hallmark of membership of a state that was still widely
seen as redundant or hostile. In Sicily primary school attendance
went up from 54.5 per cent in 1901–2 to 73.5 per cent ve years
later; and the decline in illiteracy levels (more than 10 per cent
nationally between 1901 and 1911) was especially pronounced in
areas of high migration, such as the Abruzzi, Basilicata and Sicily.17
Literacy was very useful for securing work in big cities or getting
through the immigration controls on Ellis Island; it facilitated
dealings with banks or post o ces when remittances were sent
home for deposit in savings accounts; and it opened up channels of
communication – writing letters to relatives or talking with Italians
from other regions. And beyond this there were possibilities for the
most talented of landing jobs in the civil service or within the ranks
of the Socialist Party and its a liated organs – for the Italian
Socialist Party was rst and foremost a party for intellectuals.
The widespread sense of despondency among intellectuals at the
character of the Italian state – the persistent gap between the masses
and the institutions, the pervasive corruption and materialism of the
ruling classes, the shortcomings of parliament, the high levels of
poverty and crime, especially in the south, and the inability of Italy
to assert itself as a major power on the international stage – left
many of those who had been inspired by the patriotic idealism of
the Risorgimento searching, often somewhat desperately, for a new
faith. While some, like the poet Carducci or the talented novelist
Carlo Dossi, turned to the monarchy or to Francesco Crispi for
inspiration, it was to socialism that virtually all the best minds in
the 1890s were drawn. A survey of 105 writers, 63 academics and
26 artists in 1895 found that 110 supported socialism ‘without
reserve’ and a further 41 ‘with reservations’, and among them were
such distinguished gures as the criminologists Cesare Lombroso
and Enrico Ferri, the historians Gaetano Salvemini and Ettore
Ciccotti, the writer Edmondo De Amicis, and the artist Giuseppe
Pellizza da Volpedo, whose monumental canvases of serried crowds
of rural workers, women as well as men, advancing con dently out
of the darkness into the bright sunlight, with a dream-like calm,
provided powerful visual icons for the new faith (not least thanks to
their deliberate echoes of such traditional Christian iconography as
the Holy Family, the Annunciation, and the Virgin and Child).18
The transition from frustrated Risorgimento idealism to socialism
is well illustrated by the man who was to dominate the moderate or
‘reformist’ wing of the Italian Socialist Party down to the First World
War, Filippo Turati. Turati was born in 1857, the son of a Lombard
prefect and a deeply Catholic mother, but like many well-educated
young men of his background he rejected the Church and gravitated
towards the democratic currents of Mazzinianism and republicanism
that were still powerful in parts of northern Italy in the 1870s. As a
student at Bologna university he came under the spell of Carducci,
who was teaching literature there: Turati later recalled how the
passion and intensity of Carducci’s verse and thought ‘tore at [him]
internally’ and gave him and many of his fellow students (among
them another future socialist leader, Leonida Bissolati) a sense of
‘renaissance’. For some time Turati wrote and published poetry, and
contemplated a literary career; but his graduation in 1877 coincided
with the onset of a debilitating spiritual crisis – a crisis that was
deepened the following year by Carducci’s apostasy and conversion
to the cause of the monarchy:

All my hopes, my goals, my ambitions, my noble dreams, all the

happiness of my youth, everything came to an end, disappeared and
dissolved into an abyss of the darkest misery, like a mirage melting;
and I felt I was stumbling around in a night of the most
unspeakable, agonizing neurosis. I was constantly exhausted, as if I
had come back from an orgy… and acquired the reputation of being
one of the biggest loafers in this wastrel country of ours, dosing
myself with opium, bromides and chlorites to dull the pain…19
His distraught parents toured Europe with him for several years,
no expense spared, searching for a cure. But their travels, certainly
around Italy, did little to lift him out of his dejection: Turin seemed
spiritually dead and cravenly ‘on its knees before the monuments of
the House of Savoy’, while Rome left him feeling totally
‘annihilated’. Only Genoa, with its ‘chiaroscuro’ architecture and
unexpected vistas, enchanted him; and there was the bonus of a visit
to the Staglieno cemetery and the tomb of Mazzini, where he ‘tossed
[his] visiting card through the gate like an infatuated disciple, and
meditated on Foscolo’s On Tombs like a student of rhetoric’. Among
the many doctors he visited were Cesare Lombroso, who
administered electro-therapy, and the eminent Viennese psychiatrist
Max Leidesdorf. In the summer of 1882 he went to Paris to consult
the great neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot – who diagnosed
‘cephalic and spinal neurasthenia’ and told him that his only hope of
recovery lay in complete abstinence from work. And it was while in
the French capital that he learned of the death of Garibaldi: the
news, he said, ‘made me weep: I had not wept in years’. But in the
end the solution to his illness came not from the medical profession,
but rather from his growing absorption in Italy’s social question and
his conviction, which hit him with almost Damascene intensity, that
the nation’s moral problems could only be solved by radically
transforming the material base of society. He also found therapeutic
relief in climbing mountains (like another tortured late-nineteenth-
century idealist, Nietzsche), and the Alps remained a lifelong
passion.20
For Turati, as for many other intellectuals who got caught up in
the ferment of progressive ideas in the 1880s and 1890s, socialism
provided not just a new faith but also an agenda for action; for
however much they wanted to believe that history was moving
irresistibly towards the triumph of the proletariat as a consequence
of the iron laws of dialectical materialism, the fact was the class war
stood a much better chance of succeeding if the masses knew what
they were supposed to do. Hence the vital importance of education
and propaganda; and this was felt to be all the more necessary given
that most Italian workers, certainly in the countryside, were, as
Turati wrote in 1895, still profoundly ignorant and stuck in a
medieval world of ‘putre ed barbarism’ and oblivious to the ‘ rst
signs of the modern age, the industrial phase, that is dawning in the
most civilized and advanced regions, especially of the north’.21 The
leaders of socialism should turn themselves into ‘new beings, a new
and superior race’, mingle with the masses, ‘animate them, incite
them and help them clarify their ideas’.22 In this way, as the
in uential theorist of elite politics Vilfredo Pareto informed Turati,
‘those creatures that are at present simply molluscs’ would become
‘men’.23
Buoyed up by missionary zeal, the socialist elites set about
mobilizing the masses. Unlike their liberal counterparts they had
few qualms about mixing with the poor – which is one reason why
the new movement felt so threatening to the established order. A
distinguished professor of ancient history, Ettore Ciccotti, was more
criticized by his conservative colleagues for his habit of going to
smoke- lled bars in Milan in the evenings to address workers than
for his subversive beliefs per se.24 Socialist activists staged public
meetings, debates, conferences and lectures wherever they could: in
clubs, halls, cafés and Chambers of Labour, or out in the open air.
They wrote pamphlets and contributed articles to the countless local
socialist newspapers that sprang up across northern and central Italy
from the 1890s; and in areas of high illiteracy these could be read
out to public gatherings. They encouraged school attendance – not
least because a high proportion of primary school teachers were
socialists – and promoted ‘popular libraries’ to make books
accessible to workers (a particular interest of Turati); though
whether much ‘socialist’ literature was read is unclear: a survey of
working-class readers in Milan in 1905 found that Jules Verne was
the most borrowed author, followed by Zola and De Amicis. Karl
Marx hardly gured.25
The crusading spirit that animated Turati and so many of his
fellow socialists helped impart a religious note to many of the
educational and propaganda initiatives. But as with Mazzini and the
democrats more than half a century before, there was also a strong
measure of deliberate political calculation, for the masses were
widely seen as possessing what Turati called a ‘crude and semi-
pagan religious idealism’ that predisposed them, he felt, to a ‘higher
social ideal’.26 The in uential German-born socialist Roberto
Michels referred more bluntly to their ‘infantile psychology’ and
readiness to ‘genu ect at the feet of mortal divinities’.27 (Michels
was later to convert to fascism.) Accordingly socialism needed to
present itself, both in form and in substance, as a parallel faith.
‘When the people emerge from church, after the blessing, stand on
the steps outside or on a table in an adjacent inn and begin your
sermon’ was the advice given by a senior party gure to activists in
1893 for Sunday propaganda in small towns and villages.28 And the
language and tone of the new preachers resembled, according to
Michels, the ‘primitive era of Christianity’:

Without doubt one of the most striking features of Italian socialism,

… which distinguished it from socialism in every other country, was
the extraordinary abundance of moral precepts and demands that
were circulated in thousands of booklets and pamphlets written for
the socialist propaganda of the masses. The propagandists… were
moralizers, prophets, apostles, puri ers… They railed against the
vices that infested the countryside, denouncing the murders, the
killings, the infanticides, the proneness to violence and the habit of
drunkenness.29
The presentation of socialism as a new church struck a chord with
many rural communities, and middle-class activists often found
themselves feted as if they were saints (‘angels descended from
heaven’ was how one peasant described the leaders of the Sicilian
Fasci).30 But there was a price to be paid for this popular fervour in
the form of eclecticism and ideological inconsistency. The peasants
in the Mantua countryside marched in the 1880s behind a tricolour
ag with images of the poet Virgil (who had been born in the area),
Cincinnatus and Garibaldi holding a hoe and a lamb,31 while in
western Sicily, where the socialists gained an enormous following in
the early 1890s thanks in no small measure to their imaginative use
of entertainments such as ‘socialist’ puppet shows and comedies,
dances and family parties, and the introduction of Christmas trees,
pictures of Karl Marx regularly appeared alongside those of the
Virgin Mary and King Umberto.32 Umberto, indeed, seems to have
been quite popular, even in areas with strong republican traditions
such as the Romagna, as a consequence, perhaps, of his charitable
works and his carefully nurtured image as ‘the good king’. The
events of May 1898 may have tarnished this image but they did not
destroy it. The provincial revolutionary socialist Alessandro
Mussolini, father of Benito, publicly announced to the town council
of Predappio his regret at the king’s assassination in 1900, declaring
that Umberto was at heart a ‘gentleman’.33

For Turati and other socialist intellectuals the rapid spread of

socialism among the peasantry was gratifying but also perplexing,
for according to ‘scienti c’ Marxism a revolution was only supposed
to take place following the breakdown of capitalism in its most
advanced phase. Yet as an elegant and highly strung Russian
émigrée, Anna Kuliscio , Turati’s partner, told Frederick Engels in a
famous letter of 1894, Italy was still ‘two-thirds medieval’ and its
rural population both morally and materially impoverished, and
until the country had gone through a prolonged phase of
modernization there could be no serious talk of revolution. This
consideration, together with the onset of rapid industrial growth at
the end of the century, led Turati and his colleagues in parliament
to announce that the Italian Socialist Party should defer the
revolution and instead pursue a ‘minimal’ programme of economic,
political and administrative reforms designed to ‘organize and
educate the proletariat… and prepare them for the assumption and
successful running of the collectivized society’.34 Or as Turati put it
in more homely terms, they should seek to fatten up the bourgeoisie
like a Christmas turkey, in order to have more to enjoy when the
time arrived to cook it.35
What made ‘minimalism’ or ‘reformism’ seem practicable was a
leftward shift in parliamentary liberalism after the reactionary crisis
of 1898–1900 and the return to prominence (after having narrowly
escaped imprisonment during the Banca Romana scandal) of
Giovanni Giolitti, the man who was to dominate Italian politics until
the First World War. Giolitti came from Piedmont, and like Cavour,
Quintino Sella and other leading Piedmontese politicians he
combined a pragmatic cast of mind with an Enlightenment faith in
progress through material advancement. He had little sympathy
with the idealism that had inspired so much of the Risorgimento
and scant interest in metaphysics or the arts: there was an audible
gasp of surprise on one occasion when he quoted Dante in a speech
in the Chamber.36 He tended to see discontent as rooted in
frustrated self-interest and accordingly believed that most opponents
had their price and could be transformed eventually into allies. This
often smacked of cynicism: when asked why he condoned electoral
corruption so readily, he replied that a tailor does not attempt to
dress a deformed man in normal clothes. He displayed little liking
for the south and visited it just once in the course of his long life.
 Giolitti became Minister of the Interior in 1901 and prime
minister two years later, and from the outset he made it clear that
he was willing to do business with the socialists. If Turati and his
colleagues wanted ‘a great country that was genuinely and
capitalistically modern’ with a proper bourgeoisie and proletariat,
he would help them;37 but not to hasten the advent of a socialist
revolution but rather to draw the masses within the framework of
the state and thereby create a morally uni ed nation:

The Italian people does not have revolutionary tendencies; the

Italian people has a long tradition of trusting in the Government;
and perhaps no other people has su ered such appalling ills for so
many centuries and with such fortitude as the Italian people. Were
the Government and the ruling classes to furnish a period of serious
social justice this would ensure that the population turned with love
again to our institutions… We are at the beginning of a new era of
history. Anyone who is not blind can see this… It is largely up to us,
to the behaviour of the constitutional parties in their dealings with
the working classes, to ensure that the advent of these classes
provides a new conservative force, a new source of prosperity and
greatness, and not a whirlwind that destroys the fortunes of the
fatherland!38
Under Giolitti’s guidance, and with the support in parliament of
the reformist socialists, a broad raft of progressive legislation was
introduced in the early years of the century that laid the foundations
of an Italian welfare state. There were laws to make a weekly rest-
day compulsory, prohibit child labour, limit the length of the
working day for women (to eleven hours), and institute sickness,
old-age and maternity funds (ten lire per child paid by the state,
with an additional thirty lire coming from employers’ and workers’
contributions). Spending on public works schemes rose sharply – by
50 per cent between 1900 and 1907 – with particularly large sums
earmarked for the south: special development packages for the city
of Naples and for the regions of Basilicata and Calabria (to provide
roads, irrigation schemes, drinking water and rea orestation),
subsidies to build aqueducts and railways, tax concessions and
agricultural credit funds, and relief for Messina and Calabria after
the earthquake of 1908.
But the biggest concession to the Socialist Party and the socialist-
led unions of industrial and agricultural workers in northern and
central Italy was a policy of strict governmental neutrality in labour
disputes. As far as Giolitti was concerned this was a matter of
economic growth as well as of social justice, for he claimed that the
free operation of the laws of supply and demand a orded the best
possible stimulus to production, as shown by the fact that ‘the
countries with the highest wages [were] at the forefront of
industrial progress’.39 The new laissezfaire attitude unleashed a tidal
wave of strikes at the start of the century – on average nearly a
thousand a year between 1901 and 1905, involving more than
250,000 industrial and agricultural workers, compared to just 200
and 40,000 workers in the 1890s. In 1906–10 the gures were
higher still: over 1,500 strikes and nearly 350,000 workers.40 Many
of the strikes were successful and between 1901 and 1911 wages in
industry and agriculture went up in real terms by about 2.5 per cent
per annum, thereby allowing workers to enjoy some improvement in
living standards: average daily calorie consumption, which had
dropped to just 2,119 during the crisis years of the 1890s, increased
in 1900–10 to 2,617.41 But given the extremely low baseline from
which such gains were made, most Italians would still not have
experienced any dramatic change in their material circumstances,
and certainly not enough to incline them to turn ‘with love’ to the
institutions.
CATHOLICISM

If Giolitti hoped to defuse the challenge of socialism through liberal

reforms and larger pay packets – and virtually every in uential
voice in Italy was soon decrying his pragmatism, his materialism
and his failure to o er powerful inspirational ideals – the Church
harboured no such illusions. Ever since the Counter-Reformation,
when the papacy had dispatched cohorts of Jesuit missionaries into
the remote interior regions of the peninsula to bring isolated pagan
communities into the Christian fold, the Vatican had looked on the
Italian peasantry as the bedrock of its support. The sight of socialist
zealots preaching godlessness and staging secular weddings and
baptisms (‘I dedicate you, my child, to su ering humanity. You will
be a struggler for the redemption of this class to which you belong
by birth…’)42 was profoundly threatening, and priests such as Don
Andrea Sterza responded militantly, appealing ‘in the bowels of
Christ’ to his fellow clergy ‘to raise their voices like trumpets against
the most vicious of enemies, socialism, that is raging like a
murderous hurricane… through the people of the countryside,
meting out horrendous slaughter, people who were once so religious
that a single word uttered by a priest was gospel!’43
The advent of liberalism and the loss of temporal power in the
1860s had been bad enough, and the Church had responded with
characteristic vigour, issuing the Syllabus of Errors, promulgating
the dogma of infallibility, trumpeting apparitions of the Virgin and
other Marian miracles, and launching the movement of the Opera
dei Congressi to ‘unite and reorganize Catholics and Catholic
associations from all of Italy in a common and coordinated action to
defend… the sacrosanct rights of the Church and of the papacy and
the religious and social interests of the Italians, in conformity with
the desires and directives of the Holy Father and under the guidance
of the episcopate and the clergy’.44 It had also capitalized on its
long-standing skills in choreography and spectacle, staging huge
pilgrimages to Rome – such as for the Holy Year of 1875 or two
years later for the ftieth anniversary of Pius IX’s consecration as a
bishop, when massive crowds had ocked to celebratory services in
St Peter’s (deliberately scheduled to coincide with – and upstage –
the national Festival of the Statuto) and led through the Vatican,
marvelling at the vast array of jewel-studded mitres, copes,
chasubles, chalices, crosses, crosiers and monstrances that had been
sent to the Holy Father as presents (most of which were distributed
subsequently to churches and monasteries across the country,
though the precious chalice sent by the king’s younger son, the Duke
of Aosta, was retained for the Sistine Chapel – in part as a trophy).45
As socialism began to spread, the Church stepped up its
mobilizing e orts, using its network of parishes and dioceses and
the organizational skills of the many devout members of the middle
classes and the aristocracy who had remained hostile or indi erent
to liberalism to establish a string of Catholic associations, circles,
cooperatives, banks, newspapers and periodicals (principally in the
north). These were monitored centrally by the permanent committee
of the Opera dei Congressi, whose activities increased rapidly in the
1890s under the presidency of Giovanni Battista Paganelli, a
vigorous Venetian with no sympathy for the liberal state (‘In His
Holiness we recognize not only the Pope but also the Father and
supreme Duce [leader] of the Italians: the only man who can save
them. To him we entrust the a airs of the Church and the
fatherland’).46 By 1897 the Opera controlled 3,982 parish
committees, 708 youth sections, 17 university circles, 588 rural
cooperative banks, 688 workers’ societies, 24 daily newspapers and
155 journals. And like the socialists, the Church aimed to use these
instruments to penetrate civil society and build up grass roots
support.
With socialism the principal enemy, the issue of the restoration of
the Pope’s temporal power, which had dominated Church–state
relations since 1860, slipped quietly down the agenda, and during
the 1890s a number of conciliatory gestures were made towards the
Italian government. In 1896, for example, Cardinal Ferrari agreed to
participate at the inauguration of a monument to Victor Emmanuel
in Piazza Duomo in Milan.47 And such gestures increased after the
turn of the century, with Giolitti’s tacit encouragement, and
Catholics were even discreetly encouraged by the Opera dei
Congressi to vote in national elections for a government candidate if
that meant keeping a socialist out. But this easing of tensions was
based on mutual convenience, not liking. There was still too much
suspicion and bad blood around: only a few years before, Crispi had
bullied and humiliated Pope Leo to the point where he had felt
obliged to announce to the world that he no longer felt safe in
Rome. Furthermore, as the Vatican’s famous encyclical on the social
question, Rerum Novarum (1891), made clear, Catholicism’s core
values of cooperation, inter-class solidarity, paternalism and charity
were heavily at odds with those of liberal individualism.
In order to propagate its values, the Church had a powerful set of
tools at its disposal to complement the traditional weapons of the
sermon and the confessional. In regions such as the Veneto and
Lombardy a huge amount of Catholic printed material of all sorts
circulated in the countryside: diocesan and parish magazines,
popular newspapers containing a mixture of Church news, parables,
papal allocutions, serialized novels and rural sketches, bulletins
from Catholic associations, and newsletters from religious orders
and sanctuaries (the Messaggero di Sant’ Antonio – Padua – begun in
1898, proved particularly successful: a century later it had global
sales of over 1.5 million).48 Catholic publishing houses were set up,
among them the Tipogra a dell’Immacolata Concezione in Modena
and the San Bernardino in Siena, to distribute religious manuals,
lives of saints and ‘Catholic’ novels – a growing genre, with such
titles as The Blasphemer’s Family (1904) by Father Giovanni Battista
Francesia, intended as a corrective to the supposed immorality of
realist literature, with its sympathetic depictions of murderers,
prostitutes, thieves and drunks.49
 The printed word could only have limited impact in a society
where illiteracy was widespread, and accordingly the Church, even
more than the socialists – who, as a party led by intellectuals, were
particularly attached to ‘high’ culture – happily turned to other
media in order to get its message across. Popular theatre was an
especially important tool of propaganda in northern Italy in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with plays that
highlighted Catholic family values and denounced the evils of
liberalism, Freemasonry and increasingly socialism, with its
attendant vices of sexual immorality, blasphemy and alcoholism.50
One publishing house in Vicenza listed 5,000 ‘comedies, dramas,
tragedies, farces, sketches and monologues’ for use in ‘Catholic
seminaries, colleges, institutes, recreational circles and clubs’ in its
1916 catalogue.51 Sport, too, was widely promoted, with gymnastics
particularly favoured for its capacity to foster discipline and self-
control (football, by contrast, was apparently seen as too ‘Protestant’
in its encouragement of individual self-expression). The Catholic
sporting federation FASCI (the fortuitous acronym of the
Federazione delle Associazioni Sportive Cattoliche Italiane) claimed
204 a liated societies by 1910.52 Cinema was also used in the years
immediately prior to the First World War, with the Oratory Fathers
establishing a Cinematographic Federation in Milan in 1909 and the
Catholic production company Unitas turning out over thirty lms in
1909–11 – for the most part documentaries about Jesus, the lives of
saints and exemplary priests (‘A true friend of the people’), or
morality tales: ‘How many bottles have you drunk?’, ‘Delirium
tremens’, ‘The consequences of fashion’, ‘The bread thief’.53
Quite what impact these initiatives had is hard to know. In many
cases they may have done little more than con rm the faithful in
their devotion (and enmity) and sceptics in their indi erence or
anti-clericalism. However, the socialists often claimed that their
propaganda was proving highly e ective in eroding religious
sentiment among the peasants of northern Italy, pointing to
increased rates of ‘suicide, sexual freedom and conversions to
Protestantism’ and falling levels of crime and drunkenness as
evidence of a new – and higher – secular morality.54 And o cial
gures certainly suggested a rapid drop in belief in these years, with
874,000 Italians declaring they had ‘no religion’ in the 1911 census
compared to just 36,000 ten years earlier. But the decline may have
been due more to the unimaginative responses of the local clergy to
the challenge of socialism than to a serious cultural shift – as in the
village of Busati near Lucca, where the marble quarry workers were
told by a Capuchin friar that if they joined a trade union they would
no longer be allowed to receive the Eucharist. Not surprisingly, as
the parish priest recorded sadly in his diary, ‘only a few men’
attended Easter communion in 1910, whereas in 1900 all had done
so.55
It was in a bid to ensure greater centralized control over the ght
against socialism that in 1905 Pope Pius X abolished the Opera dei
Congressi and reorganized it as three ‘unions’ – dealing with
propaganda, socio-economic a airs and elections – under the
umbrella heading of Catholic Action. Part of the Vatican’s concern
was to curb what it saw as a dangerous slide among sections of the
laity and clergy towards over-zealous engagement in social and
political questions and heterodox ‘modernism’ – to the point, in
certain cases, as with the energetic Romagna priest Romolo Murri
(excommunicated in 1909), where Catholics could appear as radical
as their socialist opponents. Pius also wanted to contain the pressure
that was building from below for conciliation with the Italian state:
he was a staunch traditionalist, an advocate of doctrinal purity, a
lover of Thomas Aquinas, Gregorian chant and the cult of the Virgin
Mary, and no sympathizer with liberalism. Catholic Action was
placed under the immediate control of the bishops and thus of the
Vatican, and although this led to greater cohesion and discipline at
a grass roots level, it also tended to sti e much of the reforming
enthusiasm that had inspired the progressive middle-class laity since
the 1890s.
Giolitti was reluctant to make any formal public overtures to the
Vatican. Indeed he described Church and state in 1904 as being like
‘two parallel lines that should never meet’. If the Church wished to
encourage Catholics to vote tactically in national elections in order
to keep socialist candidates out, as it did in 1904,1909 and (most
conspicuously) in 1913, so be it. But he could not a ord to give the
rapprochement o cial sanction. His rst priority was to bring the
working classes safely inside the framework of the state, and any
indication that he was willing to do deals with the conservative
Catholics was likely to imperil his alliance with Turati and the
reformist socialists and strengthen the hand of the revolutionaries.
And, as he explained in his memoirs, depriving the revolutionaries
of moral ammunition was absolutely crucial:

The elevation of the Fourth Estate to a higher level of civilization

was the most pressing problem for us now… The exclusion of the
working classes from both the political and administrative life of the
country… necessarily has the e ect of laying them open to the
in uence of the revolutionary parties and subversive ideas, for the
apostles of these ideas have a formidable argument at their disposal
when they see that the masses, on account of this exclusion, have no
other means of defending themselves against the possible injustices
of the ruling classes, whether particular or general, than with
violence.56
Giolitti’s strategy was on the face of it eminently rational, but it
faced two huge and interrelated obstacles. The rst was that the
socialist movement contained a powerful revolutionary or
‘maximalist’ wing, which from the outset bitterly opposed Turati’s
reformism, fearing that a strategy of collaboration with the
bourgeois state would corrupt the party leadership, domesticate the
working classes and destroy any prospect of a proletarian victory.
And while Turati believed that the masses were too prone to
anarchic violence and required educating to restraint and maturity,
the maximalists shared the view of many nineteenth-century
Risorgimento democrats that Italians had been rendered overly
passive by centuries of despotism and needed galvanizing through
direct action and inspirational ideals. It is no coincidence that the
distinguished French theorist of violence Georges Sorel enjoyed a
larger following in Italy than in any other European country (his
seminal Re ections on Violence appeared rst in Italy in 1905–6), or
that his views on the mobilizing power of myth strongly in uenced
the Italian revolutionary syndicalist movement (and through it,
fascism).
The second obstacle confronting Giolitti was the immense aura of
moral opprobrium that surrounded the liberal state, an opprobrium
that allowed the puritanically minded maximalists to claim that
their reformist colleagues were utterly misguided in believing that
any good could come from an alliance with a degenerate political
system – ‘that Byzantium’, as the young revolutionary Benito
Mussolini called it, echoing Carducci, with its ‘comedy of a
parliament’, dominated by a man who had ‘the impoverished soul of
a bureaucrat’ and was lacking in all idealism and ethical substance,
the ‘worthy prime minister of what the English call… the carnival
nation’.57 And the fact that this damning view was shared by nearly
all of the most in uential intellectuals of the day – among them the
writers D’Annunzio, Pirandello, Corradini, Marinetti, Pascoli, Papini
and Prezzolini, the sociologists Pareto, Mosca and Sighele, the
philosophers Croce and Gentile, the artists Boccioni and Carrà, and
the historians Volpe and Salvemini (who dubbed Giolitti ‘The
minister of the criminal underworld’ in a damning exposé of
electoral corruption published in 1910)58–reduced still further the
chances of the reformists being able to convince the majority of
their party that cooperating with the government was either
politically expedient or correct.
As a result, and despite all the concessions and reforms, Giolitti’s
hopes of drawing the sting of subversion from the working-class
movement proved illusory, and the revolutionary ‘maximalists’
remained a powerful and extremely vocal force within the Socialist
Party, berating the reformists constantly for their tractability and
seizing on inconsistencies in government policy to bolster their calls
for intransigence. In particular they pointed to the fact that,
notwithstanding the state’s o cial policy of neutrality in labour
disputes, workers continued to be killed and wounded in clashes
with the police – some 200 between 1900 and 1904; and although
this was not strictly the government’s fault – strikes had a tradition
of turning violent, especially in the south – the frequency of the
‘proletarian massacres’, as they were emotively styled, gave the
extremists powerful moral ammunition. In September 1904,
following a string of such ‘massacres’, they organized Italy’s rst
general strike; and that same year they managed to win a majority
at the party’s national congress. The reformists regained the
initiative at the 1908 congress, but lost it again, this time
de nitively, in 1912.
The ideological cleavage created in the socialist movement as a
result of the reformists’ alliance with Giolitti opened, as Michels
ruefully recalled, ‘a Pandora’s box’, and led to a state of protracted
civil war, with individuals, factions, currents and tendencies vying
with one another bitterly for supremacy: maximalists, minimalists,
syndicalists, integralists, centrists, revolutionary intransigents,
orthodox Marxists.59 No quarter was given: in 1895 the party had
voted piously to ban duelling among its members; but in the years
that followed this ban was time and again ignored as leading
socialists regularly resorted to sabres to resolve their di erences.
Passion and, with passion, violence became hallmarks of
revolutionary faith, signs of being untainted by the abhorred sins of
scepticism and materialism that had long been regarded as Italian
vices, and which the ‘arch corrupter’ Giolitti seemed to embody so
fully.60 Thought and action needed to be demonstrably one. And in
this tense climate a dangerous intellectual relativism began to
emerge, a sense that ideas were to be judged more for their capacity
to inspire to action than for their intrinsic merit. ‘Life’, as
D’Annunzio had implied when embracing socialism, was about
intensity not truth.
The allure of the ideal was evident in the early career of a man who
was to become a dominant gure in revolutionary socialism on the
eve of the First World War, Benito Mussolini. Born in 1883, in the
small town of Predappio in the Romagna, the son of a self-educated
blacksmith and a primary school teacher, he grew up in an
environment where the poverty of the agricultural workers who
made up the great majority of the local population was mitigated by
ardent Catholicism, fervent socialism, alcohol and sex: adultery and
crimes passionnels were common, and in later life Mussolini proudly
recalled his youthful a airs with married women as well as his
regular trips as a teenager to brothels (and one incident when he
raped a girl).61 Mussolini’s mother was deeply religious, and some
of the future dictator’s earliest memories were of attending church
services along with the rest of the community – but not his father:
as a leading local socialist he made a point of staying away – and
being excited (to the point of fainting) by the heady mixture of
candlelight, incense, colours, music and singing.62
Mussolini was baptized, at his mother Rosa’s insistence, but it was
his father, Alessandro, who chose the names: Benito, in honour of
the famous revolutionary and president of Mexico, Benito Juarez,
Amilcare, after the distinguished local anarchist, Amilcare Cipriani,
and Andrea, after Andrea Costa, the great Romagna socialist. And
though Rosa continued to hope that her eldest son might remain
within the Catholic fold, it was her husband’s values of secular
rebelliousness that proved most conducive to Benito. A period spent
at a boarding school run by the Salesian Fathers in Faenza ended
with his being withdrawn after a succession of episodes of
disobedience and unruliness, culminating in his organization of a
protest against ant-infested food and his wounding a fellow pupil
with a knife during a ght on the feast of St John the Baptist.
Thereafter he was sent to a lay college in Forlimpopoli run by
Valfredo Carducci, brother of the poet, which he found much more
congenial and where he trained to be a schoolteacher: his parents at
least agreed on the merits of learning (‘Either you study, or you
learn to become a blacksmith’ was Alessandro’s repeated threat).63
 Given his temperament and background it is hardly surprising
that Mussolini gravitated towards the revolutionary wing of
socialism. He was by instinct subversive and hostile to constituted
authority, whether of the Church or the liberal state. He also shared
the morbid fascination of many n de siècle writers with violence
and death: he wrote poetry in the style of Carducci (‘The priest
gazes darkly from afar at the blade bathed in the blood of plebeian
arteries… In his dying eyes ashed the light of the Ideal, the vision
of the centuries to come,’ ran a sonnet describing the execution of
the French egalitarian Gracchus Babeuf)64 and he admired Dante
greatly, not least for his moral vehemence, and was said to have
walked the empty streets of Forlimpopoli at night declaiming
passages from the Inferno and Purgatorio.65 He liked Nietzsche, who
lled him with ‘spiritual eroticism’, and whose glori cation of the
‘superman’, disparagement of the masses, denunciation of Christian
virtues and injunction to ‘live dangerously’ appealed to him
greatly.66 He also warmed to Sorel’s ideas about myth and violence,
and for a time identi ed with revolutionary syndicalism, leading an
agricultural strike in Predappio in 1908 and inciting the peasants to
destroy threshing machines and clash with the police. He naturally
had no sympathy for the reformist socialists and their acquiescence
in what he described as Giolitti’s ‘spineless socialoid ideology’.67
But as the leading anarchist Errico Malatesta observed, Mussolini
gave the impression as a young man of being an instinctive
revolutionary who ranged almost indiscriminately from one belief to
another, apparently uncertain as to exactly what kind of revolution
he wanted. And Mussolini himself confessed to a friend in 1912 that
his view of socialism was essentially ‘religious’, implying that it was
the power of the ideal that attracted him more than any speci c
content in the doctrines.68 His father, too, had displayed a similarly
emotional and somewhat eclectic approach to politics, combining a
passionate support for internationalism, republicanism and anti-
militarism with an idolization of the supreme Italian patriot,
Garibaldi (whose portrait hung in the family home along with the
Madonna of Pompei), sympathy for King Umberto, and admiration
for the radical warmonger and vehement anti-socialist Crispi.
According to a well-known story, when Mussolini was rejected for
the post of secretary to the town council of Predappio in 1901, his
father consoled him by shouting out in the central piazza: ‘Do not be
discouraged. You will be the Crispi of tomorrow!’69
And the ideal of national resurrection, which Crispi had
embodied, was certainly one that hovered powerfully in the air
during Mussolini’s youth and without too much di culty could be
accommodated to the hopes and frustrations that lay at the heart of
socialism. When Giuseppe Verdi died in 1901, ‘comrade’ Mussolini
was selected by his fellow pupils at Forlimpopoli to deliver a tribute
in the local theatre, and the young socialist gave a bravura
impromptu performance in which, to loud applause, he recalled the
great patriot of the Risorgimento who had lived to see his dreams
shattered by the reality of united Italy and in particular by the
persistent gulf between the ruling classes and the proletariat.70 And
in the next few years, as Nationalist ideology began to emerge as a
powerful intellectual and political rival to socialism, Mussolini
found the ideal of Italian regeneration at times too hard to resist. In
1909 he wrote to the editor of the in uential journal La Voce
congratulating him on his attempts to ‘forge the spiritual unity of
Italians’: ‘A di cult task given our history and our character, but
not an impossible one. The creation of the “Italian” soul is a superb
mission.’71 And in a newspaper article of the same year he
elaborated on the importance of La Voce’s e orts in helping to raise
the nation from the mire of mediocrity:

Education on its own cannot create a culture,… a glorious past

cannot justify a present that is utterly vulgar and debased, and a
nation’s political unity cannot ensure it a historical mission in the
world, unless there is the psychological unity to fuse wills together
and direct energies… [La Voce] will help to resolve ‘the terrible
problem’ that is confronting the national soul: ‘either to have the
courage to create the third, great Italy, the Italy that hitherto has
not existed – the Italy, not of the Popes or the Emperors, but of
those who think – or else to leave behind nothing but a trail of
mediocrity to be blown away by the very rst pu of wind’. This is
the programme of La Voce… It is a superb endeavour…72
19

Nationalism

Just as socialism taught the proletariat the value of the class struggle, so
we must teach Italy the value of the international struggle. But is not
international struggle war? Well, let there be war then! And let
Nationalism arouse in Italy the will to a victorious war.
Enrico Corradini, speech to the rst Nationalist Congress, 3
December 1910

Our aim is to establish… a religion that will link us to the deepest and
most universal impulses of humanity and build the strong, ethical
structure of the new history of Italy, which will secure our future in the
world and extricate us from our current daily humiliation… If we had a
way of in uencing this profound transformation of the Italian spirit, we
would be able to create the Italy of tomorrow, an Italy that would enable
us to forget for ever the wretchedness of our past.
                                                   Giovanni Amendola, La Voce, 28
December 1911

The word ITALY must prevail over the word LIBERTY

Electoral manifesto of the Futurists, 1913

Gabriele D’Annunzio’s conversion to socialism did not endure: his

instincts were far too aristocratic and aesthetic to allow any serious
involvement with bread and butter politics. Nor did his
parliamentary career last long: he was defeated in the elections of
June 1900. Thereafter he resumed a self-consciously Nietzschean
lifestyle, moving from one torrid sexual a air to another, ghting
duels and pouring out poetry and plays dealing with themes of
heroism, glory, myth, beauty, lust, violence, cruelty and death. He
had always been fascinated by decadence; but whereas in the past
much of his writing had focused on the struggle of the individual to
escape from spiritual decay and sterility, increasingly it was the
problem of national regeneration that concerned him. He wrote
patriotic odes celebrating Dante, the medieval city-states and
ancient Rome, and hailed the illustrious achievements of past
Italians in war and the arts as spurs to action and harbingers of the
country’s future greatness (‘Song of Augury for the Chosen Nation’).
And in ‘Song for the Mayday Holiday’ he appealed to Italy’s workers
– ‘rough spirits with vast heaving chests, sooty heroes whose smiling
teeth gleam white in darkened bronze’ – to ignore the sacrilegious
teachings of the ‘strident [i.e. socialist] tribune’ and recognize that
true strength and purpose came only from connecting with history,
hearing ‘the glorious song of the centuries’ and acknowledging the
‘fecund ancient Mother’ that bore them: ‘Let her sons feed at her
breast.’1
The concern of D’Annunzio with national revival coincided with a
new and aggressive response on the part of broad sections of the
middle classes to the challenge of socialism, the timidity of foreign
policy after Adua and (increasingly) Giolitti’s perceived lack of
idealism, and this enabled D’Annunzio to shed the remnants of his
image as an enfant terrible and emerge as the darling of the Italian
establishment. When Carducci died early in 1907 – a year after
being awarded the Nobel Prize for literature – D’Annunzio was
widely seen as the natural inheritor of his mantle, the bard of the
nation and its spiritual conscience. Indeed the university authorities
in Bologna hurried to o er him the Chair of Literature that Carducci
had occupied for so long and with such distinction. D’Annunzio
declined it – he had far too strong a sense of his own distinctiveness
to risk being in another’s shadow – but he was happy to
acknowledge his a nity with the former Mazzinian and scourge of
decadence and ‘Byzantium’, and in his ‘Ode on the Tomb of
Carducci’ he celebrated the old poet’s love of ancient Rome and all
its attendant dreams of conquest, power and glory.
 The work that set the seal on D’Annunzio’s position as Italy’s
uno cial poet laureate was his play La nave (The Ship), which was
rst performed in January 1908 in the Teatro Argentina in Rome, to
huge applause, in the presence of the king, Victor Emmanuel III.
After the performance D’Annunzio was called to the royal box to
receive the personal congratulations of the sovereign; three days
later he was guest of honour at a banquet attended by senior
politicians, including the Minister of Education. Set in Venice in AD
552, when the city was asserting its independence from the rule of
the Emperor in Byzantium, it tells the story of two brothers, Marco
and Sergio, who seize power by murdering the male members of the
leading imperial family (the four brothers are blinded and have
their tongues torn out). The beautiful Basiliola sets out to avenge
her brothers by stripping, driving Marco and Sergio wild with
desire, and inciting them to a duel, in which the jealous Marco kills
Sergio. To atone for his sin Marco decides to take the great ship that
the city is building, head o into the Mediterranean and perform
heroic deeds for the greater glory of Venice (‘Fit out the prow and
set sail for the world’, as the play’s most famous line declared). At
the last moment he realizes that he has been tricked by Basiliola and
announces that she will be nailed to the front of the vessel in place
of a gurehead as punishment. But she manages to struggle free
from her captors and throws herself into the ames of an altar.2
The huge success of La nave (it toured the country extensively,
and two lms (1912,1919) and an opera (1918) were made of it)
was due in part to the fact that it echoed the growing campaign for
the liberation of the so-called ‘unredeemed’ regions of Istria and the
South Tyrol (‘irredentism’), which had long been seen as rightfully
Italian, and for an aggressive policy in the Adriatic against Austria
(which dealt Italy a major strategic blow in the autumn of 1908 by
formally annexing Bosnia–Herzegovina). But the play also mirrored
the more general concern at the time with war as an antidote to
national decadence, a major theme in Italian patriotic thought in the
nineteenth century and one that was central to the doctrines of the
new Nationalist movement. Indeed the struggle against Byzantium
in La nave could be read as much as a moral metaphor (stemming
corruption) as a political one (opposing Austria). For D’Annunzio
the idea that war could save Italy from decline had already been
evident in his youthful writings in the 1880s, and became a near
constant refrain in his work from the beginning of the century,
culminating in 1915 in his passionate appeals for the country’s entry
into the First World War. In June 1914, a fortnight before the
assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo, he explained
to the French ambassador in St Petersburg just why he felt a con ict
was so necessary:

We live in a loathsome epoch, under the domination of the

multitude and the tyranny of the masses… The genius of the Latin
people has never fallen so low. It has completely lost all sense of
energy, pride and heroic virtues; it wallows in the mire and revels in
humiliation… A war, a great national war, is the last remaining
hope of salvation. It is only through war that peoples who have
been turned into brutes can halt their decline, as it o ers them a
stark choice: either glory or death… Consequently, this next war,
that you seem to fear, I invoke with all the passion of my soul.3

Nationalism was a powerful current of thought and feeling in much

of Europe from the turn of the century, but in Italy the increasingly
beleaguered position of the state meant that it came to enjoy
unusually wide resonance and appeal. Giolitti had tried to bolster
the institutions through a conventional liberal programme of
freedom and economic modernization; but as one leading
conservative deputy, Antonio Salandra (who saw himself as an heir
of Cavour and the traditions of the moderate right), noted sadly, a
conspicuous consequence of this had been to allow the subversives
to ‘blaspheme against the fatherland’ (‘We must blaspheme!’ the far
left shouted back at him),4 and lead the masses still further astray.
‘Nation’ and ‘fatherland’ needed to resonate with something more
powerful, more passionate (and less dangerous and counter-
productive) than ‘freedom’ if the regime that had been established
in 1860–61 was to survive. ‘The task is certainly di cult,’ Salandra
declared in the Chamber in 1913. ‘We cannot o er paradise in
heaven, like our Catholic colleagues, nor can we o er paradise on
earth, like our socialist colleagues… But we do have a ame, an
ideal: the ame of idealism at the heart of Italian liberalism is
patriotism – love of the fatherland.’5
The Nationalist movement emerged at the turn of the century as a
reaction against socialism and the perceived weakness of Italy’s
ruling classes, and from the outset it had a strongly intellectual
avour. Its leading exponents – young men such as Giuseppe
Prezzolini, Giovanni Papini and Enrico Corradini – were all highly
educated and in many cases nurtured erce literary ambitions:
Corradini, who was to become spokesman for the movement’s
dominant imperialist wing, trained as a priest before turning his
hand (unsuccessfully) in the 1890s to writing novels and plays with
n de siècle titles such as Virginity and After Death; and throughout
his career he continued to produce ction and drama alongside
political works and a vast amount of journalism. Many of the
Nationalists were inspired by a crusading idealism born of
sublimated Catholicism (‘I have always sensed in the depths of my
soul a religious and priestly mission,’ Giovanni Amendola confessed
in 1904),6 or else of a desire to reactivate the frustrated national
hopes of Mazzini – whose reputation underwent a remarkable
resurgence from the start of the century. As Giovanni Papini wrote
in 1906:

I feel – like a Mazzinian of the old days – that I can have a mission
in my country and that I must do everything to make Italy less deaf,
less blind and less craven… Rome has always had a universal,
dominating mission… [It] must become once again the centre of the
world and a new form of universal power take its seat there… The
Third Rome, the Rome of the ideal, must be the fruit of our will and
our work.7
From the outset the main vehicles for Nationalist ideas were
journals, in the main based in Florence: Il Marzocco, which began in
1896, Leonardo and Il Regno, founded in 1903, Hermes, 1904, and,
most in uentially, La Voce, set up in 1908 and edited initially by
Prezzolini and later, and until its demise in 1913, by Papini. They
never had very large circulations – at its peak in 1911 La Voce sold
around 5,000 copies – but their contributors included nearly all the
most talented younger writers and thinkers in the country; and they
came together on a common platform of dislike of the status quo
and a belief that a ‘party of intellectuals’ should be established to
save Italy from its current degenerate ruling class. They sought a
spiritual revolution: there was a widespread recognition, as
Prezzolini later recalled, that ‘everything was mediocre and
unworthy of the past and inferior to what was being done in the rest
of Europe and America’.8 But quite what the upshot of such a
revolution would be was unclear.
The Nationalists had a much sharper sense of what they disliked
than what they liked. They hated parliament: ‘Montecitorio is the
worst of Italy’s burdens; and the governmental bourgeoisie is the
most factitious aristocracy in existence because it is
useless…’9‘Those in power are the only people in the whole of Italy
with no following outside parliament. They live solely for
parliamentary life… without roots in the nation.’10 They loathed the
corruption of the capital: ‘Rome is the central leech of Italy… the
fundamental cause of all our economic, moral and intellectual
backwardness… Fish begin to stink from their heads: Italy, from
Rome.’11 They saw socialism as dangerous: they considered its
doctrines materialistic, devoid of higher spiritual values and sel sh;
and contrary to what Giolitti thought, they believed Italy was
economically and politically too fragile to bene t from the free
interplay of class forces. And they were critical of the provincialism
and complacency of much of Italian life, and of the deep aws
marring the national character: ‘the absence of discipline, the weak
conception of duty, the disregard for accuracy, the indi erence to
commitments, the limited or nonexistent sense of initiative, the
readiness to tolerate squalor’.12
 The solution, in broad terms, was greater moral energy, an energy
that would galvanize the middle classes around a programme of
national renewal and allay the threat of socialism. Giolitti’s
materialism and piecemeal reforms were too tepid; more passion
was needed to counter the scepticism and lethargy that had dogged
the Italian bourgeoisie for so long and left the country prey to those,
whether within or without, who possessed conviction and will.
Indeed an important strand running through Nationalism was a
celebration of aggression and a scorn of humanitarian and paci c
values (Corradini claimed that it was Italy’s spineless response to
Adua in 1896 that had converted him to Nationalism). For, in a
world of Darwinian struggle, how could any class or nation hope to
survive without a preparedness to ght? Giolitti’s policy of trying to
buy o the socialists with concessions was wholly misguided: ‘The
[bourgeoisie] must make the class struggle… into a reality,’ wrote
Prezzolini in 1904, ‘but with the intention speci cally of bringing it
to an end. When an enemy provokes you and, after provoking,
attacks, the best way to secure peace is to strike back and win.’13
The supreme embodiment of aggression was war, and though
Nationalism was initially divided over whether the principal focus
of its energies should be domestic or foreign policy, it was foreign
policy, and in particular colonial conquest in Africa, that emerged as
the victorious line in the years immediately before the First World
War. This was largely because war was seen as salutary. ‘War, and
war alone,’ wrote the prominent Nationalist (and distinguished
Dante scholar) Luigi Valli in 1911, echoing Turiello, ‘arouses and
rekindles the highest moral virtues and the purest ideal forces, and
in many cases can scorch in a purifying ame a people that grows
corrupt in peacetime and gets dragged into petty, narrow-minded
interests and wastes itself in wretched local or party disputes – as is
happening now with the Italian people.’14 And that same year, in an
article in La Voce, the young democrat Giovanni Amendola
dismissed the claim made by the British intellectual Norman Angell
that con icts had primarily economic causes, saying that wars were
attractive for moral reasons as, despite their horrors, they produced
‘an in nitely superior being to the cautious sybarite who nds the
best expression for his voluptuary view of life in the cradle of
peace’.15
War had another crucial function: to redirect the class struggle
outwards (Italy as a whole, according to the Nationalists, was a
‘proletarian nation’ competing for its rightful place in the world)
and heal the country’s internal fractures. ‘The ideal of Nationalism is
to create a collective national soul in place of the collective regional
souls we have today,’ declared the distinguished sociologist Scipio
Sighele.16 And what better mechanism could there be for generating
‘the awareness of belonging to a great collective organism’, as the
future fascist minister Luigi Federzoni put it, and teaching
individuals that their lives were as nothing compared to the superior
interests of the nation, than war? ‘From a national perspective,’ said
Corradini, ‘the individual has no more importance than a single
drop in the sea, than a falling leaf in a forest as vast as the surface of
the earth… The disregard for death is the supreme factor in life.’17
The Nationalists were a curious mixture of radical and
conservative. While they loathed many aspects of Italian political
life, parliament especially, and hankered after a great spiritual
revolution, their opposition to socialism, their concern with
discipline and order, and their belief in the need to subordinate the
individual to the interests of the nation drew them towards the right
– towards the monarchy, the army, the Church, big business and
landowners. Indeed by the time the rst Nationalist Congress
convened in Florence in December 1910 to bring together the
various currents of the movement, launch the Italian Nationalist
Association and agree a common programme, sympathy for
Nationalism had spread far beyond the ranks of middle-class
intellectuals who had made up most of the early support. A major
downturn in the economy from 1908 had caused large sections of
the propertied classes, already sceptical about Giolitti’s policies, to
grow increasingly angry at the government’s failure to deal with
socialism: pro t margins were now being rapidly eroded as strikes
pushed up the costs of labour. A mood of desperation was beginning
to overtake the country. ‘Italy is now becoming Nationalist,’ Vilfredo
Pareto told Sorel early in 1911. ‘The only talk is of a future war… I
am afraid it will all end badly.’18
LIBYA

Italy’s sudden invasion of Libya in the autumn of 1911 was greeted

with an enormous outpouring of excitement. The Nationalists were
exultant: for months they had been calling for a war in north Africa
from the columns of their newspaper, L’Idea Nazionale – launched
on 1 March, the anniversary of the defeat at Adua and the date
when the ancient Romans had traditionally mustered their armies.
Their fear, and the fear of many, the prime minister, Giolitti,
included, was that France might have stepped in rst; and Italy
could not a ord a repeat of the Tunisian asco of 1881, particularly
as its claim to Libya had long been recognized as strategically
paramount – and historically: had it not been an important province
of the Roman Empire? The Catholic press was enthusiastic: the
Church had large nancial holdings in Libya, and the invasion was
soon being heralded as a new crusade against the in del. Even some
right-wing socialists backed the initiative on the grounds that it
might assuage the land hunger of the peasants. D’Annunzio dashed
o a series of celebratory odes in the Corriere della Sera, while a few
weeks after the start of the campaign another leading poet, Giovanni
Pascoli, delivered a speech that quickly became a classic text of
Italian patriotism:

The great proletarian nation has stirred… Just fty years after its
return to life, Italy, the great martyr among nations, has done its
duty and contributed to the advancement and civilization of the
peoples, and asserted its right not to be penned in and su ocated in
its own waters… Oh fty years of miracle! What a transformation
there has been!… Whoever wishes to know what [Italy] is now,
behold its army and its navy… Land, sea and sky, mountains and
plains, peninsula and islands are perfectly fused. The fair-skinned
solemn Alpine soldier ghts beside the slim dark Sicilian, the tall
Lombard grenadier rubs shoulders with the short lean Sardinian
fusilier… Run your eye over the lists of the glorious dead, and
wounded – who rejoice in their radiant wounds: you will nd
yourself remembering and revising the geography of what was, but
a short time ago, just a geographical expression… Oh, you blessed
men who have died for the fatherland!… Fifty years ago Italy was
made. On the sacred ftieth anniversary… you have proved that
Italians too have been made.19
Even liberals who had been strongly opposed to the Nationalist
calls for war, such as the distinguished expert on the problems of
the south Giustino Fortunato, were carried along on the tide of
patriotism. For many years Fortunato had argued that Italy should
use its limited resources to improve the social and economic
conditions of the peasants and not waste them on extravagant
foreign-policy gestures; but once the invasion had been launched he
started to change his tune. As he told Pasquale Villari in December
1911:

I was fearful for the Tripoli expedition and continue to be fearful.

But I have one great, one immeasurable, consolation. For the rst
time since Italy was created amid the sea and beneath the sky, the
southern peasants (and I know them well and they are not easily
aroused to enthusiasm) are nally conscious of a duty to ght for a
fatherland, their fatherland, and that this has a name: Italy. Yes,
indeed, half a century of unity has not been wasted!20

What a transformation from the late 1880s, he felt, when Crispi had
brought the country to the brink of war and the peasant reservists
he had talked to had been totally indi erent: ‘Italy is Piedmont, we
are Naples,’ they had told him, ‘and if the French come down here,
it will be much the same. At most… you and other landowners will
change.’21

The rhetoric and euphoria at home were in stark contrast to the

reality on the ground in Libya. The initial expeditionary force of
some 34,000 men succeeded in taking the main towns of Tripoli,
Benghazi, Homs and Tobruk in the rst two weeks of October
without encountering much resistance from the Turkish garrisons.
But the assumption that the Arab population would welcome the
Italians as liberators proved a serious miscalculation. At dawn on 23
October some 10,000 well-armed Arabs and Turks launched a
savage attack on the Italian lines in the oasis of Sciara Sciat near
Tripoli, killing over 500. Corpses were nailed to palm trees, eyes
sewn up and genitals cut o – apparently in retaliation for sexual
o ences committed against local women.22 The Italian response was
extreme: several thousand Arabs were massacred indiscriminately
and thousands more sent o to penal islands. Gallows were set up in
the main squares, and public hangings conducted as a warning to
the ‘rebels’.
It was an inauspicious start; and the situation scarcely improved.
The Italian army found it hard to advance inland beyond the coast,
and by the time a peace treaty with Turkey was signed in October
1912, only about 10 per cent of the country had been secured – and
this despite the expeditionary force being increased to 100,000 men.
It was to be another twenty years before the colony was nally
brought under control, at the cost of around 100,000 Libyan lives –
about an eighth of the entire population. The tactics employed
against the resistance, particularly in the eastern territory of
Cyrenaica, were extreme, and in December 1913 Filippo Turati felt
obliged to ask in the Chamber whether the claims of ‘a great
civilizing mission’ in Libya were justi ed given the frequent
recourse to exemplary executions (with Italian soldiers being paid to
act as hangmen when locals refused): ‘I ask myself… if the
Government is aware that a certain Cesare Beccaria was born in
Italy?’ However, there were many who were prepared to argue that
Italy’s problems in Libya were on the contrary due to insu cient
ruthlessness – to what a leading Nationalist volunteer who had
taken part in the battle at Sciara Sciat and the ensuing bloody
reprisals condemned as liberal ‘sentimentalism’, that ‘characteristic
enervating illness of our race’.23
 One particularly strong critic of the government’s handling of the
war was the well-known writer Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who
travelled to Libya as a newspaper correspondent and denounced
what he called the ‘stupid colonial humanitarianism’ that was
hampering the military operations.24 Marinetti was the leading
gure of the movement known as Futurism, which had been
launched in 1909 with a manifesto calling for a new artistic and
cultural value system based on the celebration of energy, danger,
courage, aggression, speed, subversion and modernity (‘a roaring car
that seems as if it is mounted on a machine gun is more beautiful
than the Victory of Samothrace’). Among its members were some of
the most talented artists of the day, including Umberto Boccioni,
Mario Sironi, Giacomo Balla and Carlo Carrà. Article nine of the
manifesto had hailed the cathartic power of violence: ‘We want to
glorify war – the only source of hygiene in the world – militarism,
patriotism, the destructive act.’25
Such views were unlikely to resonate with the rank and le
peasant conscripts who were sent to Libya – except to fuel their
ignorance and their fear and encourage them to treat the local
inhabitants brutally (‘the Arabs are like animals – killing one of
them is just like killing a snake’).26 Some at least of the soldiers
appear to have set o for Africa with optimism, believing that they
would be welcomed as liberators and discover a ‘second America’ to
which they might subsequently emigrate.27 Instead they found a
barren land and an indigenous population that was united against
them:

[E]ighteen months in tents in the desert… We thought: ‘Why should

so many people be killed to come and get some sand, four palms
and a few lemons?’… There was nothing, nothing, only sand
blowing around and lling in the holes, and so many dying from
illness or the ghting… and forty- ve or fty degrees of burning
heat from the ghibli. We were always thirsty, and all we ever wanted
was to drink. And the Moors hated us…28
 But the idea that a successful war would be the answer to Italy’s
problems and purge centuries of weakness and division continued to
haunt even sober-minded intellectuals like Giustino Fortunato. In
November 1912 Fortunato wrote to his friend Gaetano Salvemini of
how the campaign in Libya had laid bare Italy’s continuing moral
shortcomings and the need still for Italians to demonstrate they
were worthy of nationhood:

I have come to the rm conclusion that only when Italy has secured
a virile victory of its people over an enemy – no matter who… only
then will it be able to say that it has avenged a millennium and a
half of shameful history and be able to face the future with
con dence. For the rst time in my life I have a vision of the
sanctity of war… Ever since the fall of the Roman Empire we have
never displayed any courage as a people, have never been able to
repel a single one of the hundred invaders, have never shown a
willingness to die rather than ee. Between the Five Days of Milan
[in 1848] and Porta Pia [in 1870] no more than 6,000 soldiers and
volunteers gave their lives… And do not imagine for a moment that
if France had not helped us in 1859 we would one day have
managed to nd ‘ourselves’. God! Even Greece was able to act on its
own in 1823. We, never. This, for Christ’s sake, is what the history
teachers ought to be explaining in our schools…29
THE FAILURE OF GIOLITTI’S PROGRAMME

The invasion of Libya provided a dramatic coda to the celebrations

that had taken place in the spring and summer of 1911 to mark the
ftieth anniversary of Italian unity. In Turin a huge International
Industrial Fair had been staged to underscore the bonds of
brotherhood and peace that work and economic progress could
bring, with thirty participating countries and a string of grandiose
pavilions along the banks of the Po, opened by the king in April in a
newly constructed stadium with 70,000 spectators and a lavish
display by 6,000 children. In Rome the highpoint of the festivities
had been the inauguration of the monument to Victor Emmanuel II,
the Vittoriano, at the beginning of June, with the liberal press
heralding the enormous in ux of crowds as evidence of the
solidarity of the people with both the nation and the dynasty. Other
events in the capital had included an exhibition showcasing the
country’s regional artistic traditions, the opening of a huge
archaeological park and the staging of Italy’s rst beauty contest,
with 302 girls wearing modern ‘Italian’ clothes (‘not Parisian or
London fashions, but our own costumes…’) competing for the title
‘Queen of Rome’.30
But behind the patriotic rhetoric and the spectacle it was di cult
in 1911 for most observers to ignore the fractured reality. The
Church formally boycotted the celebrations while the socialists
dismissed the idea of political unity as meaningless (‘North and
south are two nations; and one, the most wretched, is eeing across
the seas. City and countryside are two nations… A single fatherland
does not exist’).31 Moreover the celebrations themselves highlighted
the depth of regional tensions and divisions and, as in the case of
the ‘national’ art show in Rome, struggled to see ‘Italy’ other than in
terms of an aggregate of the discrete achievements of its parts; and
while some argued that diversity was positive and to be acclaimed,
and that any attempt to force everyone ‘into a bed of Procrustes’
would be counterproductive,32 many continued to feel that such
laissez-faire empiricism was dangerous and that a far more ethical
approach was needed. The eminent philosopher Benedetto Croce
was deeply troubled by what he saw as the declining spirit of ‘social
unity’ in Italy and the increase in corrosive, self-interested impulses
(‘bad individualism’), and he longed for terms like ‘king’,
‘fatherland’ and ‘nation’ to be injected with emotional, unifying
power.33
Giolitti hoped that success in Libya would bolster his position in
the country: win over the Nationalists, draw the moderate Catholics
into the institutional fold, and reinforce his alliance with the
reformist socialists, leaving the revolutionaries isolated. This was
especially important as he was planning a major extension of the
su rage: like his old adversary Crispi more than twenty years
before, he wanted to broaden the foundations of the state while
simultaneously trusting to a vigorous foreign policy to minimize the
danger from the subversives by ‘nationalizing’ the electorate. But it
all went badly wrong. The Nationalists claimed credit for having
pushed the government into invading Libya, increased their
popularity and standing, and launched their own political party; and
far from siding with Giolitti they denounced him for his lax
prosecution of the war and became more dismissive than ever of
liberal parliamentary democracy and its failure to impart energy
and idealism (except under Crispi), oppose socialism robustly and
elevate collective over individual rights. And many Catholics
agreed: liberalism was certainly better than socialism, but
Nationalism seemed better still.
But the biggest disappointment came with the socialists. Giolitti
had o ered Turati and his parliamentary colleagues a place in his
new administration in March 1911 – they had refused, but they had
been sorely tempted. Libya dashed hopes of any further progress,
in aming rank and le socialist feeling against the government’s
‘militarism’ and precipitating a general strike. The reformist
leadership was isolated. At the party congress in Reggio Emilia in
July 1912 the revolutionaries won control, and Bonomi, Bissolati
and a number of other deputies were expelled for supporting the
war (or more precisely for having gone to the Quirinal in March to
congratulate the king on surviving an assassination attempt). They
set up the Italian Reformist Socialist Party, but it had no signi cant
support. Turati and a number of other moderates remained in the
old party, but they were at the mercy of the extremists, who
occupied the key posts. Among the revolutionaries who were now
catapulted to prominence was Mussolini, from December the editor
of the main party newspaper, Avanti!
Italy was profoundly split. In the elections of 1913 – the rst to
be held under a new law that granted the vote to nearly every adult
male (increasing the electorate from 3 million to 8.5 million) – the
‘constitutional’ parties secured just 56.7 per cent of the poll, with
the socialists, radicals, Catholics and Nationalists all gaining
signi cantly. To make matters worse, it was claimed after the
elections by the head of Catholic Action’s Electoral Union that 228
liberal deputies had owed their seats to support from the Church in
return for signing up to a seven-point agreement on such issues as
religious education and divorce. Giolitti strenuously denied that any
agreement had existed, but the rm suspicion remained, and in the
spring of 1914 his government fell after the anti-clerical radicals
withdrew their support. Antonio Salandra took over at the head of a
conservative administration, hoping to revive the fortunes of
liberalism through ‘exaltation of the fatherland’ and a celebration of
those feelings of ‘national solidarity’ that had recently been
demonstrated by the ‘o cers and soldiers – members of the
aristocracy and middle classes, workers and peasants’ – who, ‘had
spilled their blood together on the elds of Libya’.34(Understandably
he did not say ‘deserts’.)
How little sense of ‘national solidarity’ there was became
terrifyingly apparent early in June, when three young demonstrators
were shot dead by the police in Ancona and the Socialist Party
proclaimed a general strike. Anarchists, republicans and syndicalists
joined in, and for a week much of northern and central Italy was in
a state of turmoil. Public buildings were burned, barricades erected,
tax registers destroyed, telegraph wires cut, trees of liberty planted,
railway stations seized and churches ransacked. Hundreds of
workers were killed and wounded in pitched battles, and in many
places vigilante gangs were set up to protect property and save the
country from what seemed an imminent revolution. In Milan
Mussolini harangued vast crowds, urging them to take to the streets,
and in an incident in Piazza Duomo he was struck to the ground and
nearly trampled to death. The trade unions eventually called o the
strike – much to the irritation of the revolutionaries – and order was
restored. But ‘Red Week’ had underlined clearly just how far
removed Italy was from Salandra’s dream of national cohesion. And
the solution seemed no less elusive than it had been to the patriots
of the Risorgimento nearly a century before. ‘The remedy,’ Salandra
confessed gloomily, ‘will be slow; it will be the work of many
governments and perhaps of many generations… It is a question of
political education, of substituting a new moral order for the old
one, whose sanctions are in many places crumbling.’35
INTERVENTION

Italy did not need to enter the First World War. Though it was still
formally allied to Austria and Germany under the Triple Alliance,
rst signed in 1882, the fact that Austria failed to consult Italy
before declaring war on Serbia at the end of July meant that Italy’s
treaty obligations technically did not apply. Thus, as Europe
mobilized its armies and slipped towards Armageddon in August,
Italy announced its neutrality. And many thought that it should
remain neutral, including Giolitti and a majority of deputies in the
Chamber. They believed that Italy was economically too fragile to
sustain a major con ict, particularly so soon after the invasion of
Libya; and Giolitti suggested that the country could in fact gain ‘a
great deal’ by bargaining with both sides to stay out of the war. But
Salandra and the Foreign Minister, Sidney Sonnino, negotiated in
total secrecy with the British and French governments on the one
hand and Austria and Germany on the other, in the spirit of what
Salandra referred to as ‘sacred egoism’, to see what price Italy could
secure for intervention. Britain and France made the most attractive
o er, and on 26 April 1915 the Treaty of London was signed,
pledging the South Tyrol, Trentino, Istria, Trieste and much of
Dalmatia to Italy.
When rumours of what had been agreed began to leak out at the
beginning of May pandemonium erupted. Parliament was closed,
but more than 300 deputies went to the hotel where Giolitti was
staying and left their visiting cards to signal their support for
neutrality. Realizing he lacked a majority, Salandra resigned. But
Giolitti found it impossible to form a new government: to reject the
Treaty of London and betray the British and French after having
repudiated the Triple Alliance and angered the Austrians and
Germans would have been too humiliating and might have cost the
king his throne. Meanwhile supporters of war took to the streets in
their tens of thousands, led by Nationalists, Futurists, syndicalists
and dissident socialists. Among the latter was Mussolini, who the
previous autumn had decided that the best way of bringing about a
revolution would be to plunge the country into the maelstrom of a
great con ict: he had been dramatically expelled from the party for
his renegade views.
The crowds calling for intervention were red as much by anger
towards Giolitti and the neutralists as by enthusiasm for war.
Indeed, in a speech in Rome on 14 May, D’Annunzio denounced
them as traitors and incited his audience to kill them (‘should blood
ow, that blood would be as blessed as any shed in the trenches’).36
And the anger of the demonstrators was also directed generally
towards parliament and an entire political system that was felt to
have betrayed the hopes of the Risorgimento. As an article in the
leading Nationalist newspaper explained on 15 May:

Parliament is Giolitti; Giolitti is parliament: the binomial of our

shame. This is the old Italy. The old Italy that is unaware of the
new, the true, the holy Italy that is rising again in history – and the
future… The struggle is mortal. Either parliament will destroy the
nation and over her trembling sacred body resume its profession of
procurer, and prostitute her once again to the foreigner, or the
nation will overturn parliament, destroy the barrators’ benches and
purify with iron and re the boudoirs of the pimps…37
Against this menacing and unruly backdrop the king reinstated
Salandra as prime minister. Giolitti admitted defeat and left Rome.
His former allies quickly trimmed their sails to the prevailing wind,
and on 20 May the Chamber granted full emergency powers to the
government by a majority of 407 to 74. The Socialist Party voted
against, and became the only European party of the far left, outside
Russia, not to lend its support to the con ict. On 24 May, Italy
declared war on Austria; and a week later, from the heights of the
Capitol, where the Romans had once celebrated their military
triumphs, Salandra set out the country’s goals, reminding Italians
that only by ‘dissolving [their] internal discords’ in ‘marvellous
moral unity’ would the nation nd the strength to secure victory
and complete the work of the Risorgimento:

Since the Fates have assigned to our generation the tremendous and
sublime task of realizing the ideal of a great Italy that the heroes of
the Risorgimento were not able to see nished, we accept this task
with undaunted spirit, ready to give ourselves totally to the
Fatherland, with all that we are and all that we have.38

With the fractures in the moral fabric of the nation for the moment
concealed beneath a torrent of patriotic enthusiasm, Italy’s forces
advanced into the Alpine valleys along the borders with Austria in
the vague expectation of some regenerative ‘baptism of blood’.
20

The Great War, 1915–18

Remember the school, the church tower, the town hall

Every corner that contains a living memory
Of gentle joy, of grief and honest toil.
Fair Italy, from her mountains to the sea,
Can bring all this to your mind.
(Mothers, children, smiles, every memory:
This is what the Fatherland is, this is what it means.)

Oh, said the [soldier], now I understand:

Fatherland and Home are the same thing…

‘Geogra a’, poem in the trench newspaper

San Marco, 24 May 1918

On the road to Monte Pasubio

Bom borombom
A long column climbs slowly
Bom borombom
Those who won’t return are marching
Those who will stay up there to die…

On the road to Monte Pasubio

Bom borombom
There’s nothing left but a cross
Bom borombom
No voice can be heard any more
Except the wind that kisses the owers
 ‘Monte Pasubio’,

song of the First World War

DEFEAT AT CAPORETTO

The rst signs of an imminent attack came at two in the morning of

24 October 1917, when the Austrian artillery opened re along a
fteen-mile stretch of the Isonzo front, in the mountains above the
small town of Caporetto (present-day Kobarid, in Slovenia). Ever
since Italy entered the war the Chief of General Sta , Luigi Cadorna,
had concentrated his operations along the valley of the Isonzo, a
river that wound its way through gorges and thickly wooded valleys
southwards from the Julian Alps to the Gulf of Trieste. Italy’s
western front, in the Trentino, was too inhospitable and too well
defended to allow for any serious o ensives. Cadorna was an old-
fashioned Piedmontese general of forbidding and authoritarian
character and limited imagination who regarded courage and
infantry assaults as the key to success, and between June 1915 and
September 1917 he had launched eleven battles across the Isonzo,
taking the town of Gorizia and a few kilometres of Austrian
territory, but not achieving the breakthrough that would have
allowed him to push towards Vienna and Budapest. The cost of
these battles had been enormous: around a million killed and
wounded.1
There had been plenty of warnings that something major was
afoot. Reports from aerial reconnaissance and deserters had
indicated the arrival of German troops in the Isonzo sector, but the
precise scale of the build-up had apparently not been clear.
Furthermore the general in command of Italy’s eastern front, Luigi
Capello, was a man of very di erent character and background to
Cadorna – a genial middle-class Freemason, where the other was a
reserved Catholic aristocrat – and though the two men had a
reasonable working relationship, Capello’s ambition to succeed
Cadorna as Chief of General Sta had led him almost instinctively to
think primarily in terms of attack and a spectacular success (such as
he had achieved the previous summer in capturing Gorizia). As a
result Italy’s defences on the Isonzo, especially behind Caporetto,
were inadequate. And to compound the problems, Cadorna had
come to the conclusion at the beginning of October that the
campaigning season was over and had gone on leave for three
weeks, while Capello was seriously ill and unable to issue orders.2
The artillery bombardment was interspersed with gas attacks and
culminated in thirty minutes of heavy-mortar re; and by dawn on
24 October, when the Austrian and German troops started pouring
forward through the rain and fog, the Italians had su ered serious
casualties and their communications were badly disrupted. The
Austrians and Germans met with little resistance and quickly broke
through the lines of the 4th and 27th Army Corps, wheeling right
into the valley towards Caporetto, and encircling several divisions.
By evening of the rst day some 15,000 prisoners had been taken
and a huge breach opened in the Italian front, with additional
breaches appearing to the north and south. Bemused and war-weary
soldiers everywhere gave themselves up with little or no ght. One
young German o cer with a distinguished career ahead of him,
Erwin Rommel, recalled coming across 1,500 men of the Salerno
Brigade who, when challenged to surrender, threw down their
weapons and rushed towards him: ‘In an instant I was surrounded
and hoisted on Italian soldiers. “Evviva Germania!” sounded from a
thousand throats. An Italian o cer who hesitated to surrender was
shot down by his own troops.’3 The failure of the 27th Army to put
up e ective resistance was particularly noteworthy, and its
commander, Pietro Badoglio, later faced strong criticism from the
commission looking into the disaster. But Badoglio was well
connected, and the thirteen pages dealing with his part in the rout
were omitted from the nal published report. He went on to become
Chief of General Sta .4
Cadorna initially thought that his forces could fall back onto the
line of the Tagliamento river, but the speed with which the
Austrians and Germans pushed westward and the near total
breakdown of the Italian command structures made this look
increasingly unlikely. By the beginning of November many divisions
were in a state of complete disintegration: according to o cial
gures, of the million or so men that had comprised the Isonzo
army, 10,000 were killed during the Caporetto disaster, 30,000
wounded and 300,000 taken prisoner, while a further 400,000
simply vanished – in most cases, it would seem, back to their homes
in the countryside (a majority of the front-line troops were
peasants). It was clear that the only possible line of defence was
along the Piave, the broad river that ran from the Dolomites, above
Belluno, to the east end of the Venetian lagoon, and on 9 November,
the same day as General Armando Diaz replaced Cadorna as Chief of
General Sta , the last remaining bridges were blown up and the
Austrian and German advance brought to a halt. Sti ened by the
arrival of French and British divisions and a new draft of seventeen-
year-olds, the Italian army was able to regroup and make a
successful stand. But for a year a large swathe of territory in the
north-east of Italy remained under the occupation of the Austrians.

The dissolving army presented a harrowing spectacle. Everywhere

muddy roads were choked with dishevelled, sometimes barefooted,
soldiers who had thrown away their ri es as if the war were
nished, moving in a slow stream together with the hordes of
refugees – men, women and children, an estimated 600,000 – who
had decided to ee their homes ahead of the advancing enemy,
taking with them what possessions they could in carts and carriages.
Broken vehicles, discarded matériel of every description, and dead
horses, their anks routinely darkened with blood where the esh
had been cut away with a knife or bayonet for food, littered the
waysides. Men too exhausted, too sick, or too drunk to move lay on
the ground. Rivers and streams, swollen with the autumn rains,
were clogged with corpses and debris. And most disturbing,
perhaps, was the sight of thousands of wounded and shell-shocked
troops who had escaped terror-stricken from the military hospitals,
‘wrapped in sheets, blankets and bandages, many half naked,
screaming, gesturing in agony… unleashed furies, wild beasts’.5
There was disorder and in places an almost bacchanalian spirit.
Indeed one observer, the writer Curzio Malaparte, felt that the
events of these days constituted, in retrospect at least, an Italian
version of the Russian revolution (which took place at almost
exactly the same time), with the masses rebelling anarchically (and
in his view justly) against the ‘political Italy’ of bourgeois armchair
patriots who had sent them to su er and die for the fatherland; and
he depicted the soldiers sweeping across the plains of the Veneto,
like apocalyptic gures out of a painting by Hieronymus Bosch,
looting, burning, drinking and raping, and bearing aloft in triumph
prostitutes from the army brothels, ‘naked and indecent’: ‘And often
they hoisted on their shoulders, cheering, along with the prostitutes,
some fat, pot-bellied senior o cer – Bacchus and Ariadne – while
the orgy of the “sans-fusils” dissolved into brawls and riots, cries of
lust and lewd songs.’6 But in reality such episodes were rare. The
prevailing mood among the retreating soldiers was much more
sober, a feeling of resignation in the face of a terrible disaster that
lay beyond their control – as if it had been an earthquake or a
landslide – and a sense of relief at leaving behind an alien and
senseless world, where men died in their tens of thousands for a few
hectares of stony ground.
Another radical writer (who, like Malaparte, was to become an
enthusiastic supporter of fascism) was a Futurist, Ardengo So ci.
He too served on the Isonzo front and witnessed at rst hand the
dissolution of the army, but rather than attribute it to a revolt of the
unruly peasant masses, thirsting for justice and revenge, he saw it as
a consequence of the natural fatalism of a people that had been let
down by the state – a state that had failed to make them
comprehend why they should be taken away from their tranquil,
familiar rural lives, and made to endure such inhuman conditions:

What most struck me… was the calm of many of the soldiers…
Some lay stretched out in the sun, on their backs, their arms folded
beneath their heads, their mouths open, or else on their fronts, face
down in the grass, enjoying the deep sleep of adolescents… Others
were in their shirtsleeves, hanging jackets out on the trees to dry…
or wandering here and there examining carefully the nature of the
crops and the soil… Are these beaten men, deserters, rebels,
traitors? Are they – let us not mince words – cowards? No… They
are victims. They are uncomprehending. They are deceived. And the
evil does not lie in them. We are the ower, now wilting, of a plant
whose roots are in miserable soil. The evil is in the roots. The evil is
down there beneath us: in the ignominy of those [in Rome] who
divide, sow discord, lie and haggle. Of those who abandon. The evil
is everywhere; but not here. Here there is only su ering. This is not
the way of shame. This is the way of the cross.7
There had been clear signs in the months before Caporetto that
the morale of the 2.5 million men at the front and of the civilian
population as a whole was declining. In the early stages of the war
Giustino Fortunato had been deeply impressed by the stoicism and
commitment displayed by the peasants in his town of Rionero in
Basilicata (‘The calm, the good will, the dignity of all classes, and
the peasantry especially, in this, the rst great unitary war that Italy
has fought, is astonishing, truly astonishing. Yes, Italy is made!’),8
but from the end of 1916 he had grown increasingly alarmed at the
number of deserters and at the mounting anger of the local people.
By the summer of 1917 the situation seemed desperate. The women
were incandescent with fury (like ‘harpies’) at the fate of their
husbands and sons; deserters were roaming everywhere in the
countryside; and woodland and forests were being set on re. Much
of the anger was directed towards landowners like himself (and it
pained him deeply: ‘until last year I was much loved’), who were
accused of conspiring with the government to prolong the con ict
and deliberately massacre the peasants; and he himself was the
victim of a violent assault in August. He warned his friend Salandra
that an insurrection, or worse, brigandage, was about to erupt.9
 A number of factors contributed to the declining morale, but the
abnormally harsh treatment of the conscripts was certainly one of
the most important. The bitterly low temperatures on the Alpine
front made nutrition of paramount importance; but rations, already
far from generous in the rst year of the war, were cut sharply at
the end of 1916, and average consumption in the winter of 1916–17
was less than 3,000 calories a day compared to nearly 4,000 the
previous winter. Pay was derisory – half a lira a day for an
infantryman and a similar sum for his family (scant compensation
for the loss in many cases of the principal breadwinner) – and leave
was restricted to a single period of fteen days in the year, a source
of particular resentment to the peasants as it gave them insu cient
time to attend to sowing and harvesting.10 Very little consideration
was given to entertainment (apart from improvised army brothels).
There were no war newspapers and troops were banned from
entering cinemas or bars in the so-called war zones, even when on
leave. The only leisure initiative of note was that of a Catholic
priest, Giovanni Minozzi, who founded the ‘Soldiers’ Homes’ –
usually a rather spartan building behind the lines, with a piano,
some books and possibly a lm projector. About 250 had been set
up by October 1917. However, the military authorities regarded
them with considerable indi erence and even with suspicion.11
Behind the callous attitude of the military authorities towards the
rank and le lay a good deal of mistrust, a belief that most of the
conscripts (and only 8,000 of the 5.5 million Italians who were
mobilized down to 1918 were volunteers) lacked the requisite
patriotism and discipline to be treated other than with an iron rod.
Punishments were accordingly severe, even by contemporary
standards. Around 400,000 o cers and men were arraigned before
military tribunals in the course of the war, and over a quarter of
these were convicted and punished; 4,028 received death sentences
(mostly in absentia), of which 750 were carried out.12 There was also
regular use of random summary executions and decimations
(permitted under the military penal code), though exactly how
many is unclear. The documentary evidence suggests between 100
and 200 instances, though the real gure was certainly much higher
as o cers were understandably reluctant to report them. With
frustration growing in the trenches in 1916–17 and the number of
desertions mounting, the signs are that nervous commanders
became increasingly dependent on terror to maintain order.13
Indicative of the brutal atmosphere in the trenches was an
episode recalled by a peasant from the province of Cuneo,
Alessandro Scotti, which took place on Monte Pasubio, a key
strategic point high on the Trentino front to the south-east of
Rovereto, on 9 October 1916. The commanding general had been
informed that a company of alpini (Alpine troops) in the ‘Monte
Berico’ battalion had shouted ‘Long live the fog!’ before they were
due to go into action, hoping that bad weather would force a delay
in the attack. The general immediately came down to the trenches
and ordered the ninety alpini to be bound and shot. While the ring
squad was being assembled military chaplains intervened (the 2,400
Catholic priests who served as chaplains in the war earned much
gratitude from the troops for their humanity), and after fteen
minutes of parleying the order was changed to decimation, and
every tenth man told to step forward. The chaplains intervened
again; and once more the general was induced to back down: ‘Take
Pasubio for me and you will all be deemed absolved,’ he declared.
‘Otherwise I will proceed with the executions after the assault.’
Virtually the entire company was wiped out in the ensuing battle.
Scotti managed to reach the top of the Groviglio peak where he lay
down under a rhododendron bush and slept, concealing his head
beneath a corpse; and when darkness came, he and four other
surviving alpini returned to the Italian lines. He was awarded a
bronze medal (‘because I had done my duty in full’) and went on to
survive the war and become a teacher.14
The lack of faith in the motivation of the troops was one
important reason why the authorities refused, in contrast to other
countries, to provide aid to those who had been captured. There was
a fear that if the soldiers heard that conditions in prisoner-of-war
camps were tolerable, they would surrender too easily. The
government thus did all it could to foster the idea that
imprisonment was shameful and hampered relief e orts, and as a
result the 600,000 Italians who ended up interned in Austria and
Germany were forced to make do with rations that frequently fell
below 1,000 calories a day. Many died of hunger and hunger-related
illnesses – around 100,000 ( ve times the gure for French
prisoners, who, like the British, were in regular receipt of food
parcels).15 Those who survived were understandably resentful. One,
Angelo Bronzini, wrote with bitter sarcasm after the war of how the
‘government of our fatherland’ had ‘completely abandoned’ him and
the other Italians in the camp, forbidding access to essential supplies
and hampering communication with families (only postcards were
permitted).16 Another, a peasant from Treviso, recalled how he used
to look enviously at the French prisoners, ‘whose government passed
them bread and tins of meat every week, while we went around
begging with our bowls in our hands’.17
In these circumstances it is not surprising that most rank and le
soldiers seem to have remained largely untouched by the patriotic
language and sentiment that continued to punctuate the rhetoric of
pro-war intellectuals and politicians. Surviving letters of conscripts
from the front, some of them probably written with the help of
junior o cers or chaplains, periodically contain phrases such as
‘barbarian enemy’, ‘beautiful Italy’, ‘defence of the fatherland’ and
‘unredeemed lands’ (terre irredente – rarely spelled correctly),
suggesting that o cial propaganda had, if nothing else, supplied the
conceptual tools with which to make a degree of sense of the
su ering and carnage. But such formulae usually sound a discordant
note in correspondence whose dominant themes are not surprisingly
fear of death, horror at the killing, pain at separation from loved
ones, anguish at having lost all that is familiar and comforting
(‘There are not even the chimes of bells here, just the continual roar
of cannons that do not give us a minute of peace’),18 and a longing
to return home at the earliest possible opportunity.
 There is little evidence that the peasant troops were ideologically
motivated. The attitude of many is probably well summed up by a
Piedmontese soldier who recalled: ‘We understood nothing. We only
tried not to die. We did not care about killing Austrians, but we had
to kill them because if they came forward they killed you.’19 Nor
was there much identi cation with the state and its institutions: the
king, parliament, the army. Such concepts, indeed, are almost
entirely absent from letters. As for Italia and la patria, these seemed
to be lacking in ‘national’ content and certainly had none of the
literary and historical baggage with which the educated middle
classes had often invested them. The writer Mario Mariani spoke of
how there were two kinds of soldiers in his platoon, ‘those for
whom the fatherland was their town or at most their province – the
consequence of ten centuries of enslavement – and those for whom
the fatherland was the world – the consequence of fty years of
evangelical internationalist preaching’.20 And for the majority the
experience of the trenches may well have reinforced the feeling that
abstractions in the end did not count for much and that only one
patria really mattered. When an elderly alpino who had taken part in
the bloody campaigns on Monte Ortigara on the Trentino front was
asked many years after the war what patria he had been ghting for,
he banged his st angrily on the table and said: ‘Christ! My
fatherland was leave, family, home.’21

For many intellectuals abstractions did matter, and the sight of the
army along the Isonzo dissolving at Caporetto was profoundly
distressing. The distinguished senator Leopoldo Franchetti was so
overwhelmed with grief that he shot himself. It had been widely
hoped that the war would serve to bind the masses to the state and
give the country the moral unity that it had hitherto lacked.
Benedetto Croce wrote in 1916 of how great nations were
characterized by a willingness of their citizens to die ‘for an ideal’;
and he quoted with approval the lines of the French poet Lamartine:
‘A large people without a soul is just a vast crowd… / Sparta lived
for three hundred years on one day of heroism.’22 And only a month
before Caporetto, Croce spoke enthusiastically of how Cadorna’s
army was eradicating ‘a stain fteen centuries old’ by demonstrating
that Italians had nally achieved ‘national and political cohesion’.23
Men and women, even ‘street gossips and urchins’, from every
corner of the land, now felt ‘truly one’, he said; and what
particularly grati ed him was a sense that the growing unity was
part of an upward curve of constant moral progress: ‘Every step has
been a step forward, every mistake a lesson. 1848 was better than
1821,1859 than 1848,1915 than 1866; and accordingly this war will
not only be an improvement on the past, but will also be an
experiment that will provide us with a clearer picture of
ourselves…’24
Caporetto shattered these illusions, and in the atmosphere of fear
and bitter recrimination that followed the disaster the reality of the
deep fractures in the country became abundantly clear. Italy had
entered the con ict split, profoundly split – between interventionists
and neutralists, piazza and parliament – and it was these divisions
that were now widely seen as responsible for the collapse of morale
on the Isonzo front. According to Unità, the newspaper of Gaetano
Salvemini (himself a passionate supporter of the war on the grounds
that it would help the masses to secure a greater political, economic
and social stake in the nation), Caporetto was ‘a moral reverse’
brought about by the failure of the government to stop the
propaganda of ‘the forces hostile to the con ict’ – socialists,
Catholics and Giolittian liberals – seeping perniciously ‘from the
interior of the country – from the factories and the homes of the
peasants – to the trenches’. And in line with virtually all
interventionist opinion, the newspaper called for a strong prime
minister who would crack down on the ‘defeatists’ and prosecute the
war with far greater energy than had hitherto been shown.25
The inevitable result was to deepen still further the rifts in the
nation. The anger and violence that had been such disturbing
features of the so-called ‘radiant days of May’ in 1915 resurfaced.
There was in ammatory talk of revolution, military coups,
republican plots and putting the ‘neutralist’ politicians on trial for
treason – a majority of the Chamber had remained loyal to Giolitti
and were known to be at best lukewarm towards the war. Police
reports referred to secret societies with Carbonaro-style rites and
oaths committed to the assassination of leading socialists such as
Turati (‘We are now surrounded and followed night and day by an
escort of plainclothes policemen,’ he told Anna Kuliscio in
December)26 or to blowing up the Vatican with dynamite: a great
many Catholics and Catholic associations had given their backing to
the war, but the Pope, Benedict XV, had refused to declare the
con ict ‘just’, and in August 1917 he had issued a Note describing it
as a ‘useless slaughter’ and urging disarmament and arbitration. This
had probably done serious damage to troop morale, and there were
calls in the top echelons of the army for Benedict to be arrested and
hanged.
One interventionist with particularly strident views following
Caporetto was Benito Mussolini. Mussolini had been called up in
September 1915 and had served in a bersagliere unit on the Isonzo
front and risen (like Hitler) to the rank of corporal, before being
wounded by an exploding grenade thrower in a training exercise
and invalided out in June 1917. He had resumed the editorship of Il
Popolo d’Italia, the newspaper he had founded in Milan towards the
end of 1914, and had used its columns to denounce the attempts of
‘His Holiness Pope Pilate XV’ at peacemaking and demand a more
resolute government, ‘total war’ and improved propaganda to
strengthen the ‘moral health’ of the army.27 News of Caporetto left
him distraught (according to his sister he was so depressed he talked
of dying), but he quickly rallied, and called for the Italian socialists
to be treated without mercy as ‘a more dangerous enemy’ than the
Austrians and for the nation to be fused in spirit with the army. He
wanted peasant troops to be promised land, so as to raise their
morale, and he urged a more disciplined attitude on the home front
and the closure of theatres, concert halls, race courses and cafés.28
Above all, he said, Italy needed a forceful leader to turn the
‘lacerated organism’ of the nation into something beautiful, noble
and strong:

In this moment the Italian people is a mass of precious minerals. It

needs to be forged, cleaned, worked. A work of art is still possible.
But a government is needed. A man. A man who, when the situation
demands it, has the delicate touch of an artist and the heavy st of a
warrior. Sensitive and determined. A man who knows the people,
loves the people, and can direct and bend it – with violence if
necessary.29
VICTORY AT VITTORIO VENETO

The man chosen by the king to take over the reins of government
after Caporetto was Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, a stocky white-
haired professor of constitutional law of Sicilian origin (he had been
born in Palermo a few days before Garibaldi’s Thousand entered the
city: hence his name), with great intelligence and considerable
energy – he was proud of having produced three children in thirty-
one months.30 And the new prime minister responded to the
catastrophe by urging ‘national unity’ – though in reality ‘unity’ now
meant one nation pitted against another. In the Chamber, Giolitti
and more than a hundred of his supporters closed ranks in a
‘Parliamentary Union’, while interventionist groups of all shades –
Nationalists, conservatives, democrats – retaliated in December
1917 by setting up a Parliamentary Union (Fascio) for National
Defence, with over 150 deputies and ninety senators, which pressed
Orlando’s government into introducing harsher censorship and
tougher measures against the ‘neutralists’. Across the country
‘Resistance Committees’ and ‘Fasci of National Defence’ sprang up
(the term fascio – ironically of socialist provenance – was fast
embedding itself in the patriotic lexicon) to help root out
‘defeatists’: such as the worker from Modena who was sentenced to
forty days in prison and a ne of 100 lire for refusing to subscribe to
a national loan on the grounds that ‘he had not wanted the war’.31
In this heavily polarized atmosphere the interventionists clung to
their belief that war would be salutary and curative, and in contrast
to many other European countries Italy witnessed very little
intellectual backlash against the carnage. Filippo Tommaso
Marinetti, who volunteered and served on the Isonzo and Piave
fronts, remained true to his Futurist principles and recounted his
experiences during the con ict in a tone of exultant enthusiasm,
glorying in the sensory cocktail of exploding shells, machine-gun
re and human cries, and relishing the strong emotions (not least
erotic) that accompanied the violence and danger.32 D’Annunzio
adopted a similarly celebratory and aesthetic approach, engaging in
a series of carefully choreographed and highly publicized raids by
air and sea that earned him one gold, three silver and two bronze
medals for valour, recording his exploits in exuberant prose and
poetry full of mystical, classical and religious allusions. He also
coined a number of rallying cries that became much celebrated
nationally. Among them were Memento audere semper (‘Remember
always to dare’), Iterum rugit leo (‘The lion roars again’: the slogan
given to his bomber squadron based near Venice; an inversion of
Venice’s more paci c motto, ‘Peace be unto thee, Mark, my
evangelist’), and Eia, eia, eia, alalà, a war-cry (later taken up by
Mussolini’s fascists), apparently of classical Greek origin, that
D’Annunzio made his aviators use in place of the more conventional
Ip, ip, urrah!33
Other interventionists viewed the war in less amboyant terms,
but almost all the memoirs produced during and after the con ict
were written in terms of a patriotic o cer sharing the harsh life of
the trenches with stoical, long-su ering, rank and le soldiers, who
were learning through war to subordinate local and familial ties to
the needs of the nation. Some of the most successful of these
accounts adopted the keynote that De Amicis had struck in his
earlier portrayals of military life: hardship made bearable, often
joyous, through the bonds of fraternal camaraderie and the ‘lofty
principles that we accept with our eyes closed as if they were a
faith: fatherland, necessity, discipline’34 – as in Paolo Monelli’s
highly popular Shoes in the Sun (1921), with its subtitle: Chronicle of
Joyful and Sad Adventures of Alpini, Mules and Wine. And even the
least belligerent of intellectuals felt drawn to the myth of national
solidarity, a myth that seemed to gain in emotional and ideological
allure when it was juxtaposed with the reality of pain and slaughter;
for as the young writer Renato Serra explained poignantly in 1915,
shortly before being killed in action on a mountainside near Gorizia,
fusion with the collectivity, whether in death or life, seemed almost
a moral imperative to those, like himself, who identi ed
passionately with the nation and yet inhabited an elite world,
estranged from the ‘real Italy’ of the masses. To have had the
opportunity to leap, and to have faltered, would have been shaming:
We had been on the brink, on the very edge. The wind had been bu eting us, throwing
back our hair; and we had stood, the vertigo welling up inside us, trembling – and had not
jumped. With this memory we would have grown old… I have been living in another place.
In that Italy that seemed to me, when I was merely looking at it, deaf and empty. But now I
feel that it can be lled with men like myself, gripped with the same anxiety and marching
along the same route, able to support each other, and live and die together – should the

moment come – even without knowing why.35

National solidarity seemed all the more imperative in the wake of

Caporetto given that a large section of north-eastern Italy was once
again, as before 1866, under direct Austrian rule. Many inhabitants
of the Veneto and Friuli had ed in advance of the enemy – chie y
landowners and local government o cials, mayors especially it
seems (the sense of having been abandoned by ‘the signori’ – the
wealthy – rankled subsequently in popular memory) – but the
majority of the population had stayed behind and now had to
endure considerable hardship. Looting and lawlessness were
widespread, and it took several months for order to be imposed.
And there was extensive raping by Austrian and German soldiers (a
fact emotively exploited by Italian propaganda to support the new
image of a ‘violated nation’). Requisitioning resulted in serious food
shortages, and mortality rates rose sharply: according to a later
commission of enquiry some 30,000 deaths were attributable, either
directly or indirectly, to the occupation. Yet despite the often brutal
conditions prevailing in the north-east, there is very little to suggest
that the local peasantry felt hostile to the invaders. Indeed there
were reports of the enemy being enthusiastically welcomed in
places.36
The sense that the nation needed to pull together in order to
avenge the shame of Caporetto resulted in an escalation of
propaganda. State employees, professionals, businessmen, traders
and other middle-class groups were subjected to intense patriotic
mobilization, with bodies such as the ‘Union of Italian Doctors for
National Resistance’ and the ‘General Union of Teachers for
Spiritual Assistance to the People’ being formed to sti en resolve
and sti e defeatism.37 There was a major morale-boosting campaign
for the army, with a newly formed Propaganda O ce organizing
programmes of lectures (or ‘conversations’ as they were more
democratically styled) by well-known gures such as Salvemini and
commissioning leading writers and artists to help produce lively and
illustrated ‘trench newspapers’.38 Rations were raised, annual leave
increased by ten days, and free life insurance provided
(psychologically not very sensitive, perhaps). There were frequent
promises of land for the peasants after the war was nished, and a
servicemen’s association, the Opera Nazionale Combattenti, was
established in December 1917 to look after the welfare of the
soldiers and their families.
These initiatives were accompanied by a shift in military tactics.
General Diaz was a more cautious commander than his predecessor,
concerned above all to hold the line on the Piave and not deplete his
army with unnecessary o ensives. And with the focus more rmly
on defence, casualty rates fell (143,000 killed and wounded in 1918
compared to 520,000 the previous year) and the obsession with
discipline declined: there were no more decimations. By the late
summer of 1918 it was becoming clear that the Austro-Hungarian
empire was crumbling and that with German troops pinned down on
the western front there was no prospect of reinforcements coming to
help the Austrians and sti en their agging resolve. But still Diaz
hesitated to attack. Orlando urged him on: he badly needed a
victory to strengthen his negotiating hand at any future peace
conference. So, too, did the British and French commanders, who
sensed that a major breakthrough was possible. Early in October,
Diaz nally gave his consent and three weeks later an o ensive was
launched on Monte Grappa, followed by an advance across the
Piave. There was some initial resistance, but it was not great, and on
30 October, Italian forces were able to enter the town of Vittorio
Veneto, so splitting the Austrian army in two, and proclaim victory.
Trento was taken on 3 November and troops disembarked at Trieste.
The Austrians signed an armistice and on 4 November the war in
Italy formally came to an end. With its principal ally defeated,
Germany had little choice but to surrender too.

In a ceremony held in Rome a fortnight later, Antonio Salandra, the

man who had led Italy into the war, hailed the victory as the
summation of the patriotic spirit of those many generations of men
(women still did not get a mention) who had striven for the well-
being and glory of their fatherland; and if Italians could maintain
the discipline and self-sacri ce that they had displayed during the
previous three and a half years of ghting, he predicted that the
nation would become ‘greater and more honoured still’:
[We are] the spokesmen and delegates of the martyrs, the poets, the statesmen, the
soldiers, the princes and the common people, of the great and the humble, of all those who
loved this Italy, who willed this Italy, and who celebrated this Italy; of all those who
worked for her, of all those who su ered for her, and of all those who died for her. Their
spirit resonates in our spirits. It is immortal Italy that has awoken, wreathed in her glories
and her sorrows, wishing to reconquer her throne… To Her, who is immanent, eternal,
timeless; to Her, who has been received into the heavens of history amid the purest
emanations of blood of her best sons, to Her we swear to consecrate all that remains to us

of strength and life. Long live Italy! For ever, and above all else, Long live Italy!39
PART SIX

Fascism 1919–43

21

Civil War and the Advent of Fascism, 1919–22

When I returned from the war, like so many, I hated politics and
politicians… To come home, after struggling and ghting, to the country
of Giolitti, who o ered every ideal as an object for sale? No. Better to
deny everything, to destroy everything, so as to rebuild everything from
scratch… It is certain, in my view, that without Mussolini, three-quarters
of Italian youths who had returned from the trenches would have become
Bolsheviks.

Italo Balbo, Diario 1922

Rise…
Oppressed of all the world
At the victorious eruption
Of the forces of the proletariat.
Remember
The horrendous carnage
The massive destruction.
The ancient anger of slaves
Rises ineluctably.
Spartacus prevails.

Socialist war memorial, Montella

THE WAR ECONOMY

Despite Caporetto, and despite all the charges of weakness,

incompetence and even treachery that had been hurled at
parliament by the interventionists, Italy’s victory in the First World
War constituted in many respects a remarkable achievement on the
part of the liberal state. It had been widely feared in 1915 that the
country would prove economically too fragile to sustain a prolonged
con ict. And there had certainly been severe strains and major
episodes of social unrest – most notably in Turin in August 1917,
when riots triggered by food shortages had swept through the city,
killing some fty people. But overall the country’s performance had
been impressive. FIAT had emerged as Europe’s leading
manufacturer of trucks and lorries, turning out 25,000 vehicles in
1918, six times as many as in 1914. An aeronautical industry had
been created almost from nothing, with 6,500 planes being
produced in 1918. And while the army had begun the war with just
613 machine guns, by the time of the armistice it had nearly 20,000
and over 7,000 pieces of heavy artillery in the eld – more than the
British. All this had been achieved in the teeth of persistent
shortages of essential raw materials, especially coal, and with only a
edgling domestic steel industry.1
The key to this success had lain in a ruthless programme of
economic planning. A new under-secretariat (later ministry) of Arms
and Munitions had been created, headed by an energetic and
pragmatic general, Alfredo Dallolio, to ensure production at all costs
and oversee the allocation of government contracts, cheap loans and
raw materials. Firms regarded as ‘auxiliary’ to the war e ort – and
there were nearly 2,000 of them by November 1918 – were
subjected to ‘industrial mobilization’, under which wages and hours
of labour were strictly regulated, strikes banned and employees
bound by tight military discipline, with armed guards patrolling the
factories.2 More than a third of the 900,000 workers in these plants
were men who had been exempted from military service or else
released from the army on secondment; many of the remainder were
recruited from among the peasantry. Women also featured
prominently, and nearly a quarter of the employees in munitions
factories were female.3 Although the lifestyle of these auxiliary
workers was far from easy – a seventy- ve-hour week was quite
normal at FIAT in 1916, and in real terms wages for most industrial
labourers declined in the course of the war – the general perception
of soldiers ghting at the front was that they were little more than
cosseted imboscati (shirkers) – another source of division and bitter
vituperation in Italy after 1918.
Some sectors of society pro ted – and pro ted enormously – from
the war. The main rms involved in the industrial mobilization
programme grew rapidly, and in the process swallowed up many of
their competitors. FIAT’s capital increased from 25 million to 125
million lire, and its workforce from 6,000 to 30,000; and companies
such as Breda (engineering), Ansaldo and Ilva (steel), and
Montecatini (chemicals) witnessed a similar expansion. But this
huge growth had been the result almost entirely of massive state
spending on matériel and other war-related items (around 41 billion
lire at pre-war prices, according to one estimate), most of it paid for
by raising foreign loans and printing money (with inevitable
in ationary consequences); and as a result the major rms were
acutely vulnerable to the return of peacetime conditions and the end
of government orders.4 Already in 1918 Ansaldo, Ilva and other
industrial giants were engaged in a scramble to buy leading banks
and so guarantee themselves credit and deny it to their competitors
– a rather unseemly spectacle. And the anger of workers and
veterans towards war pro teers or ‘sharks’ was to be a further rift in
the nation.
So, too, was the increased gap between the north and south of the
country. The emergence of the ‘southern question’ in the 1870s, and
the campaigns of politicians, economists and historians such as
Fortunato, Salvemini and Nitti to highlight the gulf between the two
halves of the peninsula and suggest possible remedies, had done
little to assuage the feelings of many southerners that they were
victims of northern arrogance and exploitation or of many
northerners that they were being dragged down by a corrupt and
barbarous society. Ironically, indeed, the torrent of literature from
the 1880s on the problems of the latifondi, the ma a, the camorra,
general crime and poverty in the south may well have hardened old
stereotypes, as a letter sent from the Veneto and published by the
Sicilian radical Napoleone Colajanni in 1906 suggested:
Dear Professor, if only you could hear the ideas that most people up here have about the
poor south! How many prejudices they instil into us from our earliest years! We
northerners, they say, belong to a superior race, are honest and hard-working. In short we
have every good quality. The southerners, by contrast, belong to an inferior race and have
none. They add that it was a grave mistake for Garibaldi to have gone and conquered the
Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, as we northerners now have to pay taxes as well for those
wretches in the south who do not want to work. Everything down there is ma a and
camorra… And believe me, Professor, these are not just the views of the poor and ignorant,

but also of virtually all the leading members of the educated classes.5

The industrial surge between 1915 and 1918 was concentrated in

the north-west of the country, with the population of the main cities
of Piedmont and Lombardy growing by at least 20 per cent between
1911 and 1921, and this reinforced the sense of there being ‘two
Italies’: a modern and increasingly prosperous urban north and a
backward rural south. And the fact that agricultural production in
the southern half of the peninsula had scarcely fallen during the
war, despite 2.5 million peasants being drafted into the army,
underlined dramatically the huge surfeit of manpower. The
demobilized soldiers who returned to their impoverished villages in
Campania or Calabria vented much of their anger on the
galantuomini, forcibly occupying hundreds of thousands of hectares
of land in a bid to realize their dreams of becoming smallholders.
But there was also bitterness towards the government and
resentment at continuing northern disparagement, and this led in
places to intensi ed regionalism. One manifestation of such
sentiments was a revival of the traditional idea that ‘the ma a’ had
been a northern invention to discredit Sicily, and that in reality
‘ma a’ was a form of noble behaviour characteristic of the island.
The former prime minister Orlando won rapturous applause at an
electoral rally in Palermo in 1925 when he announced: ‘I declare
myself to be ma oso, and I am proud to be such.’6
THE MUTILATED VICTORY

The liberal regime deserved much credit for its handling of the war,
but it was to receive little. The Socialist Party had been driven
further than ever into the political wilderness, and after 1918 it
retaliated by adopting a vehement revolutionary stance, inspired by
the success of the Bolshevik coup in Russia. Church and state were
still a long way from any formal conciliation, despite their increased
cooperation in 1915–18; and the various interventionist groups –
the Nationalists, the Futurists, the syndicalists and the dissident
socialists – were still deeply hostile to parliament: wedded to the
myth that Italy had only entered the con ict in May 1915 through
their will and determination, and strongly convinced that the
victory at Vittorio Veneto had been theirs and theirs alone. And the
peace was now to be theirs, too; and woe betide any liberal
politician – Orlando, or the Foreign Minister, Sonnino – who failed
to secure Italy its just deserts after the sacri ce of 600,000 men. As
D’Annunzio wrote in a celebrated poem published a few days before
the armistice, questioning the right of the United States’ President,
Woodrow Wilson, and the other allied leaders to speak for those
who had ‘exceeded in their su ering the limits set by the pity of the
Lord’:
Who is it today that arises as arbiter of all future life, over the
wailing and smoking land?
Where has he come from? From the depths of su ering or the
summits of light, as the exile Dante?
Or is he just a sage sitting in his unmoved chair, ignorant of the
trenches and circles [of Hell]?…
Who would transform the greatness and beauty of this violence into
a long debate between old men, in a senile council of trickery?
The ink of scribes for the blood of martyrs?…
Oh victory of ours: you will not be mutilated. Nobody will break
your knees or clip your wings.7
From the outset the position of the Italian delegation at the peace
conference that convened in Paris in January 1919 was extremely
di cult. Whipped up by D’Annunzio and the interventionists, public
opinion back home was expecting the maximum possible territorial
gains: not just Trentino, the South Tyrol, Trieste, Istria and northern
Dalmatia – which had been promised under the Treaty of London of
1915 – but also the port of Fiume (Rijeka) on the Croatian coast, a
town with long-standing economic and political ties to Hungary, but
which from the middle of the nineteenth century had developed a
large community of middle-class Italians, welcomed in by the
authorities in Budapest in an attempt to create a counterweight in
this strategically important centre to the potentially hostile local
Slav population. But in asking for ‘the Treaty of London plus Fiume’
Italy risked muddying the ideological waters and creating an
impression of cynical opportunism, for the Treaty of London had
been premised on old-fashioned considerations of Realpolitik (to
ensure Italy’s security in the Adriatic), while Fiume was being
claimed on the basis of the ‘principle of nationality’ – though it was
in fact questionable whether a majority of the town’s population
was Italian, as the adjacent working-class suburbs were almost
entirely Croat.
To make matters worse for the Italian delegation at Paris,
stereotypes and prejudices abounded in the deliberations of the
three most senior gures at the peace conference – Woodrow
Wilson, the British prime minister, Lloyd George, and the French
prime minister, Clemenceau – who clearly regarded Italy as
something of a parvenu and undeserving of full membership of the
great powers’ club. And such condescension served further to
in ame nationalist feelings in Italy, forcing Orlando and Sonnino to
be yet more insistent in their demands in order to avoid being
vili ed back home as authors of what was already being widely
spoken of as ‘the mutilated victory’. Orlando was generally well
received in Paris – Lloyd George warmed to his expansive
Mediterranean manner (though Harold Nicolson probably re ected
more mainstream English opinion in describing him, waspishly, as ‘a
white, weak, abby man’);8 but Sonnino was the very antithesis of a
conventional Italian with his rigid and austere character, severe
demeanour and intellectual outlook; and he created a bad
impression. Moreover he was forced to do much of the talking as the
British and Americans found Orlando very hard to understand,
despite his frequent expressive gestures.
The problem with Fiume was that the French were eager to
support a strong Yugoslavia as part of a chain of new states in
central Europe penning Germany in on its eastern ank. But there
was another, less easily voiced, consideration. Franco-Italian
relations had been deeply strained ever since 1860; and though Italy
had abandoned the Triple Alliance in 1915, it had done so primarily
on the basis of short-term expediency. In the long term, as Crispi
and others had argued, it was more logical for Italy to aspire to an
alliance with Germany against France – its rival for supremacy in
the Mediterranean. The elderly Clemenceau knew this, and
harboured few illusions, and while the Italian government did all it
could to weaken Yugoslavia, sanctioning plans to foment civil war
there by sending in agents provocateurs and even encouraging
Italian soldiers to heighten tensions by seducing local women, the
French worked to keep the new state united as a means of holding
an unpredictable Italy in check. Orlando lamented that it was
galling to have defeated Austria only to have another major power
replace it in the Adriatic. But he attracted little sympathy in Paris.9
A further di culty facing the Italian delegation was that neither
France nor Britain believed that the contribution of Italy to the war
e ort had been su cient to merit the extensive territorial claims it
was now making: in addition to Trentino, the South Tyrol and Istria,
the Treaty of London had promised the Dodecanese islands and
major footholds in the Balkans, including the port of Vlorë on the
far side of the Strait of Otranto and a protectorate over central
Albania. It was pointed out that Italy had sustained far fewer
casualties than France and Britain, and there was much anger that
Diaz had apparently only been willing to launch an o ensive when
victory had looked certain (‘They all say that the signal for an
armistice was the signal for Italy to begin to ght,’ noted the British
ambassador).10 There was irritation that the Italian navy had hardly
ventured from port, despite promises to patrol the Mediterranean
and the Adriatic, and considerable resentment at the huge sums that
the hard-pressed allies had been forced to lend to Italy (15 billion
lire in the case of Britain), not all of which had then been spent on
the war. The old idea that Italians were charming but utterly
unscrupulous played through the minds of many of the delegates in
Paris. As Clemenceau put it: ‘[T]he Italians met [me] with a
magni cent coup de chapeau of the seventeenth-century type, and
then held out the hat for alms at the end of the bow.’11
And what of the ‘principle of nationality’ that the high-minded
Wilson had proclaimed to be the touchstone of the new European
order? Was not Italy the home of this sacred ideal? In January 1919,
shortly before the peace conference began, Wilson travelled to
Genoa to pay homage at the tomb of Mazzini and, on being
presented with a bound edition of the great patriot’s writings by the
mayor of the city, he revealed that he had studied Mazzini closely
during his time as a professor at Princeton and that he was now
aiming to implement the vision of this solitary thinker who had ‘by
some gift of God been lifted above the common level’. In private he
added that perhaps only Lincoln or Gladstone had seen so clearly
into the essence of liberalism.12 How, then, could Italy insist on
annexing territories that were clearly not ‘Italian’ (only Trentino and
Trieste had a majority of Italophones)? Wilson was bemused, and as
Orlando and Sonnino clung doggedly to the formula ‘the Treaty of
London plus Fiume’, bringing the conference to an impasse, he grew
increasingly frustrated: ‘It is curious how utterly incapable these
Italians are of taking any position on principle and sticking to it,’ he
announced, with unconcealed contempt and anger.13
 But as the distinguished philosopher Giovanni Gentile (soon to be
appointed Mussolini’s rst education minister) explained in a book
published in 1919, Mazzini had never been in favour of the kind of
democratic nationalism, based simply on self-determination, that
Wilson was advocating in Paris. That was to miss the essence of
Mazzini’s thought, which was hostile to liberalism and rooted in a
deeply religious vision of life. For Mazzini, rights derived from
duties, and a nation could only claim rights when its citizens had
demonstrated a capacity to struggle in pursuit of a shared ethical
goal. Nations were spiritual entities, and freedom consisted of the
individual immersing his moral being in that of the whole.
Language, geography and race were mere epiphenomena,
‘indications’ of nationality, not their essence. And since the health of
a nation was gauged by its success in mobilizing people to action,
there was no automatic veto, according to Gentile, within the
Mazzinian schema on expansion or conquest. Hence, Mazzini’s claim
in 1871 that the Roman Empire had been ‘the most powerful
nationality of the ancient world’, despite being composed of many
di erent peoples: ‘In questions of nationality, as in everything else,
the end alone is sovereign.’14
With demonstrations and violent clashes escalating in Italy in the
spring of 1919, particularly along the interventionist–neutralist
fault-line, Orlando and Sonnino felt in no position to compromise.
Orlando claimed that a secret society had sworn to assassinate him
if he returned home without having secured Dalmatia, while
Sonnino spoke portentously of how a ‘mutilated victory’ would tip
the country into anarchy. Orlando was desperate, and on Easter
Sunday, during a particularly di cult meeting with the British,
French and Americans, he was forced to leave the table in tears,
while Clemenceau looked on impassively and the British
incredulously (Sir Maurice Hankey, the conference secretary, said he
would have spanked his son for such a disgraceful show of
emotion).15 Four days later, with the talks deadlocked, Orlando left
Paris in disgust. Crowds cheered his train as he travelled down
through Italy, and when he reached Rome he was greeted with
pealing church bells, aeroplanes circling overhead dropping
patriotic lea ets, and enthusiastic cries of ‘Viva Orlando! Viva Fiume!
Viva l’Italia!’ Everywhere walls were covered in slogans demanding
the annexation of Fiume, and in Turin students went along the
Corso Wilson, so named in honour of the president’s recent visit to
the city, changing all the signs into ‘Corso Fiume’.16
Orlando received a ringing endorsement from the Chamber, by
382 votes to 40, for his rm stand in Paris, declaring that Italy’s
claims were based on ‘such high and solemn reasons of right and
justice’ that they needed to be recognized by the allies in full. But he
was painting himself into a corner, perhaps deliberately so (‘I am…
a new Christ, and must su er my passion for the salvation of my
country,’ he had declared a few days before),17 and when he
returned to the conference table early in May, having aged,
according to one observer, ten years, his negotiating hand was
weaker than ever. Britain and France had proceeded in his absence
to carve up Germany’s African colonies among themselves, while
the last vestiges of Wilson’s thin veneer of patience had nally
cracked, leaving the Italian delegates exposed to the full force of his
cold Protestant censoriousness. Orlando pleaded for his political life.
‘I must have a solution. Otherwise I will have a crisis in parliament
or in the streets in Italy’, he told Lloyd George. ‘And if not,’ the
British prime minister asked, ‘who do you see taking your place?’
‘Perhaps D’Annunzio.’18 But Orlando’s entreaties were to no avail,
and on 19 June he lost a vote of con dence in the Chamber and
resigned, leaving his successor, Francesco Saverio Nitti, a radical
economics professor from Basilicata, to concede Dalmatia to
Yugoslavia and agree to Fiume becoming a neutral city under the
protection of the newly formed League of Nations.
THE OCCUPATION OF FIUME

Against a backdrop of spiralling in ation and mounting

unemployment, as millions of demobilized troops exchanged the
horrors of the trenches for the bleak economic realities of civilian
life, and with labour relations deteriorating as militant socialists,
many of them newly released from prison, prepared for a
revolution, ‘as in Russia’, staging strikes, protests, factory
occupations and riots, D’Annunzio stoked the res of nationalism
with his intemperate rhetoric. In two major speeches in May,
buoyed by the recent academic accolade of an honorary doctorate
from the university of Rome, he railed against the treachery of the
allies, claiming that Italy, the poorest of the belligerent powers, had
‘saved the world’ through its heroism and copious sacri ce of blood
during the war, and he accused the ‘triumvirs’ of the three richest
nations of conspiring to keep Italy impoverished and isolated, using
the League of Nations as their tool. He talked of France’s historic
per dy (had they not been responsible for Mentana, Tunisia and
even the catastrophe of Adua?), and caricatured Wilson, the
‘Croati ed Quaker’, as a grotesque hollow gurine with a ‘long
equine face’ and false teeth.19
D’Annunzio was a major threat to the authority (such of it that
remained) of the government in Rome. He had a cult following in
the army, particularly among the arditi or shock troops that had
been formed after Caporetto to help raise morale at the front and
whose celebration of ruthlessness and daring, bravura exploits and
violent language mirrored well the poet’s own feverish
Weltanschauung (their motto, Me ne frego – soon to be taken up by
the fascists – was a slang expression meaning ‘I don’t give a damn’).
In the course of the spring and summer of 1919 he was heavily
involved in negotiations with disa ected generals and o cers,
Nationalists, Futurists and other patriotic groups to seize Fiume by
force; while in Fiume itself the groundwork for a possible coup was
being laid by a society of Mazzinian inspiration called Young Fiume,
whose activities helped to feed a mood of ugly chauvinism in the
city: in one incident Italian police opened re on a party of children
returning from a picnic who had failed to shout ‘Viva Italia’, killing
nine and wounding twenty.20 The new prime minister looked to
avert the gathering storm by buying o D’Annunzio with a
government post. D’Annunzio declined it, and turned his withering
rhetoric on Nitti, dubbing him, in one of his most celebrated
neologisms, Cagoia – ‘shit-itis’.
D’Annunzio had a competitor in the war of words (and deeds;
there was to be no disjuncture between thought and action) in
Mussolini, who back in March 1919 had founded a new movement,
the Fasci di combattimento (‘ ghting units’), in a rented hall
overlooking Piazza San Sepolcro in the heart of Milan. This was one
of a number of initiatives launched at that time in the no-man’s land
between liberalism and socialism, and the event had gone almost
unnoticed in the press. A hundred or so people had turned up for
the inaugural meeting, for the most part ex-combatants and
interventionists of very di ering backgrounds and inclinations –
Futurists (including Marinetti), anarchists, syndicalists, republicans,
Nationalists, Catholics and arditi (among them the patriotically
named Ferruccio Vecchi, the group’s main national spokesman) –
and this heterogeneity had been one important reason why
Mussolini had not wanted to adopt a precise political programme.
The Fasci were to be a spiritual force, embracing all those who had
believed in the war (an eclecticism underlined when ten people had
been chosen at random from the front row to sit on the executive
committee). And the most powerful bond uniting them was not
what they hoped to build but what they hated. In April Marinetti
and Vecchi had organized the ransacking of the headquarters of the
Socialist Party newspaper, Avanti!, with the captured sign-board
being taken in triumph to the o ces of Mussolini’s Il Popolo
d’Italia.21
 Sitting at his editor’s desk, sipping a glass of milk and surrounded
by pistols, daggers, grenades and cartridges, Mussolini poured out a
steady stream of journalism intended to outdo D’Annunzio in
vehemence if not literary inventiveness. He attacked the
government for its accid handling of the peace negotiations: ‘The
Italy that deals and barters in Paris… is not the Italy of the Grappa
and the Isonzo. It is the Italy of foreigners and storytellers, of
beggars and lawyers, the Italy which sadly still survives on high, but
which lower down among the people, who have a sense of her pride
and her glory, is dead and buried.’ He called Orlando a
‘lachrymogen’, an ‘invertebrate who gets by propped up on strong
zabagliones’, and urged him to have the courage to break with
Wilson and the other ‘bandits of international plutocracy’.22 He
denounced Britain as ‘the fattest and most bourgeois nation in the
world’,23 and railed against the Bolsheviks, 80 per cent of whose
leaders, he alleged, were Jews operating in the service of Jewish
bankers in London and New York: ‘Race does not betray race.’24 And
following D’Annunzio’s lead he mocked Nitti as ‘Franz Joseph
Cagoia’, ‘Saverio Cagoia’ and ‘His excrescency Cagoia’.25 Nothing,
according to Mussolini, was sacrosanct, other than the nation: ‘We
are loyal to Italy and to the fatherland alone.’26
During the summer of 1919 Mussolini and his fascist supporters
were in close touch with D’Annunzio and the other senior gures in
the army (the king’s cousin, the Duke of Aosta, included) who were
toying with the idea of taking Fiume by force. D’Annunzio himself
was growing distracted by plans for a long-distance ight to the Far
East (and by a new love a air), and when in August the Italian
troops that had been stationed in the city since the end of the
previous year were ordered out by allied commissioners eager to
enforce Fiume’s neutrality, it was to Mussolini and General Peppino
Garibaldi (grandson of the great patriot) and to the Nationalist
leaders Enrico Corradini and Luigi Federzoni that they initially
turned for help with a coup. When they did approach D’Annunzio,
they couched their appeal in language redolent of the Risorgimento:
The Great Mother does not know Fiume; she is not permitted to know the nest of her
daughters, the purest and most holy of Italian women… We have sworn upon the memory
of all who died for the unity of Italy: Fiume or death!… And you do nothing for Fiume? You
who have all Italy in your hands – great, noble, generous Italy – will you not shake her out

of the lethargy into which she has so long fallen?27

D’Annunzio was persuaded, and on 12 September he set out from

the small town of Ronchi to the south of Gorizia with around 200
Italian troops and twenty-six armoured trucks purloined from a local
depot. As he advanced along the road to Fiume, he was joined by
patriotic veterans, mutineers (including many arditi), Futurists,
students, adventurers and even schoolchildren, and by the time the
column reached the outskirts of the city it had swollen to more than
2,000. The commander in Fiume, General Vittorio Emanuele
Pittaluga, had been given strict orders to halt the march. He
parleyed with D’Annunzio at a roadblock, telling him that Italy
would be ruined by his actions and face ‘incalculable consequences’.
‘It is you who will ruin Italy if you prevent her destiny being
ful lled,’ retorted the poet. And in a scene reminiscent of
Napoleon’s famous gesture at Lake La rey in 1815, when the former
emperor had bared his chest to the French troops sent to arrest him,
D’Annunzio pulled back his coat and invited Pittaluga’s men to aim
at the medals pinned over his heart (D’Annunzio had always craved
a beautiful death in a noble cause: throughout his life he had been
haunted by the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian). Pittaluga hesitated,
and then stepped forward and shook D’Annunzio’s hand. ‘I will not
shed Italian blood nor be the cause of a fratricidal war… Long live
Italian Fiume!’28 D’Annunzio carried on into the city, with ags
waving, bells tolling, laurel leaves tumbling from the balconies and
the arditi singing their marching song, ‘Giovinezza’ (‘Youth-time’):
Youth-time, youth-time
Beauty’s springtime
In the bitterness of life
Your song rings far and wide
 In keeping with the spirit of this anarchic anthem (soon to be
appropriated by the fascists as their o cial hymn), the occupation
of Fiume provided an extraordinary spectacle of theatricality,
political innovation and licentiousness, with carefully
choreographed parades, marches, histrionic speeches and mock
battles, public dances, riotous drinking, drug-taking and sexual
promiscuity, and outlandish experimentation with fashion and
appearance. A young English writer, Osbert Sitwell, described the
febrile and almost operatic character of the city after visiting it in
the autumn of 1920:
The general animation and noisy vitality seemed to herald a new land, a new system. We
gazed and listened in amazement. Every man here seemed to wear a uniform designed by
himself: some had beards, and had shaved their heads completely so as to resemble the
Commander himself… others had cultivated huge tufts of hair, half a foot long, waving out
from their foreheads, and wore, balanced on the very back of the skull, a black fez. Cloaks,
feathers and owing black ties were universal, and every man – and few women were to be

seen – carried the ‘Roman dagger’.29

A striking aspect of the occupation of Fiume – which was to last

for over fteen months as the government in Rome sought for a
solution, fearful of sending in the army in case it mutinied – was the
constant interplay between the sacred and the profane.
D’Annunzio’s speeches, often delivered impromptu to crowds that
gathered beneath the balcony of his residence, were full of religious
imagery and language, oaths and liturgical exchanges (‘A noi!’, ‘Eia,
eia, alalà!’) intended to create a close emotional dialogue with the
audience (‘the rst example of such interplay since Greek times,’
D’Annunzio claimed).30 There was much talk of martyrdom, blood
and faith, and the entire experience of Fiume was presented in terms
of a redemptive sacri ce – a ‘calvary’, a ‘passion’ – that was being
made by the city (the ‘Holocaust City’ as D’Annunzio called it) so
Italy might rise again. Civic ceremonies were often linked to
religious occasions – such as the feast day of St Sebastian on 20
January, when the city’s women solemnly presented D’Annunzio
with a dagger (‘To you… chosen by God to radiate the light of
renewed liberty through the world… [we] o er this holy dagger…
so you may carve the word “victory” in the living esh of our
enemies’) and the poet thanked them with an impassioned sermon
on the meaning of the saint’s death:
The Archer of Life cried out in his death agony: ‘I die in order not
to die.’
He cried, bleeding: ‘Not enough! Not enough! Again!’
He cried: ‘I will live again. But in order to live again, I must die.’
Immortality of love! Eternity of sacri ce!
The paths of immolation are the surest; and the blood of the hero
and the heroine is inexhaustible.
You know this, sisters in Christ, brothers in the living God. This is
the sense of the mystery.31
THE ELECTIONS OF 1919

Mussolini was eager to capitalize on D’Annunzio’s success in seizing

Fiume and humiliating the government in Rome, and from the
columns of his newspaper, Il Popolo d’Italia, he pledged his full
moral support to ‘the Hero’ and launched a subscription. But
D’Annunzio was annoyed that the fascist leader had not participated
directly in what he called ‘the most beautiful exploit since the
departure of Garibaldi’s Thousand’,32 and he wrote him a stinging
letter (which not surprisingly remained unpublished until after
Mussolini’s death) accusing him of cowardice and of making empty
promises. Determined to show that he was as much a man of action
as the poet, Mussolini responded by proposing a full-scale coup
d’état, including a march on Trieste, the deposition of the king,
Victor Emmanuel, a constituent assembly and the landing of troops
in the Romagna and the Marche in support of a republican
insurrection. But in reality Mussolini was not keen to get embroiled
too heavily with D’Annunzio. He wanted his own political space,
and his overriding concern was to build up his edgling movement,
which by the early autumn of 1919 numbered around 150
autonomous local sections and 40,000 members.33 And when on 7
October he ew to Fiume for talks with the poet, his principal aim
was to secure good publicity ahead of the rst national congress of
the Fasci, which was due to be held in Florence two days later.
It was no coincidence that the Socialist Party had just staged its
own national congress: Mussolini wanted his movement to appear as
a credible alternative for interventionists to the far left (though
Marinetti’s appeals in Florence for the Senate to be replaced by a
‘dynamo’ chamber of young men under thirty, the ‘devaticanization’
of Italy and the forcible enrolment of artists in government probably
did not help his cause).34 The socialists had certainly raised the
political temperature at their congress, proclaiming the Russian
revolution ‘the most auspicious event’ in the history of the working
classes, and voting overwhelmingly for a new constitution that
called for ‘the violent conquest of political power’, the dictatorship
of the proletariat, and the destruction of every instrument of
bourgeois domination and oppression. And on occasions the militant
rhetoric of the delegates was matched by equally aggressive
gestures. A former Party Secretary, the aptly named Nicola
Bombacci, a hirsute man of ferocious appearance, responded to a
taunt from a colleague during the 1921 congress that he was no
more than a ‘penknife revolutionary’ by pulling out a pistol.35
Bombacci was to be one of the founders of the Italian Communist
Party, but during the 1930 she gravitated towards fascism and
ended his days a passionate supporter of Mussolini’s puppet
government, the Republic of Salò. In April 1945 he was shot by
partisans.
The combination of ideological extremism, economic chaos,
unbridled anger and the erosion of central authority helped generate
a dangerously volatile situation. Across huge areas of southern Italy
millions of peasants demanded compensation for their su ering in
the trenches, and with banners waving and drums beating, and led
by representatives of veterans’ associations or Catholic cooperatives,
they marched onto uncultivated land, staked out plots and began
digging. With the government unwilling to intervene, many owners
were forced to sell. In northern and central Italy it was the left-wing
unions – the socialist General Confederation of Labour (whose
membership rose from 250,000 in 1918 to 2 million in 1920), the
anarchist Italian Syndical Union and the recently formed Catholic
confederation – that took the lead in mobilizing angry workers, and
during 1919 more than a million people went on strike in protest at
soaring prices and unemployment. In the rural communities of the
Po valley the Chambers of Labour provided the focal point for
militancy, with local bosses known as capilega – often ardent
socialists convinced that a revolution was imminent and de ant of
all bourgeois (indeed any) authority – controlling the peasantry,
imposing strict labour quotas on the landowners, and dictating
wages and general conditions of work.
In this atmosphere violence was rampant. Socialist leaders
encouraged their followers to clash with the police, desecrate the
tricolour, intimidate blacklegs and taunt soldiers. There were
countless instances of arson, sabotage, theft, assault and murder, in
many cases the result of crowds getting out of control as tempers
ared and insults were exchanged. Everywhere gra ti appeared
calling for revolution and applauding Lenin and the Bolsheviks,
socialism and communism, daubed in red paint on even the most
celebrated national buildings and monuments. The most publicized
instances of disorder took place in regions such as Piedmont,
Lombardy, Emilia Romagna and Tuscany, where the presence of
socialism was strongest and the in uence and ambition of its grass
roots leaders greatest (‘I do not recognize your authority – in fact I
am here to strip you of your authority,’ the head of the Bologna
Chamber of Labour told the local prefect de antly at the end of
1919),36 but in parts of the south, too, less well reported, there was
a terrifying escalation of lawlessness as old patterns of feuding and
banditry broke to the surface. In western Sicily rival factions and
gangs (schematically referred to as ‘old’ and ‘new’ ma as) vied with
one another for supremacy, leaving thousands dead. In the province
of Trapani alone there were some 700 killings in the space of just
one year, with 216 in the small town of Marsala.37
It was against this backdrop that Italy’s rst post-war elections
were held in November 1919. The government had hoped to draw
some of the sting of subversion by passing a new su rage law giving
the vote to all who had served at the front, irrespective of their age,
and to every other male over twenty-one. This increased the
electorate by more than a quarter, to 11 million. But an even more
decisive change was the introduction of proportional representation
and provincial electoral colleges, which at one blow severed the link
between deputies and local clienteles on which liberal politicians
had traditionally based their power, handing the initiative instead to
parties with the machinery to mobilize a mass turn-out.38 The
principal bene ciaries were the socialists, who secured 32 per cent
of the vote and 156 deputies, three times as many as in the previous
legislature, and a newly formed Catholic (though strictly speaking
non-confessional) party, the Italian Popular Party, which got 100
deputies. The result was that more than half of the new Chamber
was made up of politicians who were either deeply sceptical of the
liberal regime (the Catholics) or who were overtly hostile to it and
who now aimed to use their platform in parliament to vilify the
state (the socialists). The remaining deputies consisted of assorted
liberals, radicals and social democrats, who found cooperation hard.
The fascists won fewer than 5,000 votes and none of their seventeen
candidates, including the conductor Arturo Toscanini, was
returned.39 Mussolini thought of emigrating, while the socialists
gleefully paraded a co n through the streets of Milan to symbolize
his political demise.
THE RISE OF THE FASCIST SQUADS

With parliament deeply split, e ective government became almost

impossible. Nitti limped on as prime minister until June 1920,
unable to resolve the problem of Fiume, sort out the public nances
or tackle the growing militancy of the socialists. And with central
government perilously weak, the extremists became increasingly
aggressive, encouraging property-owners (and not a few workers) in
many parts of northern and central Italy to set up resistance
associations and leagues in conjunction with local fascists and other
patriotic groups in a bid to stem the tide of lawlessness. Italy was
fast slipping towards anarchy, and as the chaos intensi ed, old
anxieties about the lack of moral cohesion resurfaced. Giovanni
Amendola lamented how the moment Italians no longer had an
external enemy to ght they reverted to traditional partisan habits
and set upon each other in ‘the factional spirit that in former
centuries had kept [them] divided’,40 and early in 1920 a group of
leading intellectuals – among them Giuseppe Prezzolini, Giovanni
Gentile and the brilliant young radical liberal Piero Gobetti –
launched a passionate appeal for a ‘Fascio of National Education’ to
improve the quality of schools and teachers, lay the foundations for
‘the granitic national unity and greatness of the fatherland’, and
bring an end to the country’s long-standing internal divisions.41
The socialist leadership had little faith that a revolution could
succeed in Italy – apart from anything else, they knew that the
French and British would not tolerate a socialist state in the heart of
western Europe – but in the polarized climate of 1919–20 they
dared not use the language of moderation and so did nothing to rein
in grass roots activists or disabuse the rank and le. Equally they
failed to make plans for a national takeover, leaving the socialist
movement uncoordinated, heavily dependent on local initiatives and
vulnerable to counter-insurgency. Strikes continued unabated; and
in September 1920, amid fears that a number of employers were
about to impose a lock-out as part of a pay dispute, more than
400,000 workers occupied factories and shipyards, running up red
or black (anarchist) ags and expelling the management. Giolitti,
who had recently returned as prime minister (he was widely
considered the only man with su cient authority and guile to
restore order, despite being seventy-eight) feared a full-scale
insurrection (he pointed subsequently to the huge quantities of arms
and explosives that were found in the factories to prove his point)42
and pressurized the industrialists into making major concessions,
including the principle that trade union representatives could sit on
management boards. Giolitti wanted to buy time, convinced the
current political turmoil was little more than a ‘neurasthenic’ post-
war hangover which could, with appropriate inducements, be tamed
and steered into constitutional channels. But few shared his
optimism; indeed many felt angered by his leniency towards the far
left and thought the time had come for a more robust response.
The local government elections early in November 1920 were for
many the last straw. The far left made sweeping gains across
northern and central Italy, and in the socialist heartlands of the
lower Po valley, in old provincial centres such as Bologna and
Ferrara (where a red ag now ew triumphantly above the
Renaissance town hall), there was a new mood of de ance. On 21
November some 300 armed fascists marched through the streets of
central Bologna to Palazzo d’Accursio, where the socialist
administration was being sworn in. The attack had been announced
in advance, and the councillors had taken the precaution of
barricading themselves inside the building. ‘Red guards’ threw ve
grenades, causing panic in the crowds that were gathered outside,
and in the ensuing confusion ten socialists or socialist sympathizers
were killed, seven of them by fascists. Inside the city hall an
opposition councillor was shot (by a policeman), providing the
fascists with their rst important ‘martyr’.43
 In the weeks that followed, similar punitive attacks were
launched against socialists in other parts of the Po valley, and to the
intense surprise of most observers, Mussolini included, the fascist
movement suddenly began to escalate. There were 1,065 new
subscriptions in October–November 1920: the following month the
gure leapt to nearly 11,000; and total membership rose from
20,165 with just eighty-eight sections at the end of December to
187,588 and over a thousand sections ve months later.44 This
remarkable growth was fuelled by an unwillingness on the part of
the police and army to step in and prevent or even punish the fascist
assaults, despite repeated government orders to prefects for the law
to be upheld impartially, and also by a realization that the socialist
movement was far more fragile than its con dent rhetoric had
suggested, a point underlined at the party’s national congress in
January 1921 when a number of important delegates walked out to
found the Italian Communist Party. There was also a new air of
militant patriotism circulating in the towns and villages of northern
Italy, as one authoritative observer, the social democrat Ivanoe
Bonomi, later recalled:
After the tragedy in Bologna, the rural propertied classes were stirred to action and began
to meet and organize themselves. In the towns of the Po valley young o cers who had
served at the front summoned their landowning friends and relatives and told them that
they needed to defend themselves against those who had been opposed to the war and now
repudiated the victory, against those who were inciting violence and disorder, against
those forces that wanted to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat and repeat the
Russian experiment. A spirit of battle hovered over the countryside. During patriotic
ceremonies the men of order no longer remained rmly indoors, frightened of violence, but
displayed the national ag and went out into the piazza to cheer. The slogans on walls – so
much a part of Italian political culture – were now not just communist ones. Alongside the
numerous ‘Viva Lenins!’ and ‘Long live the dictatorship of the proletariat!’ were others

celebrating the fatherland and the victory.45

The fascist assaults were carried out by ‘action squads’. These

were composed typically of a dozen or so men, for the most part
war veterans or students, and often extremely young: under twenty
years of age. They travelled to the scene of the attack by bicycle or
train, or in cars and lorries provided by relatives, friends or
sympathetic landowners and businessmen, and used an array of
weapons: clubs (the notorious manganello, sometimes weighted with
lead or thick leather), revolvers, daggers, grenades, ri es and even
machine guns. These arms were sometimes supplied by local police
stations or army barracks. On occasions more bizarre weapons were
used: one Mantua squad became well known for beating opponents
around the head with dried cod- sh. Each squad had a sobriquet –
‘Satan’, ‘Desperado’, ‘Dauntless’, ‘Lightning’, Me ne frego, or the
name of some patriotic hero or event – and carried a banner with a
skull and cross-bones or similarly macabre motif. The leader
emerged spontaneously, through seniority or charisma, and was
known as a ras, from the Ethiopian word for a local chief.
The exotic and sometimes ludic overtones to the activities of the
fascist squads owed a good deal to the aestheticization of violence
that the Futurists, the arditi and D’Annunzio had made fashionable.
Indeed quite a few leading squadristi had spent time at Fiume prior
to joining Mussolini’s movement, and often sought to mimic the
decadent and amboyant lifestyle of the poet-commander. Alcohol
and cocaine were freely consumed before raids, while in Ferrara the
‘Celibano’ squad made a practice of pouring libations of cherry-
brandy ahead of their attacks (the name ‘Celibano’ was a drunken
version of ‘cherrybrandy’).46 But behind the histrionic facade was a
core of well-targeted brutality designed to break the working-class
movement. Party and trade union buildings were ransacked and the
o ces of left-wing newspapers devastated, while key gures in the
Socialist Party such as deputies, mayors, councillors and capilega
were singled out for intimidation, beatings, torture and on occasions
murder. According to o cial gures more than 200 people were
killed and about a thousand wounded in clashes between squadristi
and socialists in the rst ve months of 1921.
But the fascist violence was far more than just a tool of war. It
was also an instrument of propaganda, a means of disseminating the
‘myth’ of the fatherland and generating a spirit of crusading
idealism and fervour. As Mussolini declared in Naples on the eve of
the March on Rome: ‘We have created our myth. A myth is a faith, a
passion… Our myth is the nation, our myth is the greatness of the
nation.’47 The squadristi accompanied their raids with songs
proclaiming the holiness of their cause, with the manganello – ‘Saint
Manganello’ as it was often known – singled out for particular
veneration (the fascists of Monteleone Calabro had a statue of Our
Lady wearing a starred halo and holding the infant Christ and a
fascist club – the ‘Madonna of the Manganello’ – as their tutelary
saint).48 The punishments in icted on enemies were frequently
couched in terms of Catholic penitence, as in the case of the forced
ingestion of castor oil, which, as one fascist newspaper explained,
was intended ‘to purge [a man]… of his faults, of the old sins of
Bolshevism’.49 (The powerful laxative qualities of castor oil
appealed to the scatological humour of the squads.) And the general
emphasis in the movement on faith, duty and enthusiasm linked
fascism in the minds of many squadristi with what they saw as a
distinctively Italian tradition of militant idealism going back to the
time of Mazzini, with the ‘religion of the nation’ at its heart.50
With fascism growing exponentially, Mussolini found himself in
the role of the sorcerer’s apprentice, struggling to contain a
movement that risked breaking away from its radical roots and
becoming a crude anti-socialist strike force in the pay of the
conservative middle classes. A further threat was posed by the prime
minister, Giolitti, who having failed to lure the more moderate
socialists into his orbit following the occupation of the factories,
now set his sights on the fascists, looking to use them as a tool with
which to curb the far left and the Catholic Popular Party (popolari).
He accordingly invited Mussolini to participate in his ‘national’ bloc
in the elections that were due to be held in the late spring of 1921.
The risk for Mussolini was that his movement might become further
detached from its political origins (which were ercely anti-
parliamentary), but equally a foothold in the Chamber would
provide him with an authoritative platform from which to try to
control the unruly local ras. It would also furnish the fascists with
o cial endorsement (extraordinary given the extent to which they
had been openly outing the law). Giolitti’s hope was that fascism
could be tamed and brought into the constitutional fold, and thus
provide the anaemic body politic of Italian liberalism with a much-
needed injection of fresh blood.
The 1921 elections were a great personal triumph for Mussolini.
He secured an overwhelming victory in both Milan and Bologna,
gaining nearly 400,000 votes, and was returned to parliament along
with thirty-six other fascists. All but two of these new deputies came
from colleges in the north and centre of Italy. The socialists lost
ground, though not disastrously, and remained the largest party in
the Chamber with 123 seats, while the Popular Party increased its
tally to 107. Buoyed by this success Mussolini began to walk the
tightrope between the competing expectations of his radical and
conservative supporters, rea rming the republican tendency of
fascism, its commitment to major social and economic reforms, and
even his willingness to enter a coalition with the socialists, while
simultaneously stressing the need for order and discipline in his
movement. In his rst speech to parliament he mingled threats to
the socialists (‘on the plain of violence the working masses will be
defeated’) with o ers of conciliation, albeit heavily quali ed: ‘For us
violence is not a system, nor an aestheticism, far less a sport: it is a
brutal necessity to which we have been driven. And I add: we are
prepared to disarm if you, too, will disarm – your spirits,
especially… for if we continue like this, the nation runs a serious
risk of plunging into the abyss.’51
In the weeks that followed Mussolini repeatedly urged a cessation
of violence (‘the civil war is coming to an end… Bolshevism is
beaten’):52 he feared political isolation if the lawlessness persisted.
But it was hard to curb the anarchic impulses of the squads, who
continued their attacks almost unabated. In July, Mussolini
proposed a ‘pact of paci cation’ between the fascists and the
socialist unions – and even went as far as to sign one early in August
– but there was little chance of it being accepted by grass roots
members, particularly after eighteen squadristi were killed in a
pitched battle with police and the local peasantry at a town in
Liguria. A crisis of authority now gripped fascism, with many of the
squad leaders in open revolt against Mussolini; and two of the most
in uential ras, Dino Grandi of Bologna and Italo Balbo of Ferrara,
even went to see D’Annunzio in his villa on Lake Garda and ask him
to take over the movement. But D’Annunzio was not interested, and
with the ras aware that there was nobody else of su cient stature to
dominate fascism, a compromise was eventually reached: in the
autumn Mussolini agreed to abandon the pact in return for the
movement becoming a party – the National Fascist Party – with a
centralized command structure and local branches to help o set the
power of the squads.53
But the tension between centre and periphery, order and violence,
persisted – indeed it was to continue for many years to come as
fascism struggled to decide how to balance the competing claims of
spontaneity and discipline in a ‘moral revolution’. Moreover, as
Mussolini came to recognize by the autumn of 1921, fascism stood
to gain most from perpetuating the violence and using it to
blackmail the government, as neither of Giolitti’s successors as
prime minister in 1921–2, Ivanoe Bonomi and Luigi Facta (Giolitti
had been compelled to resign after the spring elections, unable to
hold together his increasingly fractured and vituperative
parliamentary coalition) showed any sign of being able to bring the
squads to heel. The police were openly fraternizing with the fascists
(‘The carabinieri travel around with [them] in their lorries… sing
their hymns and eat and drink with [them],’ reported a priest from
the Veneto in July 1922),54 and the prefects almost invariably took
their side against the socialists (one, Cesare Mori, who famously
endeavoured to make a rm stand against fascist aggression in
Bologna, was transferred to a less sensitive post in southern Italy).
Even the judiciary made little attempt to uphold the law impartially:
seven fascists were brought before the Mantua courts charged with
six counts of murder during the spring of 1921, and all were
acquitted; in the same period sixteen socialists were found guilty of
the murder of two fascists and sentenced to a total of 100 years in
prison.55
From the end of 1921 the activity of the fascist squads continued
relentlessly, with Mussolini now giving the ras his wholehearted
backing. The party expanded rapidly, developing an extensive
network of female and youth sections and claiming over 320,000
members by the late spring of 1922. There was also a growing
network of fascist trade unions, with nearly half a million workers
enrolled by the early summer of 1922 (for the most part agricultural
labourers), built up over the ruins of the socialist organizations and
led by a former revolutionary syndicalist from Ferrara, Edmondo
Rossoni. In addition there were ve national newspapers, two
journals and some eighty local newspapers, all closely tied to the
party’s central machinery in Rome.56 Although fascism was still very
much a movement of the north and centre, with only two areas of
strength in the south – the city of Naples and Puglia – it could
plausibly claim to be the rst genuinely national party in Italy
appealing to men and women of all classes and regions. As such it
felt increasingly entitled to demand power.
The cause of fascism was greatly assisted by the ineptitude of its
enemies. At the end of July 1922 the elderly leader of the reformist
socialists, Filippo Turati, desperate for a government that would
make a stand against the squadristi, went to the Quirinal Palace for
the rst time in his life to discuss the political situation with the
king and o er his support for an anti-fascist coalition. But the
liberals could not agree on what to do. Orlando talked of a
government of national unity, but Giolitti found the idea of sharing
power with the Catholic popolari repellent, and claimed that a policy
of resistance to the fascists would only plunge the country into a
full-blown civil war. The trade unions then made matters worse by
declaring a general strike. It was poorly supported – fewer than a
thousand of FIAT’s 10,000 workers downed tools – but it played
straight into the hands of the fascists, who declared themselves
defenders of the nation against a weak state and a still dangerous
Bolshevik menace, kept the public services running with volunteers,
and launched a fresh wave of attacks. In Genoa, Milan, Livorno,
Ancona, Bari and elsewhere armies of fascists, several thousand
strong, rampaged through the streets in the rst days of August,
destroying socialist buildings, occupying town halls, forcing the
resignation of left-wing councils, and leaving a trail of dead and
wounded in their wake. The only serious resistance took place in
Parma, where the squadristi, led by the Ferrara ras Italo Balbo, were
halted by troops and units of armed civilians led by a local socialist
deputy.57
It was now a question not of if but when Mussolini’s party would
come to power. The organizers of the general strike had hoped to
provide an overwhelming demonstration of support in the country
for ‘the defence of political and trade union liberties’ and the
‘conquests of democracy’. But liberty and democracy had for long
been synonymous with governmental impotence, subversion, and
economic and social chaos, and these words did not have the
emotional force to stir Italians to action. The will to oppose fascism
was lacking. On 10 August the Chamber gave its endorsement to a
compromise coalition government led by a colourless Piedmontese
lawyer, Luigi Facta, by 247 votes to 122, with the fascists, socialists
and communists voting against. Explaining why his party was
opposing the new administration one fascist deputy declared: ‘Either
the State will absorb fascism, injecting fresh life-blood into its vital
organs, or fascism will replace the State… Any solution imposed by
parliament against us would be an act of concrete violence at the
expense of the wishes of the country.’58 With this threat ringing in
its ears, the Chamber adjourned for the summer recess.
THE MARCH ON ROME

Facta was contemplating using the anniversary of Italy’s victory on

4 November 1922 to launch a programme of national reconciliation;
and there was talk that Mussolini’s rival D’Annunzio might be lured
from his retreat on Lake Garda to deliver a speech calling on all
patriotic Italians to bury their di erences and unite behind the ag.
This was a serious threat to Mussolini, though the threat was
somewhat attenuated when D’Annunzio fell from a window of his
villa on the evening of 13 August and was seriously hurt: he appears
to have lost his balance while high on cocaine and fondling the
sister of his mistress.59 Mussolini accordingly needed to act quickly,
and during the early autumn preparations began to be made for a
march on Rome. In mid-October plans were rmed up. They
envisaged the occupation of public buildings such as post o ces in
the principal cities (to hamper communications from the centre), the
concentration of squadristi at muster points in central Italy, an
ultimatum to the government to hand over power, and a descent on
the capital and the capture of ministries.60
A key issue was the monarchy. Mussolini had always maintained
that fascism was ‘republican in tendency’, but faced with the
prospect of the king ordering the army to open re on the rebels, he
quickly modi ed his position, declaring in a major speech in late
September that the Crown had nothing to fear from his party and
urging Victor Emmanuel not to oppose the ‘fascist revolution’. In the
same speech he stressed how his intention was to bring about the
spiritual regeneration of Italy in keeping with the unique traditions
of Rome and the glorious, unful lled hopes of the Risorgimento:
But if Mazzini and Garibaldi tried three times to reach Rome, and if Garibaldi had
presented his redshirts with the tragic and inexorable dilemma of ‘Rome or death’, this
signi es that for the men of the Italian Risorgimento Rome had an essential role, of
paramount importance, to play in the new history of the Italian nation. Let us therefore
turn our thoughts to Rome, which is one of the few cities of the spirit in the world, with
hearts pure and free of rancour… And it is our intention to make Rome the city of our
spirit, a city that is purged and disinfected of all the elements that have corrupted it and
dragged it into the mire. We aim to make Rome the beating heart, the galvanizing spirit of

the imperial Italy that we dream of.61

On 27 October fascist squads began converging on major towns

and cities throughout the country, occupying telephone exchanges,
telegraph o ces, town halls and prefectures, in most cases
peacefully. The autumn rain and cold, as well as uncertainty over
how the government would respond to the crisis, discouraged many
from turning out, and the mobilization went less well than expected.
Only about 16,000 squadristi, mostly from Tuscany, reached the
main assembly points around Rome, from where they were due to
descend on the capital. The majority had no weapons or food, and it
was clear that minimal army pressure would have been needed to
disperse them. The prime minister met in emergency session with
senior generals and ministers in the early hours of 28 October, and
later with his full cabinet, and it was unanimously agreed that a
state of siege should be introduced across the whole country,
beginning at midday. A telegram to this e ect was dispatched to all
prefects at 7.50. But when Facta went to see the king at nine o’clock
and asked him to sign the decree, Victor Emmanuel refused. Why,
remains a mystery: the previous evening he had apparently been
determined not to give in to fascist pressure.62 He may have come to
doubt the loyalty of his troops or feared that his cousin had struck a
deal with the fascists and was planning to depose him. Or he may
simply have wanted to avoid bloodshed. Whatever the reason, his
decision ensured that the ‘march on Rome’, which was an exercise
in political blackmail rather than a serious revolutionary or military
operation, a coup de théâtre more than a coup d’état, brought the
fascists to power.63
Facta resigned at 11.30. Half an hour later a telegram was sent to
all prefects announcing that the state of siege had been revoked:
jubilant fascists took to the streets. The king initially asked Salandra
to form a new administration, and Mussolini came under huge
pressure, particularly from the Nationalists, to accept this solution.
But he knew that he was in a position now to dictate terms. ‘Much
of northern Italy is under total fascist control,’ he wrote in Il Popolo
d’Italia on 29 October. ‘Central Italy is completely occupied by
blackshirts… The victory must not be mutilated… The government
must be unequivocally fascist.’64 Salandra declined the mandate,
and Victor Emmanuel turned instead to Mussolini, who arrived in
Rome from Milan on an overnight train on the morning of 30
October. He drove to the Quirinal, dressed in a black shirt. ‘Sire, I
bring you the Italy of Vittorio Veneto,’ he (allegedly) told the
king.65 Victor Emmanuel invited him to form a government. He also
asked him to disband the squads, but Mussolini considered this
impossible, and it was agreed that the squadristi should be allowed a
victory parade in the capital before being sent home. The next day
some 50,000 fascists marched, or more precisely roamed, through
the streets of the Eternal City, singing ‘Giovinezza’ and other songs
and brandishing clubs, knives and guns, many of them purloined
from army barracks. A group of around sixty broke into the house of
the former prime minister, Nitti, and ransacked it. The local people
watched the ‘black devils’, as they called them, with a good deal of
unease.66
22

The Establishment of a Dictatorship, 1922–5

Mankind is perhaps tired of liberty. It has had an orgy of it. Liberty is no

longer the austere chaste virgin for whom the generations of the rst half
of the last century fought and died. For the brave, energetic, robust
youths who face the glimmering dawn of the new history other words
exercise a much bigger fascination, namely order, hierarchy, discipline.

Benito Mussolini, in Gerarchia, March 1923

Fascism has simply destroyed with its violence what we had destroyed in
thought with twenty years of criticism: Italian democracy.

Giuseppe Prezzolini, in La Rivoluzione liberale, 1,36 (1922)

Excellency, I feel this is the moment to declare a faith that has been
nurtured and adhered to in silence.
If Your Excellency deems me worthy of entering the National Fascist
Party, I will consider it the greatest honour to occupy the post of your
most humble and obedient follower. Luigi Pirandello, telegram to
Mussolini, 17 September 1924
THE NEW PRIME MINISTER

At thirty-nine, Mussolini was Italy’s youngest ever prime minister.

By temperament imaginative, impulsive and emotional, with a deep-
seated strain of cynicism and a conviction that force ultimately
determined the course of all human a airs, and a nervous energy
that spilled over readily into cruelty (not for nothing was he a great
admirer of Machiavelli), he nevertheless possessed a remarkable
political intelligence. He had an extraordinary capacity to feel his
way around obstacles, wrong-footing his opponents by spinning a
web of ambiguity that left them uncertain as to exactly what he was
thinking or planning to do, and alternating threats with
blandishments. Often he himself had no clear idea where he was
going: chance and intuition might easily determine his next step.
And the fact that he was young, and even more that he came from a
humble background and lacked the sophisticated veneer of the
liberal elites – his plebeian table manners and uncouth language
were a source of much anxiety to the Foreign Ministry – inclined his
enemies to underestimate him. They mistook his gaucheness and
insecurity for weakness, and imagined they could manipulate and
use him and in due course push him aside when he tripped up and
no longer suited their purposes.
Mussolini was appointed prime minister in a constitutional
manner and he was to remain prime minister until July 1943. The
Statuto continued in force throughout this time, and Victor
Emmanuel III was head of state and commander-in-chief of the
armed forces, with responsibility for signing all decrees and laws.
That so little is known about the crucial role played by the king
during the interwar years – a consequence of the Savoy archives
remaining rmly closed – is deeply frustrating, especially as the
monarchy had traditionally viewed foreign policy and the conduct
of war as its privileged domains.1 However, from the beginning of
his administration Mussolini combined obeisances to order and
respectability with threats of subversion, claiming in his rst speech
to parliament that it was his intention to make ‘the revolution of the
blackshirts’ a ‘force for development, progress and stability in the
history of the nation’, and that while he could have turned ‘this grim
grey chamber into a bivouac for soldiers’, he had instead decided to
work towards ‘the uni cation of spirits’.2
Most observers believed that the advent to power of Mussolini
marked the beginning not of a new era but of ‘normalization’, a
return to order after the chaos of the preceding years; and the fact
that the cabinet included four liberals, two popolari, Nationalist
Luigi Federzoni, the eminent philosopher Giovanni Gentile, and two
distinguished military gures – Marshal Diaz and Admiral Thaon di
Revel – seemed a guarantee that stability would indeed be the order
of the day. Mussolini retained the key Foreign and Interior
ministries for himself, and there was a heavy sprinkling of fascist
under-secretaries; but the overall balance of this so-called National
Government was reassuringly conservative. The business community
(a large part of which had been extremely nervous at the prospect of
the unpredictable Mussolini at the helm) was reassured by the
appointment of the orthodox nancier Alberto De’ Stefani as
Minister of Finance, while the country’s most prestigious
intellectual, Benedetto Croce, who on the eve of the March on Rome
had attended a huge rally of blackshirts in Naples and applauded
Mussolini ‘fervently’, was full of praise for the new prime minister.3
Crucial to the support given to Mussolini by the old ruling classes
during his rst two years in o ce (and to a large extent thereafter
also) was his ability to look and sound conservative. After his rst
meeting with the king dressed in a black shirt, he took to wearing a
morning suit and top hat for royal audiences, and spats, butter y
collar and bowler hat for most other public occasions (although
bowler hats were discarded after it became clear to him that these
were only worn by Laurel and Hardy in the Hollywood comedies he
so much enjoyed watching).4 In speeches he referred constantly to
the importance of ‘discipline’, ‘order’ and ‘hard work’, and he
repeatedly touched on many of the traditional leitmotifs of Italian
patriotism: the need for Italy to be ‘reborn’, shake o its old vices,
and become strong, feared and respected, and not just a land of
‘museums and libraries’;5 the search for ‘moral unity’ as an antidote
to the divisions caused by factions, parties and localism (‘[fascism]
will abolish parish pumps so that Italians see nothing except the
august image of the fatherland’);6 and the necessity of ‘making
Italians’ in accordance with d’Azeglio’s celebrated injunction
(‘Italians are being fashioned through the rigours of the war, the
harsh post-war con icts and the fascist revolution’).7 He also made
highly respectful comments about the Catholic Church, describing
religion as a ‘sacred patrimony of peoples’,8 and reinforcing his
words with a number of high-pro le gestures such as increasing
clerical stipends and reinstating the cruci x in schools, courtrooms
and the Colosseum.
But alongside the conservative gestures and statements were more
subversive comments, in the main delivered to cheering squadristi at
party rallies – though the fact that these comments had been part of
mainstream criticism of the Italian state for over half a century
blunted their capacity to shock conservatives. Indeed many liberals
would very happily have endorsed them. One particular target of
attack was parliament, an institution that Mussolini repeatedly
disparaged as weak and corrupt, and whose activities in recent years
had, he claimed, caused general revulsion in the country and evoked
ideas of ‘Byzantium’.9 In a speech to party members in October
1923, explaining why the March on Rome a year before had been
necessary, he said:
For twenty, perhaps thirty, years the Italian political class had been growing steadily more
corrupt and degenerate. Parliamentarism – with all the stupid and demoralizing
associations that go with this word – had become the symbol of our life and the hallmark
of our shame. There was no government: there were just men continually under the thumb
of the so-called ministerial majority… When people could read what were referred to as
parliamentary proceedings and see what might be described as an exchange of the most
banal insults between the so-called representatives of the nation, they felt disgusted, and a

sense of nausea welled up inside them.10

Another object of attack was liberty, though here, too, Mussolini’s

insistence that freedom should not be confused with licence, and
that the state should take adequate measures to defend itself against
subversion, struck a powerful chord with those who had been
horri ed by the behaviour of the socialists in 1919s–22 (that of the
squadristi was evidently a di erent matter). As Mussolini put it in
October 1923, ‘If by liberty is meant the right to spit on the symbols
of religion, the fatherland and the state, then I – head of the
government and Duce of fascism – declare this liberty will never be
allowed!’11 As a corollary to this, he rejected the idea that freedom
was a right, endorsing instead Mazzini’s belief that it was a duty, a
means to an end rather than an end in itself, and as such subject to
modi cation according to circumstances. And he pointed out to
those who claimed that liberalism was at the very root of united
Italy that many of the most important patriots of the Risorgimento
had in fact not been liberals:
Careful, let us not exaggerate. To start with I dispute the claim that there was a liberal
party during the Risorgimento, a party, that is, in the modern sense of the word. There
were liberal currents and groups. But alongside the liberals, splendidly represented by
Camillo Cavour, there were men who were not liberals, such as Mazzini, Garibaldi, the
Bandiera brothers and Carlo Pisacane, who, together with his companions, set o to be

massacred for a dream of freedom and resurrection.12

What was deeply unclear in 1923 and 1924 was just how far
Mussolini was prepared to travel along the road to subversion. That
he wanted the March on Rome to be considered as the start of a
revolution of some sort is evident from the frequent comparisons
that he drew when addressing party members between fascism and
Bolshevism (to the inevitable detriment of the latter: ‘Moscow gives
the impression of a terrible leap forwards and a resulting broken
neck. Rome gives the impression of a march of compact legions’).13
But since he had often spoken of fascism inaugurating a ‘moral’ or
‘spiritual’ revolution, it was legitimate for liberal observers to
assume this was what he was aiming to achieve. (He himself
maintained that his attacks on parliament were only meant to goad
this decadent institution into working more e ectively.)14
Furthermore – and this was critical to the political situation in Italy
during his rst two years in power – he could argue that the
squadristi needed to be brought under control as part of the
‘normalization’ process, and that the best way of achieving this was
to assuage their radical expectations with intransigent rhetoric while
all the time working to contain them within the institutional
framework of the state.
And from the outset of his administration there was every sign
that Mussolini was indeed trying to bring the unruly squads to heel
– though he carefully cloaked each move he made in political
ambiguity. In January 1923 the Fascist Militia was set up – a party-
based paramilitary organization that absorbed the squadristi and
whose declared purpose was to provide the army and the police
with support in ‘defending the fascist revolution’. Such a body was
potentially unconstitutional, not least because Mussolini and not the
king was its commander; but the fact that it was centrally controlled
meant it could be justi ed as an instrument for disciplining the rank
and le and weakening the provincial ras. A similar line of defence
could be applied to another important innovation at this time, the
Grand Council of Fascism. This was a high-pro le consultative body
that appeared to elevate the fascist leadership to a similar plane as
the cabinet, but once again Mussolini could argue that it was a way
of tightening his grip on the party while simply compensating the
squadristi for lost autonomy.15 Moreover the party changed
dramatically in character in the months after the March on Rome,
more than doubling in size to 783,000 members by the end of 1923,
as ‘respectable’, mainly middle-class, converts moved in and
swamped the old guard.
A further sign that Mussolini was serious about curbing the
revolutionary tendencies of fascism was the absorption of the
Nationalist Association in February 1923. The Nationalists were a
small but in uential party, monarchist, authoritarian and pro-
Catholic in orientation, with strong support in the upper reaches of
the army, the diplomatic service, big business and academia. They
had much in common with the fascists and even possessed their own
paramilitary force, the blue-shirted Sempre Pronti! (‘Ever Ready!’).
But relations with the squadristi had not always been smooth, and
many radical fascists were strongly opposed to the merger, fearing
that it would pull the party in a sharply conservative direction. But
from Mussolini’s point of view the fusion o ered considerable
attractions: it served to underline the growing respectability of his
party, while providing him with (much needed) cadres of able
administrators and links to important sections of high society. The
Nationalists were to exert a huge in uence on the future
development of the regime, far more than their modest numbers
might have allowed them to expect, and gures such as Luigi
Federzoni and Alfredo Rocco were to be pivotal in shaping the
architecture of the new state.16
But it was not so much the Nationalists as the mood of frustrated
nationalism that Mussolini appeared most in thrall to during his rst
months in o ce, and his repeated calls for Italy to assert itself on
the world stage probably did more than anything else to endear him
to conservative opinion. He spoke scathingly of the League of
Nations (a ‘Franco-British duet’; an ‘insurance scheme for the
established nations against the proletarian nations’),17 and declared
that it was imperative for the proli c ‘Italian race’ to nd outlets for
its fast-growing population of more than 40 million.18 He celebrated
Francesco Crispi, unveiling a plaque to him in the Foreign Ministry
and declaring that he should be set permanently beside Mazzini,
Garibaldi, Victor Emmanuel and Cavour as one of the country’s
founding fathers (there was to be a day of national commemoration
for the Sicilian statesman in 1927).19 And on the rare occasions that
he ventured abroad he made it clear that he was determined to
uphold Italy’s right to be considered a great power. At a congress at
Lausanne in November 1922 to discuss the Turkish peace treaty he
demanded that the British and French representatives publicly
declare in advance that Italy would be treated on an equal footing,
while at a conference in London a few weeks later to discuss
German war reparations he attempted to have the French delegates
ejected from their rooms in Claridge’s on the grounds that they had
been allocated a more luxurious suite than the Italians.20
The most dramatic instance of Mussolini’s attempts to conduct an
assertive foreign policy occurred in the summer of 1923. On 27
August four Italian members of an international boundary
commission working in northern Greece were murdered in
mysterious circumstances. Relations between Rome and Athens had
been strained for some time on account of the disputed ownership of
the Dodecanese islands, which Italy had seized in 1912 at the time
of the Libyan war, and although the killers (who were never caught)
had almost certainly come from Albania, Mussolini immediately
delivered an ultimatum to the Greek government demanding a
formal apology, a large indemnity and a solemn funeral for the
victims in the Roman Catholic cathedral in Athens attended by the
entire Greek cabinet. When the Greek government objected,
Mussolini ordered the occupation of the island of Corfu.
Unfortunately the naval squadron arrived several hours behind
schedule, leaving insu cient time for the formalities of a peaceful
surrender, and the Italian commander proceeded to bombard the
island’s fortress even though he was aware that it was packed with
Armenian refugees, including hundreds of children. Sixteen people
were killed and dozens wounded.21
The Corfu episode was a blatant challenge to the authority of the
League of Nations and to its central principle of collective security,
and attracted worldwide condemnation. The British press was
particularly critical of Italy’s action, much to Mussolini’s
indignation, and relations between London and Rome grew
dangerously strained. Mussolini hoped to annex the island, but after
a month of intense diplomatic activity he was forced to withdraw
the Italian troops in return for the Greek government agreeing to
pay compensation of 50 million lire. Postage stamps bearing the
overstamp ‘Corfu’ had to be quickly removed from circulation.22
Despite this disappointing outcome Mussolini was determined to
present the Corfu incident as a major success, claiming that it had
raised the prestige of the nation greatly. At a blackshirt rally in
October he described it as the ‘most important and interesting
experience’ since 1860, in that Italy had ‘carried out a gesture of
absolute autonomy for the rst time and had the courage to deny
the competence of the Genevan Areopagus’.23
Some senior o cials in the Foreign Ministry were shocked by
Mussolini’s behaviour over Corfu, most notably the Secretary
General, Salvatore Contarini: he had been on leave at the time of
the crisis and had refused to return to Rome to participate in what
he called ‘such statesmanship’.24 But in general the Italian public
appears to have been highly enthusiastic about the coup de main,
seeing it as going some way to restoring national pride after the
‘mutilated victory’ and the rebu s at Versailles. The distinguished
liberal editor of the Corriere della Sera, Luigi Albertini, backed the
government wholeheartedly throughout the crisis, criticizing the
British for their reaction and claiming that Italy was displaying
moderation and restraint towards the ‘brutally o ensive’ Greeks.25
Most other Italian newspapers took a similar line. Italy’s
representative at the League of Nations, Antonio Salandra, pledged
his full support to Mussolini and had no qualms about defending his
country’s position vigorously in Geneva, maintaining that ‘no Italian
government could have acted otherwise’.26 In his memoirs Salandra
wrote that the Corfu a air ‘increased the prestige of Italy’s name –
as always happens in such instances – through an act of force, albeit
one carried out in contravention of the new rules… of international
law’.27
As Mussolini sensed, the painful legacy of military defeats and
setbacks in foreign policy, and the deep hurt at having for so long
been dismissed by foreigners as too undisciplined, enervated and
lacking in cohesion to be other than ‘the least of the great powers’,
could be drawn on to attract widespread support for his
government. The imagery of decadence and regeneration that had
been at the heart of the national movement in the nineteenth
century had left the prestige of Italy closely bound up in the minds
of many patriots with the pursuit of international ‘glory and power’,
as Mussolini put it.28 Tellingly it was not so much Mussolini as the
conservative Piedmontese aristocrat and former aide de camp to King
Umberto, Admiral Thaon di Revel, who was the main instigator of
the attack on Corfu, seeing a strike against Greece as indispensable
for restoring the country’s battered prestige.29 And the greatness of
the fatherland was a goal of such pre-eminent moral stature, even
for convinced liberals, as to justify the most painful moral sacri ces.
When in the spring of 1924 Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, the former
prime minister, had to decide whether to back Mussolini in the
forthcoming elections, he was torn between his love of liberty and
devotion to la patria:
[T]here are two ideals to which I have dedicated my life: the fatherland and liberty… In
giving my support [to fascism] I am aware that I would be obeying the passion and ideal of
the fatherland… At the same time I do not feel inclined to sacri ce my other ideal, liberty.
I am thus in a terrible dilemma… But knowing I have to sacri ce one ideal I cannot

possibly sacri ce the fatherland, so I sacri ce liberty.30

THE MATTEOTTI CRISIS

The elections of 1924 were held under yet another voting

arrangement. Proportional representation was widely considered to
have been a disaster, except by the socialists and the popolari, who
had been its main bene ciaries, and in the spring of 1923 the Grand
Council of Fascism proposed a ‘corrected’ proportional system under
which the group of parties with the largest number of votes would
automatically receive two-thirds of the seats, provided it had
secured more than a quarter of all votes cast. This was a radical
break with past practice and called into question the very principles
of representative government, but after years of weak majorities and
an intimidating socialist presence in the Chamber, there was a
widespread willingness to swallow such a reform. The main threat
to the proposal came from the Popular Party; but the popolari had
become deeply divided over whether or not to support fascism, with
many senior Church gures, above all Pope Pius XI, unhappy at the
increasing opposition shown by members of the party, including its
Secretary, Don Luigi Sturzo, to Mussolini. Early in July, under
pressure from the Vatican, Sturzo resigned, and the Popular Party
began to disintegrate. A few days later the Acerbo Law, as the
reform was known, passed by 223 votes to 123. Giolitti, Salandra
and Orlando all voted in favour.31
The elections held on 6 April 1924 were bitterly contested.
Mussolini had hoped that violence could be kept to a minimum, but
this was wishful thinking. There were numerous killings and
assaults by fascists, strings of attacks on opposition headquarters
and other buildings, and frequent disruptions of rallies. There were
also countless instances of intimidation and fraud. The government
slate of approved candidates (the so-called listone) included former
Nationalists, right-wing liberals and popolari, as well as fascists. The
opposition groups were heavily divided: there were two socialist
parties, a communist party, a republican party, social democrats,
popolari and various liberals (among them Giolitti). They found it
extremely hard to cooperate and failed to form a united bloc,
making it easier for fascism to claim that it was the only ‘national’
force capable of providing a government.32 The turn-out at the polls
was high at nearly 64 per cent. The listone secured two-thirds of the
votes (making the Acerbo Law in e ect redundant) and 374 of the
535 deputies in parliament. Support for the government and its
allies was particularly strong in the south, where the old liberal
clienteles had been jostling since the March on Rome to jump on the
fascist bandwagon.33

When parliament reopened on 30 May the man who had replaced

Turati as the leader of the reformist socialists, Giacomo Matteotti, a
young, fearless and highly educated lawyer from the province of
Rovigo, stood up and delivered a damning indictment of the
elections. He described in graphic detail the systematic violence and
corruption perpetrated by the fascists that had prevented the
‘expression of popular sovereignty’. ‘Perhaps in Mexico they are
used to conducting elections not with ballot papers but with courage
in the face of revolvers. And I apologize to Mexico if this is not
true!’ Throughout the speech he was subjected to repeated
barracking and abuse from the government benches. The prominent
socialist and editor of Avanti!, Pietro Nenni, who back in 1911 had
shared a prison cell with Mussolini, described the scene:
MATTEOTTI: We have a proposal from the Committee for Elections to
con rm numerous colleges. We are opposed to this proposal…
(A voice: This is provocation)
MATTEOTTI:… because if the government majority has obtained 4
million votes, we know that this result is the consequence of
obscene violence. (From their benches, the fascists brandish their
sts at the speaker. In the centre of the Chamber the most violent try
to throw themselves on Matteotti. Mussolini watches impassively from
his bench, frowning, silent, making no gesture.)
MATTEOTTI: The leader of fascism has himself explicitly declared that
the government did not consider its fate as tied to the outcome of
the elections. Even if it had been in a minority, it would have
remained in power…
[ACHILLE] STARACE: That is true: we have power and we will keep it.
(The whole Chamber descends into uproar. A voice shouts: We will
teach you to respect us by kicking you or shooting you in the back!
Another exclaims: You are a bunch of cowards! Matteotti remains
calm and allows the tumult to die down, ignoring the interruptions.)
MATTEOTTI: To support these government proposals, there is an
armed militia… (Voice on the right: Long live the Militia!)… which
is not at the service of the state, nor at the service of the country,
but at the service of a party… (Shouts on the right: Enough!
Enough! Throw him out of the hall!)…
MATTEOTTI: You want to hurl the country backwards, towards
absolutism. We defend the free sovereignty of the Italian people,
to whom we o er our salute and whose dignity we will defend by
demanding that light be shed on the elections.
(The left rises to acclaim Matteotti. On the right there are cries of:
Villain! Traitor! Provoker!)
MATTEOTTI (smiling to his friends): And now you can prepare my
funeral oration…
The ‘duce’ no longer hides his irritation… The previous day he had
interrupted a speaker, saying: Twelve bullets in the back are the best
remedy for enemies who are in bad faith.34
The speech was embarrassing to Mussolini and potentially highly
damaging, not least because Matteotti was a very well-regarded and
well-connected gure in international socialist circles. But far more
alarming for the government were rumours that Matteotti had built
up a substantial dossier on corruption in the Fascist Party and was
about to divulge its contents. One potential scandal related to the
sale of huge quantities of surplus war matériel at knock-down prices
to fascist loyalists, who then sold it on at an enormous pro t.
Among the bene ciaries of this scam was a Tuscan squadrista of
particularly violent character, Amerigo Dumini, who had moved to
Milan in the early 1920s pursued by charges of arson and murder
and become a protégé of one of Mussolini’s most powerful and
trusted lieutenants, Cesare Rossi. Thanks to his political contacts
Dumini was able to acquire thousands of ri es and other weapons
from the army, which he then passed to a bank in Trieste, which in
turn exported them to Yugoslavia. He netted the massive sum of 1.5
million lire. Whether he was acting as a front man is not known, but
it was clear that leading fascists were able to abuse their positions to
transfer state resources to private pockets or party co ers.35
Potentially far more serious were allegations that massive bribes
had been paid to high-placed fascists by an American rm, Sinclair
Oil, in its endeavour to secure the exclusive rights to petroleum
distribution in Italy. The American bid certainly seemed to be
working: in the summer of 1923 one of the leading advocates of an
alternative proposal for a national distribution company, the
powerful Milanese businessman and Minister of Agriculture
Giuseppe De’ Capitani, was removed from the cabinet.36 One of
those rumoured to be heavily involved in the party’s underhand
nancial transactions was Mussolini’s brother and close con dant
Arnaldo, who had taken over the editorship of Il Popolo d’Italia after
the March on Rome. Another was the in uential Under-Secretary at
the Ministry of the Interior, Aldo Finzi, who was also very close to
Mussolini (he acted on occasions as his second in duels), and who,
like Matteotti, came from a wealthy family in the Polesine district of
northeast Italy.37 Mussolini’s cynical view of human nature inclined
him to be indulgent towards nancial (and other) irregularities in
his colleagues, and the fascist regime was to have remarkable levels
of corruption. What Mussolini did not want was public scandal. The
prospect of Matteotti delivering another exposé of fascist crimes was
intolerable.
On the afternoon of 10 June ve men led by Amerigo Dumini,
who for a while had constituted a semi-o cial terror squad
nicknamed the Ceka (after the Soviet secret police), controlled by
the fascist party Treasurer, Giovanni Marinelli, whose function it
was to intimidate government opponents, seized Matteotti as he
walked along the Tiber towards parliament, pushed him into a car
and after a violent struggle stabbed him to death. The killers drove
around Rome for a few hours, apparently trying to decide what to
do, before disposing of the body in a shallow grave fteen miles
outside the city. The corpse was not discovered for more than two
months, but it was immediately clear to all that a serious crime had
been committed. A bystander noted down the numberplate of the
vehicle, and it was quickly traced. It belonged to the editor of the
fascist newspaper Il Corriere Italiano, formerly the mouthpiece of
Aldo Finzi, but now controlled by Mussolini’s press secretary, Cesare
Rossi. The night before the murder the car had been parked in the
courtyard of the Ministry of the Interior. Late on 10 June, Dumini
came to Mussolini’s o ce, apparently quite calm and collected, and
showed the prime minister a small piece of blood-stained
upholstery.38
The attack had been ordered by Marinelli and perhaps by Rossi,
too, and both men were in daily contact with Mussolini and would
not have acted without his knowledge. Whether the intention had
been to kill Matteotti, or to administer instead a brutal drubbing of
a kind that had become commonplace in recent years and which
might have been passed o as a regrettable ‘spontaneous’ gesture by
undisciplined squadristi, is not clear. But Mussolini knew
immediately that his government was in serious danger. He told his
sta to create ‘as much confusion as possible’ about the incident,
adding, ‘If I get away with this we will all survive, otherwise we
shall all sink together’.39 And when the killers were traced and
arrested, following the discovery of the car, Mussolini ordered the
initial investigations be taken out of the hands of the magistrates
and given (illegally) to the fascist chief of police, who promptly
interviewed Dumini accompanied by two senior members of the
Militia.40 Dumini was eventually to serve two years in prison for the
crime, but for a long time after that he was able to extract enormous
sums of money – well over 2 million lire by 1939 – from Mussolini,
a man whom he clearly saw as his patron, for all he had done, as he
put it in one of his supplicatory letters, ‘in the years of danger… for
the Idea’.41
Mussolini vehemently denied any responsibility for the murder,
and the country seemed willing to give him the bene t of the doubt.
There were almost no protests or strikes, even in the big cities,
where until recently the trade unions had been so militant (a sign of
just how rapidly the working-class movement had been broken).
The Vatican’s Osservatore Romano preached forgiveness: ‘Let him
who is without sin cast the rst stone.’42 And the king did nothing.
The principal threats to the government came from the press –
particularly the Corriere della Sera, which now established itself,
belatedly, as a beacon of opposition – and the cabinet. Several
ministers threatened to resign unless the administration was
broadened so as to hasten the process of ‘national reconciliation’.43
Mussolini complied, handing the Interior Ministry to the respectable
Nationalist Luigi Federzoni and the Justice Ministry to another
Nationalist, Alfredo Rocco. The opposition parties had decided to
boycott parliament in protest at the murder in what became known
as the ‘Aventine secession’, but this gesture only served to ensure
that the government did not get defeated in a con dence vote.
Mainstream conservative opinion was still behind the government
(the playwright Luigi Pirandello pointedly joined the Fascist Party at
this time) and on 26 June the Senate gave Mussolini its backing by
225 votes to 21. Explaining why he had voted with the majority,
Benedetto Croce said that fascism had ‘done much good’ and ought
to be given time ‘to complete its process of transformation’.44
But the prime minister’s concessions to respectability aroused
fears in the radical fascists that their ‘revolution’ was in danger, and
during the summer of 1924 Mussolini went out of his way to
reassure them, mobilizing the Militia, staging mass rallies, and
openly declaring his support for the party’s ‘intransigent’ rural wing
led by such extremists as Roberto Farinacci, the violent ex-ras of
Cremona. He called on the members of the Militia to remain
vigilant: to lay to one side the manganello, yes, but not to put on
‘slippers and a skull cap’, for while they were advancing with ‘every
possible olive branch, even a whole forest’, their enemies might be
preparing to crush them.45 Such talk inevitably did little to allay
conservative doubts, particularly when combined with a new decree
law restricting freedom of the press. During the late summer
Mussolini toured the country energetically, proclaiming his
solidarity with the working classes (‘I too have had calluses on my
hands’)46 and declaring his commitment to solving the country’s
economic and social problems. But by the time parliament reopened
in November it was clear that his support at the centre was waning.
Giolitti was the rst major liberal to come out openly against the
government, on 15 November. But Mussolini’s biggest concern was
Salandra, who was wavering: if he defected, the king might nally
be driven to act. The main opposition groups were still boycotting
the Chamber, which ruled out the possibility of defeat in a
parliamentary vote, but Mussolini nonetheless felt he had to take
further steps towards normalization, and he ordered the Fascist
Party to cease all violence and purge the ranks of unruly and
discreditable elements. This did not go down well with the
squadristi, who showed signs of mounting impatience with their
leader. And the fact that senior army generals (who were close to
the king) were putting heavy pressure on Mussolini to curtail the
autonomy of the Militia added to the tension. On 27 December the
opposition parties played what they hoped would be their winning
card, publishing a memorandum issued by Cesare Rossi to the police
in which he stated explicitly that Mussolini had been responsible for
setting up the Ceka and ordering attacks on opponents (though he
claimed not to know if Matteotti was one of them).
Mussolini had no further room for manoeuvre. On 29 December,
Salandra went into opposition. The next day Mussolini narrowly
averted the resignation of his cabinet, but on 31 December he was
told by a delegation of commanders of the Militia that unless he
acted immediately to defend the fascist revolution against the
opposition, the party would seize the initiative. And already in
Tuscany and the Romagna tens of thousands of armed squadristi
were descending on the cities, attacking the properties of anti-
fascists and in places trying to break into prisons to free fellow
blackshirts. Rumours began to abound of Mussolini’s imminent
dismissal and the declaration of martial law. But the king failed to
make a move. Perhaps he feared civil war; or maybe he thought that
as a constitutional monarch he had to wait for parliament to provide
him with a lead. Whatever the reason, Mussolini was given a nal
chance to salvage his political career when the Chamber reopened
on 3 January. The intervention he made that afternoon was not, as
he admitted, a conventional parliamentary speech but a direct
challenge to his opponents to invoke article 47 of the Statuto and
impeach him:

It has been said that I set up a Ceka. Where? When? How? Nobody
can tell us!
There has indeed been a Ceka in Russia… But the Italian Ceka has
never existed…
It has been said that fascism is a horde of barbarians encamped in
the nation, a movement of bandits and marauders! Attempts have
been made to turn the issue into a moral question, and we know the
sad history of moral questions in Italy. (Strong signs of approval.)
But there is no point in wasting time, gentlemen. I come to the
point. Here, in front of this Assembly and in front of the entire
Italian nation, I declare that I, and I alone, assume political, moral
and historical responsibility for all that has happened. (Prolonged
and very loud applause. Many shouts of ‘We are all with you! We are all
with you!’)
If some more or less garbled comments are enough to hang a
man, then bring out the gibbet and the rope! If fascism has been
simply castor oil and manganello, and not the magni cent passion of
the very ower of Italian youth, the fault is mine! (Applause.) If
fascism has been a criminal association, I am the head of that
criminal association! (Very loud applause. Many cries of: ‘We are all
with you!’)…
Gentlemen! You have deluded yourselves! You thought that
fascism was nished because I was disciplining it… But if I
employed one-hundredth of the energy that I have used in
disciplining it in unleashing it, you would see something indeed.
(Very loud applause.)
But there will be no need for this, because the government is
strong enough to stamp out fully and for good the sedition of the
Aventine. (Very loud and prolonged applause.)
Italy wants peace, tranquillity and calm industriousness,
gentlemen. We will give her this tranquillity and calm
industriousness with love, if possible, and with force, if necessary.
(Loud applause.)
You can be certain that in the forty-eight hours following my
speech, the situation on every front will be clari ed. (Very loud and
prolonged applause. Comments.)
We all know that I am driven neither by personal caprice, nor by
love of power, nor by ignoble passion, but solely by strong and
boundless love for the fatherland. (Very loud, long and repeated
applause. Repeated cries of ‘Viva Mussolini!’…)47
Nobody picked up the gauntlet thrown down by Mussolini, and as
darkness fell on 3 January liberal Italy quietly and ingloriously
came to an end. The Minister of the Interior instructed the prefects
to enforce law and order rigorously, monitor subversives and close
down any organizations that tended to ‘undermine the powers of the
state’ – a reference, naturally, to the far left, not to fascism.48 The
opposition groups lingered on for some months, hoping that there
might be some reaction in the country and debating whether or not
to return to the Chamber. But they were little more than voices
crying in the wilderness, and it was only a matter of time before
they were nally silenced. In November 1925, following an
assassination attempt on Mussolini, the reformist socialists became
the rst party to be proscribed. The popolari deputies tried to return
to Montecitorio in January 1926 but were driven away by fascist
guards. In October another attempt on Mussolini’s life led to the
remaining opposition parties being banned. Italy was now a one-
party state and a de facto dictatorship, committed to realizing the
dreams of national regeneration that had so long been a central
component of patriotism and which liberalism had failed to ful l.
23

The Fascist Ethical State

It is the State that educates citizens to civil virtue; makes them aware of
their mission; encourages them to be united… When the sense of the
State declines and the disaggregating and centrifugal tendencies of
individuals and groups prevail, national societies come to an
end.       Benito Mussolini, 10 March 1929

Fascism is a spiritual movement… For centuries there has been a

remarkable imbalance between the nobility, quality and energy of our
cultural life in Italy and the inadequacy of our civil education. This
problem… has for centuries tormented the noblest Italian thinkers. It was
the last thought of the dying Cavour. Massimo d’Azeglio summed it up
after uni cation had been achieved in a phrase that has become famous
with us: ‘Italy has been made; now we must make Italians.’ Fascism is
the greatest experiment in our history in making Italians.
    Benito Mussolini, interview with the Chicago Daily News, 24
May 1924

The relative ease with which Mussolini established a dictatorship in

1925 was in large part the result of the complex array of hopes and
anxieties that since the Risorgimento had crystallized around the
idea of la patria, investing it with a transcendent force against which
the shibboleths of liberalism ultimately proved impotent. As
dreamed of by a succession of nineteenth-century writers, nurtured
on the glories of ancient Rome and the nostalgic laments of Dante,
Petrarch and Machiavelli, the Italian nation was to be a resurrection
of past greatness, an awakening after centuries of decadence and
sleep. It was to be a fully united community, an extended family of
brothers and sisters who had agreed to renounce their evil legacy of
fratricide and division in order to work sel essly for the good of the
whole. The liberal state had failed to live up to these expectations.
Italy – or ‘Italietta’ as it was so often slightingly referred to – had
since 1860 been morally fractured, militarily weak, corrupt,
economically backward and culturally undistinguished. Freedom
had not released the pent up virtues of an enslaved people, as some
had fondly hoped. Instead, it appeared to have let loose on an
unprecedented scale, as if from Pandora’s box, all the old vices of
indiscipline, materialism and factiousness that had long been
considered the bane of the country’s history.
Fascism o ered for many a new hope and a new dawn. ‘We wait
nervously… straining our eyes to the horizon whence a star might
arise to bring us again the longed-for day,’ Giovanni Gentile had
written in 1919 in an essay entitled The Moral Crisis.1 And in
keeping with such heartfelt yearnings Mussolini embarked from
1925 on a series of initiatives designed to galvanize almost every
aspect of Italy’s moral, economic and cultural life, using the
machinery of the state and the rhetoric of war to mobilize the
population and forge a united, disciplined, industrious and
aggressive community whose entire spiritual being would be bound
up with that of the nation. It was a Herculean task, as he told a
gathering of party leaders in October 1930, since the damage that
had been in icted on the Italian psyche in recent centuries had been
immense:

We need time, a great deal of time, to complete our work. And I am

not speaking here of the material but of the moral work. We have to
scrape o and crush the sediments that have been deposited in the
character and mentality of Italians by those terrible centuries of
political, military and moral decadence between 1600 and the rise
of Napoleon. It is a prodigious undertaking. The Risorgimento was
just the beginning, as it was the enterprise of just tiny minorities.
The world war was profoundly educative. It is now a question of
continuing on a daily basis this task of remaking the Italian
character. For example, we owe it to the culture of those three
centuries that the legend grew up that Italians cannot ght. It
required the sacri ce and heroism of Italians during the Napoleonic
wars to demonstrate the opposite. The Italians of the early
Renaissance, of the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries to be
precise, had temperaments of steel, and brought all their courage,
their hatred and their passion to bear in war. But the eclipse we
su ered in those centuries of decadence weighs still upon our
destiny, as yesterday, as today, the prestige of nations is determined
almost exclusively by their military glories, their armed might…
This enterprise is my cross and my mission…2
In order to achieve its moral revolution, fascism set out greatly to
strengthen the powers of the state, taking as its fundamental
premise that the nation had claims prior to those of the individual,
and that the government was accordingly entitled to use whatever
measures were needed to protect society, irrespective of any liberal
notions of ‘rights’. Censorship was tightened up, and all newspapers
were brought under de facto government control. Local government
lost much of its autonomy, and from 1926 elected mayors were
abolished and replaced by podestà appointed by the prefects. A new
Public Safety Law of 1926 gave the police increased powers of arrest
and made them, in e ect, unaccountable, while a ‘Special Tribunal’,
applying military law (including the death penalty – though it was
rarely applied), was instituted to deal with terrorists and other
dangerous political opponents. A new punishment of con no was
introduced under which a person could be sent into exile in a
remote community (usually in the deep south) for ve years simply
for being suspected of the intention of engaging in subversive
activity. By the end of 1926 fascism was to all intents and purposes
a police state, intolerant of any opposition and bent on forging a
homogeneous national community. And one of the rst and most
widely publicized demonstrations of its new resolve came in the
campaign it waged in Sicily against the ma a.
‘EVERYTHING IN THE STATE, NOTHING OUTSIDE THE
STATE, NOTHING AGAINST THE STATE’

When Mussolini visited Sicily in May 1924 his itinerary included a

trip to the small Albanian settlement of Piana dei Greci, a few miles
to the south of Palermo. The road up into the mountains was
tortuous and dusty, and care had been taken in advance to clear it
of tra c so as to ensure that the prime minister did not arrive too
dirty. Mussolini drove one of the cars himself, fast, dispensing with
the normal comfort of goggles. On arrival he and his entourage of
ministers and dignitaries were welcomed on the steps of the
cathedral by the mayor, Francesco Cuccia, and a Greek Orthodox
priest, who o ered Mussolini a piece of bread as a traditional token
of hospitality. A group of women dressed in ethnic costume sang
songs of greeting. The church was packed, and noticing a child
waving a small ag insistently and straining to see him, Mussolini
went over, took him by the hand, and escorted him up the aisle – an
act of ‘exquisite gentility’, as one local newspaper admiringly put it.
After the service there was a reception in the town hall, with a
speech by Cuccia and numerous photographs, choreographed by the
mayor, who was determined to milk the occasion for all it was
worth. Whether at this point or earlier, Cuccia expressed surprise at
Mussolini’s police escort: Piana was his town, and he could vouch
for the prime minister’s total safety.3
Cuccia was a man with a reputation, a ma oso in local parlance,
and his high-handed manner and clear belief that he and not the
state should hold sway in Piana dei Greci deeply angered the prime
minister. Three years later, when reporting on the progress of the
recent drive against organized crime in Sicily to the Chamber of
Deputies, Mussolini referred speci cally to ‘that unspeakable mayor
who found ways of getting himself photographed at every solemn
occasion’ who was now safely behind bars.4 But in the early summer
of 1924 it was still not politically expedient for Mussolini to launch
an o ensive against the ma a. He needed the support of senior
Sicilian liberals such as Orlando; and given that ma osi invariably
had connections (whether solicited or not) with leading politicians,
any operation against the ma a might lead to the government
falling foul of important conservative interests. But after the speech
of 3 January 1925 and the defeat of the opposition parties Mussolini
had much more freedom of manoeuvre. And when in October of
that year he proclaimed that the twentieth century would be the
century of Italy’s ‘power’ and that in order to achieve this the Italian
state needed to be strong as never before – ‘Everything in the State,
nothing outside the State, nothing against the State’5 – the way was
open for an o ensive against organized crime. After all, there had
been no more agrant symptom of the liberal state’s impotence than
the persistence of the ma a.
The man appointed to conduct the operations in Sicily was Cesare
Mori. Mori came from Lombardy, and had been educated at the
Turin Military Academy, but he knew the island extremely well,
having served there as a policeman for many years prior to 1917,
gaining a formidable reputation for courage in ghting banditry. On
the face of it, therefore, his appointment as prefect of Palermo in
October 1925 appeared logical. But Mori was a Nationalist, not a
fascist, and as prefect of Bologna in 1921–2 he had earned the bitter
enmity of the squadristi for his attempts to uphold the law
impartially: after the March on Rome he had been summarily
dismissed from service. But by the autumn of 1925 Mussolini was
looking to rein in the party once again. A wave of brutal killings in
Florence (under the eyes of tourists) early in October had infuriated
him, and the party Secretary, Roberto Farinacci (who had been
appointed following the 3 January speech as a sop to the radicals),
had been soundly rebuked at a meeting of the Grand Council for
failing to control his followers. There followed a fresh o ensive to
subordinate the party to the state, culminating early in 1927 with
the Circular to the Prefects, which denounced squadrismo as ‘utterly
anachronistic’ and declared that in ‘a totalitarian and authoritarian
regime such as the fascist’ the prefect alone was to act as the
guardian of both ‘public order’ and the ‘moral order’ in the
provinces.6
It was these political parameters that determined not just the
choice of Mori for the campaign against the ma a but also the
character of the police operations. Like all those who knew Sicily
intimately at this time, Mori was well aware that the ma a was not
a secret criminal organization of the kind that sensationalist writers
liked to describe. It was, as Franchetti had observed half a century
before, a much more di use phenomenon arising from a culturally
sanctioned use of private violence by ambitious individuals pursuing
economic, social and political power in regions where the state had
historically been very weak. As such the ma a was not a clearly
circumscribed entity (though from time to time real secret societies
with hierarchies and initiation ceremonies did emerge) but rather a
complex set of networks of patron–client relationships generated by
ma osi using whatever means they could (and getting yourself
photographed standing by the prime minister, like Francesco Cuccia,
was the pinnacle of achievement). And given that the boundaries of
the ma a were ill-de ned, any decision by the police about where
to draw the line was ultimately political.
Under Mori’s direction the police rounded up dozens of members
of so-called ‘criminal associations’ (associazioni a delinquere) in the
course of 1926 and 1927 in the rural settlements of western and
central Sicily, arresting more than 11,000 men (and not a few
women). For the most part the targets were upwardly mobile
peasants, artisans and small landowners who had taken advantage
of the turbulent situation in the island during and immediately after
the war to advance themselves. How many had actually committed
crimes is di cult to say, as the charge of criminal association did
not require the police to prove direct involvement in a speci c
o ence. Often the basis for an arrest was hearsay – if someone was
known locally as ma oso: a dangerous premise, as many witnesses
pointed out, as this adjective was bandied about quite loosely at the
time and with a variety of meanings – or else membership of some
notorious individual’s family, political faction or clientele. Given
that men such as Francesco Cuccia were pivotal to the life of their
communities, it was frequently hard for the police to decide
whether to arrest a few dozen or a few hundred people in a town.7
Framing the arrests, though, were political considerations.
Mussolini wanted to draw the powerful landowning elites in Sicily
rmly inside the regime in 1926–7: many of the island’s most
prominent conservatives were uncomfortable with the radical
character of the Fascist Party in cities such as Palermo, and had
stood aloof. Since Mori knew that the wealthy had colluded with,
indeed very often protected, ma osi and were thus themselves open
to the charge of ‘criminal association’, he had a powerful weapon
for gaining their cooperation: either they support the government or
they risk prosecution. To facilitate their compliance Mori launched
an o ensive early in 1927 against the island’s most important
fascist, Alfredo Cucco, accusing him and his followers of corruption
and involvement with the ma a. Cucco was expelled from the party,
leaving the way open for fascism in Sicily to be rebuilt on a
conservative footing, with members of the aristocracy occupying
many of the key positions. This move was in keeping with a national
trend. In the course of 1926–7 thousands of former squadristi,
among them several deputies, were purged from the ranks of the
party and replaced with an in ux of respectable middle- and upper-
class members.8
Mori never envisaged destroying the ma a through police action
alone: he was well aware that simply removing a few hundred
networks of ma osi would not produce a permanent solution. Since,
according to his analysis, the ma a was not an organization in any
strict sense of the term, but rather ‘a morbid form of behaviour’
stemming from centuries of weakness on the part of the authorities,
the only way to deal with the problem e ectively was to dissuade
the landowners and the peasantry from colluding with ma osi by
demonstrating to them unequivocally that the state now had the
power to dominate all aspects of Sicilian life.9 It was a question (in
nineteenth-century parlance) of bridging the deep gulf between
‘legal Italy’ and ‘real Italy’ or, as the government put it in April 1927
in a document setting out the fundamental principles that were to
underpin the economic life of the country under fascism, of fusing
nation and state together in one seamless whole: ‘The nation is… a
moral, political and economic unit that nds expression integrally in
the fascist state.’10
Force was thus intrinsic to Mori’s operation, not just to crush the
ma a, but more importantly to impress upon the population as a
whole that it was to the state alone that they now owed total
obedience and respect. The days of supine collusion between ma osi
and a weak liberal regime, incapable out of respect for antiquated
notions of freedom of imposing itself on Sicilian society, were over.
It was a question, as the journal of the distinguished young radical
writer Piero Gobetti declared in October 1925, of conducting ‘an
enlightened and clear-sighted process of political education’,
teaching Sicilians ‘the necessity of the state’, and making ‘Italy’ for
the rst time into ‘a living experience’.11 Hence, in the wake of the
mass arrests, the symbolic importance of the trials that were staged
in the island amid much publicity from 1927. In each case dozens,
sometimes hundreds, of alleged ma osi were packed into improvised
court-rooms – a converted church or similar building – and
subjected to a swift judicial process. The ritualistic nature of the
proceedings was accentuated by the fact that the accused were
locked into huge iron cages – as if they were wild animals. Almost
all were found guilty of the crime of ‘criminal association’ and
sentenced to long terms in prison. In such circumstances justice was
inevitably rather rough; but that was hardly the point. The aim, as
Mori said, was to show that ‘fascism and ma a are irredeemably
antithetical’: ‘Fascism is the state in all its force and prestige.’12
But alongside force there had to be a measure of propaganda and
indoctrination, for the fascist state aimed to be ethical in character
and rectify through education many of the nation’s historic vices.
Mori told a regional Congress of Fascist Teachers in June 1926 of
how he had once met a shepherd boy ‘isolated in the murky solitude
of a latifondo [large estate] of ill repute’. ‘His father? Wanted, and in
America. His mother, sick and alone in the village with two babies.
The village? Far away. How far? He did not know; he never went
there. God, prayer, school? Nothing. The king, Italy, the nation?
Nothing. Rights, duties, the law, good and bad? Nothing.’ He urged
the island’s educators to do all in their power to eliminate such
appalling ignorance and fashion a ‘new soul composed of love and
inspired by one faith: God, king and fatherland’.13 Many teachers no
doubt did what they could. A school-mistress from the small town of
Prizzi sent Mori a number of tributes written by her pupils: ‘Miss has
told us,’ ran one, ‘that in Sicily there were lots of robbers, brigands
and men who always stole and killed other men, and that you have
been right to put them in prison.’14 And in Milocca the schoolmaster
dutifully informed the children that they were all Italians (not
Sicilians) and that Italy was one of the greatest nations in the world,
with a glorious past and a brilliant future. But the fact remained
that most schools were too poorly attended and too ill-resourced to
have much impact on their communities.
Mori himself toured the countryside of western and central Sicily
rallying the peasantry to the cause of the state. He handed out
subsidies to the wives and children of arrested men, distributed food
parcels to the poor, and delivered stirring speeches to large crowds
in piazzas decked out with tricolours and banners and festooned
with swags and triumphal arches. Like Mussolini’s, his rhetoric was
punctuated with words such as ‘discipline’, ‘faith’, ‘courage’, ‘work’,
‘sacri ce’ and ‘sobriety’, and he urged his audiences to remember
that the new, resurgent Italy was ‘the Italy of Vittorio Veneto
[which] advances irresistibly towards that future greatness… which
was the radiant vision of 600,000 men, nobly slain’ (a precept given
tangible expression with the inauguration of numerous war
memorials at this time).15 And, again like Mussolini, he celebrated
rural life, seeing in the stoical and resilient peasants those virtues
that would guarantee the nation a destiny worthy of its glorious
imperial past:

In the gure of the Sicilian peasant… silent, industrious and riveted

to his place of work on the sun-baked latifondo, I see not only the
worker of today… but also the bold pioneer who a rms the
primacy of Italy beyond its shores. I also see the heroic infantryman
through whose valour the warrior tradition of Italy was yesterday
born again, and which will re-emerge tomorrow and shine forth for
ever amid the ash and lightning of legends and epics.16
How much impact Mori’s propaganda had on the Sicilian peasants
(if indeed it was comprehensible: most would have found his Italian,
with its strong northern accent, almost impossible to follow)
remains unclear. In all probability, though, very little. Appeals to
self-abnegation and hard work were unlikely to fall on receptive soil
in a society where the epitome of success was the corpulent and
wealthy ma oso with a leisured lifestyle, who held court in the
central piazza of his home town every day, like a Spanish grandee,
with supplicants begging him for favours and kissing his hand in
gratitude. Nor is there anything to indicate that the recent war
resonated with the local population. An American sociologist who
lived in the village of Milocca in the province of Caltanissetta in
1928–9 noted an attitude of almost total indi erence to it:

No criticism was heard of the two men who had permanently

blinded themselves with the medicine they put in their eyes to make
themselves un t for military service. Another man told at length the
devices he used, rst to avoid being taken for the army, and later to
keep from being put in active service… No one was pointed out as a
hero of the war. Disabled veterans were preferred for employment
in minor positions connected with local government, but their war
records were never cited in their praise.17
Another problem with Mori’s attempts to draw the Sicilian
peasantry closer to the state, in accordance with the regime’s
objectives, was the absence of any serious economic inducements. In
the years immediately following the First World War there had been
a rapid rise in the number of smallholdings in the island as hard-
pressed landowners sold o parts of their estates; but this trend
began to be reversed in the later 1920s as many of the new peasant
proprietors found themselves unable to meet their mortgage
repayments following a revaluation of the lire in 1926, and had to
sell up. Furthermore a campaign to increase national wheat
production – the ‘battle for grain’, launched in 1925 – bolstered the
pro ts of even the most ine cient large landowners and tightened
the grip of the old elites on the island’s economy. The Great
Depression of the early 1930s further damaged the position of the
poor, and rural workers began pouring in tens of thousands into the
cities in an attempt to nd jobs. Reports began to speak of near
starvation conditions in many towns in the interior of Sicily.18
The campaign against the ma a formally came to an end in 1929
when Mori was removed from Palermo. His attack on the island’s
leading fascist, Alfredo Cucco, had angered many of the party’s old
guard; but the last straw was almost certainly a bitter clash with the
distinguished Sicilian general Antonino Di Giorgio, a former
Minister of War whom Mori had accused of protecting ma osi. The
government now declared that the ma a was defeated and
newspapers and other public documents were instructed not to
mention it any more. However, during the 1930s the signs are that
violence, corruption and lawlessness remained a serious problem in
the island. Indeed, they may even have got worse, as crimes went
unreported in the press and o cials were inclined to turn a blind
eye to anything that might jeopardize the o cial view that Sicily
had become a haven of tranquillity under fascism. Leading ma osi –
especially those with in uential contacts – quickly emerged from
prison; and according to many well-placed observers the situation in
the island was soon little di erent to before. As a leading lawyer
lamented to Mori in a letter of December 1931, describing the
growing chaos around Termini Imerese, to the east of Palermo:
As for public security, strong orders are issued but people go ahead
regardless and murder and rob at will… I realize that hunger, after
two bad harvests, has not improved things; but it is above all the
general lack of faith in the authorities that is to blame. In almost
every town the leading ma osi have had their sentences reduced and
are back… leaving the small fry behind. In Caccamo, a dangerous
place, the Azzarello brothers, among the worst ma a bosses in
Sicily… were proposed by the local authorities for deportation, but
were then let o by the Palermo Commission. Scandals such as this
make honest people sick and do nothing but encourage the
dishonest to commit crimes.19

In these circumstances was it any surprise if the peasantry in

western and central Sicily continued to place more trust in ma osi
than in the representatives of the Italian state?
MOULDING FASCIST MINDS

As the campaign in Sicily showed, the attempts of the fascist

government to extend the authority of the state and generate an
integrated national community faced huge obstacles. Old loyalties,
identities and patterns of thought and behaviour were hard to
eradicate – much harder than the heirs of the Enlightenment, with
their deep-seated faith in the power of education to shape a better
world, often liked to imagine. Coercion could produce alienation as
much as obedience; and while propaganda might have a positive
impact on those disposed to believe, the value system of fascism,
with its stress on discipline and self-sacri ce for the greater glory of
the fatherland, was unlikely, at least without the prospect of
tangible rewards, to appeal much to those whose lives were taken
up with the struggle for economic survival. Furthermore the fascist
state could never hope to be truly monolithic, despite talk from
1925 of the regime being ‘totalitarian’ in aspiration. Mussolini was
only ever prime minister, not head of state, and his capacity to
control those sections of society such as the army, big business, the
aristocracy and the major landowners who looked to the monarchy
as the ultimate guarantor of their interests was limited. Nor, of
course, could he dominate the Church, the most powerful source of
moral authority in Italy.
Despite these limitations, fascism followed Catholicism and other
leading religions in regarding education as critical to the attainment
of a morally uni ed community. For many years prior to 1922 there
had been a strong feeling that the Italian academic system,
especially at the level of secondary schools and universities, had
become little more than a factory, churning out diplomas and
degrees with scant regard for how the students would eventually be
absorbed into the workplace. Many conservative commentators had
been inclined to attribute Italy’s political problems before the First
World War to the fact that the country had a massive ‘intellectual
proletariat’ of teachers, lawyers, doctors, engineers and other
graduates who, it was believed, were turning to the Socialist Party
to nd solace for their frustrated hopes and ambitions. And the
problem had been getting worse. In 1919–20 there were twice as
many university graduates as in 1913–14, while the numbers
emerging from teacher-training schools (scuole normali) and
technical institutes trebled in the same period.20
In 1923 Mussolini’s rst Minister of Public Instruction, Giovanni
Gentile, introduced a series of major reforms that radically
restructured Italy’s educational system. The underlying principle
was to promote quality over quantity (‘few schools, but good ones’)
and the ultimate goal, as Mussolini declared, was to ensure that the
universities produced a ruling class ‘properly prepared for the great
and di cult duties’ of regenerating the Italian nation.21 For the vast
majority of the population schooling was to end at the age of
fourteen, with the last three years being spent in a new tier of
‘complementary schools’ that o ered no access to higher education
and whose curriculum was built around the provision of basic
vocational skills. One of the consequences (and aims) of this
innovation was to debar working- and lower-middle-class children
from proceeding up the academic ladder and thus (it was suspected)
acquiring ambitions above their station. The elites, who had passed
the necessary exams, went on to secondary schools (licei, ginnasi and
istituti magistrali) and from there were entitled to progress to
university. As a result of these reforms the numbers in secondary
schools dropped from 337,000 in 1922–3 to 237,000 in 1926–7,
while university enrolments fell from 53,000 just after the war to
around 42,000 a decade later.22
What Gentile was hoping – and many patriotic intellectuals,
Croce included, concurred – was not only that the number of over-
quali ed graduates in Italy would decline, but more importantly
that those who emerged from the secondary schools and universities
would feel organically bound to the national community as never
before. After all, in Gentile’s opinion (and Mussolini happily
endorsed his view), true freedom consisted in the spontaneous
fusion of the individual with the collectivity. This was largely why
there was such a heavy emphasis in the new secondary school
curricula on subjects such as classical studies (Latin especially),
literature, history and philosophy that were believed to transmit
most e ectively the spiritual essence of Italy. Religion, too, was
accorded a prominent place, above all in elementary schools, with
the local clergy being allowed to oversee how it was taught; for
though Gentile was himself a non-believer he saw Catholicism as ‘a
peculiarly Italian institution’ and ‘store-house of national tradition’
that could serve to reinforce respect for hierarchy and authority.23
Science was not favoured: it was seen as intrinsically cosmopolitan
and materialistic. Nor did women gain much from the reforms.
Gentile considered their natural place to be in the home, and while
he accepted they might make good primary school teachers on
account of their ‘obvious maternal qualities’, he attempted to steer
them away from the workplace by creating a new set of ‘female licei’
in which classics and philosophy were replaced by singing, dancing
and domestic skills.24
The problem with the Gentile reforms lay in the relationship
between ends and means. According to a distinguished
educationalist, Ernesto Codignola, fascist pedagogy should cast aside
the ‘agnosticism and indi erence to supreme national goals’ that
had characterized the liberal period and instead aim to create a
‘strong spiritual unity without which a nation cannot pursue
common aims, manifest any harmony of will, or aspire to
greatness’.25 But in trying to inject the academic system with a
markedly ‘national’ character – and among the innovations in 1923
were the introduction of a uniform ‘state exam’, for private as well
as public schools, a daily ‘salute to the ag’, and a general
tightening of ministerial control over both teachers and the
curricula – the government risked imposing a bureaucratic
straitjacket that would almost inevitably sti e the ‘moral’
renaissance that the reformers were looking to achieve. Gentile saw
education as a process of spiritual interaction between master and
pupil – a relationship that required spontaneity and autonomy if it
was to work – and he hoped that fewer schools, better-quali ed
students and higher-calibre teachers would allow this. But in
practice centralized prescriptiveness became the order of the day.
From 1925 teachers were subjected to increasing ‘fascistization’.
In December of that year Mussolini declared that schools ‘at all
levels and in all their teaching should educate Italian youth to
understand fascism, to renew itself in fascism and to live in the
historical climate created by the fascist revolution’.26 The same
month a law was passed allowing for the forcible retirement of any
public employee who had displayed views ‘incompatible with the
general political aims of the government’, and the ensuing purge
carried out by the Ministry of Public Instruction seems to have been
more thorough than for other government departments.27 From
1929 every primary and secondary school teacher was obliged to
take an oath of loyalty to the regime, while four years later
membership of the Fascist Party became compulsory (as for all civil
servants). In 1934 primary school teachers were instructed that
during working hours they should wear the uniform of either the
party or the Militia so as to impress upon their pupils that both ‘in
and out of school’ they were ‘o cers, educators and commandants’
who were preparing the younger generation ‘for service to the
fascist fatherland’.28
School curricula were subjected to a similar process of
fascistization, with a growing emphasis from the late 1920s on the
celebration of Mussolini, militarism and empire. To ensure the
maximum degree of uniformity a single state textbook for use in all
primary schools was introduced in 1929, with material selected and
approved by a special ministerial commission. Italian language
instruction started in the rst grade with the learning of key words
such as ‘Benito’, fascismo, Duce and re (‘king’), and progressed in
later years with compositions on aspects of the regime and its
achievements and commentaries on speeches by Mussolini. Maths-
teaching was framed to highlight the recent material progress of the
country, while physics was supposed to ‘illustrate the theories of
Galileo and Marconi with remarks designed to emphasize the
primacy and excellence of the Italian genius’. History had as its
central focus Italy as the cradle of European civilization, with a
particularly strong emphasis placed on imperial Rome and the
Risorgimento (both seen as foreshadowing fascism; the Renaissance
was frowned on as overly individualistic), and teachers were
expected to impart to students a deep sense of pride at being
‘born… on this soil bathed by so much blood, sancti ed by so many
martyrs, [and] made powerful by [the Duce’s] great genius’. In
addition to their state textbook all students received a ‘national
notebook’ for their homework (with a photograph of a smiling
Mussolini on the front cover) and a free copy of a hagiographic
biography of the Duce by Giorgio Pini.29
Given their status and their traditional concern with freedom of
enquiry, university academics were not as susceptible to state
control as schoolteachers. Gentile endeavoured to rally the
intellectual community to fascism, and in 1925 he published a
manifesto, signed among others by Pirandello, Corradini, Marinetti,
So ci and Malaparte, which called for the cultural life of the nation
to be placed at the service of the new regime in order that the
dreams of Mazzini might be realized and the work of the
Risorgimento nally be completed; but Croce replied with a
counter-manifesto, bearing a more distinguished list of signatories,
asserting the necessary autonomy of the arts and the sciences from
politics.30 Only at the end of the 1920s, after the conciliation with
the Vatican (1929) had given Mussolini a major llip to his
authority, did the government feel con dent enough to start putting
serious pressure on universities. In 1930 the Grand Council required
faculty deans and rectors to have been party members for at least
ve years, and in 1931 an oath of loyalty to the regime was
instituted for all university professors. The Pope gave his assent
(provided Catholics made a mental reservation that it would not
con ict with their duties to God and the Church), and only a dozen
out of some 1,250 academics failed to comply. This was a huge
propaganda coup for Mussolini, even though many of the jurors
probably heeded Croce’s advice to swear in order to prevent the
universities being taken over by party placemen. One of the non-
jurors, the Bologna surgeon Bartolo Nigrisoli, was assaulted and
badly injured by a gang of young fascists.31
The tightening of the government’s grip on the educational
system enabled syllabuses to be adjusted to t in with the regime’s
shifting priorities. After the conciliation with the Vatican religious
instruction (delivered by priests) was made compulsory in all
secondary schools and writers such as Bruno, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel
and Schopenhauer were dropped from philosophy courses. The
invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 led to an upsurge in anti-French and
anti-British propaganda (Italy’s ungrateful former allies, who had
forgotten ‘that the World War had been won, above all, by Italy’),32
and writers such as Tolstoy, Ibsen and Hugo were removed from the
curriculum and replaced with bellicose and nationalistic authors
such as Oriani and D’Annunzio. (After his exploits at Fiume – which
Italy nally annexed in 1924 – D’Annunzio lived quietly in his villa
on Lake Garda until his death in 1938, his vanity appeased by
o cial honours and titles, and a luxurious national edition of his
works.) The regime’s increasingly racist stance in the late 1930s was
re ected in the appearance in primary school textbooks of stories
such as ‘The White Soul of Black John’, in which a missionary
returns from Africa with a native boy who, he tells a group of
children, had been ‘little more than a beast’ when found (‘he went
about nude and ate raw meat’) but who, under the benevolent
in uence of Italy and the Church, had become civilized and
Christian. The priest announces that the boy is now ‘black outside
and white inside’, but the children remain unconvinced and one of
them asks if it would not be best to put him through the laundry to
make him clean again.33
To what extent all this centrally directed education succeeded in
in uencing the minds of the young is very hard to say. Despite the
purges of the later 1920s many teachers inevitably continued to
harbour beliefs derived from older value systems such as
Catholicism and socialism, and their support for the regime and its
directives was no doubt often super cial and based on pragmatism
more than real faith (a common joke in the 1930s was that the
initials of the Fascist Party, PNF – Partito Nazionale Fascista – stood
for Per Necessità Familiare: ‘For the sake of the family’). The constant
stream of ministerial directives generated a great deal of frustration
and resentment, especially it seems in secondary schools and
universities, where traditional humanistic culture remained strongly
entrenched. One of the more doggedly centralizing education
ministers, the authoritarian Count Cesare Maria De Vecchi di Val
Cismon (1935–6) (‘an ass and a fanatic’, in Gentile’s opinion), was
regularly referred to by teachers as unintelligent and overbearing,
according to police reports, or more graphically as ‘a pig’, ‘Tsar of
all Russia’ and ‘Caligula’.34 In these circumstances it is reasonable to
suppose that the spirit if not the letter of fascism was frequently
absent from classrooms. ‘After twenty years of fascism,’ wrote a
commentator in the early 1940s, ‘everyone agrees that we still lack
the fascist educator – I mean the educator who is physically,
morally, politically and militarily a fascist.’35
Another problem with schools as an instrument for making new
Italians was the persistent high level of absenteeism, particularly in
rural communities. While the numbers of those going to licei,
ginnasi, and istituti magistrali and university (women especially) rose
sharply in the 1930s, generating a huge surplus once again of
middle-class graduates (according to a government survey there
were 100,000 unemployed teachers in 1938),36 the peasantry still
saw primary education as having limited practical value and
regularly kept their children at home in bad weather or when they
were required for work in the elds. Most local councils remained
dominated by conservative landowners and continued to allocate
insu cient resources for teachers and classrooms. And sometimes
bureaucratic regulations worked to discourage attendance. In the
town of Milocca in central Sicily girls were not allowed to join the
second grade unless they had underwear: most peasant women did
not possess such garments.37 Illiteracy levels nationwide continued
to fall slowly during the interwar years, but 21 per cent of brides in
the south were still unable to sign the marriage register in 1936.38
MOULDING FASCIST BODIES

Mussolini harboured considerable ambivalence towards academic

learning. The decadence of Italy had set in during the Renaissance,
when speculative thought and the obsession with material comfort
and culture had distracted the ruling elites from active pursuits,
generating the ‘Guicciardini man’ that De Sanctis had so lamented:
highly educated and eloquent, but sceptical, critical, individualistic,
passive, and lacking in conviction and assertiveness. The new Italy
needed to shed this essentially bourgeois mindset (‘a mindset that is
totally antithetical to the fascist mentality’)39 and become harder
and more aggressive. Foreigners considered Italians to be not ‘a
race, but a cowardly mishmash of men and women best known for
serving and entertaining people abroad’, a collection of mandolin
and violin players, singers and dancers, not a disciplined and serious
nation.40 This had to change. As he declared in a speech in June
1925:

Only by creating a way of life, or rather a way of living, will we be

able to leave our mark on the pages of history and not just
chronicles. And what is this way of life? First and foremost, courage.
Fearlessness, love of risk, and loathing of comfort and easy living.
Being always prepared to dare in personal as in public life and to
abhor all that is sedentary… Being proud every hour of the day to
feel Italian. Discipline in the workplace. Respect for authority.41
The fascist regime accordingly aimed to mould the entire
personality and not just the intellect – a point underlined in 1929
when the Ministry of Public Instruction was restyled the Ministry of
National Education and given a new under-secretariat with speci c
responsibility for physical training. From the outset the party had
been eager to induct children and adolescents into the spirit and
practice of fascism through paramilitary organizations, and in 1926
these bodies were brought together in a single association, the
Opera Nazionale Balilla (ONB), headed by the tall, athletic and
good-looking (if uncouth) former ras of Carrara, Renato Ricci. There
were four sections: the Balilla, for boys aged eight to thirteen
(named after the child who according to tradition sparked a popular
revolt in Genoa in 1746 by inging a stone at an Austrian o cer),
the Piccole italiane, for girls aged eight to thirteen, the Avanguardisti
and the Giovani italiane, for boys and girls respectively aged between
fourteen and eighteen. To these were later added the Figli della lupa
(‘Children of the She-Wolf’) for children aged between six and eight.
The principal purpose of these organizations was to prepare the
young for their future roles in society: boys to be soldiers and girls
to be the mothers of warriors. After all, as Mussolini declared in
characteristically aphoristic fashion in 1934, ‘War is to man as
maternity is to woman.’42 Boys dressed in uniforms, paraded, sang
marching songs and engaged in competitive sports, while girls
practised rst-aid, danced around poles, went to concerts, and
attended courses on topics such as ower arranging, embroidery,
knitting and typing. Part of the training for future maternity
consisted of a military-style drill, in which girls were passed in
review carrying dolls ‘in the correct manner of a mother holding a
baby’.43 Guns were central to ONB culture, and in 1930 Ricci called
publicly for every Balilla gym to be furnished with them, on the
grounds that practising with real weapons was indispensable to the
formation of true men. One much-favoured ceremony, repeated in
piazzas up and down the country, consisted of a member of the
Giovani italiane handing a ri e to an Avanguardista, then to a Balilla
and nally to a Figlio della lupa, as if it were the torch of fascist
life.44
Camping was among the principal activities of the ONB, and by
1942 the government claimed there were 5,805 fascist campsites
visited each year by almost a million children. The camp
programmes were tightly scheduled and included games,
gymnastics, lectures, prayers for the ‘fascist martyrs’, and a twice-
daily salute to the king and the Duce. All members of the ONB were
eligible to participate, but preference was given to certain
categories, including children from poor families and the sons and
daughters of war veterans. The ONB’s main showpiece event was
the annual Campo Dux, a week-long training exercise for
Avanguardisti held from 1929 in a wooded district on the outskirts of
Rome. Mussolini and other leading party gures regularly attended,
as did delegations from overseas: the grand parade of the 1937
camp included 450 members of the Hitler Youth. Celebratory
documentary lms were made of each year’s Campo Dux and
screened in cinemas throughout the country.45
Membership of the ONB was not compulsory until 1939, but
parents who did not want their children to join had to provide
schools with a written explanation of why, and non-participants
faced discrimination when it came to state scholarships and jobs.
The ONB expanded its sphere of control fast as the government
came to see the party youth programme as necessary for
supplementing the de ciencies of traditional education and
imparting the true spirit of the fascist revolution (‘libro e moschetto,
fascista perfetto’ – ‘book and musket, perfect fascist’). In 1928 a
decree ordered the disbanding of all rival organizations – a measure
that brought the government into con ict with the Church, whose
own totalitarian aspirations had in recent decades led to the
creation of a network of Catholic associations for the young.
Mussolini came to a compromise as part of his bid for a conciliation
with the Vatican and agreed to allow the youth circles of Catholic
Action ‘with prevalently religious ends’ to continue in being, but the
Catholic Boy Scouts were banned on the grounds that they were a
‘semi-military organization’.46 In 1929 the ONB was absorbed into
the Ministry of National Education.
Sport was regarded as a ‘national necessity for the prestige and
progress of the race’, as an editorial in Il Popolo d’Italia said in 1924,
and an excellent way of forging the new fascist man. For women the
situation was more ambiguous: they needed to be t so as to ful l
their roles as healthy mothers, but, as the head of the association for
fascist university students said in 1937, they should avoid ‘useless
and dangerous over-competitiveness’ and engage instead in
‘graceful’ pursuits such as archery.47 Little had been done in liberal
Italy since De Sanctis’s reform of 1878 to encourage sport among
the masses, and neither the Catholics nor the socialists had looked
to ll the vacuum. Activities such as football had been regarded by
the Church as overly self-expressive, and encouragement had been
reserved primarily for gymnastics, whose repetitive exercises
mirrored well traditional Catholic ideas of spiritual self-discipline.48
The Socialist Party had tended to dismiss sport as inherently
bourgeois and a potential distraction for workers from the class
struggle. As a result the main developments had been in elite
pursuits such as mountaineering, fencing, cycling and motor racing,
particularly in the wealthy parts of the north. Football, too, had
initially been for the upper classes, and in the case of some of the
best-known teams, for the English upper classes: Milan had begun in
1899 as the Milan Cricket and Football Club.49
The fascist regime gave enormous encouragement to a wide range
of sports, celebrating individual courage as a cardinal fascist virtue
and hailing team victories as evidence of the new spirit of national
solidarity in the country. The Italian Olympic Committee was
brought under party control in 1926, and the following year all
local sporting federations were required to include representatives
of the PNF on their boards. In the Los Angeles Olympics in 1932 a
great deal of political capital was made out of the success of the
Italian competitors, who nished second in the medal table. Four
years later, in Berlin, they came fourth. The exploits of aviators such
as Francesco De Pinedo – whom Mussolini hailed in a major speech
in 1925 as an early example of the ‘new Italian’ (and who was made
a marquis after a 34,000-mile round trip to the Far East) – received
huge coverage, as did the achievements in the 1930s of Italy’s 6′ 7″
world heavyweight boxing champion, Primo Carnera (the ‘Ambling
Alp’). Newspapers were forbidden to show photographs of him
knocked down.
 Despite a claim by a leading party journal in 1933 that rugby was
the most fascist of games, having been introduced to the Welsh by
Julius Caesar’s legions,50 football was in fact the team sport that the
regime promoted with greatest vigour. By the end of the 1920s
almost every provincial capital had a major football squad, and in
1929 a single national league was instituted with the top teams
competing in Serie A. In Bologna a magni cent new stadium was
built under the direction of the city’s former ras, Leandro Arpinati,
and opened in 1926 – the most modern sports stadium in Europe,
with two international swimming pools, four tennis courts, a
gymnasium, an Institute for Physical Education and stands for
50,000 spectators graced by a giant bronze equestrian statue of the
Duce as a latter-day condottiero (melted down after the war and
turned into gures of a male and female partisan).51 In Florence
another ex-squadrista, Alessandro Pavolini, was the driving force
behind the building of an equally impressive stadium for the newly
founded Fiorentina team. Completed in 1932, the Giovanni Berta
stadium, as it was called (named after a local ‘fascist martyr’), was
the work of the brilliant engineer Pier Luigi Nervi and included a
daring cantilevered roof and a dramatic 55-metre high modernist
Marathon Tower, decorated with a giant fasces, with a huge jutting
platform at its base from which to address public rallies.
These and other new and refurbished stadiums in Rome, Turin
and elsewhere contributed to Italy’s successful bid to stage the
World Cup in 1934. The tournament provided an ideal opportunity
for showcasing the regime and mobilizing the country around what
in a relatively short space of time had become a genuinely national
sport. There were commemorative stamps featuring the di erent
venues, and an avantgarde promotional poster designed by
Marinetti showing a goal, a black ball and the fasces, which was
widely distributed throughout the country. Cigarette packets were
used to carry publicity, and a special Coppa del Duce was
commissioned, cast in bronze and ‘unique in moral value’ according
to an o cial press release, to be presented by Mussolini alongside
the main trophy. Mussolini himself attended many of the matches
together with other senior party and government o cials, and the
national team dutifully saluted to the strains of ‘Giovinezza’ and the
‘Marcia reale’ (‘Royal March’). The nal in Rome, between Italy and
Czechoslovakia, was turned into a political as much as a sporting
occasion, with the crowd raucously chanting ‘Duce, Duce’ and the
band of the Militia playing a succession of fascist hymns.
Fortunately the game went to script and Italy won with a goal in
extra time. In addition to the two trophies the victorious players
were presented with gold medals (for military valour) and a signed
photograph of Mussolini.52
Fascist propaganda frequently gave a strong martial gloss to the
achievements of the national team, seeing success on the football
pitch as evidence of the new spirit of discipline and aggression that
would guarantee the nation victory on the battle eld. Italy retained
the World Cup in France in 1938, but in a charged political
atmosphere; and the link that fascism had always sought to make
between sport and preparation for war became more apparent than
four years earlier. The team coach, Vittorio Pozzo, recalled the
moment in the opening match against Norway when the Italian
players were greeted with a cacophony of whistles as they gave the
fascist salute:

How long exactly that din lasted, I cannot say. I was standing rigid,
with one hand stretched out horizontally in front of me, and
naturally I could not gauge the time. The German referee and the
Norwegian players, who were with us on the pitch, stood looking at
us anxiously. At a certain point the uproar showed signs of dying
down and then stopped. I gave the order to stand to attention. But
no sooner had we put our arms down than the protests started up
again violently. Immediately I said: ‘Squad, attention. Salute.’ And
we raised our hands, as if to show that we were not afraid…53

If sport was to counter Italian decadence, and help resurrect the

Italian nation, so too was greater fecundity. As a socialist Mussolini
had favoured birth control, but by the mid-1920s he had become
smitten by the arguments of Nationalist demographers such as
Corrado Gini who had been alleging for a number of years that the
economic and cultural vitality of a people was closely related to its
birth-rate. The gloomy forecasts of the German philosopher Oswald
Spengler, whose best-selling work The Decline of the West (1918–22)
had raised the spectre of European civilization being undermined by
democracy and materialism and overtaken by the more proli c
Asian and African races, had helped to give pro-natalist ideas
popular currency. Mussolini launched the so-called ‘battle for births’
in a major speech to parliament in May 1927, claiming that ‘all
nations and empires felt the pangs of decadence’ when their birth-
rates began to fall, and that if Italy wanted to ‘count for something’
in the world it would have to raise its population by 50 per cent
over the next twenty years to at least 60 million.54
The following year, in a preface to the Italian edition of a work
by a German sociologist (and future SS o cer), Richard Korherr,
entitled Reduction in Births: Death of Peoples, Mussolini spelled out
more fully the demographic threats that were facing the nation. The
‘black and yellow races’, not to mention the Slavs, were proliferating
at an alarming rate, and ‘the entire white race’ was in grave danger
of being swamped. Much of the problem, he said, lay in the growth
of cities in Europe and the systematic emptying of the countryside,
for as all demographic studies showed, urban populations were
much less fertile than rural ones. And this phenomenon was due not
simply to economic factors: city life was inherently materialistic and
lacking in spirituality, and created individuals who focused sel shly
on their personal well-being and comfort:

The alarm bells are ringing… The challenge is to see if the soul of
fascist Italy is or is not irreparably infected by hedonism,
philistinism and bourgeois values. The birth-rate is not simply an
index of the progressive power of the fatherland… but is also what
will distinguish the fascist people from the other peoples of Europe,
in as much as it will be a measure of its vitality and of its
determination to pass on this vitality over the centuries. If we do
not reverse the trend, everything that the fascist revolution has
hitherto achieved and will achieve in the future will be completely
useless…55
This, as much as a concern to celebrate what a number of
in uential fascist intellectuals (following in the footsteps of Vittorio
Al eri) maintained was the true essence of the Italian nation, was
why so much emphasis was placed on ‘rurality’ by the regime.
Mussolini regularly toured the countryside, meeting farmers and
peasants, praising their vital contribution to the economic life of the
fatherland, lauding their sobriety and industriousness and having
himself photographed, sometimes stripped to the waist, working
alongside them in the elds. A special radio service, the Ente radio
rurale, was set up in 1933 to broadcast to farmers – though much of
the air time was given over to political propaganda, choral singing
and religion, and was unlikely to have made most peasants feel
much better about their lot (even if they had access to a radio).56
And measures were taken to make it as hard as possible for rural
workers to migrate to the cities, culminating in two laws in 1938–9
that made it illegal for anyone to transfer their residency to a major
centre unless they already had a job there.
The problem with much of the cult of rurality was that it drew
heavily on conventional urban myths about the joys of the
countryside and was likely to seem irrelevant (if not grotesque) to
those whose main concern was simply to nd enough work to live.
O cial encouragement was given to lms and songs celebrating the
life of the peasantry, especially in the later 1930s, but the results
were almost inevitably sentimental and trite. A good example was
the popular 1940 lm Mamma, in which the well-known tenor
Beniamino Gigli played a singer returning after a world tour to his
farm in the country, which had been looked after in his absence by
his mother. He is greeted by crowds of smiling peasants dressed in
picturesque costumes, who join him in a song: ‘A little house in the
country / a little garden, a vine / whoever is born here despises / –
and never seeks or dreams of – / the big city…’57 In reality, though,
Italian peasants did dream of the big cities, and despite government
prohibitions millions abandoned the land in the 1920s and 1930s
and moved to places such as Rome, Milan and Genoa – three of the
fastest-growing centres in Europe in the interwar years.
The regime’s other attempts to make Italy less bourgeois and thus
more fecund proved similarly disappointing. But there was no want
of trying. In 1926 a centralized statistics institute (ISTAT), headed
by the demographer Corrado Gini, was created to calibrate the
material health of the nation, and newspapers were instructed to
print the latest population gures regularly. Mussolini (who quickly
added two more children to his family in the late 1920s after a gap
of nearly ten years, bringing his total to ve) invited prefects to
keep him informed of interesting demographic developments and
personally intervened when he felt the situation demanded it (‘I
note that between the last census and today the population of Como
has declined by 27 stop if all the provinces of Italy were to follow
this brilliant example the Italian race would have its days numbered
stop tell the mayor to do something for large families stop Como
needs it’).58 A tax was placed on unmarried men, and the new
fascist penal code of 1930 had a category of ‘crimes against the race’
with sti penalties for anyone involved in carrying out abortions or
promoting contraception. In 1933 an annual Day of the Mother and
Child was instituted, held on Christmas Eve, during which bronze,
silver and gold medals were solemnly awarded to those with six,
eight or ten children.
Fascist propaganda worked hard to promote the ideal of the
‘authentic woman’ – fertile, rosy-cheeked, stocky, broad-hipped and
ample-bosomed – and to counter what it saw as decadent foreign
models of femininity: the so-called ‘crisis woman’ who was
neurotically obsessed with her appearance, hedonistic, wasp-waisted
and in all likelihood barren. Mussolini – whose own wife, the
sturdily built Donna Rachele, conformed to the party stereotype
(though his mistresses often did not) – made no secret of his dislike
of feminism, declaring publicly that women had a duty to obey their
husbands and should focus on ‘their natural and fundamental
mission in life’ of child-rearing and not be distracted by thoughts of
emancipation.59 The party made repeated attempts to regulate
female sexuality, issuing guidelines about the length of skirts and
the shape of bathing suits, and ordering newspapers not to publish
pictures of unusually thin women (dieting promoted infertility) or
women with dogs (child substitutes).60 Such puritanical strictures
were not surprisingly welcomed by the Church, though the Vatican
did object to some measures, such as the encouragement given to
participation by women in suitably decorous and healthy sports: ‘If
woman’s hand must be lifted, we hope and pray that it may be lifted
only in prayer or for acts of bene cence.’61
The regime also provided considerable institutional and nancial
support for its population goals. A government agency, the National
Service for the Protection of Maternity and Infancy (ONMI), was
established in December 1925 to assist needy mothers and provide
care for unwanted children and thereby, it was hoped, reduce Italy’s
very high infant mortality rates. Its funding rose from 8 million lire
initially to over 100 million in the later 1930s, helped from 1927 by
the proceeds of the tax on bachelors; but the persistent poverty of so
much of the peasantry and the squalor in which the underclasses in
the fast-growing cities lived ensured that its results were
disappointing. Infant mortality (0–12 months) dropped in the late
1920s and early 1930s to around 100 per 1,000 births (nearly twice
the level of England and Wales), but in the next few years it
remained almost unchanged and even began to rise again towards
the end of the decade. The situation was especially bleak in the
south, where in several regions the rate of mortality continued to be
in excess of 140 throughout the 1930s.62
Another important organization that sought to promote the fascist
ideal of the ‘authentic woman’ was the Federation of Rural
Housewives (massaie rurali), founded in 1933 by Regina Terruzzi, an
energetic former socialist schoolteacher who had once lost her job
for mothering an illegitimate child.63 The federation aimed to
mobilize peasant women up and down the country with a mixture of
propaganda, education and pleasure, and had a membership card
featuring a housewife balancing a tray of loaves on her head, and
the motto Alma Parens (‘life-giving mother’), and a uniform (for
o cial occasions) of an ivory-coloured neckerchief sprinkled with
the word ‘DUCE’ and decorated with ears of wheat, the fasces and
owers. There were training programmes, lectures, lm-shows and
prize competitions, and trips to Mussolini’s home-town of
Predappio, Rome or the monumental war cemetery of Redipuglia
near Gorizia; and the monthly newspaper carried photographs of
proli c mothers and farm life, and extensive information about
childcare, domestic hygiene, animal husbandry and cooking
(including how to make a patriotic green, white and red omelette).
By the end of the 1930s the association had nearly 1.5 million
members nationwide, though, as with most party organizations, the
great majority were concentrated in the north.64
The regime’s attempts to raise the birth-rate were thwarted in the
end by a combination of mundane economic and cultural factors.
The lack of jobs for the middle classes and the unremitting poverty
of many urban and rural workers made later marriages more
common and large families unrealistic. And rising expectations, and
a desire for the comfortable lifestyle that the regime o cially
disparaged, no doubt played a part, at least in the larger towns and
cities. A huge programme of land reclamation was embarked on
from the late 1920s, with areas such as the Pontine marshes outside
Rome being drained in order to make way for new settlements; and
in the 1930s the Libyan interior was subjugated and Ethiopia
invaded, it was claimed, partly to provide necessary living room for
the nation. But such initiatives were hardly justi able on
demographic grounds. The birth-rate continued to drop steadily at
least until 1936, falling below replacement levels in some parts of
the north and centre, and only picked up slightly at the very end of
the decade. And not even the top echelons of the party managed to
set a good example: the average number of children per member of
the Grand Council in 1937 was less than two.65 Once again the gap
between ideal and reality, expectation and reality, was proving
frustratingly hard to bridge.
24

Community of Believers

Hail, O people of heroes,

Hail, immortal fatherland!
Your sons are reborn
With faith in the ideal.
The courage of your warriors
The valour of your pioneers
The vision of Dante Alighieri
Shines today in every heart…

The poets and the artisans,

The landlords and the peasants,
With pride at being Italian
Swear faith to Mussolini.
There is no poor quarter
That does not send its men
Does not unfurl the ags
Of fascism the redeemer.

The fascist anthem, ‘Giovinezza’

The fascist state can only be conceived, believed in, served and
glori ed religiously.        Paolo Orano, Il fascismo (1939)
THE PARADIGM OF CATHOLICISM

Mussolini was very conscious of his body. As part of the ‘cult of the
Duce’, which became a key mechanism for generating popular
support for the regime after 1925, he developed a set of mannerisms
intended to convey the impression of an exceptional being. He
would throw his chest forward, tilt his head back and push out his
large jaw aggressively, or stand with his legs apart and hands on
hips, scowling slightly (like Napoleon). For public speaking he
developed an arsenal of amboyant gestures, but in private he was
restrained, even terse, often con ning himself simply to rolling his
large protuberant eyes in a manner that suggested (to some at least)
great volition. He had a horror of being overweight (a sign of
bourgeois self-indulgence) and ate very frugally: he used to say that
meals should take no more than ten minutes a day. He also took
regular exercise – horse-riding and fencing were his preferred sports
– to keep his muscular frame in shape. Consequently he had few
qualms about displaying his torso in public, and during family
holidays taken at the seaside resort of Riccione on the Adriatic coast
he regularly swam or jogged on the beach with crowds looking on.1
During one short family holiday at Riccione in August 1926 he
took time o to visit a number of towns in the Marche. Among them
was Pesaro, where from the balcony of the town hall he delivered a
speech whose main purpose was to announce the government’s
campaign to support the agging lira on the international exchanges
(‘from this piazza I declare to all the civilized world that I will
defend the lira to the last breath in my body and my last drop of
blood’). But he also took the opportunity to underline the degree to
which fascism was far more than just a political movement:

Fascism is not only a party: it is a regime. It is not only a regime: it

is a faith. It is not only a faith, it is a religion, which is conquering
the working masses of the Italian people… [A]nd nobody will
de ect us from the path that we must resolutely follow. Are you
ready to follow it? (Unanimous cry: ‘Yes.’) Follow it to the point of
sacri ce? (‘Yes! Yes!’) I will take your cries, then, as an oath… Long
live fascism! Long live Italy!2

In constructing itself as a religion, fascism turned to the Church as a

model, partly out of instinct and partly out of deliberate calculation.
As all the leading popular political movements in Italy since the
Risorgimento had recognized, Catholicism was by far the strongest
cultural template in the minds of the masses; and to win their
emotional support it was felt necessary to draw on the language,
iconography and practices of the Church. The liberal regime had
been repeatedly denounced for its ‘agnosticism’, for failing to
enthuse the population with strong ideals and arresting images.
Fascism aimed to rectify this. Like Catholicism, it saw itself as a
community of the faithful in which non-believers had no place (and
should be persecuted) and dissent had to be sti ed (through
censorship); and it looked to employ art, music, architecture, colour,
ritual, liturgy and ceremony to stimulate fervour and devotion
among its followers. It created its own extensive pantheon of saints
and martyrs, arranged mass pilgrimages to the new ‘shrines’ of the
regime, and elevated ‘the Duce’ into an almost godlike gure.
The cult of the Duce owed much of its early momentum to
Arnaldo Mussolini, who used his position as editor of Il Popolo
d’Italia to portray his elder brother as a man of incomparable ability.
From the mid-1920s the cult accelerated rapidly, fed by cohorts of
obliging ministers and lesser party o cials, and also by Mussolini’s
mistress, the talented Milanese intellectual and patroness of the arts
Margherita Sarfatti, whose biography, Dux (1925–6), depicted her
lover as a quint-essential Italian genius, the embodiment of all that
had been great in the peninsula since the time of the Romans. It
went through seventeen editions, sold 200,000 copies in Italy, and
was translated into eighteen languages.3 In the years that followed,
an army of journalists and writers turned out a ceaseless ow of
pamphlets and books extolling the prime minister and vying with
one another in the extravagance of their hyperboles. Mussolini was
compared to almost every illustrious gure in history, and was
deemed superior to, among others, Socrates, Caesar, Washington,
Napoleon and Lincoln. To what extent the authors of these works
were driven by genuine belief in their leader’s gifts, political zeal, or
hope that adulation might lead to a good job, is di cult to know.
Mussolini himself took a very close interest in the cult,
monitoring carefully what was written about him and scrutinizing
reports from the police, party o cials and prefects for indications of
his standing in the country. He always maintained that the masses
were deeply impressionable, citing fashionable crowd theorists such
as Gustave Le Bon in support, and he repeatedly compared Italians
to children who could be manipulated quite easily through rewards
and punishments (‘two things are utterly indispensable for ruling
the Italians: policemen and music in the piazzas’).4 His speeches, a
crucial ingredient in his charismatic appeal, were intended as
theatrical performances, to generate enthusiasm and unthinking
faith (‘the crowd does not have to know; it must believe’),5 and in
keeping with his assessment of his fellow countrymen as infantile
and credulous he developed a histrionic style of oratory that was at
once pantomimic and liturgical, with wildly exaggerated poses,
melodramatic hand movements, striking modulations in the tone
and pitch of his voice, and exchanges between speaker and audience
of the kind that D’Annunzio had made fashionable.6
An enormous variety of media were used to propagate the cult of
the Duce. Newspapers were obliged to give extensive coverage to his
daily activities and report his speeches in glowing terms (the
applause he received was invariably described as ‘delirious’,
‘formidable’, ‘unstoppable’, ‘prolonged’, ‘frenetic’, ‘vibrant’,
‘deafening’ and ‘enthusiastic’). It became mandatory to print the
words ‘Duce’ and ‘he’ (when referring to the prime minister) in
capital letters, and among the epithets that journalists attached to
his name were ‘sublime’, ‘magni cent’, ‘divine’ and ‘tireless’ (the
myth that he worked long hours was fostered by leaving a light
visibly burning in his o ce overlooking Piazza Venezia after he had
left). Mussolini’s (imputed) aphorisms – ‘Believe, obey, ght’, ‘Live
dangerously’, ‘Better one day as a lion than a hundred years as a
sheep’ – were reproduced in inscriptions and painted on walls all
over the country, while his facial features and pro le, often
reworked in a modernist idiom, were made the subject of
innumerable paintings, posters, sculptures, statues and medals.
Radio and lm became increasingly important vehicles for the cult
during the 1930s.
Allusions to the Duce’s ‘messianic’ status were frequent. Much
was made of his ‘miraculous’ survival of four assassination attacks in
1925–6 (‘Insane attempt on the life of Mussolini. God has saved
Italy,’ ran one headline)7 and Pope Pius XI’s description of him in
1929 as ‘a man of providence’ lent ponti cal backing to the cause of
sancti cation. Manuals in elementary schools frequently injected a
religious note into their descriptions of the Duce – as with the
second-grade text called ‘The “Yes” of the Deaf-Mute’, in which a
little boy is suddenly cured of his a iction while listening in a
crowd to a speech by Mussolini, and is able to shout out
enthusiastically: ‘Yes! Du-ce! Du-ce!’ in answer to his leader’s
questions. The story concluded: ‘A star is watching from the
heavens. It is the eye of God.’8 Countless allusions were made to the
parallels between Mussolini’s character – his sel essness, his scorn
of worldly goods, his stoicism in the face of the hardships of exile or
the pain of his war wounds (so many, according to Sarfatti in her
biography, that he seemed like ‘Saint Sebastian, his esh pierced as
if with arrows’)9 – and the qualities shown by Christ and the great
saints.
Mussolini’s simple origins were also an important element in the
cult, and their emotional resonance was again reinforced by explicit
parallels with the life of Jesus. The Duce’s blacksmith father became
the carpenter Joseph, while his patient and long-su ering mother,
the schoolteacher Rosa, took the part of Mary (‘They are but Mary
and Joseph in relation to Christ,’ wrote Edgardo Sulis in his 1932
Imitation of Mussolini: ‘instruments of God and history ordained to
look after one of the greatest of national messiahs – indeed the
greatest of them all’).10 The Duce’s home-town of Predappio was
extensively redeveloped from the mid-1920s as a centre for mass
tourism, with the house where Mussolini had been born and a newly
constructed family crypt containing the sarcophagi of his parents
(and from 1931, Arnaldo) acting as the focal points. Visitors were
invited to see themselves as pilgrims and behave with reverence;
and most, it seems, did, quite spontaneously, as a report on a typical
trip made in 1937 by 820 members of the national association of
massaie rurali from Pesaro suggests:

The previous evening, the massaie rurali decorated coaches and

lorries with wild owers from their elds and they also brought
enormous bunches of them to lay on the tombs [of the Duce’s
parents]. The endless queue of massaie, in their characteristic
costumes and their arms lled with owers, was a splendid, lovely
sight… Then the massaie heard a mass for Mussolini’s parents,
celebrated in the Predappio church… Then, with religious emotion
they visited the Duce’s house, poor, rustic like their own, where a
mother has worked, loved, su ered, living a life like theirs, simple
and loving, a life of sacri ce and happiness, teaching Her Great Son
goodness, discipline and self-sacri ce.

One massaia was said to have ‘religiously kissed’ everything she

could touch in the house.11

The cult of the Duce was in many respects the principal unifying
force in the fascist regime, holding together men and women of
di erent backgrounds and acting as a common denominator for the
various ideological currents that continued to run through the
Fascist Party – and indeed Italian society as a whole – after 1925. It
functioned on a number of intellectual and emotional levels, not
least the erotic: Mussolini was o cially a respectable married man,
but little was done to counter the idea that he had a fatal allure to
women and was sexually voracious (according to his private
secretary he made love, briskly, with a di erent partner almost
every day in his o ce in Palazzo Venezia).12 But the intensity and
pervasiveness of the cult derived ultimately (as it had done with
Crispi) from the plethora of hopes surrounding the idea of Italy,
which the monarchy and parliament had repeatedly failed to satisfy.
It was these hopes – political, moral, economic, cultural, military –
that the regime was able to manipulate into a form of salvationism,
with the aid of familiar religious iconography.
Ceremonies and symbols were extensively employed by fascism to
highlight the religious character of fascism. As one of the party’s
leading intellectual gures, Giuseppe Bottai, explained in 1923,
‘Religions often conquer souls and spirits through the solemnity of
their rituals more than through the sermons of their priests.’13 From
the outset fascism developed an array of distinguishing attributes,
sites of memory, and dates around which it could build a framework
of liturgy and commemoration and thereby preserve, as Mussolini
said, ‘the pathos’ of the movement14 – the salute, the black shirt, the
fasces, ‘Giovinezza’, 28 October (the March on Rome), 21 April (the
foundation of ancient Rome: to replace the socialist May Day), 24
May (the entry into the war), 4 November (victory in 1918), the
tomb of the unknown warrior (in the Vittoriano), the battle elds
and cemeteries of 1915–18. In 1927 a new calendar was introduced
alongside the Christian one, with the year beginning on 29 October
and dates, written with a Roman numeral, starting from 1922–3
(‘year one of the fascist era’).
Like Catholicism, fascism made a cult of the dead. The ‘3,000
fascist martyrs’ who had lost their lives in the struggle against
socialism between 1919 and 1922 were a major focus of veneration
throughout the regime – commemorated in speeches and
monuments and in the names of public buildings, party sections and
streets – while ‘the fallen of the Militia’ were frequently celebrated
in both prayer and print. An anthology published by the party in
1935 with photographs and biographies of 370 blackshirts killed
defending the revolution between 1923 and 1931 contained a
characteristic mixture of religious and military imagery, with a
frontispiece of a aming cruci x anked by fasces and erect
bayonets, and an invocation to the fascist dead:
GOD, you who light every re and strengthen every heart, renew
each daymy passion for Italy.
Make me ever more worthy of our dead, so that they – the strongest
– may reply to the living: PRESENT!
You nourish my book with Your wisdom and my musket with Your
will…
When the future soldier marches beside me in the ranks, may I hear
his faithful heart beating…
Lord! Make Your cross the insignia that goes before the banner of
my legion.
And save Italy, in the DUCE, always and at the hour of our
beautiful death.
Amen.15
The Catholic paradigm of the communion of the living and the
dead o ered scope for bringing large swathes of Italy’s past inside
the emotional parameters of fascism, so enabling the regime to pose
as the embodiment of the historically (and providentially) ordained
nation. And likewise those elements that were considered foreign or
unworthy could be excised from the record or held up for execration
– as with much of the period between 1860 and 1922. A good
example of how fascism used the cult of death to link past and
present was the reburial on the twelfth anniversary of the March on
Rome of thirty-seven ‘fascist martyrs’ in the crypt of Santa Croce in
Florence in a ceremony that established a continuum between the
regime, the Risorgimento (via Foscolo and his great patriotic poem
On Tombs) and the ‘Italian glories’ already interred in the church,
such as Machiavelli, Michelangelo and Galileo. The lavish
ceremony, in which each co n was carried through the streets of
the city preceded by a banner with the martyr’s name and the word
‘Presente!’, was attended by Mussolini and all the top party gures.
And the press underlined how the event bore witness to fascism’s
success in unifying the nation through religious zeal:

[A] few hours separate us from a rite which the entire Italian soul is
preparing itself for and towards which it stretches as to a supreme
and intimate source of religious energy without which life would be
a colourless succession of meaningless days… The civil liturgy of
fascism testi es to the discipline of the masses and their great faith
in the Duce.16
Among the most important expressions of fascism’s attempts to
see itself as a spiritual community of the dead and living were the
celebrations in 1932 to mark the tenth anniversary of the March on
Rome. In the summer a major exhibition of the life and legacy of
Garibaldi was held in the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome, and its
underlying political purpose was to highlight the a nity between
the ‘redshirts’ and the ‘blackshirts’. In the nal room visitors walked
down a long gallery of uniforms worn by three generations of
Garibaldian heroes from the mid nineteenth century to the First
World War, with the clear implication that the events of 1848–
9,1860, 1862,1867 and 1915–18 were manifestations of the same
faith (and all similarly sancti ed by blood) that culminated in the
fascist seizure of power in 1922. The curator of the exhibition, the
distinguished Risorgimento historian Antonio Monti, was especially
pleased with the uniform of Giuseppe Sirtori, one of Garibaldi’s
leading generals, in which the red shirt was hidden beneath a black
frock-coat. It evoked, to his mind, the bloodstained shirt of a
squadrista who had been killed at Mentana in October 1922, ‘a
magni cent signi cation of the spiritual relationship that links the
two marches on Rome’.17
No sooner had the Garibaldi exhibition closed than the beaux-arts
facade of the Palazzo delle Esposizioni was dramatically
transformed for the opening on 28 October 1932 of the Exhibition
of the Fascist Revolution: four towering black fasces, modernist in
design and nearly eighty feet high, were set imperiously against a
backdrop of red over the entrance staircase – as if to highlight the
nation’s recent metamorphosis from liberal e eminacy to fascist
virility, discipline and strength. The exhibition, which was designed
by some of the most talented architects and artists of the period,
including Mario Sironi and Giuseppe Terragni, set out to chronicle
the turbulent years in Italy from 1914 to 1922 using thousands of
original documents and photographs displayed in rooms of often
remarkable aesthetic originality. On the surface the political
narrative was paramount, with Mussolini and other leading party
gures playing key roles, but the underlying message was that the
fascist revolution had been a supremely spiritual movement whose
purpose had been to reconnect the people with the nation and so
enable Italy to ful l its rightful destiny as a force in the world.
This message was already implicit in the early rooms of the
exhibition, where the narrative thread of events following the
outbreak of the war was provided by Il Popolo d’Italia, with texts and
quotations displayed prominently on the walls and the pilasters – as
if the real protagonist of the revolution was ‘the people of Italy’
speaking through Mussolini. But it was in the nal rooms that the
idea of fascism as author and agent of a new spiritual community
was most powerfully expressed. In the Gallery of Fasces visitors
passed through a church-like hall with giant cantilevered pilasters
rising upwards on either side in the shape of a fascist salute towards
a ceiling inscribed with ‘DUCE’; while in the next room, the Hall of
Mussolini, there was a reconstruction of the fascist leader’s last
o ce in Milan, with the phone receiver lying on the desk as if he
had just been called away hurriedly, and cases of documents,
framed to resemble death notices, detailing the assassination
attempts on his life. The stress on Mussolini’s mortality served (with
a note of admonition) to emphasize that fascism’s message was
eternal, a point that was dramatically underlined in the nal room,
the Shrine of the Martyrs, a darkened hemispherical space
dominated by a huge metallic cross bearing the inscription ‘For the
immortal fatherland’ and surrounded by the word ‘Presente!’ written
up around the walls a thousand times on small metallic plates.18
FASCISM AND THE VATICAN

As a young man Mussolini had been ercely anti-clerical, attacking

the Church for its obscurantism and immorality, denouncing priests
as ‘black microbes’, and publishing a scurrilous novel in 1910 about
a cardinal who murders his young mistress;19 and though he
softened his tone markedly from the early 1920s as he looked to win
the support of the Vatican against his liberal and socialist
opponents, he remained at heart deeply hostile to Catholicism.
Many fascists, especially those of radical left-wing backgrounds,
were similarly opposed to an institution whose moral power
threatened the party’s monopoly of the hearts and minds of the
masses; and the attempts to turn the regime into a secular religion
often strayed quite deliberately – as had happened in the mid
nineteenth century with the cult of Garibaldi – into the realms of
blasphemy. Pupils in Italian schools in Tunisia in the mid-1920s
were subjected to a version of the Creed which must have caused
considerable o ence to many Catholics as well as the clergy:

I believe in the high Duce – maker of the blackshirts. – And in Jesus

Christ his only protector – Our Saviour was conceived by a good
teacher and an industrious blacksmith – He was a valiant soldier, he
had some enemies – He came down to Rome; on the third day – he
re-established the state. He ascended into the high o ce – He is
seated at the right hand of our sovereign – From there he has to
come and judge Bolshevism – I believe in the wise laws – The
communion of citizens – The forgiveness of sins – The resurrection
of Italy – The eternal force. Amen.20
That the Church did not raise its voice in condemnation of such
travesties re ected its ambivalence towards fascism. It was
heartened from the outset by the government’s support for
Catholicism and its opposition to liberalism and socialism, and it
welcomed the party’s commitment to hierarchy and order, its
preference for rural over urban life, its encouragement of
cooperation between classes, and its conservative views on the role
of women. But it had serious di culties when it came to the goals
of fascism. The battle for births, for example, accorded well with the
Church’s horror of contraception and its belief in the sancity of
family life and procreation; but the purpose of sexual activity should
be to help the dissemination of Christian values, not make Italy
economically stronger and better able to ght a war, as Mussolini
maintained. And in general the Church was highly uncomfortable
with the regime’s aggressive and militaristic culture and its
insistence that the material and moral energies of the country
should be directed wholly towards achieving worldly glory for Italy
(‘the pagan worship of the state’, as the Pope put it in a moment of
anger).21
But the biggest problem for the Church was the threat that
fascism’s totalitarian ambitions posed to organizations such as
Catholic Action; and it was largely fear of being squeezed out of
civil society that impelled Pope Pius XI into serious secret
negotiations from 1926 for a concordat and settlement of the Roman
Question. On 11 February 1929, in a magni cent ceremony at the
Lateran Palace, the Vatican’s Secretary of State and Mussolini signed
the Lateran Pacts, which brought to an end nearly seventy years of
formal dissension between Church and state. ‘Italy has been given
back to God and God to Italy,’ announced the Osservatore Romano.22
In return for recognizing the territorial settlement of 1870 as nal,
the Vatican City was made a fully independent state with forty-four
hectares of land, and the Pope received an indemnity of 750 million
lire plus a further 1,000 million in bonds as compensation for the
loss of Church property since 1860. An accompanying concordat
declared Catholicism to be the o cial religion of the state, and gave
the Church a number of important privileges, such as the exemption
of trainee priests from military service. Most signi cant of all for
Pius, the concordat guaranteed the position in Italy of Catholic
Action and its organizations, ‘in so far as they carry out their
activities independently of all political parties… for the di usion
and realization of Catholic principles’.
The pacts were of enormous political bene t to Mussolini as well
as the Church. They were hailed internationally as a great
diplomatic triumph and they consolidated the strong support for
fascism that already existed in nearly every sector of Italian society.
The level of consensus was indicated by the plebiscitary election
held in March 1929 for 400 new parliamentary deputies, in which
the government secured over 8.5 million ‘yes’ votes (98.33 per cent
of those cast) in a turn-out of more than 90 per cent. Inevitably
there was coercion, especially in the smaller centres, where the
mayor and local party o cials could easily control the result (‘We
will vote as they tell us, but God knows what is in our hearts,’ a
peasant in the Sicilian village of Milocca told an American observer
as he was marched o to the polls accompanied, in time-honoured
fashion, by the local band);23 and the absence of any alternative to
the list of government candidates inevitably meant the poll had
limited signi cance. But there can be little doubt that the
conciliation with the Vatican healed one of the most damaging
moral ssures running through Italian society and permitted
millions of Catholics to identify with the state to a degree that had
not been possible since 1860.
However, in guaranteeing the independence of Catholic Action,
Mussolini was imperilling his totalitarian dream of a fascist
community of believers. He knew this, and in 1931 he launched a
violent attack on the Vatican, and closed down all Catholic youth
organizations, claiming that they were pursuing political goals (in
contravention of the concordat). The Pope retaliated with an
encyclical recommending that anyone who took an oath of loyalty
to the regime should do so with ‘mental reservations’.24 A
compromise peace was reached in due course whereby the youth
organizations were allowed to continue, as long as they kept to
purely religious activities (and did not engage in sport). But it was
the Church, rather than fascism, that emerged as the real victor.
Having succeeded in securing niches in civil society, the Vatican set
out to capitalize on them. Membership of the Catholic youth groups
increased swiftly in the 1930s to nearly 400,000, while the Church’s
student movement, FUCI, which aimed to train a Catholic lay elite,
also ourished, nurturing in its ranks many of those who were to
lead the Christian Democrat party after 1945. And private Catholic
secondary schools prospered, with pupil numbers rising from 31,000
in 1927 to 104,000 in 1940.25
The idea of a community of believers bound together by faith in
the fatherland, working to shed the vices of past centuries and
restore the nation to a position of moral, cultural and political pre-
eminence in the world, enjoyed the powerful sanction of some of
the most important currents of the Risorgimento. And the fact that
so many Italian intellectuals – artists, architects, novelists,
playwrights, poets, musicians, journalists, teachers, academics and
lm-makers – felt able to collaborate with the regime and
contribute, often passionately, to discussions about the nature and
direction of fascism was testimony as much to the allure of the
myths of regeneration and greatness as to the capacity of the state
to co-opt through patronage. As Davide Lajolo, later to be a leading
gure in the Italian Communist Party, recalled of his time as a
young man in Piedmont in the late 1920s and early 1930s:

I never came across an anti-fascist who could make me understand

that the ardour and eagerness with which I was burning for fascism
was totally misplaced. Fascism was the only thing you heard at
school, in cafés, among friends. ‘Only with war will the world be
healthy,’ said fascism; only by ‘conquering a place in the sun’ will
the majority of poor Italians become better o … Only by ‘daring the
undareable’ – as D’Annunzio put it in his poetry (and it was deeply
seductive) – could you make yourself worthy of life. Rhetoric?
Certainly… But that rhetoric excited me. I believed so sincerely in
going to the people that I was willing to seize a ri e and stand
shoulder to shoulder in the front line with the infantry, in any war,
facing bullets. Yes, yes: ‘book and musket, perfect fascist’. And with
all that this entailed: companions dead at my side, hopes
consecrated with blood. A terrible legacy.26
But not everyone absorbed the messages of fascism as earnestly as
Lajolo, and the reception of the fascist message was inevitably
contingent on factors such as literacy, access to the media, and the
rootedness or otherwise of rival value systems. In much of the
countryside, and especially in the south, the party and its teachings
made little headway, it seems, and the old rhythms of life,
dominated by issues of family and the local community, and above
all by the need to survive in the face of unremitting poverty,
continued unaltered. ‘Fascism? I don’t remember anything of
fascism,’ said an elderly peasant in the 1970s. ‘We only thought
about our work. I never saw a newspaper…’27 And even where the
regime’s propaganda operated most insistently, as in the large urban
centres, traditional frameworks of thought and feeling – Catholic,
liberal humanist, socialist – proved hard to eradicate, ensuring that
some of the party’s more extreme ideas were greeted with
scepticism, sarcasm or hostility. As the limits of the regime’s
attempts to penetrate hearts and minds and create new fascist men
and women became ever more apparent in the late 1930s, Mussolini
grew increasingly desperate, and frequently railed to his colleagues
about the seeming impossibility of transforming what he called a
‘race of sheep’ into one of wolves:

It is the material that I lack. Even Michelangelo needed marble to

make his statues. If he had had nothing else except clay, he would
simply have been a potter. A people that for sixteen centuries has
been the anvil cannot in a few years become the hammer.28

And in his frustration, he turned, like many frustrated patriots

before him, to war:

[Italians] have to be kept drawn up in uniform from dawn till dusk.

What they need is stick, stick, stick… To make a people great you
have to take them o to ght, even if it means kicking them up the
backside. That is what I will do.29
25

A Place in the Sun, 1929–36

If, little black girl, slave among the slaves You look down from the
plateau to the sea You will see, as in a dream, many ships And a
tricolour waving for you.
Chorus
Little black face Pretty Abyssinian Waiting and hoping The moment is
drawing close. When we are with you You’ll have new laws and another
king.
‘Faccetta nera’, popular song, 1935

Italy and Ethiopia are two entirely distinct entities. The former is a great
nation, the cradle of three civilizations. The latter is a conglomerate of
barbarian tribes. Ethiopia is a negative factor for Europe, a source of
dangers. Italy, on the other hand, is a linchpin of European
collaboration…
Benito Mussolini, 9 October 1935
BREAD…

Fascism was concerned above all with the life of the spirit, but it
could not ignore nancial matters. Beyond restoring a measure of
stability, Mussolini had no clearly de ned economic policies when
he came to power. Moreover his hands were rmly tied by political
considerations: he needed to win over conservative business
interests. He accordingly reduced government spending (axing
nearly 100,000 public sector jobs), rescued the Banco di Roma,
ended the compulsory registration of shares, lowered tari s and
abolished several taxes. These measures contributed to the boom in
manufacturing that occurred (as elsewhere in Europe) between 1923
and 1925. In agriculture he curtailed the post-war trend towards the
division of major estates, and in 1925, following a poor harvest, he
launched a campaign to make Italy self-su cient in food. The ‘battle
for grain’ was of bene t mainly to large arable farmers. So, too, was
the ‘integral land reclamation’ programme, which was designed to
raise production levels through extensive investment in irrigation
works, road building and rea orestation. Private landowners were
supposed to contribute to the costs of the schemes, but in the
absence of serious penalties for non-compliance many failed to do
so.1
Once Mussolini had consolidated his grip on power in 1925, he
set out to establish greater central direction over the economy. For
some years the Nationalists had been talking of the need to
‘discipline’ labour through state-controlled syndicates, and in 1926
the government introduced a major new law con rming the fascist
trade unions’ monopoly over the representation of workers, banning
strikes and making arbitration compulsory in collective disputes. In
theory this was intended as a staging post towards a fully edged
‘corporativist state’ of a kind aspired to by many left-wing fascists,
who had been in uenced by the pre-war ideas of the revolutionary
syndicalists, with every economic category in the country –
employers as well as employees – being represented on an equal
footing in corporations so that the nation’s resources could be
harnessed rationally to the needs of the collectivity: a so-called
‘third way’ between capitalism and socialism. But in practice fascism
was never in a position to control the industrialists to the same
degree as the workers, and though some government measures –
such as the revaluation of the lira in 1926–7 – were taken in
opposition to the wishes of parts of the business community, the
fascist economy in general tended to favour the middle classes more
than peasants and urban labourers.
Italy felt the impact of the Great Depression from 1929 less
severely than many other European countries (as a consequence
principally of its still very restricted industrial base) but there was
still considerable hardship. Wages were cut by 25 per cent between
1928 and 1934; and although the cost of living also fell sharply
during the same period, the fact that the average working week was
reduced by around 10 per cent meant that many industrial workers
were on balance probably worse o than before. (Some fascist
leaders welcomed this economic asperity: according to Bottai it
would ‘have valuable psychological and moral consequences by
enforcing a more rigorous way of living’.)2 The most damaging
consequences of the depression were in the countryside, where the
shift towards wheat production that the ‘battle for grain’ had
encouraged was accelerated by the collapse of the export market for
goods such as citrus fruit, olives, nuts and wine. Smallholders now
faced serious di culties. Unemployment rose sharply and
consumption declined, especially in the south, where the traditional
safety valve of overseas emigration and remittances had been shut
o as a result of the United States and other countries introducing
strict quotas after the war.
The government responded to the country’s economic di culties
with a huge increase in public spending. The number of civil
servants doubled during the 1930s to around one million, while the
outlay on welfare schemes, including maternity bene ts and family
allowances, went up from 1.5 billion lire to 6.7 billion lire – over 20
per cent of the country’s total receipts from taxation – thereby
creating a prototype for a modern welfare state.3 Expenditure on
public works also soared. Italy had fewer than 200,000 private cars
on the roads in 1930, compared to over a million in both Britain
and France, but this did not prevent the state embarking on an
ambitious programme of motorway construction – partly to provide
jobs, and partly for prestige purposes. The Italian Encyclopaedia
claimed that motorways were ‘an entirely Italian creation’: they
were not, but they accorded well with the image that fascism liked
to project of itself as the epitome of dynamism and modernity.4 Car
ownership in Italy rose to more than 300,000 in the 1930s, helped
by the introduction of FIAT’s cheap 500cc model known
a ectionately as the ‘Topolino’ (‘Mickey Mouse’) – a modern, but
hardly dynamic, vehicle.
The state also responded to the depression with the creation of
two important new agencies – the Istituto Mobiliare Italiano (IMI,
1931) and the Istituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale (IRI, 1933) –
to rescue ailing banks and businesses. IRI in particular proved
immensely important for the development of the Italian economy,
intervening to save enterprises ranging from steelworks, shipyards
and shipping lines to electrical and machine-tool industries and the
telephone system. The aim initially was to provide capital and
managerial advice that would enable companies to be restored to
nancial health and then sold back to the private sector, but in
practice many of the rms remained fully or partially under the
control of the state, run with considerable are by a generation of
progressive entrepreneurs, a number of whom were later to
spearhead Italy’s ‘economic miracle’ during the 1950s and 1960s.
On the eve of the Second World War it was estimated that the
Italian state owned a larger proportion of the industrial sector than
any other European country outside the Soviet Union.5
The regime liked to present IRI as an aspect of the ‘corporativist
state’, which was inaugurated in 1934 with the establishment of
twenty-two vertically structured corporations of employers and
workers, each (supposedly) articulating the needs of a di erent
sector of the economy. But in reality IRI remained largely
independent of these new institutions. Indeed the corporations
turned out to be considerably less important than government
propaganda initially made them out to be. They were supposed in
theory to regulate wages, levels of production and conditions of
work in accordance with the general needs of the community, but in
practice their powers remained limited, with most of the key
decisions on the economy continuing to be made by the party-
controlled workers’ syndicates, the autonomous employers’
organization, Con ndustria, and Mussolini. But this did not stop an
enormous amount being written in Italy and abroad about the
corporativist state. The historian Gaetano Salvemini, one of a small
group of Italian intellectuals who emigrated, noted from his base at
Harvard in 1935 how ‘Italy ha[d] become the Mecca of political
scientists, economists and sociologists’ eager to examine a system
that appeared to o er a revolutionary solution to the evils of both
capitalist individualism and communist collectivism.6
… AND CIRCUSES

Objectively a majority of Italians may have witnessed a fall in their

living standards in the late 1920s and early 1930s, but subjectively
many probably felt better o . The Duce often spoke scathingly of his
desire to ‘Prussianize’ his fellow countrymen and rid them of their
image as sensual, fun-loving idlers, but the need to ensure mass
support for the regime led, paradoxically, to extensive government
promotion of leisure activities. In 1925 a national federation was
established of recreational institutes and clubs, many of them
formerly run by the socialists, and two years later it passed under
the control of the party. The Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro (‘National
After-Work Agency’), as it was known, proved extremely popular,
going from 280,000 members in 1926 (mostly railwaymen and
postal workers) to 1.4 million in 1930 and nearly 4 million in 1939.
It organized concerts, plays and dances, screened lms, ran bars and
billiard halls, promoted local carnivals and festivals, and arranged
sports events, day trips and seaside holidays. As with so much of
fascism its impact was far greater in the towns than the countryside,
the north than the south, but it was certainly one of the most
successful initiatives in generating consent during the interwar
years.7
But circuses as compensation for shortages of bread (particularly
white bread) carried political risks. While the government did its
best to use entertainment to foster ‘national’ sentiment – for
example by organizing festivals of song and dance, staging parades
of traditional peasant costumes, and reviving (or in some cases
e ectively inventing) ancient sports such as 27-a-side football (calcio
in costume) in Florence (1930) or the ‘Saracen Joust’ in Arezzo
(1931) – some of the most popular leisure activities became
powerful vehicles for foreign cultural in uences. This was the case
with cinema, which despite heavy encouragement from the
government for lms of a patriotic character remained dominated in
the 1930s by escapist comedies featuring ‘white telephones’ and
other symbols of bourgeois a uence. Some lms purveying ‘fascist’
values were successful at the box o ce, including Luciano Serra,
pilota, which Mussolini’s son, Vittorio, helped to make; and the
regime used import controls and censorship to try to restrict the
distribution of foreign productions. But with limited success: almost
three-quarters of ticket sales in 1938 were for American lms.8
Nor was the promotion of popular festivals and folklore without
its problems. Displays of provincial art, music and dress, re-
enactments of traditional ceremonies and commemorations of local
historical episodes were intended, as one party publication
explained, ‘to stop Italians blindly loving and imitating what is
foreign, encouraging them instead to make use of what is theirs and
arouse “that national spirit without which nothing great has ever
been achieved in this world” ’.9 But celebrating the glories of ‘little
fatherlands’ risked reinforcing those erce municipal attachments
that had long been regarded as a particularly Italian vice and which
the regime was ostensibly committed to curbing – as its campaign to
stigmatize local dialect and promote the use of Italian suggested.
And certainly passions often did run high. Siena grew increasingly
angered in the 1930s by other cities imitating its palio, and
Mussolini had to intervene to ban other cities from using the
word.10 And in Puglia attempts by the town of Trani to have a
monument to the ‘duel of Barletta’ erected in its territory, where it
claimed the famous encounter between Italian and Spanish knights
in 1503 had really occurred (and not in Barletta), led to pitched
battles in 1932 in which two people died and sixteen were injured.
Relating the unfortunate events to the Chamber, the Under-
Secretary of the Interior said that the causes of the violence lay in
‘an accursed survival of the spirit of campanilismo’.11
EMPIRE

Fascism liked to make out that colonies were an economic necessity

for Italy. ‘Our peninsula is too small, too rocky, too mountainous to
be able to feed its 40 million inhabitants,’ Mussolini told parliament
in 1924.12 But in reality such talk was no more than window-
dressing for the regime’s conviction that conquest and expansion
were necessary tools for proving (and improving) the moral health
of the nation. After all, if the country was so overcrowded, there
was little conceivable logic in the ‘battle for births’. Great claims
were made for the potentially huge economic bene ts to be had
from Libya and the other colonies in east Africa (Eritrea and
Somalia, which Italy had clung on to after the defeat at Adua), and
there was talk of settling 300,000 or even half a million peasants
along the north African littoral, amid the oases and fertile palm
groves, and giving them access to levels of prosperity they could not
have dreamed of back home. But by the outbreak of the Second
World War only 39,000 Italian farmers had been lured to Libya.13
Nor did the colonies do anything for the public nances: between a
half and three-quarters of each colony’s budget in 1941 had to be
paid by Rome.
Almost from the outset of his government, Mussolini spoke of
Italy’s right to an expanded empire. The humiliation of Versailles,
when the country had received ‘just a few crumbs of the rich
colonial booty’ from its per dious allies in return for its ‘supreme
contribution of 670,000 dead, 400,000 mutilated and a million
wounded’, rankled;14 and behind much of the regime’s obsession
with creating a morally integrated, demographically strong and
economically self-su cient nation, peopled by a new race of
bellicose Italians, lay a determination to make amends for the
disappointments of the past–1866,1896 and 1917, as well as 1919 –
and secure for Italy its due place in the world as a major imperial
power. And Mussolini had a fairly clear idea of when this would be.
As he said to the Chamber of Deputies in 1927:

We need to be able, at any moment, to mobilize 5 million men; and

we need to be able to arm them. We must strengthen our navy and
make the air force – in which I believe increasingly – numerically so
strong and powerful that the roar of its motors will drown out every
other sound in the peninsula and the surface of its wings will blot
out the sun across our land. In this way we will be able, tomorrow –
between 1935 and 1940, when we will once again be at a crucial
juncture in European history, I believe – to make our voice heard
and nally see our rights recognized. (Very loud and repeated
applause.)15

And in the same speech he reminded deputies that he had always

been an apologist for violence and the ‘bath of blood’ as necessary
instruments of political and moral progress.16

Fascism was determined to bring an end to what it saw as the weak

and tentative policies of its liberal predecessors in Africa. Much of
Somalia was still not under full Italian control in 1922, and the new
governor, Cesare Maria De Vecchi, one of the leaders of the March
on Rome and a future Minister of National Education, set about
subduing it with methods that earned him the nickname of ‘butcher
of the Somalis’. Even Mussolini claimed to be shocked by his cruelty
and violence.17 In one episode De Vecchi invited a group of
squadristi that he had brought with him from Turin to punish a
religious leader suspected of stirring up resistance among the
thousands of natives who had been forced to work on Italian-owned
banana plantations to the south of Mogadishu. ‘Do not forget that
you have been victorious soldiers of the Great War,’ he told them.
The squadristi duly obliged, opening re randomly on local people
and forcing the sheik and his terri ed followers to take refuge inside
a mosque. When the rebels refused to surrender, the mosque was
shelled with artillery. Some managed to escape, but were later
hunted down. On the governor’s orders no prisoners were to be
taken, and more than 200 Somalis died during the operation.18
In Libya the situation at the time of the March on Rome was
similar to that of Somalia, with Italian jurisdiction con ned to a
narrow fringe along the Mediterranean coast. Under the energetic
governorship of Giuseppe Volpi much of the northern part of
Tripolitania was subjugated, in keeping with fascism’s belief, as
Volpi explained, that Italy possessed ‘not only military superiority,
but also, and above all, a moral superiority, deriving from the
quality and strength of our historical traditions and the greatness of
the civilizing mission that Italy has for centuries carried out’.19 After
1925 the pace of military operations was intensi ed as the
government made the development of its colonies and the
strengthening of Italy’s position in the Mediterranean key goals of
fascist foreign policy. As Giuseppe Bottai explained in a pamphlet
published shortly after Mussolini had paid a high-pro le visit to
Tripoli in 1926:

The imperial future of the Italian nation hinges in large part on the
Libyan coast and on the political e ciency of its hinterland. It
should not be forgotten that mare nostrum is not ours. The
Mediterranean is everything to us, and yet we count for nothing in
it. We are penned in this sea thanks to the criminal inertia of past
governments and the power of other countries.20
The key military gure in the operations in Libya was Rodolfo
Graziani, a soldier of enormous ambition whose exploits soon led to
his being hailed as a fascist ‘new man’ and compared to the great
Roman general Scipio Africanus. Graziani, who became a marshal
and a marquis, enjoyed an extraordinary cult status in the 1930s, in
part as a result of his own assiduous self-projection as a romantic
intellectual who in moments of uncertainty turned to Caesar, Livy,
Tacitus and Sallust (‘my lords and masters’) for inspiration. He
frequently faced criticisms that he acted with excessive cruelty; but
again he found comfort in literature. As he explained at a
conference in 1931:

If sometimes I begin to have qualms and feel unsettled by the

atrocities attributed to my actions, I love to reassure myself by
reading what the great Machiavelli says: ‘A prince must not worry
about acquiring a bad reputation for cruelty when keeping his
subjects united and loyal, as it is more merciful to make a few
examples than to allow disorders, which can give rise to robberies
and killings, to persist out of an excessive sense of pity’… I know
from the history of every epoch that nothing new can be built if a
past, no longer acceptable in the present, is not partly or entirely
destroyed.21
By the spring of 1930 Graziani and the new governor of Libya,
Marshal Pietro Badoglio, had succeeded in bringing the western half
of the colony under control, but Cyrenaica, to the east, was proving
much harder to subdue. Part of the problem lay in the almost
complete lack of understanding on the part of the Italian authorities
of the culture, at once ercely proud and religious, of the nomadic
tribesmen who inhabited the region. As far as Graziani was
concerned the Senussi were scarcely more than barbarians, led by
an elderly warlord, Omar el Mukhtar (‘a Beduin… with no culture
or idea of civilized life… an ignorant fanatic’),22 who were
misguidedly opposing the forces of civilization. In fact el Mukhtar
was a man of considerable learning and almost saintly austerity,
who had taught in a Koranic school for many years before becoming
leader of the resistance in Cyrenaica. He enjoyed immense standing
with his fellow countrymen and possessed quite exceptional military
skills; and there were never any problems nding new recruits for
his mobile army of around a thousand mujahedin.
In a desperate bid to crush the Senussi resistance Graziani and
Badoglio drew up a plan in June 1930 to sever the supply lines to el
Mukhtar’s forces by interning the entire nomadic and semi-nomadic
population of Cyrenaica in concentration camps. In the course of the
next few months at least 100,000 people, for the most part women,
children and elderly men, were marched across the desert, in some
cases more than 1,000 kilometres, to a series of barbed-wire
compounds erected around Benghazi. Any stragglers were
summarily shot. According to fascist propaganda the camps were
oases of modern civilization – hygienic, clean and e ciently run –
but in reality the sanitary conditions were poor, with upwards of
20,000 Beduin crowded into an area about one kilometre square,
together with their camels and other animals, and with only
rudimentary medical services: the two camps of Soluch and Sisi
Ahmed el Magrun, with 33,000 internees, had access to just one
doctor between them. Typhus and other diseases rapidly took their
toll on constitutions severely weakened by meagre food rations and
enforced manual labour, and by the time the last camps were closed
in September 1933, more than 40,000 of the inmates had
perished.23
With the population of Cyrenaica interned, the prospects for el
Mukhtar and his followers were bleak. To isolate them still further
and prevent supplies coming in from Egypt, Graziani ordered the
construction of a 275-kilometre barbed-wire barrier, four metres
deep, running from the port of Bardia southwards across the desert
to the oasis of Giarabub. The nal operations against the rebel
forces and their families were carried out with clinical e ciency,
with bombers supporting the ground troops and dropping high
explosives and (illegal) mustard gas shells on enemy placements and
machine-gunning their lines. No prisoners were taken in
engagements: even women and children were executed. One senior
Italian o cial who tried to restrain Graziani was recommended for
transfer back to Italy. ‘The forma mentis of Dr Daodiace,’ Graziani
explained to the ministry, ‘had become stuck in the old ways and I
was constantly having to try to bully him into accepting the new.’24
The capture of the Senussi holy site of Cufra and the massacre of
many of its inhabitants provoked particular condemnation in the
Islamic world. What possible connection was there between
fascism’s ‘medieval methods’ and ‘civilization’, asked one leading
Arabic newspaper?25
 In September 1931 the 73-year-old el Mukhtar was captured by
Italian troops, summarily tried for what amounted to treason
(‘having taken up arms to detach this colony from the mother
homeland’), and sentenced to death.26 The army captain who
defended him received ten days’ solitary con nement for showing
too much sympathy. El Mukhtar was hanged in the concentration
camp of Soluch in front of 20,000 of his Beduin followers, and was
immediately hailed as a martyr throughout the Arab world. In
Palestine there were calls for his body to be buried in the holy city
of Jerusalem. Italy’s military hold over Libya was now almost
complete, but the damage done to relations with the local
population was beyond repair. In October 1933 the Cairo newspaper
Al-Jihad published an open letter to Mussolini from a prominent
Libyan exile pointing out the shortcomings of fascism’s approach in
Africa:

Thanks to your military equipment you have succeeded in

conquering a country after a war waged in our midst for twenty-two
years. But I can tell you that you have not conquered a single heart
among the people of Tripoli. For hearts are not like forts: they are
not captured with bombs, but are won over with justice and good
deeds… You are seeking with your methods to eliminate the
population in order to replace it with those who cannot nd bread
in your own country. This is a sterile policy…27

A major, and largely accurate, historical lm, The Lion of the Desert,
released in 1981, about Omar el Mukhtar and the suppression of the
Senussi resistance in Libya, remains banned in Italy on the grounds
that it is ‘damaging to the honour of the Italian army’.
THE CULT OF ANCIENT ROME

As the pursuit of empire became more central to fascism, so the

iconography of the regime grew increasingly imperial. In 1929
Mussolini transferred his governmental headquarters to Palazzo
Venezia, the former residence in Rome of the ambassadors of
Venice, the city-state whose mission it had been to dominate the
Mediterranean (as D’Annunzio had reminded the audiences of his
play La nave). The Duce’s personal o ce in the Sala del
Mappamondo – a sumptuous Renaissance room eighteen metres
long, fteen metres wide and twelve metres high, in the corner of
which Mussolini sat at his desk, in imperious isolation (‘You
virtually need a pair of binoculars to see him,’ one journalist
commented)28 – had a newly installed mosaic oor with a series of
mythological and naval motifs around a large rectangular panel
depicting the Rape of Europa by Jupiter. The subject, according to
the designer, was supposed to symbolize the conquest of the world
by Italian art, but it also lent itself readily to a much more bellicose
interpretation, especially as the image was anked by a pair of
imposing fasces.29
As the quest for colonies moved up the political agenda, imperial
Rome became the overwhelming point of cultural reference for the
regime. Like Mazzini and Garibaldi before him, Mussolini claimed to
have been intoxicated since childhood by the mystique of Rome
(‘For love of Rome I dreamed and su ered… Rome! The word itself
was like a boom of thunder in my soul’);30 and fascism, with its
rejection of democracy and celebration of authority, discipline,
patriotism and war, made it possible for the state to embrace the
history and symbols of ancient Rome in a way that liberalism never
could. The disjuncture between past and present that had tormented
so many patriots in the Risorgimento and deprived Italy after 1860
of powerful referents with which to sanction the new order
appeared ended. Fascism was imperial Rome reborn. As a teaching
manual for members of the Balilla explained:

If you listen carefully… you may still hear the terrible tread of the
Roman legions… Caesar has come to life again in the Duce; he rides
at the head of numberless cohorts, treading down all cowardice and
all impurities to re-establish the culture and the new might of Rome.
Step into the ranks of his army…31
The most potent expression of fascism’s ambitions in the world
was to be Rome itself. Mussolini called for a building programme
that would make the city as ‘vast, well-ordered and powerful’ as in
the era of the emperor Augustus. The principal Roman monuments –
the Pantheon, the theatre of Marcellus, the tomb of Augustus, the
Capitol – should be cleared, he said, of all the ramshackle housing
that had grown up around them ‘during the centuries of decadence’
and turned into mighty beacons in the urban landscape. Magni cent
buildings, be tting a great imperial power, were to replace the
‘ lthy picturesque’ structures that everywhere abounded; and he
proposed creating the longest and widest rectilinear motorway in
the world to bring ‘the imports of mare nostrum’ from the
rejuvenated port of Ostia to the heart of the city. Despite his
campaign against urbanization he wanted Rome to expand
massively – more than doubling its population and spreading twenty
kilometres west down to the sea. Italy would nally have a capital
that was both ‘morally and politically’ worthy of the nation.32
Inevitably such grandiose plans stood little chance of being
realized, but one important project that Mussolini did see completed
was the creation of a major new road running through the heart of
the old Roman forums between the Colosseum and the Capitol. Built
as the subjugation of Libya was nearing completion and inaugurated
on the tenth anniversary of the March on Rome, the Avenue of the
Empire involved the destruction of eleven streets and the levelling
of some 40,000 square metres (causing in the process extensive
archaeological damage). It was intended primarily as a route for
military parades, and it drew a symbolic as well as physical line
between the Rome of the Caesars and the Third Rome of modern
Italy – symbolized by the huge marble monument to Victor
Emmanuel II (the Vittoriano) and embodied in the jubilant crowds
that thronged Piazza Venezia to listen to the Duce’s speeches from
the balcony of his palace. Along the west side of the new avenue
were placed a series of giant marble and bronze maps illustrating
the phases of growth of the Roman Empire.
Romanità pervaded the cultural life of Italy during the 1930s.
Painters and sculptors drew heavily on classical forms in an attempt
to create distinctive ‘national’ idioms of art, while architects used
Roman motifs to produce an ‘imperial’ style of building that was at
once both monumental and modernist. Triumphal arches became a
feature of fascist ceremonies and festivals, and in places such as
Bolzano they were used to underscore the recent successes of Italian
arms. In Libya a huge arch was built in the Sirte desert between
Benghazi and Tripoli, on the ancient border of Carthage, inscribed
with an imperialistic quotation from Horace: ‘O life-giving sun, may
there be nothing more in your sight than the city of Rome.’33 A
number of high-pro le bimillenary anniversaries – for Virgil in
1930, Horace in 1935 and Augustus in 1937 – allowed the regime to
draw parallels between fascism and the golden age of Rome. Virgil
and Horace were celebrated as poets of rural life and of concord
after bitter civil war, who had placed their talents at the service of
the state, while Augustus was presented as a glorious precursor of
the Duce. A major exhibition in Rome in 1937, the ‘Augustan Show
of Romanità’, aimed to illustrate how the ancient imperial values
had been reborn in fascist Italy. Over the entrance were Mussolini’s
words: ‘Italians, you must ensure that the glories of the past are
surpassed by the glories of the future.’34
ETHIOPIA

The catastrophic defeat that Italy had su ered at the Battle of Adua
in 1896 was often referred to by fascism as a stain on the national
character that needed to be purged, and after the subjugation of
Libya it was little surprise that Ethiopia should become the next
target of Italy’s imperial ambitions. There had been periodic talk in
the 1920s of an invasion of the ancient east African kingdom, not
least because its conquest would link the two colonies of Eritrea and
Somalia, but Mussolini had more pressing concerns at the time and
had been content to build up in uence in the region through
economic penetration alone. However, in the autumn of 1932,
ushed with the success of the celebrations for the tenth anniversary
of the March on Rome, he asked the Minister of the Colonies to
draw up plans for a possible attack. These sparked o a long debate
among the leading military authorities – the Chiefs of Sta of the
army, the navy and the air force and the Chief of General Sta ,
Marshal Badoglio – about how the operations should best be
conducted, a debate that exposed how little coordination there was
at the top of the armed forces. Though nominally the most senior
general, the Chief of General Sta had no powers of e ective
command over the three services. The only person who could
impose centralized control was Mussolini, who from the end of 1933
held the War, Marine and Air Force portfolios (as well as those of
the Foreign Ministry, Interior Ministry and Ministry of
Corporations).35
The decision to invade Ethiopia was taken against the backdrop
of the new international situation created by the advent to power of
Hitler in 1933. Mussolini calculated that with Britain and France
distracted by developments in Germany, there would be little
international opposition to Italian aggression in Africa, provided it
were swift. There was also the question of Austria. When Mussolini
met Hitler for the rst time in Venice in June 1934, the German
Chancellor talked at length of his plans for a European war and
indicated that he would like to install a pro-Nazi government in
Vienna. Mussolini apparently did not demur – perhaps because he
had failed to understand fully what Hitler was saying (no interpreter
was present) – and he may thus have given the misleading
impression that he was not too worried about Austrian
independence. The following month the Austrian chancellor,
Dollfuss, Mussolini’s protégé, was murdered by Nazis, and it now
seemed only a matter of time before Austria was annexed. The
invasion of Ethiopia thus needed to be carried out before Hitler
(who at this point was far from being considered by Mussolini as an
obvious ally) could complete German rearmament and pose a threat
to Italy along its northern border.
At the end of 1934 Mussolini issued a secret memorandum to the
country’s senior political gures to prepare for the ‘total conquest of
Ethiopia’, and nine months later, on 2 October 1935, Italians
gathered in piazzas up and down the country to hear the declaration
of war transmitted over loudspeakers from the balcony of Palazzo
Venezia. ‘Fascist and proletarian Italy,’ said Mussolini in a speech
that contained echoes of Cavour and Manzoni (as well as Pascoli),
was moving in unison to secure its rightful living space and avenge
the injustices of which it had long been a victim:

Blackshirts of the revolution! Men and women of all Italy!… Listen.

A solemn hour is about to strike in the history of the fatherland.
Twenty million men are at this moment occupying the piazzas in
every corner of Italy… Twenty million men: one single heart, one
single will, one decision… It is not just an army that is moving
towards its objectives, but an entire people of 44 million souls; a
people against whom attempts have been made to commit the
blackest injustice: that of depriving us of a little place in the sun…
We have been patient for thirteen years, during which time the
noose of sel shness that has sti ed our natural energy has been
pulled ever tighter! With Ethiopia we have been patient for forty
years. Enough!36
As soon as news of the rst victories came through, including the
capture of Adua, support for the war began to escalate; and when in
the second week of October the League of Nations condemned Italy
for violating the Covenant and fty-two of its fty- ve member
states voted to apply economic sanctions, a mood of extraordinary
de ance swept the country. Distinguished liberal critics of the
regime, among them Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, Luigi Albertini and
Benedetto Croce, pledged their support to the government. So, too,
did the eminent socialist Arturo Labriola, who now apologized for
his opposition to fascism and returned to Italy from exile. Among
those who volunteered to ght in Africa was the 61-year-old
physicist and Nobel laureate Guglielmo Marconi. Popular songs
circulated acclaiming the latest military triumphs, and in particular
the victory at Adua (‘Adua is conquered / The heroes rise again’),37
while the widow of General Baratieri wrote to Mussolini to express
her gratitude that her husband’s honour had nally been avenged.
Even the peasantry, usually almost impervious to the regime’s
rhetoric, got caught up in the excitement, attracted by the wild talk
of land, work and wealth that the empire would bring.38
After years spent lauding the virtues of war, and denouncing
liberalism for the weak humanitarianism that had shattered the
dreams of the Risorgimento at Custoza, Lissa, Adua and Caporetto,
fascism could not a ord anything short of a crushing victory. On the
face of it, this should not have been di cult to achieve. The army of
the emperor Haile Selassie numbered no more than 300,000 men,
and was feudal in both spirit and organization, with loyalty owed on
a personal basis to individual warlords or ras. Most of the Ethiopian
troops had access to modern ri es, but there were no military
planes, very few machine guns and virtually no artillery. Against
these ramshackle forces Mussolini mobilized the largest army ever
seen for a colonial war. Initial plans for the campaign had suggested
that three divisions would su ce, but Mussolini wanted to be safe
and decided to send ten divisions (and eventually twenty- ve). In all
around 650,000 men were dispatched to east Africa, together with 2
million tons of supplies. They were supported by 450 aircraft,
including over 200 bombers.39
Despite this massive superiority, the lack of passable roads in
Ethiopia made it di cult to keep such large forces adequately
supplied, and the campaign stalled badly after the initial successes.
Mussolini promptly sacked the elderly commander, General De
Bono, and replaced him with Marshal Badoglio; and, as in Libya,
Badoglio was fully prepared to breach international law in pursuit
of the rapid victory that the Duce needed. At the end of December,
Mussolini sent Badoglio a telegram authorizing him to ‘employ any
kind of gas… even on a massive scale’. In fact Badoglio was already
using mustard gas, and over the next three months around 1,000
heavy bombs lled with the chemical were dropped on enemy
positions or, more lethally, sprayed as a vapour from aircraft, killing
combatants and non-combatants alike and poisoning rivers and
lakes.40 Shells lled with arsine (a compound of arsenic) were also
red. In February, with heavy ghting still continuing, Mussolini
urged Badoglio to use bacteriological weapons. But Badoglio felt
this was unnecessary given that the enemy was already su ciently
weakened.41
Mussolini endeavoured to keep the truth about what was
happening in Ethiopia hidden from the outside world. When
photographs of mustard gas victims reached London, the Italian
embassy succeeded in passing them o as cases of leprosy; and in
general the line taken by the regime was that the allegations of
atrocities were simply calumnies intended to discredit fascism. It
was even suggested that the British – against whom a barrage of
propaganda was launched following the imposition of sanctions –
were themselves supplying mustard gas to the Ethiopians.42 In Italy
the press was heavily censored and the campaign portrayed as an
unequivocal triumph, both moral and military, for the regime. None
of the many accounts of the war published subsequently by those
who had taken part referred to the use of illegal weapons – whether
from genuine ignorance or a desire to protect the honour of the
army is hard to know. And even after 1945 there remained a heavy
blanket of public silence, even in the face of incontrovertible
documentary evidence. Only in 1996 did the Ministry of Defence
nally concede that mustard gas and arsine had been used in
Africa.43
The ruthless methods employed in Ethiopia were driven by
Mussolini’s need to secure a speedy victory and fostered by a widely
held view in elite fascist circles that Italians had to acquire a sense
of racial superiority as part of their re-education (‘Racism is a
catechism which, if we do not know it already, we must quickly
learn and adopt,’ wrote the young journalist Indro Montanelli in
January 1936. ‘We will never be dominators without a strong sense
of our predestined superiority’).44 But the violence also drew on the
powerful currents of thought that from the early years of the
century, under the in uence of the Nationalists and Futurists, had
viewed war as an aesthethic and sensual experience that taught
superior, anti-humanitarian values. Among the numerous memoirs
of the ghting was one by Mussolini’s eldest son, Vittorio, who
served as a pilot in Ethiopia together with his brother, Bruno (both
were awarded silver medals for their bravery). Vittorio told his
readers that war was above all ‘a sport, the most beautiful and the
most complete’, that conferred on those who took part ‘the diploma
of manhood’; and his favourite adjective for describing the military
action was ‘entertaining’. It was sad but ‘extremely entertaining’ to
see a group of Ethiopians ‘blooming open like a rose’ after being hit
by one of his bombs, and it was ‘extremely entertaining’ to set re
to the straw roofs of houses and watch those inside leap out and run
for their lives ‘like men possessed’ (though he also admitted that it
was disappointing that the imsy Ethiopian huts simply collapsed
when hit rather than produce the dramatic explosions that he had
seen in American lms).45
 On 5 May 1936 Badoglio entered the Ethiopian capital of Addis
Ababa, three days after Haile Selassie had ed, and when the news
reached Italy the sirens sounded and more than 30 million people
emerged into the piazzas to hear the news of victory. In Rome
400,000 people packed Piazza Venezia and the surrounding streets
to listen to the Duce declare that the war was over and that Ethiopia
was ‘de iure and de facto’ Italian; and such was the acclaim that
Mussolini was compelled to come out onto the balcony ten times to
acknowledge the cheering. Meanwhile a choir of 10,000 children
sang a newly composed ‘imperial hymn’ on the steps of the adjacent
Vittoriano. Four days later, under arc lights, an even more ecstatic
crowd applauded as the Duce hailed the ‘reappearance of the empire
after fteen centuries on the fatal hills of Rome’ and announced that
the king had assumed the title of Emperor ‘for himself and his
successors’. He asked the crowd if they would be ‘worthy’ of this
empire that he had given them. And when the cry came back
resoundingly ‘yes’, he declared: ‘This cry is like a sacred oath that
binds you before God and man, in life and death.’46
In reality Ethiopia had not been secured ‘de facto’. Large parts of
the country were still outside Italian control, and because Mussolini
insisted against all advice on ruling the colony directly without the
mediation of the local ras, the new viceroys – Badoglio rst and
later Graziani – were forced into a war of attrition against an
extensive resistance movement, with mustard gas and arsine again
being used on a large scale.47 Insecurity led easily to over-reaction.
When in February 1937 two young Eritreans threw grenades at
Italian o cials during a ceremony in Addis Ababa, killing seven and
wounding some fty others (including Graziani), between 3,000 and
6,000 Ethiopians were killed randomly in reprisals in the space of
just forty-eight hours; and in the weeks that followed thousands
more were executed, deported or sent to concentration camps.
Graziani proposed razing the old city to the ground. Mussolini
thought this was excessive, but did agree that any Ethiopian leaders
‘even vaguely suspected’ of opposition should be shot.48 When
evidence came to light of possible links between rebels and the most
important Coptic Christian centre in Ethiopia, the ancient monastery
complex of Debrà Libanòs, Graziani ordered its ‘complete
liquidation’. According to o cial gures more than 400 monks were
shot, though the total number of victims, including sympathetic
local laity, teachers and students, may well have been closer to
2,000.49 Graziani also had itinerant singers, fortune-tellers and
witches executed, on the grounds that they served as possible
conduits of information about the resistance. In these circumstances
it is little surprise that relations between the local population and
the Italian occupying forces remained tense, and by the outbreak of
the Second World War Ethiopia was far from being subdued.
26

Into the Abyss, 1936–43

My wife was down in the vineyard with my father-in-law… I shouted out

to [them]: ‘Armistice, the war is over!’… The three of us climbed back
up the slope in silence.
The end of Badoglio’s message had been obscure – but at the same
time all too clear: ‘Any attempt at aggression, whatever side it comes
from, will be repelled with arms.’ Who could this aggression come from,
except from the Germans?
The farm workers are celebrating. As I write I can hear the faint
sound of songs issuing from the town: everyone is in the tavern. The
common people are happy. We are not. Why should that be? Did we not
want peace as well? But this evening the common people have no idea of
the abyss into which we have fallen. Or perhaps they realize all too well,
and do not care. Peace, everyone home, drunk on Sunday, and to hell
with the government…
A peaceful night. A short while ago I went out into the yard and
looked up at the sky, empty except for the stars. No more roaring of
enemy bombers. A great silence reigns around the corpse of the
fatherland.

Andrea Damiano, Rosso e grigio (1947)

THE BRUTAL FRIENDSHIP

With the conquest of Ethiopia, Mussolini reached the pinnacle of his

popularity in Italy. The king, who had wept with joy on hearing of
the fall of Addis Ababa and then spent a sleepless night staring
proudly at a map of Africa, awarded him the country’s highest
military honour for having won ‘the greatest colonial war in history,
a war that he… conceived and willed for the prestige, the life, the
greatness of the fascist fatherland’.1 From his villa on the shores of
Lake Garda the elderly D’Annunzio wrote to congratulate Mussolini
on his magni cent achievement, saluting the Duce ‘in immortality’
and describing the victory as an ‘incomparable and courageous
gesture’ that had left his soul stirred ‘by a kind of spiritual
revelation’: ‘You have subjugated all the uncertainties of fate and
defeated every human hesitation… You have nothing more to fear,
you have nothing more to fear.’2 Other tributes poured in from
every quarter, and propagandists hurried to proclaim the Duce an
instrument of God, a ‘genius’, a ‘Caesar’, a ‘Titan’, ‘divine’,
‘infallible’, ‘ineluctable’, the ‘founder of a religion’ (‘the name of this
religion is Italy’).3 Giovanni Gentile declared that the Empire had
nally dissipated ‘every doubt and uncertainty’ and ushered in ‘a
new Italy’.4
In fact the war in Ethiopia had in many respects been disastrous
for Italy. The costs in human terms had been quite light (something
in the order of 4,500 Italians killed, against anything between
70,000 and 275,000 on the Ethiopian side), but the nancial burden
of transporting and supplying an army that most experts reckoned
to be many times larger than was really needed was huge: probably
well in excess of 40 billion lire or the equivalent of virtually the
entire national income for a year.5 One result of this was that Italy
was in no position to invest in developing its armed forces either
numerically or qualitatively at a time when other countries were
engaging in massive rearmament programmes in preparation for the
impending European war. Equally devastating were the political
consequences of the invasion. By defying the League of Nations and
acting in Ethiopia in ways that shocked the civilized world, Italy
was pushed away from Britain and France and drawn inexorably
closer to Nazi Germany.
For Mussolini personally, the adulation that surrounded him in
Italy after the declaration of empire encouraged a growing
detachment from reality and a tendency, as many of his closest
collaborators noticed, to believe in his own myth. He seemed
possessed by a sense of infallibility, and became increasingly
impervious to rational discussion, trusting instead to what he called
his ‘good star’ and instinct (‘I have never made a mistake following
my instinct, but always have when I obeyed reason’).6 Moreover the
relative ease with which Ethiopia had been conquered inclined him
to imagine that a decade of fascist education had begun to pay o
and that Italians were nally acquiring the ‘unity of faith and
action’ that would enable them to achieve a position of dominance
in the new world order that was fast unfolding: a world order in
which the decadent democracies of the West – France and Britain
especially, with their falling birth-rates, materialism, e ete ruling
classes and aversion to war – would be supplanted by the virile
peoples of Italy and Germany. To those who dared to suggest that
Italy might be too nancially exhausted to sustain the burden of
further wars he brusquely retorted that economic issues had never
halted ‘the march of history’.7
The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War seemed to lend credence to
the idea that fascism was an ideology of potentially universal
application, and though Mussolini had a low regard for Spaniards on
account of what he took to be an Arab element in their racial make-
up, he agreed to send 50,000 troops to support the rebel forces of
General Franco. He presumed that the war would be over quickly,
but in March 1937 three Italian divisions under the command of
General Mario Roatta were routed at Guadalajara while attempting
an ill-judged push on Madrid. The defeat received huge
international coverage and revived old taunts about the incapacity
of Italians to ght (Lloyd George spoke mockingly of the ‘Italian
skedaddle’),8 and it was made all the more galling in that the
victorious Republican units had included members of an Italian anti-
fascist ‘Garibaldi brigade’. Mussolini was now obliged to try to
salvage the honour of his fascist ‘new men’, and got sucked deeper
into the war, sending huge quantities of aircraft, artillery, machine
guns and armoured vehicles to Spain at a cost of at least 8.5 billion
lire by the spring of 1939. Much of this matériel never returned to
Italy.
The drain on the country’s economic resources was made all the
worse by the sanctions imposed by the League of Nations in the
wake of the invasion of Ethiopia. Though these remained in force
only until July 1936, and did not include oil, they hit imports
severely and compelled the government to shift much of its trade
towards Germany. A campaign of self-su ciency or ‘autarky’ was
launched and e orts were made to produce a range of ersatz goods –
such as rayon for cotton and ‘lanital’ (from milk) for wool – but they
could not compensate for Italy’s chronic shortage of raw materials,
and by 1939 only about a fth of the nation’s needs in primary
goods was met from domestic production.9 New taxes and capital
levies were introduced, and in December 1935 Italians were asked
to pledge their wedding rings and any other gold items ‘to the
fatherland’; but such initiatives did not stop the budget de cit
soaring. In October 1936 the gold standard had to be abandoned
and the lira was devalued by 41 per cent. In ation rose, and the
quality of living began to drop alarmingly. By the eve of the Second
World War the economy was bordering on collapse and reports
spoke of widespread popular disillusionment and discontent.10
When in May 1939 the Duce came to Turin to inaugurate the FIAT
Mira ori factory, only a few hundred of the 50,000 assembled
workers applauded him. The rest stood silently with their arms
folded.11
 The intervention in the Spanish Civil War fostered the seemingly
inexorable rapprochement of Italy and Germany. In the autumn of
1936 Mussolini’s new Foreign Minister, his 33-year-old son-in-law,
Count Galeazzo Ciano, visited Hitler and came away enthused by
the prospect that had been held out to him of Germany expanding
eastwards and into the Baltic and Italy being left free to dominate
the Mediterranean – the division of power in Europe that Crispi had
once dreamed of and worked to achieve. Mussolini, too, was
excited, and on Ciano’s return he delivered a major speech in which
he reminded the world that ‘the life of the Italian people’ could
never be separated from ‘the sea that was the sea of Rome’, and
warned that any attempts to ‘su ocate’ Italy within the con nes of
the Mediterranean would only result in con ict. He also announced
that an ‘understanding’ had been reached between Germany and
Italy, and that Berlin and Rome now formed ‘an axis around which
all the European states motivated by a desire for cooperation and
peace can collaborate’.12
By September of the following year relations between the two
countries had grown su ciently close for Mussolini to pay an
o cial visit to Germany. The Nazis did everything they could to
impress him, laying on huge military parades and staging the most
spectacular army manoeuvres ever seen in the country (though
Badoglio reassured the Duce that the Italian forces were superior).13
He was taken to visit arms factories, blast furnaces and the tomb of
Frederick the Great, and on the evening of 28 September, amid
torrential rain and thunder, he addressed an estimated crowd of
nearly a million people at an outdoor rally in Berlin. Speaking in
German, he talked of how fascism and Nazism were indicative of the
close historical parallels between two nations that had achieved
unity at a similar time and in a similar fashion, and he stressed just
how much their world views had in common: hostility to
communism and materialism, an acceptance of will as the principal
motor of history, an exaltation of work and of youth, a belief in the
virtues of discipline, courage and patriotism, and a scorn of comfort
and easy living. He said that the Rome–Berlin Axis existed to
promote peace in the face of the ‘dark forces’ that were operating to
foment war, and he concluded by insisting that the two peoples,
who together constituted ‘an imposing and ever-increasing mass of
115 million spirits’, should be united ‘in one unshakeable will’.14
Mussolini came back from Berlin con dent that the Axis powers
would prevail in any future war (indeed Ciano wondered if it might
not be best to start ‘the supreme game’ right away),15 and by the
time Hitler paid a return visit to Italy in May 1938, Mussolini had
withdrawn from the League of Nations, signed an anti-Soviet pact
with Germany and Japan, and acquiesced (albeit uncomfortably) in
Germany’s annexation of Austria. However, he was reluctant to
commit to a formal alliance, as it made little sense to break
irrevocably with France and Britain until he had seen just how far
these countries were prepared to go to maintain his friendship. And
although he took great trouble to ensure that Hitler derived from his
six-day tour of Italy an impression of discipline, wealth and military
strength – every part of the itinerary was carefully scrutinized, and
shabby buildings pulled down or encased in arti cial facades, trees
planted and appropriate works of art installed (a copy of Donatello’s
statue of Saint George, a suitable prototype of the fascist ‘new man’,
was erected along the route of the motorcade in Florence)16 – he
refused to accede to the Führer’s wish for a military convention.
But war was clearly approaching; and to prepare Italians for the
rigours ahead and further accentuate the anti-bourgeois and military
culture of the regime, Mussolini and his dull-witted but zealous
party Secretary, Achille Starace, introduced a series of measures to
‘reform the customs’ of the people. Handshaking was suddenly
declared unhygienic and banned: the more martial ‘Roman salute’
was to be used instead. The polite form of address, lei, was
condemned as a foreign import with connotations of ‘servility’ and a
erce campaign was waged to replace it with the more fraternal and
manly voi. Civil servants were obliged to wear uniforms to work,
and co ee-drinking was discouraged as decadent. And in order to
underline the vital importance of physical tness party leaders were
required to take part in gymnastic displays and jog in public (an
unedifying sight in many cases). One reform that Mussolini set
particular store by was the introduction in the course of 1938 of a
more aggressive marching step, the passo romano. To most observers
this seemed an imitation of the German goose-step, but Mussolini
claimed that it was in fact Piedmontese in origin and that it was
important to adopt it in order to dispel the myth that Italians were
physically inferior (the king could not do it – he had abnormally
short legs – and was morti ed). The new march was intended as a
manifestation of ‘will’ and ‘moral force’.17
The most brutal of the ‘anti-bourgeois’ measures was the
introduction of racial legislation. References to an Italian razza or
stirpe had punctuated the speeches and writings of Mussolini and
other senior party gures from the outset of the regime, but such
language derived more from a Nationalist preoccupation with
generating a spirit of national cohesion and identity in Italy than
from any obvious biological platform. However, the work of Cesare
Lombroso and his followers had penetrated lay culture, and
especially socialism, deeply, and many fascists (including Mussolini)
had grown up in an environment in which ‘race’ was regarded as a
modern and progressive intellectual category. Enrico Ferri, one of
the most authoritative gures within the school of criminal
anthropology and a key exponent of theories of racial degeneracy,
was a strong supporter of fascism until his death in 1929. In most
Italian universities in the interwar years anthropology departments
were located in faculties of science and were dominated by
biological approaches to the subject. Assumptions about the
inferiority of the coloured races were widespread. As the
distinguished ethnologist Lidio Cipriani (who had recently
volunteered to ght in Ethiopia) said in 1938:
We Italians have already irrevocably xed our attitudes towards the coloured races in
Africa. We are convinced that a fundamental inferiority, linked to biological causes and
therefore transmittable from generation to generation, distinguishes these races from

whites.18
 Such views underpinned the government’s attempts to prevent
miscegenation in the colonies. A decree of April 1937 made it a
crime, punishable with up to ve years in prison, for an Italian
citizen to have a ‘conjugal relationship’ with an African subject, and
other measures in the course of the next few years endeavoured to
keep blacks and whites as segregated as possible so as to ‘defend the
prestige of the race’.19 The drift towards Nazi Germany inevitably
favoured the introduction of racial laws in Italy, but there was never
any direct pressure from Berlin; and the emphasis under fascism
remained as much on the psychological and moral advantages to be
had from fostering a sense of racial superiority as on the biological
bene ts. As Mussolini explained in October 1938, Italians had long
su ered from ‘an inferiority complex’ in so far as they saw
themselves as a ‘mixture of races’ rather than ‘one people’ – with a
particularly dangerous cleavage between north and south – and
convincing them that they were ‘pure Aryans of a Mediterranean
type’ would generate the mind-set needed to ensure that they acted
as ‘standard-bearers of civilization’ in the eyes of conquered
peoples.20
The legislation against the Jews that was introduced from the
autumn of 1938 was similarly intended to give the ‘bourgeoisie a
heavy punch in the stomach’, as Mussolini put it, and create a more
pitiless and aggressive cultural environment in Italy. (Had not the
belligerence of the ancient Romans derived in large part from their
being ‘racists to a quite extraordinary degree’?)21 For many years
Mussolini and other leading fascists had denied that the country’s
48,000 Jews constituted a problem; and Jews had in fact been
disproportionately well represented in the party from the outset,
even at the highest levels. Aldo Finzi, Under-Secretary of the
Interior at the time of the murder of Matteotti, was Jewish, as was
Margherita Sarfatti, Mussolini’s mistress for much of the 1920s and
a pivotal cultural gure of the regime. Guido Jung, Minister of
Finance from 1932 to 1935, was also Jewish. It was only when race
became a central concern of the regime following the conquest of
Ethiopia that anti-semitism suddenly emerged as a serious political
issue. Symptomatic was the publication in 1937 of a book by one of
the most authoritative spokesmen for fascist culture, Paolo Orano,
rector of the University for Foreigners in Perugia, which argued that
there was a fundamental incompatibility between Jewish identity
and Italy’s need to defend its ‘national patrimony in every eld and
manifestation, at the centre of which stands the immense work of
the Church, which is entirely Roman and entirely Italian’.22
The fact that Catholicism had for centuries nurtured a deep vein
of hostility towards the Jews undoubtedly helped the reception of
the anti-semitic laws in Italy; and though the Pope protested at the
more extreme aspects of the new racism, issuing the encyclical Mit
brennender Sorge in 1937 and telling a group of Belgian pilgrims in
September 1938 that anti-semitism was ‘unacceptable’, centuries of
persecution, discrimination and enclosure of the Jews in ghettos had
left the Church morally compromised and in no position to take a
strong stand. Among the most outspoken supporters of the racial
legislation were a number of Catholic intellectuals, and in 1938 Pius
XI was obliged to refrain from condemning the laws – which
debarred Jews from marrying ‘Aryans’, teaching in schools and
universities, owning more than fty hectares of land, being
members of the Fascist Party, and serving in the armed forces – as
much from fear of splitting the Church as from concern with
possible retaliation by the government. The Vatican con ned itself
simply to endeavouring to secure more favourable treatment for
Jews who had married Catholics or who had converted to
Christianity.23
Most of the fascist leadership gave their backing to the anti-
Jewish laws (as did the king, who signed them), whether from a
desire to ingratiate themselves with Mussolini, moral conviction, or
a belief that such measures would serve to strengthen the fabric of
the nation and the revolutionary pro le of the regime. Giorgio
Almirante, who for many years after 1945 was to be the outspoken
Secretary of Italy’s neo-fascist party, wrote in the newly established
periodical La Difesa della razza (The Defence of the Race) of how the
campaign against the Jews constituted ‘the biggest and most
courageous recognition of itself that Italy has ever attempted’,24
while the Minister of National Education, Giuseppe Bottai, used his
journal Critica fascista as a platform for proclaiming the ‘eminently
spiritual’ character of fascist anti-semitism, which, he said, summed
up 3,000 years of Italian ‘history, thought and art’.25 At a more
popular level, an enormous number of magazines and newspapers
spread the racist message through the medium of satirical articles
and cartoons that lampooned the somatic features of blacks and
Jews and caricatured their supposed de ning traits: infantility in the
case of Africans, mercenariness and moral deviancy in the case of
Jews.26
There was some resistance to the new laws, but it was very
limited. A number of senior fascists made it a token of their personal
authority to protect Jewish friends or clients – as the otherwise
vehemently antisemitic Farinacci did in the case of his private
secretary – but in general the legislation was complied with fully,
and between 1938 and 1943 Italy’s Jews were subjected to
increasing levels of persecution. Some 6,000 emigrated, but those
who were left behind faced expulsion from professional positions,
ejection from societies and clubs, the exclusion of their children
from schools, and ostracism and humiliation in numerous, often
petty, ways. Bottai was especially punctilious as Minister of National
Education, stipulating that universities apply strict racial
segregation during oral exams and even banning Jews from public
libraries. To some contemporaries the level of compliance was
frightening. As a high-minded anti-fascist observer from Trento
recorded in her diary in the autumn of 1938:
The law is a reagent that brings out the worst instincts in Aryans, exposes stupidity and
ignorance, and revives superstitious hatreds…

The reaction of Aryan Italians:

One: in public, no protest.
Two: in private, rumours of petitions presented by one or two
senior gures…
 Three: Supine obedience to the orders to remove the names of
even distinguished Jews from cultural, intellectual and business
associations… One professor who had come out of a meeting of an
elite cultural institute, which had that day struck o the names of
eminent Jews, said to me: ‘And yet we had all been opposed.’ When
I asked him why then they had acted as they did, he replied: ‘We are
all sheep’ (this is what they are reduced to after sixteen years of an
absolutist regime).27
With Italy’s entry into the war in the summer of 1940 all the
country’s foreign Jews were interned along with other groups
considered to be dangerous: gypsies, ethnic minorities (such as
Slavs) and anti-fascists. Several thousand Jews were sent to a
concentration camp at Ferramonti in Calabria, from where they had
the good fortune to be liberated by Allied soldiers in September
1943. Jews of Italian nationality faced mounting restrictions on
their liberty, culminating in May 1942 in a government order
requiring their conscription for heavy manual labour (an
appropriate punishment, according to the press, given that ‘the tribe
of Israel’ had always been parasitic and work-shy).28 By this date
information was coming through to the Italian government that the
Nazis were exterminating the Jews systematically, and in the
months that followed the evidence available mounted; and though it
is true that the Italian authorities resisted pressure from the Nazis to
hand over Jews in occupied territories – in France, Greece and
Yugoslavia – it is also the case that Italy made no attempt to curb
the actions of its ally. In the autumn of 1943, the Minister of the
Interior in the newly founded Republic of Salò, Guido Bu arini
Guidi, ordered the internment in concentration camps of all Jews in
northern and central Italy and the con scation of their goods.
Around 7,000 were later deported to Auschwitz and other camps.29
NON-BELLIGERENCE

Mussolini spoke wildly from 1936 of having ‘8 million bayonets’ at

his disposal; and the phrase was often repeated in the Italian press.
But in reality the armed forces were much weaker than the regime’s
bombast suggested. The infantry had access to good ri es, machine
guns and artillery, but in many cases the weapons were in short
supply, and the repower of Italian divisions was thus considerably
less than that of many other armies. Even more problematic was the
lack of tanks. The General Sta had failed to appreciate the
importance of armoured vehicles (partly because they were still
thinking of a static war in the Alps – ‘men, mules, ri es and
cannons’ were the keys to an e ective ghting unit, according to
Badoglio),30 and this error, together with the country’s growing
insolvency, meant that in 1939 the only tank available was a small
three-ton machine. Similar de ciencies dogged the air force and the
navy. The relative weakness of the industrial base meant that it took
nearly ve times as long to build an aeroplane in Italy as in
Germany, and the main ghters produced by FIAT were far slower
and more lightly armed than the new generation of Spit res and
Messerschmitt 109s. The eet was impressive in size, but it had
major problems with its guns (not one shot red by an Italian
battleship hit its target in the war), and largely because of the
admiralty’s refusal to cooperate with the other services it had no
aircraft carriers or air cover of its own, which made it hard for
Italian ships to leave port.31
If the Duce’s martial posturing helped to conceal the truth about
the country’s military strength from the Italian public (and many
foreign observers, too), it also had the e ect of encouraging Hitler
in his aggression. After acquiescing in the annexation of Austria,
Mussolini made it clear to Berlin that he would not stand in the way
of a German invasion of Czechoslovakia, and that if it came to a
general war Italy was ready to ght (and would use poison gas to
ensure a quick victory, if need be).32 In September the British Prime
Minister, Neville Chamberlain, urged Mussolini to use his in uence
to restrain Hitler, indicating that London might accept a partial
annexation of Czechoslovakia, and Mussolini took the opportunity
to gain international credit by brokering a much-acclaimed deal in
Munich, relishing the fact, as he said afterwards, that Chamberlain
had ‘licked his boots’ and declaring to loud applause in Rome that
for the rst time since 1861 Italy had played a ‘preponderant and
decisive role’ in Europe.33 Mussolini was becoming increasingly
con dent that Britain and France did not have the stomach for a
con ict, and when Chamberlain paid him a visit in January in a last
attempt to prise Italy away from the Axis, he was scornful of the
British Prime Minister’s bourgeois demeanour and claimed that
‘people who carry an umbrella’ could ‘never understand the moral
signi cance of war’.34 Two months later Hitler completed the
annexation of Czechoslovakia and Mussolini responded by launching
an invasion of Albania, a country that for some time had been a de
facto Italian protectorate.
Germany and Italy were now dancing to the same tune, and there
was no realistic prospect of a return to cordial relations with the
Western democracies. Hitler was speaking of Poland as his next
target; Mussolini was talking of pushing on from Albania further
into the Balkans: to Greece, Turkey or Romania. And despite
growing signs of public disquiet at the enormous risks that the
country was facing Mussolini believed that the moment had come to
conclude a formal alliance with Germany. He announced it in May,
without any consultation of colleagues; and the terms of the Pact of
Steel (the Duce’s initial preference had been for ‘Pact of Blood’)
were drawn up almost entirely in Berlin, with little being done by
Rome to place restraints on its partner. Italy committed itself to
supporting Germany in any defensive or aggressive war in which it
became involved; and although there had been much talk of the
need for Italy to buy time for rearmament, no temporal clauses were
inserted into the treaty. The Germans repeatedly told Ciano that
they did not have plans to attack Poland at the moment. And Ciano
was apparently reassured. But as soon as the pact was signed Hitler
issued secret orders to his generals to make preparations for the
invasion of Poland.35
In the weeks that followed Mussolini repeatedly ignored requests
from Hitler for a meeting, but continued to indicate to Berlin that
Italy would be fully behind Germany in the event of war. His hope
was probably that he could continue to exploit German aggression –
as he had in the previous four years – to secure further territorial
gains. When it became clear early in August that an attack on
Poland was impending, Ciano (who was fast becoming conscious of
his own naivety with regard to Hitler) was sent to Germany to
explain that Italy was not ready to ght in what would almost
certainly become a generalized European con ict and to request a
delay of two or three years. But Hitler had no intention of stopping
at this juncture. He was con dent, he said, that France, Britain and
Russia would not enter the fray; and he told Ciano (to his great
relief) that he was not expecting any direct Italian help with the
invasion of Poland. He also invited Italy to consider taking
Yugoslavia or Greece as its part of the deal. Mussolini was initially
hesitant, but when towards the end of August it was announced that
Hitler had signed a pact with the Soviet Union (to Mussolini’s
astonishment: Italy had not been consulted or informed in advance),
he became much more con dent and issued fresh orders to the army
to prepare for a limited war in the Balkans.36
But Britain’s announcement in the wake of the Nazi–Soviet pact
that it would guarantee Poland’s independence made it clear that
the war would not be localized. Hitler pressed Mussolini to say
whether or not he would support Germany. Fear of repeating the
abhorrent behaviour of the liberal neutralists in 1914–15 inclined
him to say yes; but faced with overwhelming evidence that the army
was desperately short of basic equipment and in no position to
sustain a prolonged con ict, he told Hitler that he would intervene
‘immediately’, but only if Germany supplied, among other things, 6
million tons of coal, 7 million tons of petrol and 2 million tons of
steel – impossible quantities, as he well knew. Hitler scathingly
remarked that Italy was acting towards Germany just as it had done
at the outbreak of the First World War.37 In order to de ect
accusations of cowardice and disloyalty, Mussolini informed the
Italian public, with an air of statesmanship, that despite having 100
divisions and 12 million troops at his disposal he had decided to
remain ‘non-belligerent’ in keeping with his long-standing desire to
achieve ‘peace based on justice’ in Europe.38 In reality, as he
confessed ruefully to Ciano, the army had only ten divisions ready
to ght.39
APPOINTMENT WITH HISTORY

As Hitler’s armies swept almost e ortlessly through eastern Europe,

the Baltic and Scandinavia between the autumn of 1939 and the
spring of 1940, Mussolini became increasingly uncomfortable at
watching from the sidelines. He described himself as a cat eying up
its prey and waiting for the right moment to jump;40 but without
any clear idea about where exactly he intended to strike – whether
in north Africa, the Balkans, Corsica or Malta – it was not possible
to undertake any serious military planning. Nor were appropriate
command structures created, as Mussolini refused to appoint his
own general sta or do anything that might remedy the congenital
lack of cooperation between the army, the navy and the air force.
But when in the early summer it looked as if France was on the
verge of defeat Mussolini decided that the time had come to keep
his ‘appointment with history’. On 10 June, from the balcony of
Palazzo Venezia, he announced to a country that by all accounts
was more perplexed than enthusiastic (and not a little ashamed by
the opportunistic timing),41 that the moment had nally arrived to
‘break the chains’ that were shackling Italy in the Mediterranean
and embrace the struggle of the ‘young and fecund peoples’ against
those who were trying to monopolize the world’s wealth but who
were ‘impotent and nearing their sunset’.42
Mussolini was certain that the ghting was nearly over, and that
all he needed were ‘a few thousand dead’ to guarantee Italy a seat at
the peace table. Accordingly (and to Hitler’s astonishment) the army
of 300,000 men, massed in the north-west of the peninsula, was
ordered to remain on the defensive for ten days after hostilities had
formally begun. Only when Paris had fallen and the French
requested an armistice was the decision made to attack. But without
any serious planning (once again), the results were disastrous. The
artillery were positioned too far to the rear, and the air force had
not received any training in bombing enemy positions in the Alps;
and as a result the infantry were thrown against well-defended forts
with very little chance of success. All along the line the Italian
advance ground to a near standstill, and by the time the armistice
was signed on 25 June virtually no French territory had been taken.
In the meantime Italy had sustained nearly 4,000 casualties
(compared to just 104 on the French side), while inadequate
clothing and footwear (rubber-soled boots made of the milk-derived
cloth lanital) had resulted in more than 2,000 instances of
frostbite.43
Despite this chaotic failure, Ciano was despatched to Berlin to
press Italy’s claims to large swathes of territory, including Nice,
Corsica and Malta, and huge parts of northern and central Africa.
But Hitler now had the full measure of his ally’s worth and
suggested instead that they wait until Britain had been defeated
before making any decisions. Meanwhile the fascist press discussed
Italy’s impending dominance of the Mediterranean, and there was
talk of creating an Italian sphere of in uence that stretched from
north-west Africa and Spain across Europe to the Balkans, Turkey
and even the Middle East. It was generally agreed that Palestine
should be acquired by Italy, because of the Church’s moral claims to
the Holy Land and the fact that one of Victor Emmanuel’s ancestral
titles was ‘King of Jerusalem’.44 In order to improve his future
bargaining position at the peace table, Mussolini pressed Hitler to be
allowed to take part in the invasion of Britain, and even sent 300
aircraft to Belgium to help with the bombing of London (the
Germans soon sent them back when they discovered how out of date
they were). But Hitler urged Mussolini to concentrate his limited
resources instead on north Africa, which he correctly foresaw would
be a critical sector of the war.
Hitler’s advice went unheeded, and on 15 October Mussolini
announced to a meeting of ministers and army generals (for some
reason representatives of the navy and air force had not been
invited) that Italy would invade Greece in two weeks’ time. The
strength and morale of the Greek forces were greatly
underestimated and it was widely assumed that the campaign would
be swift and easy. The heavy autumn rains were not seen as a
problem, nor was the fact that Albania had no ports large enough to
keep a major army adequately supplied. As soon as the attack began
on 28 October it became clear that the Italian forces would be in
trouble. They quickly got bogged down in the mud and snow of
almost impassable roads, so allowing the Greeks time to mobilize
and launch concentrated counterattacks. Reinforcements poured in,
and by the early spring there were half a million Italian soldiers
stretched along a 250-kilometre front. But they failed to break
through the Greek defences. Only when Hitler decided that control
of the Balkans was a necessary prerequisite for his forthcoming
attack on the Soviet Union was the stalemate ended and, on 6 April,
German troops crossed into Yugoslavia and Greece, overrunning
both countries with ease. The Greeks initially refused to surrender
to the Italians, on the grounds that they had not been defeated by
them (28 October is still celebrated as a national holiday in Greece
in honour of the successful resistance to the Italian invasion), but
Mussolini begged Hitler to be allowed a share of the victory: Italian
losses had after all amounted to nearly 100,000 men. Hitler agreed,
and an armistice was signed with both Italy and Germany on 23
April.
By now the regime was facing disasters on all fronts. Three heavy
battleships were sunk by British torpedoes while lying unprotected
in the harbour of Taranto in November 1940, and the following
March the eet paid the price for having no aircraft carriers (or
radar) in an engagement with the British at Cape Matapan o the
coast of Greece in which a further ve Italian warships were lost.
Thereafter the navy hardly ventured out to sea again. In Libya,
Rodolfo Graziani’s serious shortcomings as a general were
underlined when his huge but under-equipped army of nearly
250,000 men was routed early in 1941 by 30,000 British troops
supported by a few hundred tanks. More than 130,000 prisoners
were taken, and lm footage of interminable columns of
demoralized and poorly clothed soldiers quickly made its way into
cinemas around the world, exposing the hollowness of fascist claims
to have forged ‘new men’ and reactivating the old stereotype of
Italians who cannot ght.45 At the same time Somalia and Ethiopia
were attacked by British forces from Kenya and were quickly
overrun. In May 1941 Haile Selassie entered Addis Ababa exactly
ve years after he had been forced to ee, and Italy’s new Roman
empire came to an end.

With the regime showing signs of crumbling, Mussolini found

scapegoats wherever he could. He pinned the blame for the asco in
Greece on Badoglio and forced him to resign as Chief of General
Sta along with the under-secretaries in the ministries of War and
the Navy (but resisted calls for the dismissal of Ciano, even though
his son-in-law had been perhaps the strongest advocate of the
Balkans campaign).46 After the Libyan disaster he sacked Graziani as
the army’s Chief of Sta , and in moments of anger he even talked of
having him shot – though Graziani was too much a man after the
Duce’s own heart to remain in disgrace for very long, and he went
on to become Minister for the Armed Forces in the Republic of Salò
in 1943. But Mussolini’s most vehement invective was reserved for
the Italian people in general and their failure, after nearly twenty
years, to absorb the central tenets of fascist education. He
denounced their levity, their egoism, their cowardice, their
corruption, their disobedience, their indiscipline, their
disorganization, their lack of faith and their materialism. They were
not a serious nation, he claimed, but rather a collection of
individuals; and he feared that Italy would only ever be a country
for tourists – a large Switzerland. And to support his case he
maintained a dossier in his private archives which he labelled
‘immaturity and blameworthiness of the Italian people’.47
On the home front, the situation was growing increasingly grim.
In the north aerial bombardments disrupted production and
shattered morale. By the end of 1942,25,000 dwellings had been
destroyed in Turin and around 500,000 people had moved out of
Milan. Shortages of food and fuel for heating caused severe
hardship, especially in the cities, and essential items such as shoes,
soap and medicines all but disappeared. Rationing – which was
introduced relatively late (only in October 1941 in the case of
bread), partly in the hope of sustaining the illusion that the war
would be short – allowed adults little more than 1,000 calories a
day; and widespread corruption and administrative ine ciency
meant that even with heavily restricted quantities staple items were
often unavailable. Those with money were forced to turn to the
black market, which ourished: by the spring of 1943 eggs were
selling at fteen times the o cial price in Rome (whose cats had
long since vanished from the streets and forums).48 Petrol supplies
dwindled, and in 1942 private cars were requisitioned, leaving
many towns eerily silent and empty except for pedestrians and
bicycles.
Defeatism and political opposition grew. Years of patriotic
rhetoric and calls to ‘believe, obey and ght’ seemed to have had
little impact as young men hurriedly enrolled in universities to
avoid conscription: student numbers doubled between 1940 and
1942, and in all nearly a million Italians found ways of securing
exemption from military service during the war.49 Clandestine
newspapers, often linked to embryonic communist, socialist or
Christian democrat anti-fascist groups, began to circulate, and
strikes broke out, culminating in March 1943 in more than 100,000
workers downing tools in Turin for a week. Even more subversive,
perhaps, was the escalation of sardonic humour ridiculing the
regime, and the police struggled hard to contain those who peddled
it – like the Milanese hairdresser Leonardo Patanè, who was arrested
in February 1942 for distributing a list of alternative titles to current
lms: A Hopeless A air was ‘The War’, It’s a Joke, ‘Fascism’, The
Eternal Illusion, ‘Victory’, One Hour with You is Enough, ‘Mussolini’,
and The Miserable Ones, ‘The Italians’.50
By the spring of 1943 the last hopes of salvaging something from
the war had gone. Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union, launched in
the summer of 1941, had ground to a catastrophic halt in the snows
around Stalingrad, and of the 200,000 soldiers that Mussolini had
insisted on contributing to the campaign half never returned. In
Slovenia, Dalmatia and Croatia the Italian occupying forces had
been confronted with a ferocious resistance movement, and General
Roatta had responded with a brutal reign of terror and mass
deportations of local civilians in which thousands, probably tens of
thousands, ended up dying in concentration camps.51 In north Africa
the German forces under the command of Field Marshal Rommel,
which had been sent in to help the Italians prosecute the campaign
against the British after Graziani’s army had collapsed, had been
driven back towards Tunisia following the Battle of El Alamein.
Mussolini had wanted Libya held to the last man. But this was
clearly futile, and in May 1943 General Messe, one of the few Italian
commanders to emerge with some credit from the war, surrendered
after a brave nal resistance. British and American troops now
controlled the entire north African seaboard and were poised to
invade Italy.
For some time Mussolini had been losing touch with reality more
and more, seeking distraction from his stomach pains, insomnia and
other nervous conditions in the arms of his young mistress, Claretta
Petacci, or in administrative minutiae – such as deciding whether
Parsifal or Tannhaüser was a more appropriate opera for the Rome
season – or in intellectual diversions such as translating Manzoni’s
The Betrothed into German. He was no longer capable of making
rational decisions, and to some observers he resembled a
sleepwalker who was oblivious to all that was going on around him.
And without any obvious successor who could replace him, the
Germans made preparations for a possible occupation of the
peninsula in the event of the regime collapsing. At the same time a
number of senior fascists, including some of the Duce’s closest
associates such as Ciano and Grandi, desperately began searching
for ways to mitigate the imminent débâcle. At the centre of the web
of conspiracy was the king, who as head of state still had the
constitutional right to dismiss his prime minister.
 On 10 July, British and American forces landed in Sicily, with
little resistance, and two weeks later at a specially convened
meeting of the Grand Council in Rome a motion calling on the king
to resume the full military powers accorded him under the Statuto
was passed by nineteen votes to seven. Among those who supported
the measure were such leading fascists as Bottai, Grandi, Federzoni,
De Bono, De Vecchi and Ciano. Mussolini had ve of the ‘traitors’
executed a few months later. The precise implications of the vote
were not clear at the time, but when the Duce went to see the king
on the afternoon of 25 July, Victor Emmanuel told him that the
army’s morale had utterly collapsed and that he had decided to
appoint Marshal Badoglio as prime minister. Mussolini left the
audience in a daze, and was promptly arrested. Later that evening a
radio broadcast announced that the Duce had ‘resigned’ and called
on the Italian people to rally round their sovereign. There were
some celebrations, but popular excitement was muted by Badoglio’s
ominous statement that the war would continue. Nowhere in the
country did any serious gesture of protest occur at the overthrow of
the man whom millions had supported passionately for two
decades.52
In the next few weeks the king, Badoglio and other senior
generals secretly negotiated the terms of Italy’s surrender to the
British and the Americans. Despite the relative ease with which
Sicily had fallen (most of the 300,000 Italian troops stationed in the
island having simply melted away leaving the German divisions to
ght a erce rearguard action near Messina), the Allies were in no
position to conduct a full-scale invasion of the mainland given that
they needed to conserve the bulk of their forces for the anticipated
landings in France. Consequently any further swift and signi cant
gains in Italy required the support of the Italian army; and when
Badoglio signed the armistice on 3 September at Fair eld Camp in
Sicily he pledged to secure all air elds and ports against the
Germans and hand over the entire eet and air force. The Allies
were particularly intent on capturing Rome, so cutting the peninsula
in half, and this necessitated the aid of the 60,000 Italian troops –
far more than the Germans had in the area – that were based in and
around the capital under the command of General Roatta.
The tragic events of the next few days revealed just how fragile
was the sense of the state – and perhaps of the nation, too – in the
minds of more than 40 million Italians. When news of Italy’s
surrender was made public on 8 September, neither Badoglio, nor
Victor Emmanuel, nor any of his senior generals showed a
willingness to take responsibility for the fate of the country at this
critical juncture. Lack of con dence in the armed forces – not
unfounded, but probably excessive – and fear of the Germans almost
certainly contributed to their inertia. No orders were issued to the
army – apart from a near meaningless statement by the prime
minister that troops should retaliate if attacked – and nothing was
done to secure the air elds and ports as the armistice had required.
The only action taken by General Roatta before he ed Rome was to
instruct an armoured corps to withdraw to Tivoli so as to avoid
‘grave and sterile losses’ in the city. The minister in charge of the
navy, Admiral De Courten, was supposed to send his battleships to
north African waters under cover of darkness and surrender to the
British. Instead he ordered them to proceed to Sardinia, where they
were intercepted by German planes. One, the Roma, was sunk with
heavy loss of life.53
At dawn on 9 September, as German forces were pouring into
Italy, the king, Badoglio and more than 200 generals and senior
o cers left Rome for the safety of Allied protection in the extreme
south of the peninsula. All across the country – and beyond, too, in
the occupied territories of Greece, the Balkans and southern France
– chaos and confusion spread. In the absence of orders from the top,
panic-stricken Italian soldiers everywhere ung away their ri es and
their uniforms. Many surrendered to the Germans, who ended up
taking nearly a million prisoners. Feelings of terror mingled with
resentment and anger: anger above all towards the country’s
leaders, who had added to the humiliation of defeat with what
seemed like a double act of betrayal – of both the Germans and the
Italian people (not to mention the British and the Americans).54 And
in the maelstrom of emotions that followed in the wake of the
armistice, some who had believed blindly in fascism found solace in
the prospect of a new redemptive faith: like Nuto Revelli, who went
home, threw his weapons into a rucksack, and set o to nd a
communist or socialist partisan unit, convinced that the only
‘fatherland’ in which it was worth believing was ‘that of the poor
devils who ha[d] paid for the sins of others with their lives’.55
Others chose to cling to the idea that the fatherland was best
represented by fascism – particularly after the behaviour of Badoglio
and the king – and pledged their support to the Republic of Salò, the
puppet state that was set up in northern and central Italy after the
Germans had freed Mussolini from imprisonment on the Gran Sasso
mountain in a commando raid on 12 September.
But for many, perhaps the vast majority, the events of these days
provided no discernible way forward. Instead they seemed to o er a
terrible summation of decades of hopes that, however noble in their
origins, had led ultimately to a terrifying abyss – an abyss into
which the ideas of ‘Italy’, ‘nation’ and ‘state’ now risked being
hurled and shattered. The elderly Benedetto Croce lay awake at
night racked by the thought that ‘everything that generations of
Italians had for a century constructed, politically, economically and
morally’ had been ‘irremediably destroyed’,56 while his fellow
philosopher Giovanni Gentile saw in the turmoil and lacerations
that followed 8 September the tragic end of all his dreams of
building ‘the Italy of the Italians’:
Suddenly the Italy in which we had believed, the Italy of the Italians, where we had lived
and wanted to live united in both feeling and thought, seemed to have vanished. What
Italy should we now live for, think, make poetry, teach and write? For it will always be
hard, if not impossible, to open one’s spirit and be creative, even in abstract thought,
without having the fatherland to lean on – in other words that spiritual patrimony by
which everyone exists – without being able to participate in that eternal dialogue of the
living with the dead through which Italians can feel themselves Italian. And when the
fatherland vanishes, air and breath vanish too… Today’s incalculable disaster is not the
foreign invasion and the devastation of our cities… It lies in our spirit, in the discord that
rends us… in the dissolution of what had been our common faith, through which we had
looked with the same eyes at our past and with the same passion at our future: the sense of
no longer recognizing or understanding one another, and thus of no longer feeling at ease

with ourselves.57

A few months after writing these words, Gentile was shot by a band
of communist youths as he sat in his car in front of his house in
Florence. His assassin allegedly cried as he red at point blank
range that it was not the man he wanted to kill, but his ideas.58
But most Italians could not articulate the catastrophe in such
intellectual and rare ed terms. For millions of ordinary people it
was simply a matter of survival at any cost. ‘Like ants when their
nest is being destroyed, the Italians race hither and thither, on foot,
horse, train and ship,’ recalled the journalist Leo Longanesi. ‘They
must now save their skins and their homes: they must save that little
Italy that we all carry around with us.’59 And for the great majority
of the population that ‘little Italy’ meant those elements that had
shaped the moral and material horizons of humble men and women
for centuries: family, friends and native village, with its familiar
peal of bells and parish priest, its patron saint and festivals, its
dialect, folklore and ancestral memories. For decades idealists had
sought to expand these contours into the greater unit of the nation;
but amid the wreckage of defeat appeals to anything as remote and
abstract as the ‘state’, the ‘nation’ or ‘Italy’ seemed to have little
meaning. A young Milanese bank clerk, Luigi Berlusconi, was typical
of many of those serving in the Italian army on 8 September who
were faced with a moral choice. As his son, Silvio, explained years
later, Luigi decided to put his own and his family’s interests rst:
Then 1943 arrived: the great crisis, the fall of fascism, 8 September, the Germans, the fear,
the bombardments. My father was serving in the army at the time of the defeat. The
Germans had started hunting down Italian soldiers, and he was persuaded by a group of his
friends to go with them to the safety of Switzerland. He made the right choice. He saved

his life and saved the future of all the members of our family.60
After so many years of trying to create a sense of the nation, what
nation could Italy now be?
PART SEVEN

Parties

27

The Foundations of the Republic, 1943–57

I feel entitled to speak… as a democratic antifascist, as a representative

of the new republic, which, combining in itself the humanitarian
aspirations of Giuseppe Mazzini, the universal ideas of Christianity, and
the international hopes of workers, is set now on achieving that lasting
and reconstructive peace that you seek…

Alcide De Gasperi to the Peace Conference, Paris, 10 August

1946

The reorganization, under any form whatsoever, of the dissolved fascist

party, is forbidden.

Article of the Constitution of the Italian Republic, 27 December

1947

We must present ourselves for what we truly are, and that is as fascists
of the Italian Social Republic… We alone are extremists… And our
courage, or rather our audacity, consisted in 1946 of inserting ourselves
into this democracy as the MSI, in other words as an active party.

Giorgio Almirante, Fifth Congress of the Movimento Sociale

Italiano, Milan, November 1956
‘WHAT ITALY?’

On the morning of 27 April 1945, the war in Europe almost at an

end, a column of cars, trucks and armoured vehicles, lled with
German soldiers and Italian fascists, was halted by communist
partisans of the 52nd Garibaldi Brigade at a road block just south of
the small town of Dongo on the western shore of Lake Como.
Exactly where the column was heading is unclear: the countryside
was swarming with members of the resistance and the chances of
crossing the border into Switzerland or travelling east into the
Valtellina and thence into Austria were slight. After several hours of
parleying it was agreed that the Germans would be allowed to
proceed but that any Italians should be handed over. The vehicles
began to be searched, and a man with a German helmet and
greatcoat, the collar turned up over his face, was spotted under a
blanket in the corner of one of the lorries, apparently asleep. ‘Drunk,
wine,’ the Germans said. But the partisans became suspicious, and
pulled o his helmet. The man stood up, his eyes glazed with
exhaustion rather than fear, surrendered his sub-machine gun and
pistol without a struggle, and was escorted to the nearby town hall
of Dongo. Excited onlookers shouted: ‘It’s him, it’s him, Mussolini.’
Other prominent fascists in the column, many of whom had tried to
nd sanctuary in local houses or hidden in the water among the
rocks beside the lake, were also rounded up and brought to the
town hall. Among them were Marcello Petacci and his sister,
Claretta, Mussolini’s long-standing mistress. They had been
travelling disguised as the Spanish consul and his wife.1
That night there was discussion among the partisan leaders in
Milan as to what to do with Mussolini. Some favoured handing him
over to the British and Americans, but the majority wanted him to
be dealt with immediately by a popular tribunal. Fascism may have
been destroyed primarily by the Allied armies, who had spent much
of the preceding eighteen months ghting their way up the
peninsula, but at least the representatives of the Italian ‘people’
would claim credit for having killed the Duce.2* The decision was
accordingly taken to send Walter Audisio, whose battle name was
Colonel ‘Valerio’, a communist who had spent ve years in con no
for anti-fascism in the 1930s, at the head of an armed unit to
administer justice. He arrived in Dongo in the early afternoon of 28
April and learned that Mussolini and his mistress had spent the
night under guard in a farmhouse in the nearby hamlet of
Bonzanigo.
When they reached Bonzanigo, Valerio and his men found the
Duce dressed in a grey overcoat standing listlessly in a bedroom
with Petacci. The contrast between the heroic public image of the
dictator and the mundane private reality was striking. ‘His
appearance [was] very di erent

from that of the strong and energetic man built up by fascist

propaganda,’ one of the partisans recalled. ‘He had his forearms
slightly raised and was holding a spectacle case in each hand.’3
Valerio announced that he had come to rescue Mussolini. Mussolini
was initially incredulous, but as they left the house his con dence
seemed to grow and he turned to Valerio and said: ‘I will o er you
an empire.’4 The small party walked down a slope (Petacci
stumbling on the wet surface in her black high-heeled suede shoes)
to the small piazza, where a waiting car was parked. Three local
women were scrubbing clothes in the village fountain. Mussolini
and Petacci were driven a short distance to the gates of the Villa
Belmonte in Giulino di Mezzegra, where Valerio ordered them to get
out. He pushed them against a wall. Whether he read out the death
sentence (‘By order of the general command of the Army of
volunteers of liberty, I am charged with rendering justice to the
Italian people’) is unclear. Possibly not. Petacci threw her arms
around Mussolini. Valerio shouted to her to let go. He pulled the
trigger of his submachine gun, but it jammed, and he had to borrow
another weapon: a French sub-machine gun taken from one of the
fascists arrested the previous day, with a tricolour ribbon tied round
the end of the barrel. Before being shot, the Duce apparently opened
his coat and cried: ‘Aim at my heart!’5 ‘O cial’ communist accounts
of his death contained no suggestion of heroism.
It was shortly after four in the afternoon, and Valerio
immediately set o back for Dongo. Two hours before, he had been
shown a list of the fascist prisoners being held in the town, and
despite vigorous protests from members of the 52nd Garibaldi
Brigade, who were unsure exactly what authority the Milan
emissary had to dispense summary justice to ‘their’ captives, Valerio
had placed a cross against the names of those who were to be shot.
They included the former revolutionary socialist and founder
member of the Italian Communist Party, Nicola Bombacci, who had
gravitated to fascism in the later 1930s and become a close
supporter and friend of Mussolini in the Republic of Salò, and
Alessandro Pavolini, the one-time Florentine PNF leader, who had
been made Secretary of the reconstituted Fascist Party in northern
and central Italy in September 1943. After their death sentences had
been read out, fteen men were escorted into the central piazza in
Dongo, in front of crowds of onlookers, and lined up against the
parapet wall looking out over Lake Como, their backs to the ring
squad. Francesco Barracu, a former under-Secretary in the republic
of Salò, turned and demanded to be shot in the chest: he had a gold
medal for valour. Valerio refused. Before the nal order to re was
given, the condemned raised their arms in fascist salutes and shouts
were heard of ‘Viva l’Italia!’ Valerio apparently retorted angrily:
‘What Italy?’ To which the reply came back: ‘Our Italy, not yours,
you traitors!’ Bombacci was reported to have cried: ‘Viva Mussolini!
Long live socialism!’ Pavolini’s last words were: ‘Viva l’Italia! Long
live fascism.’6
The corpses were gathered up and thrown into the back of a
lorry, which set o for Milan. The intended destination was Piazzale
Loreto, where on 10 August the previous year fteen political
prisoners had been shot by Italian fascists (on German orders) as a
reprisal for a partisan raid, and the bodies left gruesomely piled up
in the baking sun for a day as a warning to the public. After
stopping at Giulino di Mezzegra to collect the remains of Mussolini
and Petacci, the lorry arrived in Piazzale Loreto in the early hours of
29 April, and deposited its load haphazardly on the ground. Huge
crowds quickly gathered, and the bodies became the object of every
possible form of desecration – spat on, shot at, urinated over,
kicked, beaten and taunted (‘Make a speech now! Make a speech
now!’).7 Mussolini, Petacci and several other of the better-known
gures were strung up by their feet from the gantry of a petrol
station. They were soon joined by the former Secretary of the PNF,
Achille Starace, whose lifelong obsession with physical tness had
proved his undoing. Spotted on 27 April jogging near Porta Ticinese
by a passer-by, who had tipped o some partisans, he had been
taken to a People’s Tribunal and summarily tried and sentenced to
death (his curious o er to help educate the younger generation of
communists had not surprisingly elicited only mirth). He was
brought to Piazzale Loreto on the morning of 29 April, his hands
tied behind his back. When asked who the man hanging upside
down beside the woman was, he answered, with some de ance it
seems: ‘My Duce!’ Just before he was shot he turned towards the
suspended bodies and raised his hand in a Roman salute.8

Italy emerged from the Second World War, as it had done from the
uni cation process in 1860 and the Great War in 1918, deeply split
and profoundly uncertain as to its identity. For over twenty years
fascism had striven to appropriate state and nation, embracing the
monarchy, the constitution, the administrative system and (from
1929) the Church, seeing itself as the rightful heir of the
Risorgimento with all its aspirations to unity, spiritual revival and
political greatness, and proclaiming itself the embodiment of more
than 2,000 years of history in the peninsula. Now, amid the
wreckage of the regime and the visceral anger – summed up in the
macabre scenes in Piazzale Loreto – being directed at those deemed
most responsible for the country’s débâcle, where could Italy turn to
nd building blocks for its future? At the heart of fascism had been
obsessive and paroxysmal nationalism: could anything with truly
‘national’ resonance ever be used again with conviction? Socialism
and communism had of course both been anathematized in the
interwar years, and thus had powerful moral claims to a place in the
new order; and Catholicism, despite the settlement of 1929, could
legitimately maintain that it had endeavoured to preserve a certain
degree of independence from the regime. But all three of these
ideologies were markedly universal in outlook and had enjoyed a
highly problematic relationship with ‘Italy’. To what extent could
they be expected to provide solid bases for a reconstituted nation?
The need for new shared ideals seemed especially pressing given
that the war had resulted in major regional as well as political
cleavages in the country, with the north–south divide in particular
having widened as a consequence of the very di erent experiences
of the two halves of the peninsula since September 1943. After
eeing Rome ahead of the advancing Germans, Victor Emmanuel
and Badoglio had set up a Kingdom of the South in the territories
liberated by the Allies (and by the autumn the British and
Americans had reached Naples, with the Germans dug in a little to
the north in a series of heavily forti ed defensive lines running
across the Apennines); but in practice this reincarnation of the
Italian state enjoyed very little autonomy, and most of the south was
ruled directly by the Allied Military Government. The king
desperately tried to enhance his standing by entering the con ict as
a fully edged ‘ally’. But Churchill was rmly opposed; and though
Victor Emmanuel did declare war on Germany on 13 October (with
what little remained of his army: at best some twenty poorly
equipped divisions), he did so only with the ill-de ned status of ‘co-
belligerent’.
The consequence of this situation was that the south of Italy (in
contrast to the north) had almost no experience of active anti-
fascism in 1943–5, and the appalling hardship and su ering of the
last phase of the war, with rampant in ation, food shortages,
disease, broken infrastructures and widespread homelessness, failed
to generate political currents or ethical positions that could feed
constructively into post-war national politics. Instead southerners
fell back on time-honoured methods of survival, living from hand to
mouth through black-marketeering, petty crime, corruption,
clientelism and banditry in ways that further eroded the already
fragile sense of the state. And in Sicily, ma a activity ourished
once again on a huge scale (the idea that the ma a was deliberately
reintroduced into the island by the Americans has no basis: ma osi
simply resurfaced, as they had done at every moment of major
political crisis, taking advantage of the new opportunities opened up
in the semi-anarchy that followed the Allied invasion). It was a
sordid and unedifying spectacle, that horri ed high-minded
observers like the writer Curzio Malaparte, who felt that the country
had been struck by an extraordinary medieval plague that somehow
left the esh intact but gnawed away at the soul, leaving everyone
‘de led, vitiated and debased’.9
What was particularly disconcerting in this moral decay, at least
to those with patriotic leanings, was the sensation that more than
eighty years of unity had barely touched the surface of society.
There was little apparent remorse or shame at the disaster that had
befallen the country, and the occupying forces were everywhere
greeted with wild enthusiasm, the poor clamouring for chocolates
and cigarettes, the wealthy hurrying to throw open their doors and
lay on receptions for the victors. As the Calabrian writer Corrado
Alvaro noted with a mixture of horror and amazement, public
opinion seemed to think that ‘national dignity’ and ‘national honour’
involved no more than trying to curb the swarms of shoe-shiners
and prostitutes that were thronging the streets.10 It was almost as if
people were happy to be liberated not just from fascism but from
‘Italy’ (‘I hope the Anglo-Americans will never go away… [T]hey
have a vision of life that is di erent from the wretched one that we
have known up to now,’ wrote a Neapolitan in a letter in January
1944).11 To those conscious of history, there was a horrible sense of
déjà vu – the same vices (‘the eternal Italian psychology of looking
to foreigners for salvation’, as the Florentine academic and anti-
fascist Piero Calamandrei lamented) requiring, it seemed, the same
remedies: ‘Once again [we need] to make Italians… We have to turn
them from subjects into citizens.’12
In contrast to the south, the north and centre of Italy had
experienced a bitter civil war in the eighteen months following the
armistice. The Republic of Salò – or the Italian Social Republic as it
was o cially called – was a puppet regime with a string of
ministries dotted around the main northern cities and its capital in
the small resort of Salò on the western shore of Lake Garda, near to
where Mussolini had his personal residence in the Villa Feltrinelli at
Gargnano. The Duce tried to preserve what autonomy he could, but
real power lay with the Germans. It was they who controlled much
of the machinery of government and issued orders to the Republic’s
ill-equipped and relatively small conscript army headed by Marshal
Graziani (around 600,000 former Italian soldiers were kept in prison
camps in Germany and deployed as slave labour). They ran (or
attempted to run) sections of the Republic’s ramshackle and factious
police forces, composed largely of former members of the Militia
and ex-carabinieri; and it was they who were chie y responsible for
rounding up and deporting some 7,000 Italian Jews, nearly all of
whom subsequently died in the gas chambers.
But German dominance of the Republic of Salò did not preclude
support for the new state among signi cant sections of the Italian
population. The reconstituted party – the Fascist Republican Party –
set out to recapture the anti-bourgeois spirit of the early fascist
movement, and a number of radical measures were introduced,
including the ‘socialization’ of large rms and the election of
workers onto boards of management. But what backing the Republic
secured did not derive so much from any of its policies as from
Mussolini’s residual appeal and from the capacity of the government
to employ the language of patriotism and denounce as enemies of
‘the fatherland’ those who had overthrown fascism and surrendered
to the Allies ( ve of the conspirators of 25 July 1943, including
Galeazzo Ciano, the Duce’s son-in-law, were shot in Verona, on
Mussolini’s orders, in January 1944). The Republic’s propaganda
agencies worked tirelessly to link the defence of the Republic to the
honour of la patria, and the names of Mazzini, Garibaldi and the
other heroes of the Risorgimento were invoked constantly. Letters
from those who volunteered to ght for Salò, many of whom had
been born after Mussolini came to power and had grown up
immersed in the nationalistic language and culture of fascism,
indicate that this patriotic rhetoric fell on highly receptive soil. As
one seventeen-year-old wrote:
Italy, resurrected, once more marches towards its predestined goal, with an iron will. The
sacri ce of so many years could never have been wrecked in dishonour in so unseemly a
fashion… Out of the abyss into which we have fallen, overwhelmed by lightning events
and betrayed by the traitors, we – we volunteers in particular – have raised ourselves up
with all our strength to redeem the path of honour. And we sing new songs of war, with

the same immutable faith in our hearts, and with one great name on our lips: ITALY!13

But the Republic did not enjoy a monopoly of the language of

patriotism in northern and central Italy, for the resistance
movement that began to emerge in the autumn of 1943 among ex-
soldiers eeing the German and Italian authorities after the
armistice likewise appealed to the ‘honour of Italy’, ‘the ideal of the
fatherland’ and the ‘independence of the nation’.14 Estimates as to
how many Italian partisans there were in 1943–5 have varied
considerably. There was never a ‘mass’ popular rising against
fascism, as communist mythology subsequently tried to claim; but
equally the resistance was far from being a wholly negligible entity.
According to the Salò government there were over 80,000 ‘rebels’ at
large by the early summer of 1944, most of them young men who
had taken to the hills to avoid being drafted into the Republican
army; and by the spring of the following year this gure had more
than doubled. But not all of those who deserted became active
partisans. Many were simply in hiding, indi erent to the competing
claims of nation and fatherland, and waiting for peace to return so
that they could go home and resume their normal lives.15
Those who did ght were impelled by a complex array of
motives. Some saw the resistance as primarily a war of liberation, to
drive the German occupying forces out of the country. Others were
inspired by socialist ideals, and viewed the struggle as primarily one
for the emancipation of the poor and greater social justice. Still
others regarded the destruction of ‘fascism’ as the overriding goal.
These varied objectives were soon to crystallize into distinct
political positions as representatives of the communists, the
Christian Democrats, the socialists and the other anti-fascist parties
that were fast emerging in the major cities in 1943–4 began to
in ltrate the partisan formations and draw them into their orbit. But
as the distinguished socialist Vittorio Foa later recalled, at the heart
of the resistance lay a common desire to try to nd some positive
new meaning for Italy after the catastrophic experience of fascism:
Fascism had driven nationalist propaganda to excess. It had raised the nation up on an
altar, like a god, and had destroyed it. It had obliterated the nation in the eyes of Italians
with the collapse of 8 September; and it had obliterated the nation in the eyes of the world
in the way it had entered the war – cravenly, and at the last moment – in the way it had
fought it, and in the way it had lost it. Fascism had deprived the nation of all value. This
was the fundamental feeling… that lay at the root of the resistance:… the need to

reconstruct an identity for ourselves in the face of fascism…16

But whatever the inspiration to take up arms, and however noble

the aims, the resistance involved Italians ghting against Italians in
a civil war of great viciousness. According to o cial gures 44,720
partisans were killed between September 1943 and April 1945 and a
further 10,000 civilians died in reprisal raids; and most of these
deaths came at the hands of the various police and militia units that
made up the sprawling, semi-anarchic, public security machinery of
the Republic of Salò. Exactly how many fascists were killed in the
same period remains unknown.17 The celebration of violence and
the rejection of humanitarian values that had been central to
interwar culture ensured that the Republican forces had few qualms
about acting with brutality towards their enemies; and a desire to
assuage some of the humiliation of defeat by showing that they
could behave as ruthlessly as their Nazi allies also encouraged
atrocities. Torture, rape, public executions, the display of corpses
(often with crude inscriptions pinned to the bodies to indicate the
crimes) and the annihilation of entire communities for having given
support to partisans were all features of this grim struggle.18
Both sides saw the violence as necessary; and for many partisans,
certainly those in communist or socialist units, the armed struggle
and the terrible punishments frequently meted out to innocent
civilians following attacks on fascists or Nazis could be justi ed by
the thought that the resistance was on behalf of ‘the people’; and if,
as a consequence of the reprisals, the masses were goaded into
hating the enemy more and giving active support to the partisans, so
much the better.19 Like the Risorgimento democrats a century
earlier, the resistance ghters hoped that out of sacri ce and
bloodshed would emerge an engaged people and a regenerate
nation; and it pained many of them to see just how much Italian
society was still a icted by its ‘secular inertia’, ‘like a giant rusty
wheel’ that was almost impossible to turn, as the communist Franco
Calamandrei noted in his diary.20 Alfredo Pizzoni, President in
1943–5 of the National Committee for the Liberation of Upper Italy,
the supreme organ of the resistance, recalled ‘the huge, abject
category of so-called benpensanti… who at that time had only one
preoccupation: to come back home each evening with their bags full
of the meat, rice, butter and our they needed to support their
families’:
That Italy was disarmed, rent to pieces, and torn in every possible way, and appallingly so,
mattered less to them. They thought about it, perhaps, yes; but only on the fringes of their
material concerns. They cared solely about their own private a airs, and got ready to
criticize what had taken place once the war was over,… unaware that they ought
themselves to have done something, oblivious to the heroic e orts that had been made and

the great results achieved.21

Here was yet another formulation of the old problem that had
taxed Francesco De Sanctis in the years after uni cation: that of the
insouciant ‘Guicciardini man’ and the divorce between thought and
action. But given what ‘Italy’ had signi ed for most inhabitants of
the peninsula in the preceding decades – the persistent poverty, the
false hopes, the social con icts and the ruinous wars – it was
perhaps not altogether surprising that the standard-bearers of the
new gospels of national redemption should have been greeted with
considerable scepticism. According to Nuto Revelli virtually all the
peasants in the Piedmontese province of Cuneo regarded the events
of 1943–5 as a largely meaningless ‘fratricidal war’, from which it
was best to stand aside and not get involved.22 And for many of
them the resistance ghters appeared no more than dangerous
trouble-makers who requisitioned scarce food and other supplies
and risked precipitating reprisals – of the kind that occurred in and
around the small town of Marzabotto in the countryside to the south
of Bologna in late September and early October 1944, when German
troops punished the peasants for giving assistance to local partisans
by massacring nearly 1,000 people, including over 200 children.
THE ‘VALUES OF THE RESISTANCE’

Though popular support for the partisans was in reality far less than
was subsequently maintained by governments eager to assert to the
outside world that post-war Italy was built on the ‘values of the
resistance’, politically it was hard in 1944–5 to ignore the claims of
the anti-fascist forces to a monopoly of power. Following the
capture of Rome by the Allies in June 1944, the leaders of the
communists, the socialists, the Christian Democrats and the
‘Actionists’ (a liberal democratic formation, heavily involved in the
resistance, but whose elitist character led to its rapid disappearance
after 1945) emerged from hiding and succeeded in wresting control
of the government from Badoglio (with the backing of the
Americans – President Roosevelt had the wishes of 600,000 Italo-
American voters back home to consider – but to Churchill’s
annoyance: ‘I am not aware… that we have conceded to the Italians,
who have cost us so dear in life and materials, the power to form
any Government they choose without reference to the victorious
Powers and without the slightest pretence of a popular mandate’).23
And once the war in Europe was over in May 1945, these same anti-
fascist parties continued in power – in coalition – and, with the
exception of the Actionists, were to dominate the Italian political
landscape for the next forty- ve years.
The ethical foundations of post-war Italy were provided by the
‘values of the resistance’, celebrated annually in a new national
holiday on 25 April and endorsed solemnly by all the leading
parties. But the events of July–September 1943 and the ensuing civil
war in the north and centre – which continued long after May 1945,
with at least 20,000 fascists being hunted down and killed by
vigilantes in the next two years – left a legacy of anger and
bitterness that was to fester beneath the surface of society for
decades to come. As a result millions of Italians openly refused after
1945 to identify with the o cial political orientation of the state,
with on average around 7 per cent of the electorate regularly voting
for neo-fascist parties. And well into the 1950s clandestine
formations such as the Mussolini Action Squads, the Italian Army of
Liberation, the Fasci of Revolutionary Action and the Italian Anti-
Bolshevik Front carried out terrorist operations in the name of
fascism. One of these formations, the Fascist Democratic Party,
attracted international publicity in April 1946 by stealing the body
of Mussolini at night from its unmarked grave in a cemetery in
Milan. (The remains were found a few months later hidden in a
cupboard in the Charterhouse of Pavia).24
A further problem with the ‘values of the resistance’ was that they
belonged almost exclusively to the north. Many southerners,
especially among the propertied classes, had experienced 1943–5 as
a period of lawlessness and social upheaval, with peasants
occupying estates in time-honoured fashion and demanding a share
of the land. In these circumstances fascism could easily be viewed
with nostalgia as a time of ‘order’ and the new democratic parties –
the communists and socialists in particular – as a threat. In Sicily
the landowners responded by organizing a movement in 1944–6 to
make the island independent, even nancing a sizeable private
army, with bandits and ma osi in its ranks, to ght the ‘Italian’
security forces. In the mainland south the Fronte dell’Uomo
Qualunque (‘Average Man Front’), created shortly after the end of
the war by a amboyant Neapolitan playwright called Guglielmo
Giannini, showed its disdain for the ‘values of the resistance’ by
championing the cause of those who simply wanted to be left in
peace to enjoy their lives without meddling ‘professional politicians’
imposing taxes, passing laws and talking loftily about the ‘nation’
and the ‘fatherland’ (‘If anything is mortal on earth, the most mortal
thing of all is the idea of the fatherland’).25 The Front gained well
over a million votes in the elections held in 1946.
Perhaps the most dramatic indication of the limited resonance of
the ‘values of the resistance’ (and also of the political fracture
between north and south) came over the question of the monarchy.
Victor Emmanuel’s close involvement with Mussolini and his
unheroic ight from Rome after the armistice had compromised his
political credibility heavily (and seemingly beyond repair), and on 2
June 1946, the same day as elections were held for a Constituent
Assembly, Italians went to the polls to decide the fate of the Savoys
in a referendum. A month earlier Victor Emmanuel had abdicated in
favour of his son, Umberto II. But it was not enough to save the
dynasty, and on 13 June, after several days of mounting tension as
the king tried to insist that the Court of Cassation ratify the vote (in
the end the government took it upon itself to proclaim the Republic,
allowing the king to talk of a ‘coup’), Umberto left the Quirinal
Palace for exile in Portugal. Yet the vote had been close–12.7
million to 10.7 million. And while almost every province in the
north and centre had followed the lead of the communists, socialists
and Christian Democrats in favouring a republic, in Rome and the
south the monarchists had secured a clear majority (nearly 80 per
cent in Naples).
The Constituent Assembly that was returned on 2 June by
universal male and (for the rst time in Italy’s history) female
su rage was dominated by the three main anti-fascist parties: the
Christian Democrats, who secured 207 of the 556 seats, the
communists, who had 104, and the socialists, who had 114; and the
constitution that emerged from the Assembly’s rapid deliberations in
1946–7 was a forceful a rmation of the ‘values of the resistance’.
The Republic was to be democratic, liberal and decentralized – the
antithesis of fascism – with an elected president, an executive
answerable to parliament, a powerful Chamber of Deputies,
proportional representation, regional government, an independent
judiciary, a Constitutional Court, and mechanisms for allowing the
general public to propose or repeal legislation. Numerous civil and
political liberties and social rights were guaranteed. Potentially the
most divisive question related to the Church, with the Christian
Democrats eager to maintain Catholicism as the state religion and
the lay parties opposed. But with the Cold War setting in, the
Communist Party leader, Palmiro Togliatti, did not want to in ame
popular opinion unduly, and with his support the 1929 Lateran
Pacts were embedded in the new constitution. The socialists were
furious. ‘When Togliatti announced the vote in favour, anger
erupted on the socialist benches… [with] cries of treachery,’
recalled a young Christian Democrat deputy, Giulio Andreotti.
‘Many of us had tears in our eyes.’26 Here was yet another deep
emotional fault-line running through Italian society that was to add
to the fractured political landscape in the years ahead.
As in so many other moments of Italian history, the principles
embodied in the constitution (which came into force in January
1948) underlined the gap between the mass of the population and
the elites and thereby the limits of the latter’s moral authority in the
country. Nor was the cause of the anti-fascist leadership assisted by
the British and Americans, who, in drawing up the peace treaty in
1945–6, refused to recognize that Italy’s contribution to the defeat
of Germany had been signi cant, and certainly not enough to atone
for the sins of fascism. Benedetto Croce and a number of other
prominent Italian intellectuals had been endeavouring since 1943 to
argue that the interwar years had been no more than a mysterious
parenthesis in the country’s history, an aberration from the true
path of liberalism and peace laid down during the Risorgimento. But
such attempts to minimize the signi cance of fascism, and
e ectively to absolve the nation of responsibility for it, were not
met with much sympathy by the victorious powers, and Italy was
obliged in the peace treaty that was signed in Paris in February
1947 to accept a large measure of blame for the outbreak of the
Second World War. As punishment it was stripped of its colonies,
forced to hand over Dalmatia, Istria and Fiume to Yugoslavia, and
saddled with a heavy bill for reparations.
But the biggest blow to hopes that the ‘values of the resistance’
might provide the basis for a cohesive sense of nationhood lay in the
splintering of the anti-fascist coalition with the onset of the Cold
War. From the moment he returned from exile in Moscow in March
1944, the bespectacled, cautious and austerely intellectual Palmiro
Togliatti had tried to give his party a reassuring face, stressing its
commitment to democracy and national unity, and using the
writings of his old friend Antonio Gramsci (who, like Togliatti, had
been a founder of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in 1921) to
argue that the road to socialism in Italy lay not through a violent
seizure of power but through the peaceful and gradual
establishment of moral, cultural and political ‘hegemony’ over
society. But there was no escaping the fact that the PCI was a
communist party with close links to the Soviet Union – Togliatti had
been Vice-Secretary of the Comintern (Third International) and was
a loyal supporter of Stalin. And as the world began to polarize
sharply between Eastern and Western blocs in 1946–7, so pressure
grew, both within and outside Italy, for the PCI and its socialist
allies (early in 1947 the Italian Socialist Party split between its pro-
and anti-Moscow wings) to be excluded from power. In May 1947
Alcide De Gasperi, the Christian Democrat prime minister,
announced the formation of a new government without the far left.
The anti-fascist front was broken and the pattern was set for Italian
politics over the next forty- ve years, with the Christian Democrats
dominating a succession of centrist coalitions and the PCI
permanently consigned to opposition.
What made the split particularly acrimonious was the position of
the Church. The collapse of fascism and the humiliation of surrender
in 1943 presented Pope Pius XII with a golden opportunity, it
seemed, to ‘reconquer’ Italy for Catholicism. And the fact that
millions of Italians looked spontaneously towards the Papacy for
solace and leadership amid the wreckage of defeat appeared to
justify the hope that Italy could be turned into a agship of
‘Christian civilization’. But ‘Christian civilization’ did not embrace
the communists and socialists, and after 1945 the Vatican used
every available tool, traditional and modern, to mobilize the faithful
against the enemies of the Church: radio broadcasts, newspapers,
sermons, Catholic Action, pilgrimages, reports of miracles, cults of
saints (above all the Virgin Mary – appealing to women was seen as
especially important now that they had the vote) and lms – a
documentary about Pius XII, Pastor Angelicus, portraying him as a
charismatic leader super partes, toured the country to large
audiences. And with the Italian ‘nation’, such as it had been
conceived in the course of the preceding century or so, now stripped
of much of its ethical credibility, the Church hurried in to pick up
the mantle, with one authoritative Catholic newspaper describing
the ponti as ‘the supreme pinnacle of our fatherland’ to whom Italy
owed ‘its independence, liberty, glory, life, beauty – everything!’27
With Italy ideologically polarized between the Christian
Democrats and the Catholic Church on the one hand and the
communists and the socialists on the other, and with the United
States raising the political temperature further by making it clear to
De Gasperi that American aid for economic reconstruction was
contingent upon the far left being kept at bay, the ‘values of the
resistance’ lost any residual capacity to provide a clear ethical
platform for the new Republic. And with neither camp able to
appeal with conviction to ‘the nation’ as an overarching pole of
reference (what, after all, was the ‘fatherland’ of Catholics if not the
international communion of believers, and of communists, the
Soviet Union?), the essence of Italian political life became, as it had
been for so much of its history, more a struggle against an internal
enemy than a pursuit of collective goals. For those whose faith in
the ideal of an Italian nation had not been shattered by fascism, the
spectacle of so much mutual vituperation was dispiriting. As the
non-conformist anti-fascist priest Primo Mazzolari wrote in 1949:
Everything is being rebuilt: roads, bridges, factories. But we are not. Even though we
continue to grow in number and speak the same language as the men of our Risorgimento,
it is hard to say that we have returned to being Italians… The communist proletariat calls
Russia its fatherland, while the rest look to America… Italians are still in the position they
were on 8 September, when, from love of liberty, some rebelled. The resistance is still
going on, but in the name of a party pitted against the fatherland, perpetuating and
aggravating the divide… How can we move towards peace when we lack a shared political
consciousness, shared sentiments and a shared altar on which to lay our fratricidal arms? I
see collective su ering and collective poverty that could soon become collective ruin. But I

do not see a collective fatherland. I see fascists and partisans, not brothers and Italians.28
 With Italy caught up in what amounted to a war of religion, with
each side ghting for what it felt to be an entire cultural universe
rather than just a programme of government, the principles
underlying the ‘values of the resistance’ were widely dismissed as
too idealistic to be practicable – with enormous damage, as a result,
to the credibility of the state. Large swathes of the constitution were
glossed by the conservative Court of Cassation as merely
aspirational or ‘programmatic’ and not implemented.29 Thus, apart
from in Sicily, Sardinia and the Alpine fringes, there were no
regional governments until the 1970s: the Christian Democrat-led
administrations found the prospect of the communists holding
power in areas such as Emilia Romagna, Tuscany and Umbria,
where their support was concentrated, unacceptable. A
Constitutional Court was not created until towards the end of the
1950s, and in the meantime many laws and legal codes that had
been introduced by the fascists were left in force despite being in
agrant contradiction of the democratic precepts of the Republic.
Tools of control and repression were after all useful for containing
left-wing militancy, whether in the south, where the communists
were active in organizing land occupations by the peasantry in the
late 1940s (three demonstrators were killed and fteen wounded in
a clash with the police in a village in Calabria in October 1949), or
in the more industrialized north. In the province of Bologna
between 1948 and 1954 there were nearly 14,000 trials for o ences
against public order, including such ‘crimes’ as putting up posters
and selling the Communist Party newspaper, L’Unità.30
Even more telling of the gulf between the ‘values of the
resistance’ and the reality of the post-war Republic was the failure
to rid the state of former fascists. A number of decrees were issued
in 1944 calling for the bureaucracy to be purged, but they were not
implemented with any rigour. This was partly because of the
practical di culties of trying to prove who had been ‘fascist’ (or at
least sincerely ‘fascist’) in a regime where party membership had
been compulsory for all civil servants, but more fundamentally
because the Christian Democrats, and behind them the British and
the Americans, had no wish to see the administrative machinery
decimated and replenished with communists and socialists. As a
result the courts, run still by judges appointed under Mussolini, gave
credence to lines of defence of great suppleness – as in the case of
Guido Leto, head of the Duce’s secret police, OVRA, and later
Deputy Chief of Police in the Republic of Salò, who was acquitted in
April 1946 of the charge of having helped to maintain the regime in
being, on the grounds that he had simply been carrying out his
duties as a public o cial and so had not been in a position to decide
on the constitutionality or otherwise of the laws and institutions of
the state.31 An alternative defence, widely used and with equal
success, was to claim to have been in reality a secret anti-fascist:
many of those accused of collaborating with the Republic of Salò
found friends (and often fabricated documents) to attest their links
to partisans.32
A particularly perverse aspect of the failure of the courts to
uphold the ‘values of the resistance’ related to the prosecution of
war crimes. An amnesty for political and military prisoners, issued
in June 1946 as part of an attempt to inject a note of reconciliation
into the newly proclaimed Republic, excluded those who had been
responsible for ‘especially heinous tortures’. But the judiciary often
decided that the atrocities perpetrated by fascists against members
of the resistance had been neither ‘tortures’ nor ‘especially’ brutal.
Thus the captain of a unit who had allowed a female partisan
prisoner to be tied up, blindfolded and repeatedly raped by his
troops was deemed not to have committed ‘torture’ but ‘only the
maximum o ence to the honour and modesty’ of the woman.33 By
contrast partisans frequently found themselves branded by the
police and judges as common criminals rather than resistance
ghters, and thus excluded from the amnesty. In 1954 the Supreme
Military Court went so far as to rule that the Republic of Salò had
been a legitimate government, ‘albeit through error’, and that those
who had fought for it had thus not committed a crime, whereas
partisans had been irregular troops and so could not claim the
protection of military law.34
The consequences of the failure to prosecute war crimes
adequately were far-reaching. Many of the most senior gures of the
fascist regime who had not been captured and shot in 1945 escaped
serious punishment; and without a set of high-pro le trials,
comparable to those at Nuremberg, in which the regime’s
responsibility for the Second World War, the atrocities committed in
Libya, Ethiopia, the Balkans and elsewhere, and such domestic
policies as the racial laws and the persecution of the Jews could be
publicly aired and condemned, the Republic failed to de ne itself
clearly in relation to fascism (and indeed to the rest of recent Italian
history). And a succession of former supporters of the regime
pro ted from the climate of political ambivalence to produce a
number of best-selling works that sought to soften and humanize
fascism, and above all Mussolini. (What had the Duce done that was
‘terrible’, asked Indro Montanelli in his 1947 book, Il buonuomo
Mussolini (The Good Soul Mussolini), except ‘grimace’? And aside
from sending a few hundred people to con no, had the fascist
government not been characterized by ‘mildness’?)35 Such views
derived powerful support from the heavily Catholic culture su using
Italy (and especially the middle classes) in these years, with its
injunctions to forgiveness and mercy.36
Despite the Republic’s claims to be built on ‘the values of the
resistance’, anti-fascism was in fact a hard article of faith only for
the communists and the socialists, who were con ned to a ghetto of
political opposition during the height of the Cold War (albeit a
substantial one: 31 per cent of the votes in the 1948 elections; 35
per cent in 1953). And in the absence of a signi cant purge, the
state showed a remarkable degree of continuity from fascism. It was
calculated in 1960 that sixty-two of the country’s sixty-four prefects
had been functionaries under Mussolini; and the same applied to
every one of the 135 police chiefs and their 139 deputies.37 Many
senior gures in the army and the judiciary had likewise established
their careers in the fascist period: Gaetano Azzariti, who became
President of the Constitutional Court in 1957, had been the
President of the Race Tribunal in 1939–43. Of course not all of these
o cials had shared the illiberal and virulently anti-socialist values
of fascism. But many had; and as a result large parts of the
bureaucracy had concentrations of civil servants who were
profoundly unsympathetic to the principles expressed in the
constitution and willing to hamper the operation of democracy in
Italy or even actively to conspire against it.

On 31 August 1957, a little over twelve years after huge crowds had
desecrated and taunted the corpse of Mussolini in Piazzale Loreto,
two Capuchin friars dragged a large wooden box from the back seat
of a car outside the gates of the cemetery of San Cassiano, near
Predappio. Ever since being recovered from the Charterhouse of
Pavia, the remains of the Duce had been secretly stored in a
monastery near Milan, and requests by the family to have them
handed over for burial in Predappio had gone unheeded. Now, with
the recently installed Christian Democrat prime minister Adone Zoli
(whose family also came from Predappio) dependent for survival in
parliament on the votes of neo-fascist deputies (among them,
Domenico Leccisi, the man who had stolen Mussolini’s body in
1946: opposite him, on the far left of the Chamber, sat Walter
Audisio, Mussolini’s executioner), the government decided the time
had come to relent. On 1 September, with a throng of faithful
supporters looking on, their right arms raised in salute, the box with
Mussolini’s body was laid in the mausoleum in San Cassiano, where
it remains to this day, a site of pilgrimage for a steady stream of
visitors.38
28

The Economic Miracle, 1958–75

Come, come to the city

Why hang around in the country
If you want a good life
You’ve got to come to the city

The city is beautiful

The city is big
The city is lively
The city is fun

It’s full of streets and shops

And shop windows brightly lit
With lots of people working
And lots of people producing

With bigger and bigger advertisements

With stores and escalators
With taller and taller skyscrapers
And so many, so many cars
  Giorgio Gaber, ‘Com’è bella la città’

(popular song, 1969)

At the beginning of the 1960s, due to the pollution of the air and,
particularly in the countryside, of the water… the re ies began to
disappear… After [they] had gone, the ‘values’… of the old rural and
paleo-capitalist universe suddenly did not count any more. Church,
fatherland, obedience, order, thrift and morality lost their signi cance…
They were replaced by the ‘values’ of a new type of civilization, one that
was totally alien to the civilization of the peasantry…

Pier Paolo Pasolini, ‘Il vuoto del potere in Italia’, in Corriere della
Sera,
1 February 1975
CHRISTIAN DEMOCRATS AND COMMUNISTS

The Republic had a low-key birth. Two decades of nationalist

rhetoric had culminated in military defeat, economic destitution and
civil war, and few were inclined to consider this latest incarnation
of Italian unity as an occasion for patriotic celebration. And given
the widespread feeling that it was not just fascism but the country’s
entire recent past that had been shattered in 1943–5 (‘To see the
destruction of the Italy that had been created by the men of the
Risorgimento… is something that I cannot reconcile myself to,’
wrote Croce disconsolately in September 1946),1 it was very
di cult to know what symbols might be deployed to celebrate the
new regime. The commemorative stamps that were issued in
October 1946 lacked any obvious ‘national’ allusions. There were
references to the maritime republics of the Middle Ages and to the
Florentine republic, but not to anything in the modern era
(including the resistance). And there was no tricolour: not until
1952 did the national ag feature on a stamp, and then only
discreetly in an image of the cathedral of Trieste (Trieste had been
claimed by Yugoslavia at the end of the war, and remained a ‘Free
Territory’ under British and American occupation until 1954, when
it was handed to Italy).2
The weak identity of the Republic was evident in other areas of
symbolism. The Royal March was no longer serviceable as a national
anthem, but there was little consensus as to what might take its
place. Many Italian soldiers had spontaneously sung Verdi’s ‘Va
pensiero’ as they were taken o to prison camps by the Germans in
September 1943; and for many years after the war there were to be
intermittent calls for this or for ‘O Signore, dal tetto natio’ from I
Lombardi to be made Italy’s o cial anthem. But the sentiment
expressed in both choruses – yearning for an absent or lost
fatherland – was hardly very apt for a collective a rmation of
nationhood. The ‘Hymn of Mameli’ (‘Brothers of Italy’) was
provisionally indicated as the Republic’s anthem in the autumn of
1946, and largely by default (no formal decision was taken on the
matter) the choice was allowed to stand. But there was much
disquiet about the hymn’s bellicose wording, and the Republic never
identi ed with it very strongly (the British authorities were
evidently unsure what to play when Italy faced England in a football
match at Wembley in May 1959 and performed the Royal March by
mistake).3
In other areas, too, it was apparent that the Republic was short of
cohesive national symbols. Streets with names or dates of obviously
fascist origin – such as 21 April, 9 May (the proclamation of Empire)
and 28 October – had to be changed, but it was hard to get
agreement on what should replace them. The constitution declared
25 April, 1 May, 2 June and 4 November to be public holidays, but
each of these dates, with the possible exception of 4 November
(Italy’s victory in the First World War), had resonances more of
division than of unity. Nor was it possible to devise an emblem for
the new Republic that could command a strong emotional (and
aesthetic) response. A competition for the design was launched in
January 1948 with several permitted themes: bees, a toothed wheel
(both symbols of industry: the rst clause of the constitution had
declared Italy to be a democracy ‘founded on work’ – a compromise
formula that had been agreeable to all parties), a star, a shield with
a turreted crown, an eagle (probably a little too Roman for
comfort), and a beacon.4 The winning entry consisted of a ve-point
star set against a toothed wheel and anked by laurel and oaks
leaves – symbolizing peace and the strength and dignity of the
Italian people.
In the absence of a solid base, rooted in national history, on
which to found their legitimacy, the political parties that dominated
the Republic from 1946 until the early 1990s relied for much of
their authority on sources that were largely extraneous to ‘Italy’.
The Christian Democrats were heavily dependent on the Church.
They were not a confessional party, and some of the political
choices they made – the fostering of close ties with the USA and the
sanctioning of American-style consumerism, for example – did not
meet with the full approval of the Vatican, certainly in the 1950s.
But the Christian Democrats were committed to upholding Catholic
values and ghting the far left, and the Church accordingly threw its
moral and organizational weight behind them, using the pulpit, the
confessional, the press and the powerful machinery of Catholic
Action to mobilize voters (especially women, who made up 60 per
cent of Christian Democrat supporters). The drift of peasants from
the countryside to the cities and the growth of secularization after
the 1950s undoubtedly reduced the power of organized Catholicism
to in uence elections, but the continued support of the Church was
an important factor in the Christian Democrats being able to secure
around 40 per cent of the vote consistently down to the early 1980s
(with a high of 48.4 per cent in 1948).5
The Socialist and Communist parties derived much of their cachet
from the near mythic status of the Soviet Union among left-wing
voters in Italy during the later 1940s and 1950s. The extraordinary
achievements of the Red Army against the Nazis – the siege of
Leningrad, the Battle of Stalingrad, the victories of 1943–5, the
capture of Berlin and the Red Flag hoisted over the ruins of the
Reichstag – became the stu of legend to those whose own forces
had performed so miserably during the war; and to these military
achievements was added the image of a country that in the space of
a little over two decades had transformed itself from a backward
agricultural power into an industrial colossus. Stalin was an object
of veneration to millions of Italians, the personi cation of
superhuman strength and paternal kindness, his moustached
features held aloft on placards at countless communist and socialist
rallies. And when he died in 1953 there were extraordinary scenes
of collective grief: one party activist recalled standing outside the
gates of FIAT at dawn on 6 March distributing copies of L’Unità,
with its large headline – ‘The man who has done most for the
liberation of the human race is dead’ – and watching workers
dissolve into tears as they took in the news.6
In order to consolidate their followings, the two main blocs into
which the country was divided (the only other grouping of
signi cance, aside from the neo-fascists, was that of the centrist lay
parties – the Social Democrats, the Republicans and the Liberals –
who had about 10 per cent of the vote between them) set about
colonizing civil society, using as their model many of the techniques
of the fascist regime. The communists built up a powerful network
of institutions alongside those of the party and its a liated trade
union, the Italian General Confederation of Work (CGIL), and
together these enabled millions of their supporters to move in what
amounted to a parallel universe to that of their opponents. There
were organizations for ex-partisans and women (the Union of Italian
Women, with 3,500 local circles and over a million members by
1954); there were the Case del Popolo (‘Houses of the People’), the
focal points (together with the church) of community life in many
smaller towns, which arranged debates and meetings, screened
lms, laid on children’s activities and sports events, and in some
cases even ran their own pharmacies and medical services; and
there were the popular feste dell’Unità, designed as fund-raising
events for the party newspaper, with barbecues, singing, dancing
and other entertainments for the whole family.7
Although the Christian Democrats relied heavily on the
organizations of the Church to mobilize their supporters, especially
in the north, where Catholic Action (which had more than 2.5
million members in the mid-1950s) was strongest, they also built up
their own extensive network of anking structures. The most
important of these were ACLI (the Association of Italian Christian
Workers), CISL (the Italian Confederation of Free Syndicates) – a
trade union rival to the communist and socialist CGIL – and the
association for peasant farmers known as Coldiretti. The latter was
particularly important in the post-war years, when Italy was still
predominantly an agricultural country, and it was conceived from
the outset as a militant anti-communist movement (‘We will not
defeat communism or build a dyke against it… [unless we]
galvanize the masses on the basis of precise beliefs… and call on
them to ght,’ its founder declared).8 It had its own newsletters and
magazines, special divisions for women and the young (‘Youth of
the Fields’), and training schools, whose motto was Provare,
Produrre, Progredire (‘Strive, Produce, Progress’). By 1956 it had
more than 13,000 local sections and 1,600,000 families as
members.9
Whereas the fascists had endeavoured to mobilize Italians on
behalf of the ‘fatherland’, the two blocs into which the country was
now split made little attempt to encourage their supporters to see
the state or the nation as overarching objects of loyalty. Instead
each regarded itself as the standard-bearer of a set of supreme and
embattled values (symbolized in the case of the Christian Democrats
by their badge of a crusader shield emblazoned with the word
libertas), whose defence against the benighted forces of the
opposition – demonized by both sides in a manner often reminiscent
of the crude propaganda techniques used by fascism – might
necessitate even severe moral compromises: the appropriation,
perhaps, of public resources for party or personal ends, connivance
at support from known criminal elements, or the suppression of
potentially damaging truths – such as the fact of the Stalinist purges
of the 1930s, which many well-placed Italian communists (including
Togliatti) would have known about, in some measure at least, well
before the revelations made by Nikita Khrushchev at the twentieth
congress of the Russian Communist Party early in 1956.10
If both sides inherited the view, deeply ingrained since the
Risorgimento, of seeing politics largely as a pedagogic struggle to
indoctrinate the masses, it was the communists who set the greatest
store by education, ideas and culture. This was partly because the
PCI attracted into its upper ranks a disproportionately large number
of intellectuals – including many of the best-known writers, artists
and lm-makers of the period – but also because the dominance of
idealism in Italian thought, ampli ed by twenty years of fascism,
had dulled the left to the political power and importance of the
economy. Thus, at a moment when the Western world was about to
undergo one of the most dramatic material transformations in its
history, the communists failed to o er a clear vision of how greater
well-being might be secured through the promotion of the public
sphere and its partnership with the private sector. Instead they
devoted much of their energy to securing the citadels of high
culture, disseminating Marxist history and critical theory, using
newspapers and journals to attack bourgeois individualism and
argue the merits of socialist values, encouraging the production of
didactic social-realist lms, and promoting texts by Antonio Gramsci
and other approved communist writers.
If the communists succeeded in building up their own powerful
subculture – a subculture in which party activists addressed one
another as ‘comrade’, gave their children names such as Ivan,
Vladimiro, Uliano and Illich, wore leather ‘commissar’ jerkins,
celebrated the resistance, sang partisan songs, idolized the Soviet
Union and sported works by Steinbeck and Dos Passos alongside
those of Stalin and Gramsci on their shelves11 – the capacity of the
left to proselytize beyond its established heartlands in the centre
and north of the country was severely limited by the growing
challenge of consumerism. Faced with a barrage of images in the
1950s and 1960s of an opulent modern urban lifestyle, with
luxurious apartments, domestic appliances, expensive clothes and
Cadillacs, transmitted through Hollywood lms, glossy magazines
and television programmes, it was hard for the left’s austere
emphasis on work and self-denial in the name of social justice and
the greater good of the collectivity to compete with much hope of
success. The dreams of most Italians resided in New York, not
Moscow; and increasingly from the late 1950s they had the
wherewithal to realize them.
THE ‘ECONOMIC MIRACLE’

The immediate post-war years were a time of severe hardship for

most Italians. Real wages in 1945 were half what they had been in
1938–9, and it was estimated that a typical factory worker spent
around 95 per cent of his income on food. Average daily calorie
consumption in 1941–50 stood at 2,171 (compared to 2,834 in the
1920s), and a national survey in 1951–2 found that 869,000
families–744,000 of them in the south – never ate meat or sugar. It
also discovered that 48 per cent of households had no kitchen and
73 per cent no bathroom, and that only 7.4 per cent of homes were
tted with the basic necessities of running water, electricity and an
indoor toilet.12 The most common form of transport in the
countryside was still the mule and cart, and in the city, the tram and
bicycle – as in Vittorio De Sica’s classic neo-realist lm Bicycle
Thieves, shot in the near noiseless streets of Rome in 1948. The
cheapest car, the FIAT 500 ‘Topolino’, cost about twice the annual
income of industrial and white collar workers in 1950, and was thus
una ordable, and it was only with the appearance of the Vespa
scooter (powered with a war-time aeroplane starter engine that had
never gone into production) and shortly afterwards of its rival the
Lambretta, towards the end of the 1940s, that most Italians began to
experience their rst taste of private mechanized travel.13
But in the space of a decade, between the mid-1950s and the mid-
1960s, there was an extraordinary surge in manufacturing that in
e ect transformed Italy from a relatively backward agricultural
country into one of the world’s most powerful modern economies.
The gross domestic product grew at an average rate of over 6 per
cent per annum and industrial production doubled – faster than in
any country in the world apart from Japan (and possibly West
Germany). Most of this growth occurred in the ‘industrial triangle’
of the north-west (Turin–Milan–Genoa) and was led by FIAT –
which by 1967 was selling more cars in Europe than any other
company, Volkswagen included – and by a string of engineering
rms specializing in electrical appliances such as refrigerators,
washing machines, sewing machines and televisions. In 1951 Italy
produced just 18,500 fridges annually; by 1957 the gure had gone
up to 370,000; and by 1967 it stood at 3,200,000, making it the
third-biggest producer after the USA and Japan. Italy had also
become Europe’s leading manufacturer of washing machines, with
rms such as Candy, Zanussi and Ignis (quite literally) household
names.14
Several factors lay behind this extraordinary development –
which radically transformed the way Italy saw itself and was seen
by outsiders: the land of Bicycle Thieves suddenly became the
country of Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960), of Gina
Lollobrigida and Sophia Loren, of Martinis, Cinzanos and Ferraris. In
the rst place Italian industry and infrastructure had been spared
some of the worst ravages of war-time bombing and were able to
recover relatively quickly; and the reconstruction process was
greatly assisted by the in ux of goods and cheap loans (worth more
than $1,400 million between 1948 and 1952) under America’s
Marshall Aid programme, designed to restore European markets
(and stop impoverishment fuelling support for the far left).15 Italy’s
economy bene ted, too, from the air of a generation of highly
talented business leaders, many of whom had honed their
management skills in the progressive surroundings of fascism’s
Institute for Industrial Reconstruction. Fuel was also an important
ingredient in the economic miracle: large supplies of natural gas
were discovered in the Po valley towards the end of the war, and
these, together with the massive oil imports that Enrico Mattei, the
unscrupulous but dynamic head of Italy’s state petroleum company,
negotiated with overseas suppliers on extremely advantageous
terms, ensured that Italian industry had the cheapest energy in
western Europe.
 Another major element in Italy’s industrial growth was the
European Economic Community. The combination of shattered
national self-con dence, the Catholic universalism of the Christian
Democrat leadership, and the urgent need for export markets for
Italian goods and labour (to relieve the demographic pressures in
the south) made De Gasperi and most of his successors as prime
minister enthusiastic supporters of European cooperation. In 1952
Italy followed up its membership of NATO, which it had joined in
1949, by signing the European Defence Community plan; and in
1957 it became a founder signatory of the European Economic
Community with the Treaty of Rome. The bene ts of the new
market opportunities that this agreement a orded became
immediately apparent as the country’s burgeoning manufacturing
sector began shipping fridges, cars and washing machines in huge
quantities over the Alps to meet the consumerist demands of the
renascent west European economies. In 1955,23 per cent of Italian
products were exported to EEC countries. By 1960 the gure had
gone up to 29.8 per cent; and by 1965 it stood at over 40 per cent.16
But probably the most important factor behind the ‘economic
miracle’ was Italy’s reservoir of cheap labour. Nearly 50 per cent of
the country’s population of over 45 million people at the end of the
war was still dependent on agriculture, but, in the southern
countryside especially, living standards were lower than almost
anywhere else in Europe, with labourers earning just a few hundred
lire a day (if they could nd work) – about half what their
counterparts in industry could make.17 The Christian Democrats
looked to assuage the land hunger of the peasants – or at least
defuse the tensions caused by the forcible occupation of estates
across the south after 1943 – by passing a series of reforms in 1950
that allowed for the expropriation of large properties and their
distribution in lots to the poor. This was a radical initiative that
nally broke the power of the centuries-old southern elites; but only
a small proportion of peasant families ended up as bene ciaries, and
those that did become smallholders were rarely able to make a
decent living from the few hectares of poor quality soil that they
acquired. As a result millions of rural workers began to abandon the
land in the 1950s in search of employment in the cities, willing to
take on almost any job.
For the industrialists this was an ideal situation; and the
government assisted them by pursuing orthodox liberal policies (in
reaction, largely, to fascist ‘planning’) that left unemployment high
and the trade unions weak and unable to counter the often ercely
punitive measures taken by factory owners against organized
labour. The peasants who arrived in the towns and cities of the
north-west in search of work, many of them from the most
impoverished regions of the south (around 200,000 southerners
settled each year in the industrial triangle in the late 1950s and
early 1960s), clutching battered suitcases and jars of olive oil, were
forced to take jobs in factories where safety regulations and
insurance payments were non-existent and the hours inhumanly
long. Accidents and fatalities were common – eight people died in
the space of just one month on building sites in Turin in the summer
of 1961–and average wages were among the lowest anywhere in
Europe.18 But at least the hours were regular and the pay
considerably better than the migrants received back home. And
despite the harsh and squalid conditions, the allure of the big cities
remained almost unassailable: ‘In Sardinia they talk of Turin as if it
were a God,’ remarked one contemporary.19
The ‘economic miracle’ radically transformed the lifestyle and
expectations of countless Italians. Men and women whose families
had for centuries lived in small towns and villages, and whose lives
were attuned to the rhythms of the agricultural calendar and the
seasons, who spoke dialect chie y and perhaps only rudimentary
Italian, suddenly found themselves in a new and often bewildering
world. ‘I felt alone, like in a forest without a single living soul,’
recalled Antonio Antonuzzo, a Sicilian peasant who had come to
Milan in 1962, after an unsuccessful period as a charcoal burner and
miner in Tuscany.20 And if in the past those who had migrated –
whether to other parts of Italy or abroad – had done so in the hope
of returning to their native community after they had saved enough
money to buy a few hectares of land there, most of the estimated
9,140,000 Italians who moved away from their home regions
between 1955 and 1971 were conscious that there was now nothing
for which to go back.
But it was not just the need to make a living that uprooted so
many Italians from the land. The ‘economic miracle’ spread a
constellation of powerful new ideas and images that challenged
many of the traditional values of rural society – built as they had
been around the precepts of the Church and an embedded sense of
moral and material immobility – and threatened to destroy a culture
‘that had certainly remained unchanged for a span of time far
greater than the two thousand years of Catholicism’, as the writer
and lm-maker Pier Paolo Pasolini lamented.21 Migration was a
measure of the extraordinary appeal of consumerism, which
permeated Italian society rapidly after the war through such media
as American lms (some 5,000 were being screened in cinemas
across the country in 1953 to huge audiences), weekly magazines
and (from 1954) television. The most popular television programme
by the early 1960s, watched by more than 8 million viewers each
day, was Carosello, a ten-minute compilation of comedy sketches,
cartoons, stories, songs and music framing a series of advertisements
for the latest products now on o er thanks to the ‘economic
miracle’.22
The Church observed the spread of the new consumerist values
with horror, aware that the migration to the cities would erode its
cultural grip on Italians, and conscious, too, that the central
message of consumerism – that happiness was to be found in the
pursuit of material well-being – was antithetical to its own teaching.
Pius XII tried to nd crumbs of comfort in modern life where he
could (he welcomed the advent of television in so far as it o ered
‘the entire family the possibility of honest pleasure together, away
from the perils of unhealthy company and unhealthy places’; though
the prospect of programmes transmitting the ‘poisoned atmosphere
of materialism, fatuity and hedonism’, which was so often found in
cinemas, made him ‘shudder’),23 but he thought American culture in
general repugnant and during his last years (he died in 1958) he
spent much time denouncing its evils: its lax sexual mores, its
individualism, its utilitarianism, its weak sense of family, its
obsession with health and bodily functions, and its mistaken notions
about the place and role of women in society.
For much of the 1950s the Christian Democrats supported the
Church’s battle to uphold strict Catholic morality. As head of the
Central O ce for Cinematography from June 1947, the future prime
minister Giulio Andreotti ensured that lms were subject to strict
censorship, with anything that might o end public decency
carefully excised (moments of sexual intimacy and bad language in
particular). Journalists and radio broadcasters were obliged to
transfer the linguistic gymnastics that they had developed in
extolling the Duce and fascism to nding ingenious circumlocutions
and synonyms for sensitive terms. Thus ‘abortion’ became
‘interruption of maternity’; ‘pregnancy’, ‘interesting condition’;
‘suicide’, ‘insane gesture’; ‘breast’, ‘chest’; and ‘member’,
‘component’ (even the phrase ‘member of parliament’ was banned).
A particular challenge was o ered by the second Kinsey Report on
the sexual behaviour of Americans, which the weekly magazine Oggi
ventured to publish in 1954 as a supplement. The word ‘sexual’ had
to be replaced with ‘amorous’ throughout, while the noun ‘coitus’
was stripped of any suggestion of physicality by use of the bizarrely
poetic phrase ‘sentimental expansiveness’.24 Television was tightly
controlled from the outset, with the chief executive of the newly
created state broadcasting company, RAI (1954), Filiberto Guala,
prohibiting any material that might incite ‘class hatred’ or
undermine the ‘institution of the family’ or ‘the sanctity of the
matrimonial bond’.25
But the Christian Democrats knew that they were ghting a losing
battle, and that doggedly to uphold the moral injunctions of the
Vatican in the face of the rising tide of consumerism and growing
secularization risked exposing them to unpopularity and,
increasingly, to ridicule. In 1956 Guala was forced to resign after
RAI tried to make amends for a live broadcast in which ballerinas
had danced in almost transparent tights – allegedly causing the Pope
to turn o his television in shock and retreat hurriedly to prayer –
by instructing the dancers to wear what looked like long johns in
subsequent transmissions: large sections of the press fulminated
against RAI’s apparent subservience to the Vatican. Guala shortly
afterwards retreated to a Trappist monastery and was replaced at
RAI by a tough-minded managerial party gure who was willing to
be more attuned to the fast-shifting values of Italian society – and
prepared to deliver the diet of quiz shows and light entertainment
that the public relished.
The Church had little answer in the end to consumerism and its
attendant values. During the ponti cate of John XXIII (1958–63) the
Vatican sought to steer Catholicism in fresh directions, opening up a
dialogue with the left and trying, with the Second Vatican Council,
to adapt to the changing world rather than campaigning against it.
But attempts to reach out to the new Italy of the ‘economic miracle’,
however imaginative, could not avoid a strong savour of incongruity
and, increasingly, of anachronism – as when in October 1964 the
prime minister, the directors of IRI and the archbishop of Florence
gathered in a small church built in front of the Florence North
service station to sing a Te Deum of thanksgiving to God for having
allowed the completion of the latest section of the Autostrada del sole
motorway from Naples to Milan.26 For most Italians in the 1960s
miracles (including the economic miracle) were made on earth, not
in heaven. In 1956,69 per cent of Italians attended mass regularly
on Sunday. Twelve years later the gure had fallen to 40 per cent,
and of these just 6 per cent could be classi ed as ‘devout’. The
situation was especially alarming among the immigrant workers in
the sprawling suburbs of the northern cities, where in 1968 only 11
per cent of men were found to be going to mass regularly.27 With
the Church’s authority dwindling, Italy’s Christian Democrat rulers
were forced to look elsewhere for a source of legitimacy to sustain
them in power. But their moral choices were limited, and in the
absence of God they had little else to call on but Mammon.
THE COLONIZATION OF THE STATE

The celebrations in 1961 to mark the centenary of the uni cation of

Italy were deeply uncertain and strained in tone. Behind the
speeches, the conferences and the laying of wreaths on the tombs of
Garibaldi, Mazzini and Victor Emmanuel II (‘The Italian Republic to
Victor Emmanuel II, the father of the Fatherland’); behind the
television documentaries and the lms – including a specially
commissioned work by the leading director Roberto Rossellini, Viva
l’Italia!, re-enacting for modern cinema-goers the events of 1860;
behind the major exhibitions dedicated to the Risorgimento, the
regions and ‘work’ (‘to illustrate… the most distinctive feature of
this age, namely the staggering technical and social progress’), all
held in Turin – selected primarily because it was the symbol of the
resurgent Italy of the ‘economic miracle’ – the Italy of the gleaming
production lines of FIAT;28 behind all these o cial initiatives lay,
for many observers, a sense of malaise, an awareness that the
country’s political unity had still not been matched by the moral
unity that the patriots of the nineteenth century had so desperately
hoped to achieve. As Italy’s most authoritative newspaper, the
Corriere della Sera, said in an article in April 1961:
Material progress, increased prosperity and economic dynamism are important… But what
are also needed are a common basis, a foundation that will unite, and above all a moral
centre – a state that invites loyalty and instinctive obedience. These are things that are
hard to improvise once they have been destroyed, whatever the regime. But an attempt
should at least be made to reconstruct them little by little, with patience, good will,
sacri ce and faith in the principles underpinning public life… We have failed to do this in

the fteen years that have elapsed since the war and the resistance.29

The absence of a ‘common basis’ was evident in the polemics that

took place in 1961 over Italian history. The Christian Democrats
argued that the true Italy was the community of the Catholic
faithful, who, thanks to the Lateran Pacts of 1929 and the
establishment of the postwar Republic, had at last been brought into
the fold of the state by the guiding hand of Providence, so giving the
‘nation’ its proper contours and character. The entire liberal period
was written o largely as an aberration, a period of ‘di culties and
shortcomings’, as the Catholic pressput it, caused by ‘the Gordian
knots that the hasty and almost improvised diplomatic-military
solution of the Italian problem’ had failed to cut.30 The communists
and socialists contested this reading of Italian history vigorously –
and at the same time denounced the commemorations of 1961 as a
vainglorious display of self-congratulation by the representatives of
‘monopoly capitalism’ who had plunged the country into ‘a series of
bloody wars and twenty years of dictatorship’.31 The rightful
protagonist of Italian history, they maintained, was the working
class, which had been kept in ignorance by the Church and denied
social justice by the liberals, the fascists and now the Christian
Democrats, too. Only the small centrist lay parties were willing to
defend the achievements of the Risorgimento, pointing to the
extreme irony of celebrating the centenary of uni cation while
depicting Cavour and the liberal state ‘in roughly the same terms…
as Radetzky and the Habsburg empire had been presented to our
forebears: as little more than monumental obstacles blocking the
path of the Italian people to the glorious achievements and progress
that would otherwise have been secured without them’.32

The contested memories and erce ideological divisions were

especially striking given that the economic advances of the 1950s
and 1960s were dissolving many of the traditional material
impediments to unity: television, mass migration, education, cars,
urbanization, improved infrastructures and rising levels of
prosperity served to make Italians culturally more uniform than at
any time in their history. They ate much the same food, wore
similar clothes, had convergent patterns of work and leisure, and in
most cases could communicate with one another in standard Italian
(even if dialect remained the rst language for over half the
population in the 1970s).33 But as a number of acute observers
pointed out, Italy’s rapid emergence as a modern industrial
democracy made the need for shared national values and a strong
sense of the state more important than ever. For how could the
growing economy be properly planned and regulated, and social
tensions be mediated, if there was not a willingness on the part of
individuals and interest groups to make sacri ces on behalf of the
community as a whole? As the political commentator Domenico
Bartoli observed in 1959 (echoing similar re ections by Mazzini, De
Sanctis and others a century before):
A democracy without patriotism will struggle to exist. It is easier in such circumstances for
a society that is ruled by an authoritarian government to survive, where the cracks can be
covered up and the sores contained. But patriotism cannot be imposed from above… It has
to be found within each person. And to nd it, people need to suppress their feelings of
egoism and become conscious of their duties as citizens… Now that our dangerous
nationalistic illusions have been destroyed for good, the only appropriate patriotism (and it
is, in fact, the only genuine form of patriotism) is something resembling the proud national
sentiment of the Scandinavians, the Swiss or the English today. Pride in reforms
accomplished or intended; pride in a well-ordered society; pride in progress made.
Patriotism does not exist without good governance. But equally there can be no good

governance without patriotism.34

Such warnings owed much to a realization that the pedagogic

impulses that had operated since the Risorgimento to counter the
country’s historic divisions had all but evaporated, and that with the
‘economic miracle’ Italy seemed in danger of falling back once again
into the exaggerated individualism and materialism that the high-
minded patriots of the nineteenth century had sought to correct. The
problem lay partly in the fact that the spheres in which ‘national’
sentiment could legitimately be expressed had become so
constricted after fascism and were now con ned primarily to sport
(and particularly to the achievements of the azzurri in football);35
and it was also the case that many politicians and intellectuals (like
their counterparts elsewhere in Europe) were inclined to see the
nation-state as essentially an anachronism and were looking instead
to the supra-nationalism of European integration as the best long-
term guarantee of peace, prosperity and political stability. But the
situation in Italy was made worse by the inability of the Christian
Democrats to provide an ethical vision of citizenship or the state
that would serve to o set the centrifugal tendencies of party
politics.
Much of the reason for this failing lay in the preoccupation of the
Christian Democrats with dominating government at all costs and
excluding the communists from power. Hence, from the early 1950s,
their adoption of a strategy designed to reduce their dependence on
the Church and build up an autonomous party machine, using the
state’s resources to create huge networks or clienteles of support,
especially in the economically dependent south. The result was an
accentuation of the tendency, already heavily pronounced under
both liberalism and fascism, for the public sector to be regarded as a
tool of partisan political ambitions rather than as a neutral
instrument for the implementation of law and policy. But the
inability of the Christian Democrats to put forward an ethical model
of citizenship also derived from the feeling that it was ultimately the
Catholic Church and not the state that should be the principal
source of moral instruction in Italy. After all, as De Gasperi said in
1946, it was God who was the supreme arbiter of human a airs: ‘To
rule a state is to generate an intimate link with the Almighty, our
Father, and… to create an immediate responsibility towards the
people, but only in so far as the state is the mediator of the divine
will that governs us.’36
The colonization of the state by the Christian Democrats – and in
due course by their coalition partners, too – was far from being
systematic. Much of the impetus came from the largely haphazard
competition for power between the various factions into which the
party was divided. The leaders of these rival currents – men such as
the right-wing Mario Scelba, the centrists Mariano Rumor and
Giulio Andreotti, and the left-leaning pragmatist (and former fascist)
Amintore Fanfani – endeavoured to build up networks of political
support by ensuring that their friends and allies were placed in key
positions within the public administration and the state-controlled
industries. These appointees in turn bolstered their own positions by
recruiting allies, and so on down the bureaucratic chain, thereby
creating vast capillary networks that penetrated into almost every
corner of Italian society. The result was a di use and fragmented
state with archipelagos of competing power in which the dominant
ethos was not so much public service as the provision of jobs for the
party faithful – irrespective, very often, of whether those who were
employed were in possession of the appropriate quali cations.
The consequences of this system were most conspicuous in the
south, where the relationship between politicians and the electorate
had traditionally hinged on the exchange of favours – jobs,
pensions, contracts – for votes: in the north ideology had tended to
gure more prominently. The agencies set up to implement the land
reforms of 1950 quickly became dominated by Christian Democrats,
who made sure that peasants bearing suitable letters of attestation
from their parish priest were given preferential treatment and that
communist supporters were rejected.37 The proliferation of public
agencies controlled by the local authorities provided especially
fertile terrain for the exercise of state clientelism. In the Sicilian city
of Catania by the mid-1970s there were eighteen agencies dealing
with health, pensions, sickness bene t and social security, eleven
operating public services (such as water and gas) and ve running
public housing. In 1950 the Christian Democrats had just seventeen
directors and eight presidents on their boards; in 1955 the gures
had gone up to thirty-three and thirteen respectively; and by the
mid-1960s they stood at seventy-nine and twenty-two.38
From a political point of view, state clientelism was a remarkably
powerful tool. The huge sums of public money that owed into local
government co ers could be channelled towards the friends and
allies of Christian Democrat politicians who tendered for the
massive development contracts on o er in the 1950s and 1960s. The
Cassa per il Mezzogiorno (‘Fund for the South’), set up in 1950 to
assist the economic regeneration of the poorest regions of the
country, spent more than 1,000 billion lire during the rst years of
its existence on roads, electricity, housing, water supplies and other
infrastructure works in the south, and over 8,000 billion lire
between 1957 and 1975 on (for the most part failed) schemes to
promote industrialization. The chief bene ciaries were often
unscrupulous entrepreneurs like Francesco Vassallo, the man who
dominated the Palermo construction sector during the 1950s and
1960s thanks to his close association with Giovanni Gioia and Salvo
Lima, two of Sicily’s most powerful Christian Democrat politicians
(both of whom were widely regarded as having extensive ma a
connections: Lima was murdered in 1992).39
With party interests taking precedence over nancial prudence or
considerations of the common good, the public sector in Italy
became increasingly bloated, corrupt and ine cient. State
industries, which had remained largely competitive in the course of
the 1950s, went into the red in the 1960s as managers were
appointed according to political criteria and clientelism undermined
e ciency. Local government pay rolls lengthened as the drive to
build up Christian Democrat support intensi ed. In Naples the
number of municipal employees quadrupled between the early
1950s and 1968, and in Palermo, according to one estimate, over 35
per cent of the entire labour force consisted of public sector workers
in 1976.40 Services such as street cleaning and refuse collection had
veritable armies of sta on their books (though southern cities
remained notoriously among the most squalid in Europe). And even
the health service got sucked into the vortex of clientelism. The
Vittorio Emanuele Hospital in Catania was the city’s third-largest
employer, with every post from consultant to cleaner lled (or not
lled: keeping aspirants dangling was an excellent way for local
politicians to expand their client base) according to party
considerations. In 1963 the president of the hospital, a Christian
Democrat senator who was desperate to get re-elected, had patients
specially transferred to the hospital so that they could vote for him
from their beds.41
 The colonization of the state by the Christian Democrats and their
allies was to have disastrous long-term e ects on the economy. As
the appeal of the government came to lie almost exclusively in its
capacity to deliver prosperity to its clients and keep the communists
out (and from the 1960s the threat posed by the PCI in the eyes of
many voters was not so much its commitment to socialism as its
stronger sense of the law and public morality), so successive
administrations had to resort to borrowing heavily to stay a oat
(enforcing higher taxation would have been counter-productive).
There were also deleterious consequences throughout the public
sector, as local and central bureaucracies became unaccountable and
increasingly sclerotic, and services such as postal and telephone
communications, health care and education grew ever more
ine cient. Planning, too, went out of the window. Emblematic was
the situation in the Sicilian town of Agrigento, where in July 1966 a
hillside development of new high-rise ats, built illegally and in
contravention of engineering reports, began slipping down the
valley towards the ancient Greek temples below. Party political
concerns and private speculative interests had prevailed over
considerations of public welfare.
Behind state clientelism, with all its corruption and ine ciency,
lay an insidious circularity. The more pathological the public sector
became, the more necessary it was for private individuals to have
patrons (‘saints in Heaven’) who could intercede on their behalf. In
a world where jobs, contracts, licences and so much else depended
on having access to the appropriate contacts, it was hard for even
the most high-minded to avoid succumbing to the system and
fostering the cycle of dysfunctionality. And with the state weak and
the judiciary unwilling to take a stand (judges who tried to uphold
the law and oppose corruption could nd themselves accused of
behaving ‘politically’ and have their careers ruined), it was logical
for people to take refuge in what one American anthropologist
described as ‘amoral familism’42 (encouraged by the Church’s
celebration of the family as the inviolable cell of society) – or even,
in more extreme cases, in subterranean bodies such as the ma a
networks of the south or ‘P2’, an apparently subversive secret
Masonic organization that came to light in 1981 and whose
membership included hundreds of prominent politicians, civil
servants and journalists.

The mass migrations from the countryside to the cities, the decline
of traditional practices and values, the onslaught of consumerism,
the rise in material expectations, the strengthening power of the
trade unions as Italy approached full employment, and a growing
sense that the Christian Democrat state was too impotent and
backward-looking to deal with the demands posed by the ‘economic
miracle’ led at the end of the 1960s to an explosion of discontent. As
in other Western countries where the extraordinary pace of recent
economic change had given rise to huge social and cultural tensions,
students took to the streets in protest at the overcrowded and
ramshackle universities; and their anger soon fanned out into a
broad denunciation of many of the key features of post-war
Christian Democrat Italy: capitalism, pro-Americanism, sexual
repression, conformism, individualism and authority. Millions of
industrial workers voiced their dissatisfaction at low pay and poor
working conditions and at the failure of the state to provide the
housing, transport, education and welfare to match the country’s
self-image as a modern industrial democracy. The Communist Party
was widely attacked for having been unable to orchestrate e ective
opposition.
The Christian Democrats and their coalition allies – including the
socialists, who since 1956 had distanced themselves from the
communists and moved towards the centre ground of politics –
responded to the unrest with a string of piecemeal reforms. In a bid
to make the state more responsive to the country’s socio-economic
needs regional government was nally introduced in the spring of
1970, twenty-two years after it had been enshrined in the
constitution, with elected councils being given the power to legislate
in areas such as health, social welfare, town planning and public
works. The upshot, as the Christian Democrats had always feared,
was the creation of a ‘Red Belt’ of communist-led regions in Emilia
Romagna, Tuscany and Umbria. New laws were also passed on
pensions, public housing and index-linked pay; spending on the
south was greatly increased; and from 1975 workers who were
made redundant were entitled to receive at least 80 per cent of their
pay for up to a year from a state insurance fund. There were also
important social reforms, most notably, in 1970, the introduction of
divorce – despite strong opposition from the Christian Democrats,
the neo-fascists and the Church. In 1978 (the same year as the rst
non-Italian for more than 450 years was elevated to the throne of St
Peter) a further milestone on the march of secularism was reached
with the legalization of abortion.
But these changes did little to alter the fundamental weaknesses
of the state; and the fact that the government had responded to the
demands of the trade unions and other pressure groups with such
extraordinary largesse (Italy had the most generous welfare
provisions in Europe by the mid-1970s, and Italian workers were
among the best paid, best treated and most protected) underlined
the extent to which the authority of the Christian Democrats
depended on their capacity to guarantee material well-being – and
little else. Despite a succession of high-pro le nancial scandals and
indications that corruption was rife in government circles, voters
continued to back the Christian Democrats: in the elections of 1976
the party secured nearly 39 per cent of the vote. But the dangers
inherent in supporting a government that had failed to maintain a
clear commitment to the national good were evident in the massive
budget de cits, unrestrained borrowing and spiralling public debt of
the 1970s and 1980s. The fear of many nineteenth-century patriots
that ‘parties’ would prove ruinous in Italy, given the absence of any
strong tempering sense of the collectivity, seemed in danger of being
realized.
29

Towards the ‘Second Republic’

Padania is our pride, our great source of wealth, our only means of
expressing ourselves freely in the fullness of our individual being and our
collective identity.
The history of the Italian state, by contrast, has become a history of
colonial oppression, of economic exploitation and moral violence… The
Italian state has deviously compelled the Peoples of Padania to endure
the systematic exploitation of the economic resources created by their
hard work, and see them squandered in the thousand streams of support
for the ma a clienteles of the south…
WE, PEOPLES OF PADANIA,
solemnly proclaim,
PADANIA IS A FEDERAL, INDEPENDENT AND SOVEREIGN
REPUBLIC

Declaration of the independence of Padania by the Northern

League,
15 September 1996

At school, almost all the teachers say that Berlusconi is a fascist, that
he’ll sell the school to whoever can a ord to buy it… But if Berlusconi is
a fascist, why is he always laughing and happy? I learned that the
fascists wore black shirts, were always in uniform, wanted the war and
used their clubs on people… And so they certainly had no reason to
laugh… But if Berlusconi put on a uniform, started clubbing people and
wanted to go to war, then his televisions wouldn’t be watched by
anybody.
Thirteen-year-old child writing about Silvio Berlusconi, Rome,
1994
COSA NOSTRA

During the 1950s and 1960s the problem of organized crime in the
south of Italy had been seen largely in terms of economic
backwardness.

The ma a was felt to belong primarily to the semi-feudal world of

the great estates of western and central Sicily, a world of orange and
lemon groves and cattle rustling, of bandits, archaic codes of
honour, arcane rituals and symbols and exotic legends peddled by
travelling bards. It was widely believed that this rural sub-culture
would quickly disappear once the island became fully absorbed into
a modern capitalist society. There was certainly consternation in the
immediate post-war years at the high murder-rate (particularly of
left-wing activists); and in the 1950s, the appearance of gangster-
style violence on the streets of Palermo, linked, it seemed, to the
new opportunities for enrichment a orded by the massive in ux of
public money into the island, led to increasingly insistent demands
for a formal government enquiry – especially from the communists,
who correctly surmised that it would be the Christian Democrats
who would emerge most embarrassed by any ndings. But even
after a parliamentary commission had been instituted in 1962 to
investigate ‘the phenomenon of the ma a’, it was still believed by
many that the problems of Sicily would best be resolved through
economic investment.1
During the 1970s, however, faith in the salutary e ects of
‘modernization’ began to diminish. Far from changing old patterns
of behaviour it was becoming clear that ma a methods were
ourishing in a society where Mercedes cars, Rolex watches and an
urban jet-set life-style were the hallmarks of success (as opposed to
land and leisure, as formerly). The massive investments by the
government in infrastructure and industry had not produced a self-
sustaining economy: instead vast sums had been squandered on
initiatives that, as a result of clientelism, corruption and poor
planning, had never stood a serious chance of success. Entire
factories (nicknamed ‘cathedrals in the desert’), built at great public
cost and often in entirely unsuitable locations, stood idle as they
were found to be uncompetitive to run. The onset from 1973 of a
major international recession, sparked by the huge rise in world oil
prices, further highlighted the futility of trying to solve the island’s
problems through industrial investment. Pessimism spread, and a
century of discussions linking the regeneration of the island (and
indeed the south in general) to economic, social and political
reforms came quietly to an end, leaving the spotlight to be trained
instead on law and order. The ma a was no longer seen as a
symptom; it was the cause of Sicily’s problems.
For a time in the 1970s the principal focus of the government’s
concerns lay more in the north of the country than the south. The
explosion of left-wing militancy in 1968–9 produced a right-wing
backlash, with support for the neo-fascists at the polls rising to
nearly 9 per cent in 1972 and extremist paramilitary groups
assaulting student leaders, trade unionists and communists and
promoting a ‘strategy of tension’ – using random bombings to create
an atmosphere of panic and uncertainty and (it was hoped) trigger
an authoritarian military crack-down of the kind that had occurred
in Greece in 1967. The rst major act of terrorism took place in
Milan in December 1969, when a bomb placed in a bank in Piazza
Fontana near the centre of the city killed sixteen bystanders and
wounded more than eighty others. The police hurried to pin the
blame on anarchists, but it soon transpired that the most likely
perpetrators were in fact a neo-fascist group from the Veneto with
links to the Italian secret services. Calls for an investigation into the
activities of Italy’s secret services went unheeded on the grounds of
national security.2 Other neo-fascist attacks followed in the next few
years, including a bomb on an express train north of Florence in
August 1974, which killed twelve people. A device left on Bologna
railway station in August 1980 killed eighty-four.
 Alongside right-wing terrorism went an escalation from the mid-
1970s of left-wing terrorism, as groups of revolutionary
intellectuals, disenchanted with the lack of militancy shown by the
Communist Party in recent years, endeavoured to bring about the
collapse of capitalism by striking at the heart of what they called the
‘Imperialist State of the Multinationals’. The leaders of these groups
were often the sons and daughters of partisan ghters from the
Second World War, who felt that the struggle for social justice had
been betrayed since 1945; and some, like Renato Curcio and
Margherita Cagol, the founders of the most famous terrorist
organization, the Red Brigades, came from strongly Catholic
families.3 In contrast to the neo-fascists, they selected their targets
carefully: prominent magistrates, businessmen, journalists and
politicians. And their most spectacular success occurred in the
spring of 1978 when a Red Brigade unit kidnapped the most senior
gure in the Christian Democrat party, Aldo Moro, subjected him to
a public ‘trial’ and then shot him, after more than seven weeks of
captivity. His body was left in the back of a car in via Caetani, in the
centre of Rome, halfway between the headquarters of the
communists and the Christian Democrats.
The kidnapping of Aldo Moro precipitated a crisis over the state
and its values. Contrary to the hopes of the terrorists (whose highly
abstract readings of Italian society, in uenced by fashionable
Marxist sociology, had blinded them to the reality of the
conservative aspirations of most ordinary Italians), the country was
not plunged into incipient civil war. Instead, as one of the
kidnappers, the young feminist Anna Laura Braghetti, recalled
despondently, a wave of indignation and solidarity swept the
country, ‘with piazzas full of red ags and students and workers
calling us fascists’.4 But if public condemnation of the Red Brigades
was strong, there was far less clear-cut support for the line of no
negotiation with the terrorists taken, rather reluctantly, by the
Christian Democrats and, more insistently, by the communists. The
socialists claimed that a humanitarian gesture to save the life of
Moro would in fact strengthen Italian democracy, while others
found the spectacle of Christian Democrats invoking a ‘sense of the
state’ to justify their intransigence immensely hypocritical. What
‘sense of the state’ had the Christian Democrats ever displayed
during thirty years in power, asked the well-known writer Leonardo
Sciascia. Had they not consistently subordinated the interests of
Italy to those of their party?5
The murder of Moro forced the state onto the o ensive. The
incompetence of the intelligence services had been exposed by their
failure over a period of fty- ve days to locate the hideout of the
Red Brigades in a suburb of Rome (leading to much speculation
about conspiracies),6 and in the summer of 1978 it was decided to
give the ght against terrorism much greater cohesion. The man
appointed to head the new operations was a highly e cient
carabiniere general, Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, whose family
embodied a Piedmontese belief in service to the state and the need
to impart a sense of the law to traditionally recalcitrant regions of
the country: his father had participated in the campaign waged by
Cesare Mori against the ma a in Sicily in the 1920s and he himself
had been stationed in the island after the war and again from 1966
to 1973. Though left-wing violence increased in 1979–80, this was
indicative of growing desperation on the part of the terrorists as
Dalla Chiesa’s security forces tightened the net around them and
cells splintered and competed with one another for publicity. Public
opinion, too, had lost all residual sympathy for the armed struggle.
By 1981, aided by a new law that o ered reduced prison terms to
those who agreed to collaborate with the authorities and ‘repent’
(pentiti), terrorism was fast waning and the state was free to turn its
new-found sense of determination towards organized crime.
Criminal gangs specializing in drug tra cking, arms smuggling,
prostitution rackets and other criminal activities had become
extremely powerful in the southern cities by the start of the 1980s,
their ranks swollen by growing armies of unemployed, as the
economic recession of the 1970s closed o the safety valve of
emigration. Violence, too, escalated – especially in Naples, where
the network of families known as the camorra had become well
organized – and in Palermo. In the spring of 1981 a brutal war
broke out between ma a factions in the Sicilian capital, leading to
hundreds of killings in and around the city over the next few years.
What made the situation particularly alarming to the authorities was
the willingness of the criminals to target senior public o cials,
including magistrates and politicians. In January 1980 the Christian
Democrat President of the Region was assassinated after attempting
to liberate himself from his old ma a connections. He was followed
by Palermo’s chief prosecutor and in the spring of 1982 by the
highly respected leader of the Sicilian Communist Party and
energetic member of the Anti-Ma a Commission, Pio La Torre. It
was immediately after La Torre’s murder that Carlo Alberto Dalla
Chiesa arrived in Palermo as the 58th prefect of the city since the
island’s incorporation into united Italy.
From the start Dalla Chiesa had the sensation that the supporters
of Giulio Andreotti – the dominant Christian Democrat group in
Sicily – were against him. In contrast to when he was ghting
terrorism, he felt isolated; and, as he told a journalist on 7 August,
when a man was simultaneously isolated and dangerous the ma a
moved in to eliminate him.7 Since arriving in Palermo he had faced
the dilemma of many previous prefects: whether to surround himself
with high security and risk becoming cut o from the general
public, or to attempt to win local sympathy and support at the cost
of personal safety. He had chosen the latter course. On the evening
of 3 September 1982 he left his o ce in the centre of Palermo
together with his young wife and got into a small beige-coloured car
to return home to his o cial residence. He had only one guard
following as an escort. As the vehicles entered via Isidoro Carini,
two men on a large BMW motorbike pulled up and opened re with
an AK-47 sub-machine gun, killing Dalla Chiesa and his wife
instantly. The guard was also assassinated. The funeral was held
hastily the following day and was televised live nationally. Crowds
threw coins at the government ministers who had come to pay their
respects. Dalla Chiesa’s brother-in-law shouted: ‘You have murdered
them, in parliament!’8
Dalla Chiesa’s assassination resulted in the next few years in a
relentless o ensive against organized crime. A special ‘pool’ of
investigating magistrates was created in Palermo headed by a group
of Sicilians with an unusually strong sense of civic duty – men such
as Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino.9 And the press ensured
that the government remained committed to the campaign through
persistent coverage of their initiatives and graphic reporting of the
innumerable atrocities for which the ma a had been responsible
over the years: any residual ‘romantic’ ideas about the ma a (on
which ma osi had often traded in Sicily) were to be rmly scotched.
A major breakthrough occurred in 1984, when a senior boss,
Tommaso Buscetta, agreed to collaborate with the authorities and
gave detailed information about a structured organization known as
Cosa Nostra, with initiation ceremonies and ‘statutes’, that
specialized in drugs and arms tra cking and was based in and
around Palermo. On the basis of his testimony – and soon that of
other ‘repentant’ ma osi (pentiti), too – more than 450 members of
this extensive criminal association went on trial in 1986 in a
specially built underground ‘bunker’ courtroom in Palermo, and 344
were found guilty.
At the time there was widespread optimism that a decisive
turning-point had been reached in Sicily’s fortunes. Buoyed by the
determination of the state and the successes of the police and
judiciary, anti-ma a movements began to spring up across the
island, and students and workers took to the streets to show their
solidarity with the ght against Cosa Nostra. The Church, for the
rst time in its history, was taking a public stand (in 1976 the
Archbishop of Palermo, Salvatore Pappalardo, had become the rst
prelate to denounce the ma a openly), while the Sicilian Christian
Democrats had dispensed with their old corrupt leadership and were
being guided by a charismatic young mayor of Palermo, Leoluca
Orlando (a descendant of the prime minister of 1917–19), who had
pledged to make the ght against the ma a his principal objective.
Academics, too, lent their support. Older interpretations that had
suggested the ma a was not a unitary organization but more a form
of behaviour, rooted in popular culture, were replaced by a new
orthodoxy declaring it always to have been a highly structured
criminal association, like Cosa Nostra, based in Palermo.10 Though
such a view was not well supported by the historical evidence, it
had the political advantage of drawing a clear distinction between
the ma a and its social milieu and endorsing the idea that rm state
action was the most appropriate solution.
But at the end of the 1980s the ght against organized crime ran
into the same sort of di culties that many earlier operations had
faced. Buscetta and the other pentiti had refused to be drawn on the
links between Cosa Nostra and politicians, and ugly disputes broke
out within the judiciary about how much further to press the
enquiries. In 1988 the most high-pro le of the judges, Giovanni
Falcone, was passed over for promotion to leadership of the Palermo
‘pool’ and left for a post in Rome, and the momentum of the
investigations rapidly slowed. It was only after Falcone was
murdered in 1992, blown up along with his escort by nearly 400
kilos of high explosives placed under a motorway near Palermo, that
the campaign resumed some of its former intensity. Meanwhile the
relentless media focus on the ma a provoked in some quarters an
uneasy feeling that old stereotypes of the island as a land of crime
and barbarism were being reactivated, and that the crusading zeal
displayed by the authorities might lead to the perpetration of
serious injustices and a strengthening of traditional Sicilian
animosity towards the state. When Leonardo Sciascia voiced such
concerns in two newspaper articles in 1987, he provoked a storm of
fury and accusations that he had in e ect become a ma a fellow-
traveller.11
THE SORPASSO

The focus on organized crime during the 1980s de ected attention

from the growing disparity between the north and south of Italy.
The development programmes of the 1950s and 1960s, based on the
idea that targeted intervention could kick-start the southern
economy and lead to a sustainable industrial base, were discredited
for good by the recession of the 1970s. There were some parts of the
south – in the Abruzzi, Molise and Puglia, for instance – where local
manufacturing had succeeded in putting down some roots, but
elsewhere the general picture was bleak. By 1990 the gross domestic
product (GDP) of the south, in proportional terms, was 59 per cent
that of the rest of the country (lower than it had been in 1980 and
in 1970) and unemployment, especially among the young, had
climbed to perilously high levels: over 44 per cent of those aged 14–
29 were classi ed as having no occupation, compared to 14.6 per
cent in the centre and north.12 Admittedly the living standards of
most southerners had changed almost beyond recognition since the
1940s, and the trappings of modern consumerism had become
nearly as conspicuous in the south as in the north. But much of this
lifestyle was the result of cash transfers through the social security
system (subsidies, pensions and invalidity bene ts, often
fraudulently assigned) and super uous public sector jobs.
In northern and central Italy the recession of the 1970s gave way
in the 1980s to a period of what some commentators called Italy’s
‘second economic miracle’. As in other Western countries, the
manufacturing sector was dramatically restructured, with employers
defying the trade unions (seemingly all powerful in the 1970s) and
laying o hundreds of thousands of workers in a bid to reduce
labour costs and shed the less pro table parts of their operations.
Companies such as Pirelli were able to return a pro t for the rst
time in a decade. Simultaneously a huge growth took place in the
service industries – for example, leisure, entertainment, advertising,
banking and insurance – so that by 1995 more than three- fths of
all jobs were in this sphere of the economy compared to less than
half fteen years earlier.13 Television experienced a particularly
spectacular boom after a ruling in 1976 that ended RAI’s monopoly
of broadcasting. In the space of a few years an ambitious Milanese
property tycoon, Silvio Berlusconi, managed, with powerful political
protection and in de ance of court rulings, to secure a near
monopoly of all commercial stations in the country. By the middle
of the 1980s 44 per cent of prime-time viewers were watching
channels that he owned.14
But the thrust of Italy’s economic dynamism in the 1980s was
provided by small and medium-sized manufacturing rms, many of
them family owned, clustered in specialized industrial districts of
the north and centre – shoes in Vigevano, ceramics in Sassuolo,
cutlery in Lumezzane, spectacles in Belluno, furniture in Poggibonsi,
jewellery in Arezzo, clothes in Treviso (Benetton). They drew on
traditional artisan, design and engineering skills, and through a
combination of hard work, exibility, paternalistic management,
and strong support and cooperation at a local level, they were able
to beat o sti competition, especially from the Far East, and
maintain a strong position in the European export market. They also
bene ted from contracts from larger manufacturers who had sought
to reduce their costs by outsourcing.15 At the beginning of the 1980s
nearly 60 per cent of Italy’s industrial workforce was employed in
rms with fewer than a hundred people – a gure comparable to
that for Japan, but far higher than that for the USA (23 per cent),
the UK (25 per cent), France (29 per cent) and Germany (30 per
cent).16
However, the success of these smaller businesses was also heavily
dependent on the willingness of the state to turn a blind eye to
numerous scal and other abuses. Tax evasion was rife throughout
the sector, and when in 1983 a law was passed to try to rectify the
situation, workers in a million private rms took action in protest
(public sector employees simultaneously went on strike in favour of
the law: they were paying an increasingly disproportionate share of
the country’s revenue from taxation).17 The government was
disinclined to force the issue, and only when Italy was facing
exclusion from the mainstream of European economies in the early
1990s on account of its dire public nances did it begin to tackle the
matter. Firms also kept their costs down by ignoring the health and
safety directives emanating from Brussels (and successive
governments again showed little willingness to address the
problem), employing sta on short-term contracts without social
security payments, and drawing on the huge pool of hidden or
‘black’ labour – those with undeclared second jobs, pensioners
operating from home, immigrants from the Balkans or (increasingly)
north Africa. In the early 1990s it was estimated that the black
economy accounted for some 2 million people, many of them
working in appalling conditions.18
The serious structural weaknesses behind the economic boom of
the 1980s – above all the fact that the state was having recourse to
massive borrowing to cover the low scal take and the persistent
high levels of public expenditure – were largely ignored amid a
widespread sense of euphoria at what seemed the country’s
de nitive arrival in the ranks of the great industrial democracies. In
1976 Italy had been admitted (despite protestations from the
French) to membership of the elite club of leading capitalist nations
(the G7), and just over a decade later the government was able to
notch up a further success when it announced with considerable
satisfaction that Italy had overtaken Britain to become the fth
largest economy in the world. The British Chancellor of the
Exchequer contested the claim vehemently – a sign of the United
Kingdom’s own deep insecurity over its status after years of
industrial decline – but o cial gures for the GDP of both countries
con rmed that the sorpasso had indeed taken place. In the course of
the next few years per capita income and overall volume of GDP
remained more or less the same for the two economies, before the
United Kingdom began to pull ahead again quite sharply around the
turn of the millennium.19
The economic optimism was matched by hopes that the political
stalemate that had marred the rst decades of the Republic might be
coming to an end, as the grip of the Christian Democrats on
government loosened and the socialists under a dynamic leader,
Bettino Craxi, set out to supplant the communists as Italy’s main
party of the left. Craxi came from Milan, and during the 1980s he
and his followers embodied much of the ethos of the ‘second
economic miracle’ (to which Lombardy had so greatly contributed).
The new socialists were bullish and technocratic, with sharp suits
and mobile phones, and while they paid lip service to old left-wing
ideals of social justice and inclusiveness, their prevalent values
seemed to be more those of personal success – whatever the means.
Craxi was a close friend of Berlusconi: the two men went on holiday
together to Saint-Moritz and Porto no; and in 1984, a year after
Craxi had become prime minister, the socialist leader agreed to act
as godfather to Berlusconi’s illegitimate daughter – a gesture
redolent of the transition from Catholic to post-Catholic clientelism.
Over the next few years Craxi helped Berlusconi to consolidate his
media empire, and in return Berlusconi’s television stations ooded
Italian households with the modern consumerist values that Craxi
and his party so admired.20
Craxi’s accession to power was made possible by the declining
appeal of the communists and the waning authority of the Christian
Democrats. In 1973 the newly elected leader of the Communist
Party, Enrico Berlinguer, a shy but charismatic Sardinian of
aristocratic background, had proposed a ‘historic compromise’
between the three principal parties as a way of defending Italian
democracy in the face of terrorism; and the Christian Democrats,
worried by the spread of secularism and the continued socio-
economic unrest in the country, had edged towards an alliance with
the communists as a possible means of safeguarding their electoral
fortunes. But a sharp drop in the vote for the Communist Party in
1979 coupled with an escalation of the Cold War after the invasion
of Afghanistan brought the ‘historic compromise’ to a sudden end,
leaving the Communist Party to return once again to sterile
opposition. Meanwhile the Christian Democrats were rocked by a
string of corruption scandals; and in 1981 the Italian President,
Sandro Pertini, an elderly, austere, high-minded and combative
former partisan leader, appointed the respected university professor
and leader of the diminutive Republican Party, Giovanni Spadolini,
as the rst non-Christian Democrat prime minister since 1945. Two
years later, in the wake of a disastrous electoral showing by the
Christian Democrats, Craxi became prime minister.
Craxi’s aggressive and amboyant style of leadership (cartoonists
delighted in showing him wearing Mussolini’s riding boots and
black shirt) was a marked contrast to the colourless Christian
Democrat administrations of previous decades, but his four years in
o ce did nothing to change the pathological imbalance between
state and party, public and private, that had dogged the Republic
from the outset. Corruption ourished during the 1980s on an
unprecedented scale as ambitious members of the Socialist Party
took their cue from the top and clawed out enclaves of patronage
and power at the expense of their rivals using kickbacks and other
illicit means; and their opponents, desperate not to lose ground,
responded in kind. Local politicians took advantage of the eagerness
of private companies to gain lucrative municipal contracts by
insisting on huge clandestine payments as the price for a successful
bid: typically about 10 per cent of the value of the contract. The
money was transferred through a maze of foreign banks or handed
over more prosaically (and commonly) in a briefcase stu ed full of
old banknotes and then transferred to the party co ers or straight to
private pockets.21
A good example of how the system worked was provided by a
minor Milanese socialist politician, Mario Chiesa, whose arrest in
February 1992 as he frantically tried to ush 30 million lire down a
toilet after being caught in agrante accepting a kickback, opened
the door to the so-called Tangentopoli (‘Bribesville’) scandal that
rocked Italy to its political foundations. Chiesa ran a council-
subsidized old people’s home in Milan and was a supporter of the
local Socialist Party Secretary, Craxi’s son, Bobo (the mayor of Milan
was Craxi’s brother-in-law, Paolo Pillitteri, a man who openly
dismissed opponents of corruption as ‘cretins who… do not
understand how the world operates’).22 Chiesa also controlled
sporting and recreational facilities and estimated that his little
empire was worth 7,000 votes. The old people’s home was
especially useful: not only were its inmates easy fodder when it
came to elections but the allocation of commissions gave Chiesa an
important instrument of patronage. It was the owner of a small
cleaning company, who had become fed up with being regularly
bullied by Chiesa into paying a 10 per cent kickback in return for
being given the contract to clean the old people’s home, who
eventually shopped him to the police.23
THE END OF THE ‘FIRST REPUBLIC’

The boom of the 1980s left the north one of the most a uent
regions of Europe, but the huge tide of money washing through the
towns and countryside of Piedmont, Liguria, Lombardy, the Veneto,
Emilia Romagna and Tuscany had almost drowned out any serious
talk of Italy as a moral point of reference. There were shades of the
Renaissance in the combination of opulence and cynicism, with
family, clientele and party taking decisive precedence over the
broader framework of national claims that the patriots of the
nineteenth century had sought to construct. The fact that the
prosperity of these years was overwhelmingly at the expense of the
public nances went largely unheeded, and little e ort was made by
Craxi or the weak and short-lived Christian Democrat governments
that succeeded him at the end of the decade to rein in public
spending. Borrowing soared to levels unequalled in Europe, with the
Treasury issuing huge quantities of high-yield bonds to savers (who
often bought them with the surplus income that they should have
handed over to the state in taxes). Between 1982 and 1990 the
annual budget de cit doubled, and by 1992 the accumulated public
debt had reached well over 100 per cent of GDP. And simply
servicing the debt had become a major problem – it was costing
some 10 per cent of GDP in 1990.24
With governments lacking the authority and the will to sort out
this parlous situation, they turned to Europe for possible salvation.
In 1990 Giulio Andreotti, prime minister again for the sixth time,
took the lira into the band of currencies that comprised the
European Monetary System, trusting the markets would not worry
unduly about Italy’s precarious public nances; and over the next
two years he pressed the case for greater political and economic
integration, shepherding Europe’s ministers towards the Maastricht
Treaty, which laid down the criteria for monetary convergence. The
treaty, signed in 1992, in e ect put a gun to Italy’s head: but at least
it was a gun held by Europe, for which Italians had traditionally
shown considerable enthusiasm. To qualify for entry into the single
currency Italy would have to reduce its budget de cit to 3 per cent
of GDP (down from 9.9 per cent) and bring the public debt to below
60 per cent of GDP. On the face of it this was an almost impossible
task, but some leeway was provided with the nal wording of the
convergence criteria when it was stated that a public debt of more
than 60 per cent might not be seen as an impediment provided there
had been su cient evidence of movement in the right direction.25
If Italy was now to avoid relegation from the top ight of
European states – and the frequency with which this concern was
aired in the press in the next few years indicated just how much the
old anxieties about the country’s standing in the world still
reverberated two centuries after Napoleon’s armies had swept
through the peninsula and triggered the national soul-searching of
the Risorgimento – there would have to be drastic reforms. And the
seriousness of the situation was underlined in September 1992,
when the lira was forced out of the European Monetary System and
heavily devalued. Successive governments embarked on desperate
programmes to try to deal with the public debt, selling o state
companies, freezing wages, raising taxes, and reducing spending on
pensions and the bureaucracy. But such measures were inevitably
highly unpopular after years of a uence, and mass demonstrations
were staged in protest at the cuts and the job losses. At the same
time there were loud calls for institutional changes, with the focus
as so often in the past on altering the voting system in the hope of
creating stronger governments. A new electoral law of 1993
introduced single-member constituencies for three-quarters of the
deputies, but it could not solve the fundamental problem: that
Italy’s parties lacked the authority and credibility needed to
maintain internal cohesion and command widespread popular
support.
As resentment spread and uncertainty grew, the fragile edi ce of
the Republic began to disintegrate. The conclusion of the Cold War
at the end of the 1980s, and the collapse of the Soviet Union that
followed, removed one of the principal pillars upon which the post-
war order in Italy had been built. In January 1991, exactly seventy
years after its foundation, the Italian Communist Party held its last
Congress and voted to dissolve itself and become the Democratic
Party of the Left (PDS) – though a sizeable minority found the
breach with the past too hard to bear and separated o to form a
group called Communist Refoundation. And with the red ag and
hammer and sickle now replaced as the symbol of the PDS by a
benign spreading oak tree, what justi cation was there for the
crusader shield of the Christian Democrats? In the elections of 1992
the Christian Democrats secured less than 30 per cent of the poll for
the rst time in their history (the ex-communists managed just 16
per cent); and with public money no longer freely available to prop
up their clienteles, and with judicial investigations into corruption
gathering pace, recriminations and in ghting escalated. In 1994 the
Christian Democrats broke in two, with the centre and the left
resuming the old name of the Popular Party and the right styling
itself the Christian Democratic Centre.
A major catalyst for the disintegration of the old political system
came with the eruption of the ‘Bribesville’ scandal following the
arrest of Mario Chiesa in February 1992. The enquiry into the illegal
funding of parties through kickbacks was led by the chief prosecutor
of Milan, Francesco Saverio Borrelli, and a team of magistrates, of
whom one, Antonio Di Pietro, rapidly acquired cult status as a result
of his formidable interrogatory skills and dramatic courtroom style
(and probably humble southern origins as well) – gra ti such as
‘Thank you Di Pietro’ and ‘Di Pietro, you are better than Pelé’
became common on the walls of buildings in Milan.26 The ease with
which the investigators were able to extract confessions from a
string of politicians and businessmen was due in large measure to
the severely weakened state of the principal parties (attempts to
probe the world of corruption had in the past been quickly snu ed
out) and to the almost feverish desire of the general public to nd
scapegoats for the mess into which the country had descended. The
enquiries spread rapidly upwards through the ranks of the socialists
and the Christian Democrats (and some of the smaller parties, too –
the ex-communists, whether rightly or not, were left largely
untouched), and, by the summer of 1993,130 members of
parliament were facing investigation.
Craxi – who rst received notice that he was under enquiry for
corruption at the end of 1992 – attempted, like others caught up in
the scandal, to claim that he was the victim of a political witch-
hunt.27 But it was di cult to discern any obvious party bias among
the Milan magistrates. Some undoubtedly had left-wing sympathies,
but others, including Di Pietro (a former policeman), leaned towards
the right. This said, the febrile atmosphere that surrounded the
investigations, heightened by massive international media attention
and an Italian press that was ready to report news of the latest issue
of a ‘Notice of Guarantee’ to a suspect as if it were a clear indication
of guilt, pushed the protagonists into seeing themselves as more
than simple enforcers of the law. There was a sense in the country
that a sea-change – indeed a revolution of some kind – was required;
and the magistrates responded accordingly: ‘Ours is a legal and wise
revolution,’ Borrelli announced proudly in May 1993, ‘which has
lasted a little more than a year. Remember that the French
Revolution began in 1789 and was completed only in 1794.’28 In
such a climate of heightened expectations, it was almost inevitable
(as in the ght against Cosa Nostra) that miscarriages of justice
would occur.
As the constituent political elements of the Republic dissolved
amid ignominy or a sense of redundancy, the old struggle to
determine the identity of Italy resumed, and as it did so, the history
of the preceding two centuries emerged as an ideological battle eld
to be fought over by competing groups vying for popular legitimacy.
In northern Italy a combination of the a uence of the 1980s, the
spectacle (in amed by the media) of a south seemingly dominated
by organized crime, and the imposition of scal stringency in the
early 1990s led to the rapid emergence of a major party of protest
known as the Northern League. Led by Umberto Bossi, a rough-
speaking Lombard senator with dishevelled hair and ill- tting suits,
his tie half undone as if he had just come out of a long and
acrimonious board-meeting, the League celebrated the industry and
entrepreneurial spirit of northerners, denounced the government in
Rome for having squandered the hard-earned taxes of northern
businessmen on the ma a-ridden clienteles of the south, and
proclaimed uni cation in 1860 to have been a catastrophic error:
north and south were two separate nations, and the country should
at the most have been no more than a federation, as the Milanese
writer Carlo Cattaneo had argued.29
The League appealed especially to small businessmen,
shopkeepers and other self-employed groups in the small towns and
cities of the north of Italy – groups that had developed increased
feelings of xenophobia and particularism in recent years thanks to a
heavy in ux of immigrants from eastern Europe and Africa (though
racist attitudes towards southern Italians had a long history, and
may well have been more exacerbated than reduced by the
migratory ows of the 1950s and 1960s).30 Under Bossi’s
charismatic leadership, the League promoted a strong pseudo-ethnic
culture, postulating the existence of a north Italian nation called
Padania, celebrating Lombard and other local dialects, and drawing
selectively on history to support its claim to the essential unity of
the north. Much was made (ironically, given how it had been used
by the ‘Italian’ patriots in the Risorgimento) of the twelfth-century
Lombard League, and the party’s badge showed the hero of the
Battle of Legnano in 1176, Alberto da Giussano, raising his sword to
rally the city-states of the Po valley against Frederick Barbarossa.
The growth of the Northern League – in the elections of 1992 it
came from almost nowhere to win 8.7 per cent of the national vote
(with 20 per cent in Lombardy, Piedmont, Liguria and the Veneto) –
triggered a series of intellectual and political initiatives to counter
what appeared to be a serious threat to the integrity of the state. If
in the past the ‘southern question’ had been viewed as a way of
acknowledging (and addressing) the problems of the most
disadvantaged half of the country, it could now seem a liability in as
much as it gave the League ammunition for its blanket dismissal of
the south as a separate (and inferior) nation. An important new
historical school emerged committed to demonstrating the
arti ciality of the concept of ‘the south’ and showing that
southerners had often been just as entrepreneurial and modern-
minded as their northern counterparts. (It also promoted vigorously
the idea of ‘the ma a’ as a structured criminal organization like
Cosa Nostra with no roots in popular culture – in part as an antidote
to the League’s crude claims that all southerners were to a degree
ma osi.)31
While some southerners responded to the League’s claims that
uni cation had been a disaster for the north by asserting that it had
been a catastrophe for the south, too (books, pamphlets and
websites proliferated in the 1990s dedicated to showing how the
south had been the victim of brutal northern colonialism – even
genocide – after 1860), the prevalent feeling among southerners was
that the unity of the state had to be defended at all costs. After all,
what future could the south look forward to if it was cut adrift from
the rest of the peninsula? One symptom of the growing concern for
the integrity of the state was a surge of support for the far right. In
the autumn of 1993 the suave and demure leader of the neo-fascist
party, the MSI, Gianfranco Fini, stood for mayor of Rome and was
only narrowly defeated. And the same happened in Naples, where
Alessandra Mussolini, the Duce’s granddaughter, a model and lm
actress (and niece of Sophia Loren), was a candidate. The following
year, the far right – which had recently repositioned itself as a ‘post-
fascist’ force and adopted the name National Alliance – won 13.5
per cent of the vote in the general elections. Ninety-four of its 109
deputies represented constituencies in Rome and the south.32
With the peninsula fracturing into discordant political pieces, and
with the very idea of unity being called into question, many
commentators began to ask – in a manner reminiscent of the
agonized discussions that had taken place in the nineteenth century
among patriots about the country’s failure to achieve ‘moral
uni cation’ – why Italy still displayed so little sense of nationhood.
A string of books appeared by well-known intellectuals with
alarmist titles such as If We Cease to be a Nation, The End of Italy: The
Decline and Death of Risorgimento Ideology and The Death of the
Fatherland, analysing who or what might be to blame for the current
insalubrious situation.33 History, geography, the Church and the
national character were all indicted in varying measures (as they
had been in many previous discussions); and so, too, were the
parties that had dominated Italy since 1945 and failed to inculcate a
strong sense of the law and the state or provide a clear framework
of common memories and values.
With debates centring once more on the inveterate problem of the
nation, the balance of moral power shifted sharply to the right, with
the former communists (and communists) being subjected to
increasingly vituperative attacks from broad sections of conservative
opinion and above all from the resurgent forces of neo-fascism for
their lack of commitment to ‘Italy’. Among other things the far left
were accused of having driven a wedge through the nation after
1945 thanks to their celebration of the ‘values of the resistance’ and
their wilful distortion of the historical reality of fascism. Had not
Mussolini’s regime in fact been far more benign and moderate than
that of Nazism, with which the communists had unjustly sought to
confound it? And had not those who had supported the Republic of
Saló been motivated by ideals of patriotism that made them fully as
worthy of honourable commemoration as the partisans? And though
the Duce had undoubtedly made mistakes, had he not at least tried
to promote a sense of the ‘fatherland’ and heal the country’s internal
fractures? And, anyway, who were the communists to take the
moral high ground against the far right given the atrocities that had
been committed by the Soviet Union or, indeed, by the resistance
itself?

On 26 January 1994, with the First Republic, as commentators were

now calling it, lying largely in ruins, Silvio Berlusconi sent a short
videocassette to RAI, Reuters and his own commercial television
channels, in which he announced his intention to enter the political
arena in the forthcoming general elections to be held in March:
Italy is the country I love. Here are my roots, my hopes, my horizons. Here I have learned,
from my father and from life, how to be an entrepreneur. Here I have acquired my passion
for life… Never as in this moment does Italy… need people of a certain experience, with
their heads rmly on their shoulders, able to give the country a helping hand and to make
the state function… If the political system is to work, it is essential that there emerges a
‘pole of liberty’ in opposition to the left-wing cartel, a pole which is capable of attracting to
it the best of an Italy which is honest, reasonable, modern. Around this pole there must
gather all those forces which make reference to the fundamental principles of Western
democracies; in the rst place the Catholic world which has contributed generously to the
last fty years of our history as a united nation… I tell you that we can, I tell you that we

must, create for ourselves and for our children a new Italian miracle.34

With his principal political patron, Bettino Craxi, disgraced, and

many of his business friends and associates caught up in the
Bribesville scandal, Berlusconi knew that the best way to safeguard
his massive media empire was in power. His companies were
heavily in debt; and if a left-wing coalition won, there was a strong
chance that it would legislate to end his near-monopoly of
commercial broadcasting. Using the most advanced marketing,
polling and advertising techniques, Berlusconi had recently created
a new political party designed to have the maximum possible
resonance with an electorate with few certainties about its past or
its future, and little faith in the ideologies that had guided the
thoughts and actions of Italians for so much of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. Its name, Forza Italia, was taken from a football
chant (‘Go, Italy!’) (part of Berlusconi’s popular appeal lay in his
ownership of the country’s most successful team, AC Milan); and the
values that it trumpeted were those of nancial success, family,
consumerism, Catholicism (of a non-committal kind) and freedom –
understood mainly as freedom from the irksome shackles of the
state.35
It was a winning formula, and in the spring of 1994 Berlusconi
swept to power with his rather unlikely allies of the Northern
League and the National Alliance. Forza Italia emerged as the
biggest party in Italy with 21 per cent of the vote: much of its
support had come from housewives, the young and the self-
employed. But the victory was short-lived, and there was to be no
‘new Italian miracle’. The coalition partners soon began to fall out,
and when, in November, Berlusconi was served with a Notice of
Guarantee (embarrassingly while presiding over a meeting of the G7
in Naples), informing him that he was under investigation for a
number of counts of corruption, including bribing the nance police
to ignore false tax returns, the Northern League took the
opportunity to withdraw its support from the government. In the
months that followed, fresh charges were lodged against Berlusconi
and many of his closest business and political associates by the
Milan magistrates. Berlusconi’s future looked bleak.
But he survived: the judiciary succumbed to internal feuding
(even Di Pietro found himself under investigation for a time) and
the drive against corruption slowed. And when fresh elections were
held in the spring of 1996, Forza Italia again managed to secure
more than 20 per cent of the vote. But it was the centre-left that
won, and for the next ve years Italy was ruled by a succession of
left-wing coalitions that struggled to deal with the country’s
nancial problems and the parlous state of the public services. They
o ered no coherent vision or systematic programme for
implementing reforms – perhaps inevitably given the strange
mixture of communists, former communists, Catholics, Republicans,
Greens and other groups in the government – and they accordingly
failed to inspire much enthusiasm in the country. Their one
signi cant achievement was to gain acceptance into the single
European currency in 1998 – despite the public debt still being
almost twice the level permitted by Maastricht. When fresh elections
were held in May 2001 Berlusconi was returned to power with a
considerable majority. He remained prime minister for the next ve
years (despite facing a string of corruption charges), but was unable
to nd a magic formula to sort out Italy’s problems. In the elections
of 2006 he was narrowly defeated by the centre-left.
At the beginning of the twenty- rst century Italy had been
transformed beyond all recognition from the impoverished country
into which Mazzini, Garibaldi and Cavour had been born 200 years
earlier. Most of its inhabitants were far better fed, much better
educated, and considerably richer and healthier (and possibly
happier) than at any other time in history. They were also
undoubtedly more ‘Italian’. But the concerns that had haunted the
patriots of the Risorgimento – how to construct a nation with a
shared past and a strong sense of collective destiny and purpose –
remained almost as pressing in the age of Forza Italia as in the era
of the Carbonari and Young Italy. The Italian nation had from the
outset been di cult to de ne and even more di cult to build; and
despite the endeavours of poets, writers, artists, publicists,
revolutionaries, soldiers and politicians of varying hues and
persuasions, it was clear that old patterns of thought and behaviour
had remained deeply entrenched, and that faith in the ideal of ‘Italy’
had not been engendered in the way that so many patriots had
hoped. Perhaps, though, the very insistence with which the project
of ‘making Italians’ had been pursued down to the Second World
War had contributed to the scant belief in collective national values.
But if states are to function well they need an overarching sense of a
greater whole to which the interests of the individual, the group or
the party are ultimately subordinate; and at the start of the new
millennium ‘Italy’ appeared still too uncertain and contested an idea
to provide the emotional core of a nation – one at least that was at
peace with itself and able to face the future with con dence.
1. The invasion of Italy by France in 1796. A contemporary allegory
showing turreted Italy being assailed by Marianne while Gallic
cocks run riot. On the left Italy’s ‘emasculated military genius’ lies
sleeping.

2. The bronze horses of St Mark’s, Venice, being shipped o to Paris

on Napoleon’s orders in 1797. The horses were used to adorn the
Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel – built to celebrate France’s victories
– before being returned to Venice in 1815.
3. Antonio Canova’s monument to the poet and playwright Vittorio
Al eri, in the church of Santa Croce, Florence (1806–10). The gure
of Italy grieving became an icon for patriots of the Risorgimento.

4. Francesco Hayez’s painting of Pietro Rossi, lord of Parma, being

implored by his wife and daughters not to take up command of the
Venetian forces (1818–20). The gure on the right was modelled on
Canova’s sculpture of Italy in Santa Croce.
5. Peter the Hermit Preaching the First Crusade (1827–9), by Francesco
Hayez. The depiction of ‘the people’ being inspired by religious zeal
to undertake a great mission made this painting a particular
favourite with Giuseppe Mazzini and the democrats.
6. A meeting of Carbonari – apprentices to the left, masters to the
right – in a lithograph of 1821. Behind the Grand Master in the
centre is a picture of St Theobald, the patron saint of the
Carboneria.
7. An engraving celebrating Pope Pius IX’s allocution of 10 February
1848 in which he invoked God’s blessing on Italy (‘Benedite Gran Dio
l’Italia’). The hopes of Italian patriots were shattered shortly
afterwards when Pius denounced the national movement.
8. Francesco Hayez’s second version of his painting La Meditazione
(Meditation, 1851). The female gure, representing Italy’s abject
condition after the revolutions of 1848–9, holds a history of Italy
inscribed with the date of the Milanese rising of March 1848.

9. Giuseppe Mazzini in a photograph taken in the 1860s. From an

early age Mazzini vowed always to dress in black as a mark of
mourning for his enslaved country – and Italy, as far as he was
concerned, was still enslaved after 1860.

10. Count Camillo Benso di Cavour in a photograph taken during

the Paris peace congress in 1856.
11.King Victor Emmanuel II and Rosa Vercellana around the time of
their morganatic marriage in 1869. The daughter of an army o cer
and barely literate, Rosa had become the king’s mistress when she
was only fourteen. Victor Emmanuel relished her simple peasant
cooking.

12. North meets south following uni cation. A bersagliere posing

beside the body of the bandit leader Nicola Napolitano after he had
been captured and shot at Nola, near Naples, in September 1863.
13. Giuseppe Garibaldi, with a characteristically exotic hat,
displaying the bullet wound he had received in his right ankle
during an encounter with Italian troops at Aspromonte in August
1862. Parallels with Christ and his su ering were an important part
of Garibaldi’s appeal.
14. Francesco Crispi (right) meeting Bismarck at Friedrichsruh in
October 1887. Bismarck was unreceptive to Crispi’s suggestion of a
war against France. Cartoonists made much of the physical
resemblance between the two politicians.
15. The warlord Ras Makonnen pursuing Italian troops at the Battle
of Adua in 1896 in a contemporary Ethiopian painting. At the top,
the patron saint of Ethiopia, St George, lends his support.

16. An emigrant family from southern Italy searching for lost

luggage at Ellis Island, New York, 1905. A photograph by the
celebrated American documentarist Lewis W. Hine. Around 6
million Italians emigrated in the rst decade of the twentieth
century, many of them to the United States.

17. Giovanni Giolitti – the man who dominated Italian political life
in the rst years of the twentieth century – in a photograph of 1908.
Giolitti was vili ed by idealists on both left and right for what was
seen as his uninspiring bourgeois pragmatism.
18. Nietzschean superman. The poet Gabriele D’Annunzio on board
an Ansaldo biplane on the occasion of a celebrated ight to drop
400,000 propaganda lea ets on Vienna, 9 August 1918.

19. The fascist squad of Fermo (Ascoli Piceno) posing in dandyish

fashion for the camera, 1922. The astheticization of violence owed
much to the in uence of D’Annunzio and the Futurists.
20. Holy violence. The Madonna del manganello (‘Madonna of the
bludgeon’), the patron saint of the fascists of Monteleone Calabro
(Vibo Valentia) in Calabria. The statue was destroyed after the fall
of fascism.

21. Living dangerously. A young fascist leaping over bayonets in a

gymnastics display in the Foro Mussolini (now known as the Foro
Italico) in Rome during the 1930s.
22. The entrance to the exhibition in Rome marking the
bimillennium of the birth of the emperor Augustus in 1937. In
contrast to Nazism, fascism favoured modernism in both art and
architecture.

23. Fascism’s place in the sun. Camel troops from Africa parading
before the monument to Victor Emmanuel II (Vittoriano) in Rome
during the rst annual review of the foundation of the Empire,
1937.

24. Hitler, with Mussolini on his left, being given a Renaissance-

style reception at Florence railway station on the occasion of his
visit to Italy in 1938. Hitler was enchanted by the magic of Florence
and its Renaissance art.
25. The front cover of the rst number of La difesa della razza (The
Defence of the Race), the best known of the many party publications
issued in the wake of the racial laws of 1938. A Roman sword
protects the Aryan from contamination by Semitic and Negroid
types.

26. Piazzale Loreto, Milan, 29 April 1945. The bodies of Mussolini,

his mistress, Claretta Petacci, and several prominent fascists strung
up by their feet from a petrol station.

27. ‘Mother! Save your children from Bolshevism! Vote Christian

Democracy’. A poster from the bitterly fought general election of
April1948. The far-left used the face of Garibaldi (with shades of
Saint Joseph and Karl Marx) as a campaign symbol.
28. The advent of television. The screening of a lm in the small
town of Carpi, near Modena, in 1956 is halted to allow the cinema
audience to watch the hugely popular quiz programme Lascia o
raddoppia? (Quit or Double?).

29. The launch of the new FIAT 500 at the Mira ori factory, Turin,
July 1957. This car replaced the equally diminutive ‘Topolino’
(1937–55) and became an icon of Italy’s ‘economic miracle’. Nearly
4 million models were built between 1957 and 1975.
30. In the shadow of Mussolini and consumerism: Ravenna, May
Day, 1961. An Italian communist reading the party newspaper
against a backdrop of a poster commemorating the sixteenth
anniversary of Mussolini’s death.

31. The weight of modernity. A newly arrived immigrant from the

south of Italy in front of the Pirelli tower, Milan, 1969. Around 1.5
million southerners moved to the far north in search of work in the
1960s.
32. The triumph of image. Silvio Berlusconi addressing a meeting of
leading Italian business gures in Milan in April 2004. Berlusconi
promised ‘a new economic miracle’, but he turned out not to have
heavenly powers when it came to dealing with the country’s
disastrous public nances.

33. Ma a violence. The wife and daughters of Benedetto Grado at

the scene of his murder in Palermo, 15 November 1983. Grado was
one of several hundred victims of a war between rival factions of the
organization known as Cosa Nostra in the early 1980s.
References

Preface

1. J. Budden, The Operas of Verdi. Vol. 2: From Il Trovatore to La

Forza del Destino (London, 1978), p. 435.
2. G. Verdi, Letters of Giuseppe Verdi. Selected and Translated by
Charles Osborne (London, 1971), pp. 124,129.

1: Deliverance, 1796–9

1. F. Venturi, ‘L’Italia fuori d’Italia’, in Storia d’Italia. Vol. 3: Dal

primo Settecento all’Unità (Turin, 1973), p. 1131.
2. E. Passerin d’Entrèves and V. E. Giuntella (eds.), Storia d’Italia.
Vol. 3: Dalla pace di Aquisana all’avvento di Camillo Cavour
(Turin, 1959), p. 230.
3. Ibid., pp. 237–8.
4. R. Sò riga, L’idea nazionale italiana dal secolo XVIII
all’uni cazione. Scritti raccolti e ordinati da Silio Manfredi
(Modena, 1941), pp. 35–7.
5. Venturi, ‘L’Italia fuori d’Italia’, p. 1036.
6. G. Angiolini, Lettera di Gasparo Angiolini a Monsieur Noverra
sopra i balli pantomimi (Milan, 1773), pp. 11,110.
7. Só riga, L’idea nazionale, p. 39.
8. Stendhal, La Chartreuse de Parme. Préface, commentaires et notes
de Victor del Litto (Paris, 1983), p. 21(Ch. 1, ‘Milan en 1796’).
9. Sóriga, L’idea nazionale, p. 41.
10. G. R. Carli, ‘Della patria degli italiani’, in S. Romagnoli (ed.), ‘Il
Ca e’ ossia brevi e vari discorsi distribuiti in fogli periodici (Milan,
 1960), pp. 297–302.
11. A. Saitta, Filippo Buonarroti. Contributi alla storia della sua vita e
del suo pensiero, Vol. 2 (Rome, 1950–51), pp. 1–2.
12. G. Pécout, Il lungo Risorgimento. La nascita dell’Italia
contemporanea (1770–1922) (Milan, 1999), p. 67.
13. Venturi, ‘L’Italia fuori d’Italia’, p. 1131.
14. A. Saitta, Alle origini del Risorgimento. I testi di un ‘celebre’
concorso (1796), Vol. 1 (Rome, 1964), pp. x–xi.
15. Ibid., Vol. 2, pp. 51–2,66, 73.
16. Ibid., Vol. 3, pp. 268–71.
17. Ibid., Vol. 2, pp. 191–6.
18. Ibid., Vol. 3, pp. 233–4.
19. Ibid., Vol. 2, pp. 337–40.
20. Ibid., Vol. 3, pp. 382–6.
21. Passerin d’Entrèves and Giuntella (eds.), Storia d’Italia, Vol. 3, p.
233.
22. A. De Fournoux, Napoleèon et Venise 1796–1814 (Paris, 2002), p.
210.
23. C. Cantuù, Della indipendenza italiana. Cronistoria, Vol. 1 (Turin,
1872), p. 99.
24. Fournoux, Napoleèon et Venise, pp. 213–14.
25. Edizione nazionale delle opere di Ugo Foscolo. Vol. 2: Tragedie e
poesie minori, ed. G. Bezzola (Florence, 1961), pp. 331–41
(‘Bonaparte liberatore (1797–99)’).
26. Ibid. Vol. 6: Scritti letterari e politici dal 1796 al 1808, ed. G.
Gambarin (Florence, 1972), p. xxv.
27. A. Lyttelton, ‘The national question in Italy’, in M. Teisch and R.
Porter (eds.), The National Question in Europe in Historical Context
(Cambridge, 1993), p. 75.
28. U. Dotti, Storia degli intellettuali in Italia. Vol. 3: Temi e ideologie
dagli illuminati a Gramsci (Rome, 1999), p. 180.
29. V. Al eri, Il Misogallo, in Opere di Vittorio Al eri. Scritti politici e
morali, Vol. 3, ed. C. Mazzotta (Asti, 1984), p. 200.
30. Ibid., pp. 199,201.
31. Dotti, Storia degli intellettuali, Vol. 3, p. 177.
32. Al eri, Il Misogallo, p. 411 (‘Conclusione’).
33. A. Pillepich, Milan capitale napoleèonienne 1800–1814 (Paris,
2001), p. 139(to Eugène de Beauharnais, 18 May 1808).
34. S. Woolf, A History of Italy 1700–1860. The Social Constraints of
Political Change (London, 1979), p. 175.
35. G. Candeloro, Storia dell’Italia moderna. Vol. 1: Le origini del
Risorgimento (Milan, 1956), p. 174.
36. Stendhal, La Chartreuse de Parme, p. 24.
37. C. Capra, L’età rivoluzionaria e napoleonica in Italia 1796–1815
(Turin, 1978), pp.108–9.
38. Ibid., pp. 113–17.
39. R. Salvadori, ‘Moti antigiacobini e insorgenze antinapoleoniche
in Val padano’, in Storia della società italiana. L’Italia giacobina e
napoleonica, eds. G. Cherubini et al. (Milan, 1985), p. 192.
40. Ibid., pp. 120–21.
41. T. Coleman, Nelson. The Man and the Legend (London, 2002), pp.
177–8.
42. J. A. Davis, Naples and Napoleon. Southern Italy and the European
Revolutions 1780–1860 (Oxford, 2006), p. 44.
43. N. Moe, The View from Vesuvius. Italian Culture and the Southern
Question (Berkeley, 2002), pp. 61,67.
44. B. Croce, La rivoluzione napoletana del 1799 (Bari, 1948), pp.
39–40.
45. Candeloro, Storia dell’Italia moderna, Vol. 1, p. 260.
46. R. De Felice (ed.), I giornali giacobini italiani (Milan, 1962), p.
455 (‘Educazione della plebe’, in Monitore napolitano, February
1799). Cf. Davis, Naples and Napoleon, pp. 99–100.
47. Capra, L’età rivoluzionaria e napoleonica, p. 138.
48. C. Albanese, Cronache di una rivoluzione. Napoli 1799 (Milan,
1998), p. 111.
49. P. Colletta, Storia del reame di Napoli, Vol. 2, ed. N. Cortese
(Naples, 1969), pp. 46–7.
50. Albanese, Cronache di una rivoluzione, p. 112.
51. Ibid., p. 120.
52. C. De Nicola, Diario napoletano, dicembre 1798–dicembre 1800,
ed. P. Ricci (Milan, 1963), p. 277.
53. Albanese, Cronache di una rivoluzione, p. 135.

2: Searching for the Nation’s Soul

1. A. Ottolini, La Carboneria dalle origini ai primi tentativi

insurrezionali (1797–1817) (Modena, 1936), pp. 14–16.
2. R. Sò riga, L’idea nazionale italiana dal secolo XVIII
all’uni cazione. Scritti raccolti e ordinati da Silio Manfredi
(Modena, 1941), pp. 45–7.
3. V. Cuoco, Saggio storico sulla rivoluzione napoletana del 1799, ed.
F. Nicolini (Bari, 1929), p. 28.
4. Ibid., p. 90.
5. Ibid., p. 21.
6. S. Patriarca, ‘Patriottismo, nazione e italianità nella statistica del
Risorgimento’, in A. M. Banti and R. Bizzocchi (eds.), Immagini
della nazione nell’Italia del Risorgimento (Rome, 2002), p. 125.
7. G. Calò, Pedagogia del Risorgimento (Florence, 1965), pp. 4–6.
8. Ibid., p. 4.
 9. V. Cuoco, Platone in Italia, Vol. 2, ed. F. Nicolini (Bari, 1928),
pp. 157–8.
10. Caloó, Pedagogia, p. 8.
11. E. Noether, Seeds of Italian Nationalism, 1700–1815 (New York,
1969), pp. 79–82.
12. S. Woolf, A History of Italy 1700–1860. The Social Constraints of
Political Change (London, 1979), p. 197.
13. G. Candeloro, Storia dell’Italia moderna. Vol. 1: Le origini del
Risorgimento (Milan, 1956), pp. 308–9.
14. C. Capra, L’età rivoluzionaria e napoleonica in Italia 1796–1815
(Turin, 1978), p. 160.
15. C. Zaghi, Napoleone e l’Italia. Studi e ricerche (Naples, 1966), pp.
309–22.
16. Stendhal, La Chartreuse de Parme. Preèface, commentaires et notes
de Victor del Litto (Paris, 1983), p. 38.
17. L. Patetta, ‘Il neoclassicismo’, in Storia della società italiana.
L’Italia giacobina e napoleonica, eds. G. Cherubini et al. (Milan,
1985), p. 421.
18. P. Colletta, Storia del reame di Napoli, Vol. 2, ed. N. Cortese
(Naples, 1969), p. 266.
19. M. Meriggi, Gli stati italiani prima dell’Unità. Una storia
istituzionale (Bologna, 2002), pp. 72–4.
20. U. Foscolo, ‘Orazione a Bonaparte pel Congresso di Lione’, in
Edizione nazionale delle opere di Ugo Foscolo. Vol. 6: Scritti letterari
e politici dal 1796 al 1808, ed. G. Gambarin (Florence, 1972), pp.
212,231–2.
21. U. Foscolo, ‘Dei sepolcri’, in ibid. Vol. 1: Poesie e carmi, eds. F.
Pagliai, G. Folena and M. Scotti (Florence, 1985), p. 130.
22. U. Foscolo, ‘Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis’, in ibid. Vol. 4: Le
ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis, ed. G. Gambarin (Florence, 1955),
p. 260.
23. U. Foscolo, ‘Dei sepolcri’, in ibid. Vol. 1, p. 130.
24. U. Foscolo, ‘Essay on the present literature of Italy’, in ibid. Vol.
11, part 2: Saggi di letteratura italiana (ed. C. Foligno), p. 476.
25. U. Foscolo, ‘Dell’origine e dell’o cio della letteratura’, in ibid.
Vol. 7: Lezioni, articoli di critica e di polemica (1809–1811), ed. E.
Santini (Florence, 1933), p. 17.
26. Ibid., pp. 33–4.
27. Ibid., pp. 36–7.
28. E. Francia, Del na de Custine, Luisa Stolberg, Giulietta Reècamier a
Canova. Lettere inedite (Rome, 1972), p. 73.
29. F. Mazzocca, ‘L’iconogra a della patria tra l’etaà delle riforme e
l’Unitaá’, in Banti and Bizzocchi (eds.), Immagini della nazione,
pp. 100–101.
30. Ibid., pp. 94–7.
31. Ibid., pp. 97–8.
32. E. Irace, Itale glorie (Bologna, 2003), pp. 124–7.
33. M. Gutwirth, Madame de Staél, Novelist. The Emergence of the
Artist as Woman (Urbana, 1978), p. 285.
34. Madame de Staél, Corinne, or Italy, trans. S. Raphael (Oxford,
1998), pp. 11,89.
35. J. C. Herold, Mistress to an Age. A Life of Madame de Staél
(London, 1959), pp. 301–3.
36. S. Balayè, Madame de Staél. Écrire, lutter, vivre (Geneva, 1994),
p. 326.
37. De Staél, Corinne, or Italy, p. 27.
38. Madame de Staél, Correspondance geèneèrale. Vol. 6: De Corinne
vers De l’Allemagne. 9 novembre 1805–9 mai 1809 (Klincksieck,
1993), p. 245.
39. De Staél, Corinne, or Italy, pp. 261–2.
40. Ibid., p. 24.
41. C. Garry-Boussel, ‘L’homme du Nord et l’homme du Midi dans
Corinne’, in Mme de Staeël. Actes du colloque de la Sorbonne du 20
novembre 1999 (Paris, 2000), p. 62.
42. De Staél, Corinne, or Italy, p. 99.
43. Ibid., p. 99.
44. Ibid., p. 304.
45. Ibid., pp. 110–11.
46. G. Montanelli, Memorie sull’Italia e specialmente sulla Toscana dal
1814 al 1850 (Florence, 1963), p. 30.
47. A. Codignola (ed.), Go redo Mameli. La vita e gli scritti. Vol. 2:
Gli scritti (Venice, 1927), pp. 279–80.

3: Conspiracy and Resistance

1. Cf. J.-E. Driault, Napolèon en Italie (1800–1812) (Paris, 1906),

pp. 477–8.
2. D. Gregory, Napoleon’s Italy (Madison, 2001), p. 181.
3. F. C. Schneid, Soldiers of Napoleon’s Kingdom of Italy. Army, State,
and Society 1800–1815 (Boulder, 1995), p. 76.
4. F. Della Peruta, ‘Dai particolarismi all’idea di nazione.
L’esperienza degli anni “giacobini” e “napoleonici” ’, in F.
Tarozzi and G. Vecchio (eds.), Gli italiani e il tricolore.
Patriottismo, identità nazionale e fratture sociali lungo due secoli di
storia (Bologna, 1999), p. 71.
5. Schneid, Soldiers of Napoleon’s Kingdom of Italy, pp. 129–30.
6. F. Della Peruta, Esercito e società nell’Italia napoleonica (Milan,
1988), pp. 422–3.
7. R. Salvadori, ‘Moti antigiacobini e insorgenze antinapoleoniche
in Val padana’, in Storia della società italiana. L’Italia giacobina e
napoleonica, eds. G. Cherubini et al. (Milan 1985), p. 205.
8. Ibid., p. 206.
 9. M. Broers, Europe Under Napoleon (London, 1996), p. 132.
10. J. A. Davis, Naples and Napoleon. Southern Italy and the European
Revolutions 1780–1860 (Oxford, 2006), pp. 209–31.
11. Gregory, Napoleon’s Italy, p. 171.
12. G. Cingari, Brigantaggio, proprietari e contadini nel sud (1799–
1900) (Rome, 1976), pp. 44–60.
13. Ibid., pp. 77–9.
14. Cf. B. Amante, Fra Diavolo e il suo tempo (1796–1806) (Florence,
1904), p. 458.
15. Gregory, Napoleon’s Italy, p. 173.
16. A. Ottolini, La Carboneria dalle origini ai primi tentativi
insurrezionali (1797–1817) (Modena, 1936), p. 54.
17. G. Candeloro, Storia dell’Italia moderna. Vol. I: Le origini del
Risorgimento (Milan, 1956), p. 362.
18. Ottolini, La Carboneria, pp. 48–9.
19. R. John Rath, ‘ “The Carbonari”: their origins, initiation rites,
and aims’, in American Historical Review, 69,2 (1964), pp. 359–
61.
20. R. Sò riga, Le società segrete, l’emigrazione politica e i primi moti
per l’indipendenza. Scritti raccolti e ordinati da Silio Manfredi
(Modena, 1942), p. 99.
21. Ottolini, La Carboneria, pp. 124–6.
22. J. Rosselli, Lord William Bentinck. The Making of a Liberal
Imperialist 1774–1839 (London, 1974), p. 155.
23. D. Mack Smith, A History of Sicily. Modern Sicily after 1713
(London, 1968), p. 350.
24. Rosselli, Lord William Bentinck, pp. 151,161–3.
25. R. Sò riga, L’idea nazionale italiana dal secolo XVIII
all’uni cazione. Scritti raccolti e ordinati da Silio Manfredi
(Modena, 1941), pp. 184–202.
26. Rosselli, Lord William Bentinck, p. 168.
27. Ibid., p. 172.
28. Ibid., p. 176.
29. C. Mozzarelli, ‘Sulle opinioni politiche di Federico Confalonieri,
patrizio e gentiluomo’, in G. Rumi (ed.), Federico Confalonieri
aristocratico progressista (Bari, 1987), p. 56.
30. Candeloro, Storia dell’Italia moderna, Vol. 1, pp. 371–2.
31. D. Mack Smith, The Making of Italy 1796–1870 (London, 1968),
p. 18.
32. A. Manzoni, ‘Il proclama di Rimini’, in Tutte le opere di
Alessandro Manzoni. Vol. 1: Poesie e tragedie, eds. A. Chiari and F.
Ghisalberti (Milan, 1957), pp. 119–20.
33. J.-P. Garnier, Gioacchino Murat re di Napoli, trans. G. F.
Malquori (Naples, 1959), p. 346.

4: Restoration, Romanticism and Revolt

1. Cf. Pelagio Palagi: artista e collezionista. Mostra organizzata dal

Museo civico con il contributo della Regione Emilia Romagna
(Bologna, 1976).
2. F. Hayez, Le mie memorie dettate da Francesco Hayez (Milan,
1890), p. 21.
3. M. C. Gozzoli and F. Mazzocca (eds.), Hayez (Milan, 1983), p.
86.
4. I. Marelli, Brera mai vista. Il Romanticismo storico: Francesco
Hayez e Pelagio Palagi (Milan, 2001), p. 16.
5. F. Mazzocca, ‘La pittura dell’Ottocento in Lombardia’, in E.
Castelnuovo (ed.), La pittura in Italia: l’Ottocento, Vol. 1 (Milan,
1991), p. 102.
6. Cf. F. Venturi, ‘L’Italia fuori d’Italia’, in Storia d’Italia. Vol. 3: Dal
primo Settecento all’Unità (Turin, 1973), pp. 1217–18.
7. Cf. A. Scirocco, L’Italia del Risorgimento 1800–1860 (Bologna,
1990), pp. 35–55.
8. A. Balletti, Storia di Reggio nell’Emilia (Rome, 1968), pp. 615–32.
9. Cf. L. C. Farini, Lo Stato Romano dall’anno 1815 al 1850, Vol. 1
(Florence, 1853), pp.6–15.
10. G. Candeloro, Storia dell’Italia moderna. Vol. 2: Dalla
restaurazione alla rivoluzione nazionale 1815–1846 (Milan, 1974),
p. 61.
11. D. Laven, Venice and Venetia under the Habsburgs, 1815–1835
(Oxford, 2002), pp. 122,140–42.
12. Scirocco, L’Italia del Risorgimento, p. 61.
13. Ibid., pp. 64–5.
14. M. Meriggi, ‘Centralismo e federalismo in Italia. Le aspettative
preunitarie’, in O. Janz, P. Schiera and H. Siegrist (eds.),
Centralismo e federalismo tra Otto e Novecento. Italia e Germania a
confronto (Bologna, 1997), pp. 52–5.
15. Candeloro, Storia dell’Italia moderna, Vol. 2, pp. 28–9.
16. Laven, Venice and Venetia, pp. 79–80.
17. Venturi, ‘L’Italia fuori d’Italia’, pp. 1218–19.
18. Madame de Staél, ‘Sulla maniera e le utilità delle traduzioni’, in
Biblioteca italiana (Milan), January 1816, pp. 16–18.
19. G. Berchet, Lettera semiseria di Grisostomo, introduction by A.
Galletti (Lanciano, 1913), pp. 109–12,118, 121,146–7.
20. Cf. M. Thom, Republics, Nations and Tribes (London, 1995), pp.
289–305.
21. Candeloro, Storia dell’Italia moderna, Vol. 2, pp. 33–4.
22. Cf. Scritti editi ed inediti di Giuseppe Mazzini, Vol. 39(Imola,
1924), p. 9(‘Parties and a airs in Italy’).
23. Candeloro, Storia dell’Italia moderna, Vol. 2, p. 106.
24. Cf. R. Balzani, ‘I nuovi simboli patriottici: la nascita del
tricolore e la sua di usione negli anni della restaurazione e del
Risorgimento’, in F. Tarozzi and G. Vecchio (eds.), Gli italiani e il
tricolore. Patriottismo, identità nazionale e fratture sociali lungo due
secoli di storia (Bologna, 1999), pp. 146–7.
25. Candeloro, Storia dell’Italia moderna, Vol. 2, p. 114.
26. P. Giudici, Storia d’Italia narrata al popolo. Vol. 4: Il Risorgimento
(Florence, 1932), p. 335.
27. L. Gigli, Santarosa (Milan, 1946), pp. 221–323.
28. G. Mazzini, Note autobiogra che, ed. R. Pertici (Milan, 1986),
pp. 52–3.
29. F. Lemmi, Carlo Felice (1765–1831) (Turin, 1931), p. 182 (9
May 1822).
30. Cf. S. Romagnoli, ‘Narratori e prosatori del Romanticismo’, in E.
Cecchi and N. Sapegno (eds.), Storia della letteratura italiana. Vol.
8: Dall’Ottocento al Novecento (Milan, 1968), pp. 150–57.
31. R. J. M. Olson, Ottocento. Romanticism and Revolution in 19th-
Century Italian Painting (New York, 1992), p. 152.

5: Fractured Past and Fractured Present

1. C. Petraccone, Le due civiltà. Settentrionali e meridionali nella

storia d’Italia (Rome, 2000), p. 6.
2. G. Bollati, ‘L’italiano’, in Storia d’Italia. Vol. 1: I caratteri originali
(Turin, 1972), p. 954.
3. Cf. I. De Feo, Manzoni. L’uomo e l’opera (Milan, 1971), pp. 131–
2,158, 596–8.
4. A. Manzoni, ‘Marzo 1821’, in Tutte le opere di Alessandro
Manzoni. Vol. 1: Poesie e tragedie, eds. A. Chiari and F.
Ghisalberti (Milan, 1957), pp. 115–18.
5. Ibid., pp. 854–5.
 6. A. M. Banti, ‘Le invasioni barbariche e le origini delle nazioni’,
in A. M. Banti and R. Bizzocchi (eds.), Immagini della nazione
nell’Italia del Risorgimento (Rome, 2002), p. 22.
7. A. Manzoni, Il Conte di Carmagnola, Act 2, Chorus, in Tutte le
opere di Alessandro Manzoni, Vol. 1, p. 337.
8. Manzoni, ‘Discorso sur alcuni punti della storia longobardica in
Italia’, in Tutte le opere di Alessandro Manzoni. Vol. 4: Saggi storici
e politici, ed. F. Ghisalberti, pp. 198,206–11.
9. Manzoni, Adelchi, Act 3, Chorus, in Tutte le opere di Alessandro
Manzoni, Vol. 1, pp. 613–15.
10. A. M. Banti, La nazione del Risorgimento. Parentela, santità e
onore alle origini dell’Italia unita (Turin, 2000), p. 47.
11. G. Mazzini, ‘De l’art en Italie, à propos de “Marco Visconti”,
roman de Thomas Grossi’, in Scritti editi ed inediti di Giuseppe
Mazzini, Vol. 8 (Imola, 1910), pp. 45–7.
12. L. Settembrini, Lezioni di letteratura italiana, Vol. 2 (Florence,
1964), pp. 1072–3(‘La rivoluzione interiore. Il Manzoni’).
13. M. L. Astaldi, Manzoni ieri e oggi (Milan, 1971), p. 319.
14. J. C. L. Sismondi, Histoire des rèpubliques italiennes du moyen age,
Vol. 10 (Paris, 1840), pp. 364–401.
15. Ibid., Vol. 2, pp. 42–4.
16. F. Venturi, ‘L’Italia fuori d’Italia’, in Storia d’Italia. Vol. 3: Dal
primo Settecento all’Unità (Turin, 1973), p. 1177 (Sismondi to
Madame de Staél, 20 March 1804).
17. Ibid., p. 1178.
18. Cf. M. O’Connor, The Romance of Italy and the English Political
Imagination (Basingstoke, 1998), pp. 40–55.
19. C. Botta, Storia d’Italia continuata da quella del Guicciardini sino
al 1789, Vol. 1(Capolago, 1832), p. 42.
20. C. Botta, Storia dei popoli italiani, Vol. 2 (Pisa, 1825), p. 16.
21. Ibid., p. 111.
22. Botta, Storia d’Italia continuata da quella del Guicciardini, Vol. 1,
p. 44.
23. Botta, Storia dei popoli italiani, Vol. 5, pp. 164–5.
24. Bollati, ‘L’italiano’, p. 972.
25. Go redo Mameli. La vita e gli scritti. Vol. 2: Gli scritti, ed. A.
Codignola (Venice, 1927), pp. 76–7.
26. G. Mazzini, Doveri dell’uomo, in Scritti editi ed inediti di Giuseppe
Mazzini, Vol. 69(Imola, 1935), pp. 61–2.
27. G. Pescosolido, ‘L’economia e la vita materiale’, in G. Sabbatucci
and V. Vidotto (eds.), Storia d’Italia. Vol. 1: Le premesse
dell’Unitaà. Dalla ne del Settecento al 1861 (Rome and Bari,
1994), pp. 107–9; G. Montroni, La società italiana
dall’uni cazione alla Grande Guerra (Rome, 2002), p. 7.
28. A. Scirocco, L’Italia del Risorgimento 1800–1860 (Bologna,
1990), pp. 239–43.
29. A. M. Banti, La nazione del Risorgimento. Parentela, santità e
onore alle origini dell’Italia unita (Turin, 2000), pp. 19–22.
30. D. Mack Smith, The Making of Italy 1796–1870 (London, 1968),
p. 85.
31. R. Romeo, Cavour e il suo tempo. Vol. 2: 1842–1854 (Rome,
1977), pp. 214–20.
32. A. M. Banti, Storia della borghesia italiana (Rome, 1996), p. 81.
33. S. Woolf, A History of Italy 1700–1860. The Social Constraints of
Political Change (London, 1986), p. 286.
34. V. Zamagni, Dalla periferia al centro. La seconda rinascita
economica dell’Italia: 1861–1981 (Bologna, 1990), pp. 37–9.
35. Woolf, A History of Italy, pp. 285–6.
36. Banti, Storia della borghesia, pp. 82–3.
37. M. Petrusewicz, Latifondo. Economia morale e vita materiale in
una periferia dell’Ottocento (Venice, 1989), pp. 185–219. Cf. S.
Lupo, ‘I proprietari terrieri nel Mezzogiorno’, in P. Bevilacqua
 (ed.), Storia dell’agricoltura italiana in etaà contemporanea. Vol. 2:
Uomini e classi (Venice, 1990), pp. 112–18.
38. Romeo, Cavour e il suo tempo, Vol. 2, pp. xii–xiv.
39. Ibid., p. 142.
40. L. Serianni, Storia della lingua italiana (Bologna, 1990), pp. 17–
18.
41. G. Visconti Venosta, Ricordi di gioventuù. Cose vedute o sapute
1847–60 (Milan, 1904), p. 277.
42. E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780. Programme,
Myth, Reality (Cambridge, 1990), p. 94.
43. Cf. R. Price, A Social History of Nineteenth-Century France
(London, 1987), pp. 349–52.
44. T. De Mauro, Storia linguistica dell’Italia unita (Rome, 1984), p.
44.
45. Ibid., p. 31.
46. Ibid., p. 32.
47. Banti, La nazione del Risorgimento, p. 25 (Olimpia Savio).
48. Stendhal, Rome, Naples and Florence, trans. R. Coe (London,
1959), p. 316.
49. Ibid., p. 220.
50. Ibid., pp. 36–7,51, 56–8,68, 105,128.
51. Ibid., p. 93.
52. Ibid., p. 122.
53. Ibid., p. 220.
54. Ibid., p. 453–4.
55. Cf. R. Damiani, Vita di Leopardi (Milan, 1992), pp. 41–77.
56. G. Leopardi, All’Italia, Sopra il monumento di Dante, Ad Angelo
Mai, Nelle nozze della sorella Paolina, in Opere, Vol. 1, ed. S.
Solmi (Milan, 1956), pp. 3–28.
57. Leopardi, ‘Discorso sopra lo stato presente dei costumi degl’
italiani’, in Opere, Vol. 1, pp. 853–4.
58. Leopardi, Zibaldone, Vol. 1, ed. R. Damiani (Milan, 1997), p.
1004 (27 Julyo 1821).

6: Apostles and Martyrs

1. C. Dédéyan, Lamartine et la Toscane (Geneva, 1981), pp. 36–42.

2. B. Croce, Pagine sulla guerra (Bari, 1928), p. 219.
3. G. Garibaldi, Le memorie di Garibaldi nella redazione de nitiva del
1872 (Bologna, 1932), pp. 321–2,365.
4. G. Peècout, ‘Philhellenism in Italy: political friendship and the
Italian volunteers in the Mediterranean in the nineteenth
century’, in Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 9,3 (2004), p. 408.
5. Cf. M. Isabella, ‘Italian exiles and British politics before and
after 1848’, in S. Freitag (ed.), Exiles from European Revolutions.
Refugees in mid-Victorian England (Oxford, 2003), pp. 61–9.
6. F. Della Peruta, ‘Le teorie militari della democrazia
risorgimentale’, in F. Mazzonis (ed.), Garibaldi condottiero.
Storia, teoria, prassi (Milan, 1984), pp. 63–4.
7. Ibid., p. 64.
8. G. Montanelli, Memorie sull’Italia e specialmente sulla Toscana dal
1814 al 1850 (Florence, 1963), p. 7.
9. F. Chabod, Storia della politica estera italiana dal 1870 al 1896.
Vol. 1: Le premesse (Bari, 1951), p. 16.
10. Carteggi di Michele Amari, Vol. 1, ed. A. D’Ancona (Turin, 1896),
p. 452 (Amari to Arrivabene, 24November 1848).
11. Ibid., p. 91 (Amari to Panizzi, 10 March 1843).
12. G. Procacci, La dis da di Barletta. Tra storia e romanzo (Milan,
2001), p. 63.
13. Ibid., pp. 56–60.
14. G. Candeloro, Storia dell’Italia moderna. Vol. 2: Dalla
restaurazione alla rivoluzione nazionale 1815–1846 (Milan, 1974),
pp. 182–5.
15. R. Soòriga, Le società segrete, l’emigrazione politica e i primi moti
per l’indipendenza. Scritti raccolti e ordinati da Silio Manfredi
(Modena, 1942), p. 261.
16. G. Mazzini, ‘La peinture moderne en Italie’, in Scritti editi ed
inediti di Giuseppe Mazzini, Vol. 21 (Imola, 1915), pp. 292,301.
17. M. C. Gozzoli and F. Mazzocca (eds.), Hayez (Milan, 1983), p.
114.
18. Mazzini, ‘La peinture moderne en Italie’, pp. 301–3.
19. A. Lyttelton, ‘Creating a national past: history, myth and image
in the Risorgimento’, in A. Russell Ascoli and K. von Henneberg,
Making and Remaking Italy. The Cultivation of National Identity
around the Risorgimento (Oxford, 2001), p. 35.
20. P. Barocchi, F. Nicolodi and S. Pinto (eds.), Romanticismo storico
(Florence, 1974), p. 30.
21. F. Mazzocca, Hayez dal mito al bacio (Venice, 1998), p. 108.
22. S. Mastellone, Mazzini e la ‘Giovine Italia’ (1831–1834), Vol. 1
(Pisa, 1960), pp. 89,117–18.
23. D. Mack Smith, The Making of Italy, 1796–1870 (London, 1968),
pp. 48–9.
24. E. E. Y. Hales, Mazzini and the Secret Societies (New York, 1956),
p. 26.
25. Mastellone, Mazzini e la ‘Giovine Italia’, Vol. 1, pp. 334–8.
26. D. Mack Smith, Mazzini (New Haven, 1994), p. 156.
27. Hales, Mazzini and the Secret Societies, p. 188.
28. Ibid., p. 192.
29. G. Mazzini, Della Giovine Italia (1832), in Scritti editi ed inediti di
Giuseppe Mazzini, Vol. 20 (Imola, 1907), p. 99.
30. L. Salvatorelli, Il pensiero politico italiano. Dal 1700 al 1870
(Turin, 1949), p. 261.
31. A. M. Banti, Il Risorgimento italiano (Rome, 2004), p. 66.
32. A. Giardina and A. Vauchez, Il mito di Roma. Da Carlo Magno a
Mussolini (Rome, 2000), p. 169.
33. N. Costa, Quel che vidi e quel che intesi, ed. G. Costa (Milan,
1983), p. 121.
34. Mack Smith, Mazzini, p. 5.
35. A. Scirocco, L’Italia del Risorgimento 1800–1860 (Bologna,
1990), pp. 184–6.
36. Mastellone, Mazzini e la ‘Giovine Italia’, Vol. 2, pp. 73–4,82–3.
37. Hales, Mazzini and the Secret Societies, pp. 163,166, 173.
38. E. Morelli, L’Inghilterra di Mazzini (Rome, 1965), pp. 14–15.
39. Mack Smith, Mazzini, p. 24.
40. Gozzoli and Mazzocca (eds.), Hayez, p. 98.
41. G. Rumi, Gioberti (Bologna, 1999), pp. 37–8,47, 50.
42. L. Settembrini, Ricordanze della mia vita, ed. M. Themelly
(Milan, 1961), pp. 68–71.
43. P. Alatri, ‘Benedetto Musolino, biogra a di un rivoluzionario
europeo’, in Benedetto Musolino. Il Mezzogiorno nel Risorgimento
tra rivoluzione e utopia. Atti del convegno storico in Pizzo 15/16
novembre 1985 (Milan, 1988), p. 26; Mack Smith, Mazzini, p. 86.
44. C. M. Lovett, The Democratic Movement in Italy, 1830–1876
(Cambridge, 1982), p. 126.
45. Montanelli, Memorie sull’Italia, p. 156.
46. Mack Smith, Mazzini, p. 41.
47. L. Carci, La spedizione e il processo dei Fratelli Bandiera. Con una
appendice di documenti (Modena, 1939), pp. 12–13,89–90,100.
48. Ibid., pp. 130–33.
49. G. Mazzini, Ricordi dei fratelli Bandiera (1844), in Scritti editi ed
inediti di Giuseppe Mazzini, Vol. 31 (Imola, 1921), pp. 69–70.
50. Carci, La spedizione e il processo dei Fratelli Bandiera, pp. 28–
35,158–66.
51. Ibid., pp. 157–8.
52. Ibid., pp. 49–59; G. Ricciardi, Martirologio italiano dal 1792 al
1847 (Florence, 1860), pp. 231–3.
53. Ricciardi, ibid., p. 233.

7: Educators and Reformers

1. A. Tennyson, ‘Locksley Hall’, in Alfred Tennyson: In Memoriam,

Maud and Other Poems (London, 1977), pp. 58–64.
2. R. Romanelli, Italia liberale (1861–1900) (Bologna, 1979), p.
119.
3. A. M. Banti, Storia della borghesia italiana (Rome, 1996), p. 181.
4. G. Montroni, La società italiana dall’uni cazione alla Grande
Guerra (Rome–Bari, 2002), pp. 135–40.
5. S. Woolf, A History of Italy 1700–1860. The Social Constraints of
Political Change (London, 1986), p. 333.
6. A. Scirocco, L’Italia del Risorgimento 1800–1860 (Bologna, 1990),
pp. 213–15.
7. Ibid., pp. 216–17.
8. R. Romeo, Cavour e il suo tempo. Vol. 2: 1842–1854 (Rome,
1977), pp. 219–20.
9. D. Bertoni Jovine, I periodici popolari del Risorgimento. Vol. 1: Il
periodo prerisorgimentale (1818–1847). Le rivoluzioni (1847–
1849) (Milan, 1959), pp. xi–xii, xv–xvi, lviii–lx, 233–56.
10. M. Isnenghi, ‘Il ruralismo nella cultura italiana’, in P.
Bevilacqua (ed.), Storia dell’agricoltura italiana in età
contemporanea. Vol. 3: Mercati e istituzioni (Venice, 1991), p.
878; M. Berengo, ‘Appunti su Luigi Alessandro Parravicini. La
 metodica austriaca della Resaurazione’, in A. Mastrocinque
(ed.), Omaggio a Piero Treves (Padua, 1983), p. 1.
11. Isnenghi, ‘Il ruralismo nella cultura italiana’, p. 883.
12. Monumenti di Giardino Puccini (Pistoia, 1845), p. 16.
13. Ibid., p. 533.
14. C. Mazzi and C. Sisi, ‘La collezione di Niccolò Puccini’, in
Cultura dell’Ottocento a Pistoia. La collezione Puccini (Florence,
1977), p. 16.
15. S. von Falkenhausen, ‘L’immagine del “popolo”: dal centralismo
al totalitarismo in Italia e in Germania’, in O. Janz, P. Schiera
and H. Siegrist (eds.), Centralismo e federalismo tra Otto e
Novecento. Italia e Germania a confronto (Bologna, 1997), p. 196.
16. P. Luciani, ‘Le committenze di Niccolò Puccini’, in Cultura
dell’Ottocento a Pistoia, pp. 25–6.
17. Bertoni Jovine, I periodici popolari del Risorgimento, pp. 42–3.
18. A. Gamberai, Memorie storiche della vita di Niccolò Puccini (no
place, no date), pp. 7–8.
19. C. M. Lovett, The Democratic Movement in Italy, 1830–1876
(Cambridge, 1982), p. 51.
20. C. Sorba, Teatri. L’Italia del melodramma nel età del Risorgimento
(Bologna, 2001), pp. 96–8,118, 145–6.
21. Ibid., pp. 26,33–4,40, 45.
22. C. Sorba, ‘Il Risorgimento in musica: l’opera lirica nei teatri del
1848’, in A. M. Banti and R. Bizzocchi (eds.), Immagini della
nazione nell’Italia del Risorgimento (Rome, 2002), p. 141; C.
Sorba, ‘ “Or sia patria il mio solo pensier”. Opera lirica e
nazionalismo nell’Italia risorgimentale’, in F. Tarozzi and G.
Vecchio (eds.), Gli italiani e il tricolore. Patriottismo, identità
nazionale e fratture sociali lungo due secoli di storia (Bologna,
1999), p. 187.
23. C. Sorba, ‘La patria nei libretti d’opera verdiani degli anni ’40’,
in P. Ballini (ed.), La rivoluzione liberale e le nazioni divise
(Venice, 2000), pp. 345–6.
24. Sorba, ‘Il Risorgimento in musica’, p. 136.
25. J. Rosselli, The Life of Verdi (Cambridge, 2000), p. 77.
26. G. Mazzini, Filoso a della musica (1836), in Edizione nazionale
degli scritti di Giuseppe Mazzini, Vol. 8 (Imola, 1910), pp.
131,141, 150.
27. Sorba, ‘Il Risorgimento in musica’, p. 139.
28. Ibid., p. 145.
29. L. Settembrini, Ricordanze della mia vita, ed. M. Themelly
(Milan, 1961), p. 163.
30. Scirocco, L’Italia del Risorgimento, pp. 223–4.
31. V. Gioberti, Il rinnovamento civile d’Italia, Vol. 1 (Milan, 1915),
pp. 65–6.
32. Ibid., p. 55.
33. Ibid., Vol. 4, pp. 164–6,192.
34. R. Romanelli, ‘Nazione e costituzione nell’opinione liberale
avanti il ’48’, in Ballini (ed.), La rivoluzione liberale e le nazioni
divise, p. 276.
35. C. Balbo, Le speranze d’Italia (Turin, 1948), pp. 62–95,141–
2,264–8.
36. Scirocco, L’Italia del Risorgimento, p. 225.
37. Balbo, Le speranze d’Italia, p. 133.
38. Ibid., p. 200.
39. Ibid., pp. 145–50.
40. A. M. Banti and M. Mondini, ‘Da Novara a Custoza: culture
militari e discorso nazionale tra Risorgimento e Unità’, in W.
Barberis (ed.), Storia d’Italia. Annali 18: Guerra e pace (Turin,
2002), p. 432.
41. M. d’Azeglio, Epistolario (1819–1866). Vol. 2: 1841–1845, ed. G.
Virlogeux (Turin, 1989), p. 149.
42. M. d’Azeglio, I miei ricordi (Turin, 1949), pp. 553–4.
43. M. d’Azeglio, Raccolta degli scritti politici (Turin, 1866), pp.
13,72–5.
44. G. Pallavicino, Memorie di Giorgio Pallavicino pubblicate per cura
della moglie. Vol. 2: 1848–1852 (Turin, 1886) p. 435.
45. Romanelli, ‘Nazione e costituzione nell’opinione liberale avanti
il ’48’, p. 304.
46. Ibid., pp. 285–6.
47. Ibid., p. 282.
48. G. Durando, Della nazionalità italiana. Saggio politico-militare
(Lausanne, 1846), pp. 87–91,176–80.

8: Revolution, 1846–9

1. G. Montanelli, Memorie sull’Italia e specialmente sulla Toscana dal

1814 al 1850 (Florence, 1963), p. 150.
2. Ibid., p. 154.
3. C. Sorba, ‘Il Risorgimento in musica: l’opera lirica nei teatri del
1848’, in A. M. Banti and R. Bizzocchi (eds.), Immagini della
nazione nell’Italia del Risorgimento (Rome, 2002), p. 143.
4. G. Mazzini, ‘A Pio IX, Ponte co Massimo’ (8 September 1847),
in Scritti editi ed inediti di Giuseppe Mazzini, Vol. 36 (Imola,
1922), p. 232.
5. A. Scirocco, Garibaldi. Battaglie, amori, ideali di un cittadino del
mondo (Rome–Bari, 2001), p. 135.
6. Cf. L. Settembrini, Ricordanze della mia vita, ed. M. Themelly
(Milan, 1961), p. 34.
7. M. d’Azeglio, Raccolta degli scritti politici (Turin, 1866), pp.
213,216, 247–8(‘Proposta di un programma per l’opinione
nazionale italiana’, July 1847).
8. Sorba, ‘Il Risorgimento in musica’, p. 148.
9. Montanelli, Memorie sull’Italia, pp. 259–60.
10. Ibid., p. 261.
11. R. Romeo, Cavour e il suo tempo. Vol. 2: 1842–1854 (Rome,
1977), p. 314.
12. R. Marshall, Massimo d’Azeglio. An Artist in Politics 1798–1866
(Oxford, 1966), p. 118.
13. M. Minghetti, Miei ricordi. Vol. 1: Dalla puerizia alle prime prove
nella vita pubblica (1818–1848) (Turin, 1889), pp. 365–7.
14. M. d’Azeglio, Lettere di Massimo d’Azeglio a Giuseppe Torelli, ed.
C. Paoli (Milan, 1870), p. 327 (to wife, 16 April 1848).
15. A. Scirocco, L’Italia del Risorgimento 1800–1860 (Bologna,
1990), p. 304.
16. D’Azeglio, Raccolta degli scritti polittici, p. 475 (‘Timori e
speranze’).
17. Ibid., pp. 432 (‘L’onore dell’ Austria e l’onore dell’Italia’, 16
August 1848), 468–73,501–4 (‘Timori e speranze’).
18. Ibid., p. 540 (‘Ai suoi elettori’, 8 January 1849).
19. G. Asproni, Diario politico 1855–1876. Vol. 1: 1855–1857, eds.
C. Sole and T. Orrù (Milan, 1974), p. 584.
20. A. Ricci, La repubblica (Bologna, 2001), p. 94 (Cernuschi to
Cattaneo).
21. Scirocco, Garibaldi, p. 149.
22. G. Garibaldi, Le memorie di Garibaldi nella redazione de nitive del
1872 (Bologna, 1932), p. 502.
23. Ibid., p. 624.
24. C. Osborne, The Complete Operas of Verdi (London, 1973), p.
201.
25. C. M. Lovett, The Democratic Movement in Italy, 1830–1876
(Cambridge, 1982), p. 138.
26. Ricci, La repubblica, pp. 88–91.
27. Go redo Mameli. La vita e gli scritti. Vol 2: Gli scritti, ed. A.
Codignola (Venice, 1927), p. 370 (Mameli to Girolamo
Boccardo, 29 August 1848).
28. Montanelli, Memorie sull’Italia, pp. 459–60.

9: Piedmont and Cavour

1. B. Tobia, ‘Riti e simboli di due capitali (1846–1921)’, in V.

Vidotto (ed.), Storia di Roma dall’antichità a oggi. Roma capitale
(Rome and Bari, 2002), pp. 372–3.
2. F. Mazzonis, La monarchia e il Risorgimento (Bologna, 2003), p.
93.
3. L. Cafagna, Cavour (Bologna, 1999), p. 84.
4. V. Gioberti, Del rinnovamento civile d’Italia, Vol. 3 (Milan, 1915),
pp. 151–2,157–61,212–14,239–44.
5. E. Casanova, ‘L’emigrazione siciliana dal 1849 al 1851’, in
Rassegna storica del Risorgimento, XI (1924), pp. 841–3.
6. C. M. Lovett, The Democratic Movement in Italy, 1830–1876
(Cambridge, 1982), p. 176.
7. D. Mack Smith, Mazzini (New Haven and London, 1994), p. 83.
8. S. Woolf, A History of Italy 1700–1860. The Social Constraints of
Political Change (London, 1979), p. 419.
9. H. Adams, The Education of Henry Adams. An Autobiography
(London, 1918), pp. 92–3.
10. H. Rudman, Italian Nationalism and English Letters (London,
1940), pp. 97–8.
11. Mack Smith, Mazzini, pp. 95–6.
12. E. Morelli, L’Inghilterra di Mazzini (Rome, 1965), pp. 40–45,79–
82,108–12,187.
13. Ibid., pp. 8–9.
14. S. Patriarca, ‘Patriottismo, nazione e italianità nella statistica
del Risorgimento’, in A. M. Banti and R. Bizzocchi (eds.),
Immagini della nazione nell’Italia del Risorgimento (Rome, 2002),
p. 127.
15. G. Aliberti, La resa di Cavour: il carattere nazionale italiano tra
mito e cronaca, 1820–1976 (Florence, 2000), p. xvii.
16. Carteggi di Michele Amari, Vol. 2, ed. A. D’Ancona, p. 23 (Amari
to Giuseppe Ricciardi, 11 October 1853).
17. R. Romeo, Cavour e il suo tempo. Vol. 1: 1810–1842 (Bari, 1969),
p. 241.
18. Cafagna, Cavour, p. 41.
19. D. Mack Smith, Cavour (London, 1985), p. 65.
20. R. Romeo, Cavour e il suo tempo. Vol. 2: 1842–1854 (Rome–Bari,
1977), pp. 617–23.
21. D. Mack Smith, Vittorio Emanuele II (Rome–Bari, 1975), p. 353.
22. Ibid., p. 356.
23. R. Grew, A Sterner Plan for Italian Unity. The Italian National
Society in the Risorgimento (Princeton, 1963), pp. 153–6.
24. Ibid., pp. 140–41,151.
25. Cafagna, Cavour, p. 194; N. Moe, The View from Vesuvius. Italian
Culture and the Southern Question (Berkeley, 2002), pp. 87–
120,139–53,158–64.
26. R. Romeo, Cavour e il suo tempo. Vol. 3: 1854–1861 (Rome–Bari,
1984), pp. 333–6.
27. Cf. N. Rosselli, Carlo Pisacane nel Risorgimento italiano (Turin,
1932), pp. 315–41.
28. C. Pisacane, ‘Seconda dichiarazione a bordo del “Cagliari” (28
June 1857), in Opere complete di Carlo Pisacane, Vol. 3, ed. A.
Romano (Milan, 1964), p. 364.
29. C. Pisacane, ‘Testamento politico’ (24 June 1857), in ibid., pp.
353–9.
30. L. Mercantini, La spigolatrice di Sapri, in Poeti minori
dell’Ottocento, Vol. 2, eds. L. Baldacci and G. Innamorati (Milan,
1963), pp. 1079–80.

10: Unity, 1858–60

1. F. Orsini, The Austrian Dungeons in Italy. A Narrative of Fifteen

Months’ Imprisonment and Final Escape from the Fortress of S.
Giorgio, trans. J. M. White (London, 1856).
2. M. Packe, The Bombs of Orsini (London, 1957), pp. 250–61,272–
3.
3. R. Romeo, Cavour e il suo tempo. Vol. 3: 1854–1861 (Rome–Bari,
1984), p. 340.
4. C. Cavour, Epistolario. Vol. 15: 1858 (January–July), ed. C.
Pischedda (Florence, 1998), pp. 520–30 (Cavour to Victor
Emmanuel II, 24 July 1858).
5. D. Mack Smith, Cavour (London, 1985), p. 143.
6. J. Rosselli, The Life of Verdi (Cambridge, 2000), p. 77.
7. F. Nicolodi, ‘Il teatro lirico e il suo pubblico’, in S. Soldani and
G. Turi (eds.), Fare gli italiani. Scuola e cultura nell’Italia
contemporanea. Vol. 1: La nascita dello Stato nazionale (Bologna,
1993), pp. 257–8.
8. R. Villari, Cospirazione e rivolta (Messina, 1881), pp. 303–6,373–
80.
9. Romeo, Cavour e il suo tempo, Vol. 3, p. 515.
10. Ibid., p. 527.
11. Ibid., p. 538.
12. Mack Smith, Cavour, p. 163.
13. R. Martucci, L’invenzione dell’Italia unita 1855–1864 (Milan,
1999), pp. 54–61.
14. Romeo, Cavour e il suo tempo, Vol. 3, p. 576.
15. Martucci, L’invenzione dell’Italia unita, p. 94 (Cavour to Farini, 3
July 1859).
16. Ibid., p. 70.
17. Mack Smith, Cavour, pp. 169–70.
18. L. Firpo (ed.), Henri Dunant e le origini della Croce Rossa (Turin,
1979), pp. xvii–xxx, 27–31.
19. Il carteggio Cavour–Nigra dal 1858 al 1861. Vol. 2: La campagna
diplomatica e militare del 1859 (Bologna, 1961), pp. 291–2.
20. A. Sa , Ricordi e scritti di Aurelio Sa . Vol. 6: 1860–1 (Florence,
1901), p. 33.
21. Cf. D. Mack Smith, Victor Emanuel, Cavour and the Risorgimento
(Oxford, 1971), pp. 256–9,264.
22. F. Guardione, ‘La spedizione di Rosalino Pilo nei ricordi di
Giovanni Corrao’, in Rassegna storica del Risorgimento, IV (1917),
p. 822, n. 6.
23. L. Riall, ‘Storie d’amore, di libertà e d’avventura: la costruzione
del mito garibaldino intorno al 1848–49’, in A. M. Banti and R.
Bizzocchi (eds.), Immagini della nazione nell’Italia del Risorgimento
(Rome, 2002), pp. 161–71.
24. F. Crispi, I Mille, da documenti dall’archivio Crispi (Milan, 1911),
pp. 93–5.
25. C. Duggan, Francesco Crispi. From Nation to Nationalism (Oxford,
2002), pp. 179–85.
26. L. Riall, Sicily and the Uni cation of Italy. Liberal Policy and Local
Power, 1859–1866 (Oxford, 1998), pp. 71–4.
27. Crispi, I Mille, p. 193.
28. A. Scirocco, Garibaldi. Battaglie, amori, ideali di un cittadino del
mondo (Rome–Bari, 2001), p. 289.
29. Romeo, Cavour e il suo tempo, Vol. 3, p. 762.
30. A. Mario, La camicia rossa (Venice, 1977), pp. 209–10. Cf. G. C.
Abba, Da Quarto al Volturno. Noterelle d’uno dei Mille (Bologna,
 1956), pp. 257–8.
31. Mack Smith, Victor Emanuel, Cavour and the Risorgimento, p.
253.
32. Duggan, Francesco Crispi, p. 598 (Costantino Nigra, 7 August
1890).
33. C. Tivaroni, L’Italia degli italiani, Vol. 3 (Turin, 1897), pp.
136,207.

11: The New State

1. M. G. De Lucia, Brigandage and Political Unrest in the District of

Cerreto: The Case of Pontelandolfo, August 1861, unpublished
MPhil, University of Kent at Canterbury, 2001, pp. 51–2,61.
2. Ibid., p. 51; G. Pescosolido, ‘L’economia e la vita materiale’, in
G. Sabbatucci and V. Vidotto (eds.), Storia d’Italia. Vol. 1: Le
premesse dell’Unità. Dalla ne del Settecento al 1861 (Rome–Bari,
1994), pp. 22–3.
3. V. Zamagni, Dalla periferia al centro. La seconda rinascita
economica dell’Italia: 1861–1981 (Bologna, 1990), p. 44.
4. De Lucia, Brigandage and Political Unrest, pp. 52–6.
5. Ibid., pp. 66–7.
6. Ibid., pp. 67,70–71,119.
7. R. Martucci, L’invenzione dell’Italia unita 1855–1864 (Milan,
1999), pp. 208–20.
8. Cf. F. Molfese, Storia del brigantaggio dopo l’Unità (Milan, 1964),
pp. 63–6,99–100.
9. De Lucia, Brigandage and Political Unrest, pp. 129,139–41,168,
171–2.
10. Cf. G. Di Fiore, I vinti del Risorgimento. Storia e storie di chi
combatté per i Borbone di Napoli (Turin, 2004), p. 256; A. De
Jaco (ed.), Il brigantaggio meridionale. Cronaca inedita dell’Unità
d’Italia (Rome, 1969), pp. 190–92.
11. De Lucia, Brigandage and Political Unrest, pp. 150–53,162–6.
12. Cf. C. Melegari, Cenni sul brigantaggio. Ricordi di un antico
bersagliere (Turin, 1897), pp. 12–13,17–19.
13. S. Lupo, ‘Il grande brigantaggio’, in W. Barberis (ed.), Storia
d’Italia. Annali 18: Guerra e pace (Turin, 2002), p. 468.
14. De Lucia, Brigandage and Political Unrest, p. 159.
15. Ibid., p. 161.
16. Di Fiore, I vinti del Risorgimento, p. 339.
17. Cf. C. Levi, Christ Stopped at Eboli, trans. F. Frenaye (London,
1982), pp. 135–7.
18. De Lucia, Brigandage and Political Unrest, p. 169 (Gazzetta di
Torino, 15 August 1861). Cf. P. Calà Ulloa, Lettres napolitaines
(Paris, 1864), pp. 84–93.
19. Martucci, L’invenzione dell’Italia unita, p. 323 (parliamentary
session of 20 November 1861).
20. Lupo, ‘Il grande brigantaggio’, p. 489.
21. Carteggi di Camillo Cavour. La liberazione del Mezzogiorno e la
formazione del Regno d’Italia. Vol. 3 (October–November 1860)
(Bologna, 1952), p. 208 (Farini to Cavour, 27 October 1860).
22. Mack Smith, Cavour, p. 412.
23. C. Petraccone, Le due civiltá. Settentrionali e meridionali nella
storia d’Italia (Rome–Bari, 2000), pp. 45–6.
24. N. Moe, The View from Vesuvius. Italian Culture and the Southern
Question (Berkeley, 2002), pp. 172–3. Cf. N. Moe, ‘ “Altro che
Italia!” Il Sud dei piemontesi (1860–61)’, in Meridiana. Rivista di
storia e scienze sociali, 15 (September 1992), pp. 78–84.
25. Moe, The View from Vesuvius, pp. 175–6; Petraccone, Le due
civiltá, p. 31.
26. Moe, The View from Vesuvius, p. 183.
27. Molfese, Storia del brigantaggio dopo l’Unitá, pp. 75–80.
28. I. Nievo, Lettere garibaldine, ed. A. Ciceri (Turin, 1961), p. 89
(29 October 1860).
29. Lupo, ‘Il grande brigantaggio’, p. 494 (to De Sanctis, August
1861).
30. Cf. Martucci, L’invenzione dell’Italia unita, p. 313; Lupo, ‘Il
grande brigantaggio’, p. 494; L. Del Boca, Indietro Savoia. Storia
controcorrente del Risorgimento (Casale Monferrato, 2003), p.
222.
31. F. De Sanctis, La giovinezza, ed. G. Savarese (Turin, 1961), p. 10.
32. Ibid., pp. 432,477, 537.
33. F. De Sanctis, Il Mezzogiorno e lo Stato unitario, ed. F. Ferri
(Turin, 1960), pp. 80–81 (16 October 1860).
34. Cf. R. Romanelli, ‘Centralismo e autonomie’, in R. Romanelli
(ed.), Storia dello stato italiano dall’Unitá a oggi (Rome, 1995),
pp. 131–7; R. Romeo, Cavour e il suo tempo. Vol. 3: 1854–1861
(Rome–Bari, 1984), pp. 859–63.
35. A. Scirocco, L’Italia del Risorgimento 1800–1860 (Bologna,
1990), pp. 448–9.
36. A. Bertani, Discorsi parlamentari di Agostino Bertani pubblicati per
deliberazione della Camera dei Deputati (Rome, 1913), p. 70 (19
June 1863).
37. Il Mondo illustrato (Turin), 23 February 1861.
38. F. Crispi, Discorsi parlamentari di Francesco Crispi, Vol. 1 (Rome,
1915), p. 11 (17 April 1861).
39. G. Barbèra, Memorie di un editore. Pubblicate dai gli (Florence,
1883), pp. 342–3.
40. A. C. De Meis, Il sovrano. Saggio di loso a politica con riferenza
all’Italia, ed. B. Croce (Bari, 1927), p. 15.
41. A. M. Banti, La nazione del Risorgimento. Parentela, santitá e
onore alle origini dell’Italia unita (Turin, 2000), p. 173; R. Leydi,
Canti sociali italiani. Vol. 1: Canti giacobini, repubblicani,
 antirisorgimentali, di protesta postunitaria contro la guerra e il
servizio militare (Milan, 1963), p. 112.
42. D. Mack Smith, ‘Britain and the Italian Risorgimento’, in M.
McLaughlin (ed.), Britain and Italy from Romanticism to
Modernism (Oxford, 2000), pp. 24–6; H. Rudman, Italian
Nationalism and English Letters (London, 1940), pp. 296–305.
43. F. Venturi, ‘L’immagine di Garibaldi in Russia all’epoca della
liberazione dei servi’, in Rassegna storica toscana, 6 (4)
(October–December 1960), p. 313.
44. D. Mack Smith, Mazzini (New Haven and London, 1994), p.
159.
45. George Eliot, Romola, ed. D. Barrett (London, 1996), pp. 581–3.
46. Rudman, Italian Nationalism and English Letters, pp. 138–41.
47. Romeo, Cavour e il suo tempo, Vol. 3, p. 801.
48. A. M. Banti and D. Mondini, ‘Da Novara a Custoza: culture
militari e discorso nazionale tra Risorgimento e Unitá’, in W.
Barberis (ed.), Storia d’Italia. Annali 18: Guerra e pace (Turin,
2002), p. 436.
49. Romeo, Cavour e il suo tempo, Vol. 3, p. 917.
50. C. Duggan, Francesco Crispi. From Nation to Nationalism (Oxford,
2002), p. 223.
51. J. Rosselli, The Life of Verdi (Cambridge, 2000), p. 123.
52. G. Verdi, Letters of Giuseppe Verdi. Selected, Translated and Edited
by Charles Osborne (London, 1971), p. 126 (Verdi to mayor of
Borgo San Donnino, 6 January 1861).
53. F. Della Peruta, ‘Verdi e il Risorgimento’, in F. Della Peruta,
Uomini e idee dell’Ottocento italiano (Milan, 2002), p. 232.
54. Cf. Rosselli, Life of Verdi, pp. 82–5,93, 128–31.
55. F. Chabod, Storia della politica estera italiana dal 1870 al 1896.
Vol. 1: Le premesse (Bari, 1951), pp. 512–28.
56. A. Mattone, ‘I miti fondatori del parlamentarismo italiano’, in L.
Violante (ed.), Storia d’Italia. Annali 17: Il parlamento (Turin,
2001), pp. 18–20.
57. G. Carducci, ‘Il parlamento’, in Edizione nazionale delle opere di
Giosuè Carducci. Vol. 4: Odi barbare e rime e ritmi (Bologna,
1944), pp. 259–65.
58. F. De Sanctis, I partitie l’educazione della nuova Italia, ed. N.
Cortese (Turin, 1970), p. 516.
59. F. Petruccelli della Gattina, I moribondi del Palazzo Carignano
(Milan, 1862).
60. F. Cammarano, ‘Nazionalizzazione della politica e
politicizzazione della nazione. I dilemmi della classe dirigente
nell’Italia liberale’, in M. Meriggi and P. Schiera (eds.), Dalla
cittá alla nazione. Borghesie ottocentesche in Italia e in Germania
(Bologna, 1993), pp. 142–5.
61. De Sanctis, Il Mezzogiornoe lo Stato unitario, pp. 201,215 (2 July
1864).

12: The Road to Rome, 1861–70

1. R. Romeo, Cavour e il suo tempo. Vol. 3: 1854–1861 (Rome–Bari,

1984), pp. 908–9.
2. M. d’Azeglio, ‘Questioni urgenti. Pensieri’, in M. d’Azeglio, Scritti
e discorsi politici. Vol. 3: 1853–65 (ed. M. De Rubris) (Florence,
1938), p. 374.
3. F. Chabod, Storia della politica estera italiana dal 1870 al 1896.
Vol. 1: Le premesse (Bari, 1951), p. 320.
4. F. Curato, ‘Aspetti nazionalistici della politica estera italiana dal
1870 al 1914’, in R. Lill and F. Valsecchi (eds.), Il nazionalismo
in Italiae Germania no alla Prima guerra mondiale (Bologna,
1983), p. 17.
5. Chabod, Storia della politica estera italiana, p. 318.
6. E. Gentile, La grande Italia. Ascesae declino del mito della nazione
nel ventesimo secolo (Milan, 1997), p. 48.
7. Chabod, Storia della politica estera italiana, p. 203.
8. A. Scirocco, Garibaldi. Battaglie, amori, ideali di un cittadino del
mondo (Rome–Bari, 2001), p. 311.
9. D. Mack Smith, Vittorio Emanuele II (Rome–Bari, 1975), pp. 169–
77.
10. Scirocco, Garibaldi. Battaglie, amori, ideali, pp. 322–3; G.
Garibaldi, Le memorie di Garibaldi nella redazione de nitiva del
1872 (Bologna, 1932), pp. 496–9.
11. D. Pick, Rome or Death. The Obsessions of General Garibaldi
(London, 2005), p. 101.
12. C. Duggan, Fascism and the Ma a (New Haven and London,
1989), pp. 24–7.
13. Cf. A. M. Banti, La nazione del Risorgimento. Parentela, santitá e
onore alle origini dell’Italia unita (Turin, 2000), pp. 141–2.
14. M. d’Azeglio, Lettere di Massimo d’Azeglio a sua moglie Luisa
Blondel, ed. G. Carcano (Milan, 1870), p. 523 (25 October
1864).
15. S. Sepe, ‘Amministrazione e “nazionalizzazione”. Il ruolo della
burocrazia statale nella costruzione dello Stato unitario (1861–
1900)’, in M. Meriggi and P. Schiera (eds.), Dalla cittá alla
nazione. Borghesie ottocentesche in Italia e in Germania (Bologna,
1993), pp. 310–35.
16. M. d’Azeglio, Lettere di Massimo d’Azeglio a Giuseppe Torelli, ed.
C. Paoli (Milan, 1870), p. 440 (3 December 1864).
17. M. d’Azeglio, I miei ricordi (Turin, 1949), p. 38.
18. D’Azeglio, Lettere di Massimo d’Azeglio a Giuseppe Torelli, p. 212
(8February 1865).
19. F. D’Amoja, ‘La sinistra e i problemi di politica estera’, in
Rassegna storica toscana, XI, 2 (1965), p. 61.
20. F. Crispi, Discorsi parlamentari di Francesco Crispi, Vol. 1 (Rome,
1915), pp. 716–17 (8 May 1866).
21. F. De Sanctis, Un viaggio elettorale, ed. N. Cortese (Turin, 1968),
p. 391(31 May 1866).
22. Ibid., p. 400 (23 June 1866).
23. E. De Amicis, La vita militare (Florence, 1869), p. 384.
24. S. Sonnino, Diario 1866–1912, Vol. 1, ed. B. Brown (Rome–Bari,
1972), p. 43 (20 June 1866).
25. Ibid., p. 9 (17 May 1866).
26. A. Pollio, Custoza (1866) (Rome, 1925), p. 32.
27. Ibid., pp. 138,233, 257,315, 319.
28. Mack Smith, Vittorio Emanuele II, pp. 212–13,253–4.
29. I. Massabò Ricci, ‘L’Alta Corte di giustizia e il processo Persano’,
in L. Violante (ed.), Storia d’Italia. Annali 17: Il parlamento
(Turin, 2001), p. 1100.
30. Ibid., pp. 1117–22.
31. C. Duggan, Francesco Crispi. From Nation to Nationalism (Oxford,
2002), p. 283 (Crispi to Bertani, 12 August 1866).
32. G. Fortunato, Carteggio. Vol: 1: 1865–1911, ed. E. Gentile
(Rome–Bari, 1978), pp. 234–5(Fortunato to Abba, 6 August
1910).
33. P. Villari, ‘Di chi è la colpa? O sia la pace e la guerra’, in P.
Villari, Le lettere meridionali e altri scritti sulla questione sociale in
Italia (Naples, 1979), pp. 113,138.
34. E. Pantano, Memorie. Dai rintocchi della Gancia a quelli di S.
Giusto. Vol. 1 (1860–70) (Bologna, 1933), pp. 232–6; M. Da
Passano (ed.), I moti di Palermo del 1866. Verbali della
Commissione parlamentare di inchiesta (Rome, 1981), p. 103.
35. Duggan, Fascism and the Ma a, pp. 29–30.
36. F. Petruccelli della Gattina, Storia d’Italia dal 1866 al 1880
(Naples, 1882), pp. 46,55–6; G. Candeloro, Storia dell’Italia
moderna. Vol. 5: La costruzione dello Stato unitario (1860–1870)
(Milan, 1968), p. 346.
37. F. Crispi, Carteggi politici inediti di Francesco Crispi (1860–1900),
estratti dal suo archivio, ordinati e annotati da T. Palamenghi Crispi
(Rome, 1912), p. 248 (27 September 1867).
38. G. Finali, Memorie (Faenza, 1955), p. 346.
39. G. Carducci, Canto dell’Italia che va in Campidoglio, in Edizione
nazionale delle opere di Giosuè Carducci. Vol. 3: Giambi ed epodi e
rime nuove (Bologna, 1944), pp. 85–8.
40. G. Carducci, ‘Per Vincenzo Caldesi otto mesi dopo la sua morte’,
in ibid., pp 76–7.

13: The Threat From the South, 1870–85

1. F. De Sanctis, Storia della letteratura italiana, Vol. 2, ed. N. Gallo

(Turin, 1962), p. 612.
2. Ibid., pp. 606–7.
3. Ibid., pp. 974–5.
4. Cf. G. Farrell-Vinay, Povertàe politica nell’Ottocento. Le opere pie
nello Stato liberale (Turin, 1997), pp. 32–60,95–124.
5. E. Sereni, Il capitalismo nelle campagne, 1860–1900 (Turin,
1968), pp. 142–5.
6. Cf. V. Zamagni, Dalla periferia al centro. La seconda rinascita
economica dell’Italia: 1861–1981 (Bologna, 1990), pp. 219–29.
7. G. Candeloro, Storia dell’Italia moderna. Vol. 5: La costruzione
dello Stato unitario (1860–1870) (Milan, 1978), p. 253.
8. L. Franchetti and S. Sonnino, Inchiesta in Sicilia. Vol. 2: I
contadini (Florence, 1974), p. 184.
9. C. Duggan, Francesco Crispi. From Nation to Nationalism (Oxford,
2002), pp. 344–5.
10. Cf. A. Capatti, A. De Bernardi and A. Varni (eds.), Storia d’Italia.
Annali 13: L’alimentazione, pp. xlix–liv.
11. G. Montroni, La società italiana dall’uni cazione alla Grande
Guerra (Rome–Bari, 2002), pp. 21–2.
12. Cf. M. Petrusewicz, Come il Meridione divenne una Questione.
Rappresentazioni del Sud prima e dopo il Quarantotto (Catanzaro,
1998), pp. 35–8,135–6,144–50.
13. C. Duggan, Fascism and the Ma a (New Haven and London,
1989), pp. 33–6.
14. L. Franchetti and S. Sonnino, Inchiesta in Sicilia. Vol. 1:
Condizioni politichee amministrative (Florence, 1974), pp. 5–7,23–
5,31–3,92, 101,106–7.
15. Ibid., pp. 52,101.
16. Ibid., pp. 132–4,224.
17. Cf. D. Frigessi, Cesare Lombroso (Turin, 2003), pp. 97–101; R.
Villa, Il deviante e i suoi segni. Lombroso e la nascita
dell’antropologia criminale (Milan, 1985), pp. 147–56.
18. M. Gibson, Born to Crime. Cesare Lombroso and the Origins of
Biological Criminality (Westport, 2002), p. 100.
19. Ibid., p. 106.
20. C. Lombroso, L’uomo delinquente in rapporto all’antropologia, alla
giurisprudenza ed alle discipline carcerarie, Vol. 1(Turin, 1889), p.
85.
21. Ibid., p. 577.
22. Gibson, Born to Crime, p. 127.
23. F. Turati, Il delitto e la questione sociale: appunti sulla questione
sociale (Bologna, 1913), p. 14.
24. Gibson, Born to Crime, pp. 29–30.
25. Atti della Giunta per la inchiesta agraria e sulle condizioni della
classe agricola (Presidente della Giunta: Conte Stefano Jacini)
(Rome 1881–5).
26. R. Molinelli, Pasquale Turiello precursore del nazionalismo italiano
(Urbino, 1968), pp. 12–14.
27. P. Turiello, Governo e governati in Italia. Fatti (Bologna, 1889), p.
106.
28. Ibid., pp. 109–11.
29. Ibid., p. 309.
30. P. Turiello, Governo e governati in Italia. Proposte (Bologna,
1890), p. 113.
31. Ibid., p. 238; Turiello, Governo e governati in Italia. Fatti, pp.
8,53, 319.

14: National Education

1. S. Pivato, ‘Tricolore e simboli patriottici nell’onomastica post-

risorgimentale’, in F. Tarozzi and G. Vecchio (eds.), Gli italiani e
il tricolore. Patriottismo, identità nazionale e fratture sociali lungo
due secoli di storia (Bologna, 1999), pp. 161–5. Cf. A. C. Jemolo,
Anni di prova (Vicenza, 1969), p. 4.
2. G. Bini, ‘Romanzi e realtà di maestri e maestre’, in Storia d’Italia.
Annali 4: Intellettuali e potere, ed. C. Vivanti (Turin, 1981), pp.
1201–2.
3. E. Catarsi, ‘Il suicidio della maestra Italia Donati’, in Studi di
storia dell’educazione, 1,3 (1981), pp. 35–6.
4. S. Pivato, Pane e grammatica. L’istruzione elementare in Romagna
alla ne dell’800 (Milan, 1983), pp. 45–6.
5. Ibid., p. 53.
6. T. De Mauro, Storia linguistica dell’Italia unita (Rome–Bari, 1984),
p. 325.
7. Ibid., pp. 88–9; A. Asor Rosa, La cultura, in Storia d’Italia. Vol. 4:
Dall’Unità ad oggi (Turin, 1975), pp. 903–9.
8. A. Bertani, Discorsi parlamentari di Agostino Bertani pubblicati per
deliberazione della Camera dei Deputati (Rome, 1913), p. 564 (22
 June 1884).
9. Pivato, Pane e grammatica, pp. 43–4.
10. Catarsi, ‘Il suicidio della maestra Italia Donati’, p. 36.
11. Ibid., pp. 36–7.
12. C. Paladini, ‘Le sventure di Italia Donati’, in Corriere della Sera,
10–11 June 1886.
13. Ibid.
14. Catarsi, ‘Il suicidio della maestra Italia Donati’, pp. 41–2,44–6.
15. Bini, ‘Romanzi e realtà di maestri e maestre’, pp. 1204–5.
16. M. Lessona, Volere è potere (Sesto San Giovanni, 1915), p. 6.
17. S. Lanaro, Nazione e lavoro. Saggio sulla cultura borghese in Italia
1870–1925 (Venice, 1979), p. 121.
18. P. Pancrazi, ‘Vita del Collodi’, in Tutto Collodi. Per i piccoli e per i
grandi, ed. P. Pancrazi (Florence, 1948), p. xxix.
19. C. Collodi, Le avventure di Pinocchio. Storia di un burattino, ed. F.
Tempesti (Milan, 1983), p. 154.
20. G. Carducci, Eterno femminino regale. Dalle mie memorie (Rome,
1982).
21. Lessona, Volere è potere, p. 31.
22. A. Capatti, A. De Bernardi and A. Varni (eds.), Storia d’Italia.
Annali 13: L’alimentazione (Turin, 1998), p. xlviii.
23. L. Magliaretta, ‘Alimentazione, casa, salute’, in S. Lanaro (ed.),
Storia d’Italia. Le regioni dall’Unità a oggi. Il Veneto (Turin, 1984),
p. 681.
24. F. Mazzonis, ‘L’esercito italiano al tempo di Garibaldi’, in F.
Mazzonis (ed.), Garibaldi condottiero. Storia, teoria, prassi (Milan,
1984), pp. 204–5.
25. F. De Sanctis, I partiti e l’educazione della nuova Italia, ed. N.
Cortese (Turin, 1970), pp. 227–30,255–6.
26. G. Bonetta, Corpo e nazione. L’educazione ginnastica, igienica e
sessuale nell’Italia liberale (Milan, 1990), p. 83.
27. G. Montroni, La società italiana dall’uni cazione alla Grande
Guerra (Rome–Bari, 2002), pp. 163–4.
28. Ibid., p. 84.
29. G. Oliva, ‘La naja’, in M. Isnenghi (ed.), I luoghi della memoria.
Strutture ed eventi dell’Italia unita (Rome–Bari, 1997), pp. 98–9.
30. E. De Amicis, La vita militare (Florence, 1869), p. 257.
31. E. De Amicis, Cuore. Libro per i ragazzi, ed. L. Tamburini (Turin,
2001), pp. 47–8.
32. Oliva, ‘La naja’, p. 98.
33. Ibid., pp. 97,100; R. Leydi, Canti sociali italiani. Vol. 1: Canti
giacobini, repubblicani, antirisorgimentali, di protesta postunitaria
contro la guerra e il servizio militare (Milan, 1963), pp. 348,366,
382–94; S. Lanaro, ‘Da contadini a italiani’, in P. Bevilacqua
(ed.), Storia dell’agricoltura italiana in età contemporanea. Vol. 3:
Mercati e istituzioni (Venice, 1991), p. 938.
34. Cf. N. Revelli, Il mondo dei vinti. Testimonianze di vita contadina,
Vol. 1 (Turin 1977), p. 57; Oliva, ‘La naja’, p. 100.
35. Mazzonis, ‘L’esercito italiano al tempo di Garibaldi’, pp. 240–1.
36. Ibid., pp. 206–7; Leydi, Canti sociali italiani, pp. 401–3.
37. R. Romanelli, L’Italia liberale (1861–1900) (Bologna, 1979), p.
55.
38. G. Verga, ‘Cavalleria rusticana’, in Tutte le novelle di Giovanni
Verga, Vol. 1 (Milan, 1959), p. 107.
39. N. Labanca, ‘I programmi dell’educazione morale del soldato.
Per uno studio sulla pedagogia militare nell’Italia liberale’, in
Esercito e città dall’Unità agli anni Trenta. Atti del Convegno di
studi, Spoleto 11–14 maggio 1988, Vol. 1 (Rome, 1989), pp. 523–
5; Mazzonis, ‘L’esercito italiano al tempo di Garibaldi’, pp. 237–
8.
40. Mazzonis, ‘L’esercito italiano al tempo di Garibaldi’, p. 205.
41. P. Del Negro, ‘L’esercito italiano da Napoleone a Vittorio
Veneto: fattore di identità nazionale?’, in S. Bertelli (ed.), La
chioma della vittoria. Scritti sull’identità degli italiani dall’Unità alla
seconda Repubblica (Florence, 1997), p. 73.
42. N. Marselli, Gli avvenimenti del 1870–71. Studio politico e militare
(Turin, 1871), pp. 141–2.
43. Mazzonis, ‘L’esercito italiano al tempo di Garibaldi’, p. 202.
44. A. Guiccioli, Diario di un conservatore (Milan, 1973), p. 22 (2
June 1877).
45. Marselli, Gli avvenimenti del 1870–71, pp. 31,139; N. Marselli,
La politica dello Stato italiano (Naples, 1882), p. 402.
46. Marselli, La politica dello Stato italiano, p. 398.
47. Del Negro, ‘L’esercito italiano da Napoleone a Vittorio Veneto’,
p. 78.
48. I. Porciani, ‘Stato e nazione: l’immagine debole dell’Italia’, in S.
Soldani and G. Turi (eds.), Fare gli italiani. Scuola e cultura
nell’Italia contemporanea. Vol. I: La nascita dello Stato nazionale
(Bologna, 1993), pp. 398–9.
49. I. Porciani, La festa della nazione. Rappresentazione dello Stato e
spazi sociali nell’Italia unita (Bologna, 1997), pp. 22–3,37.
50. Ibid., p. 207.
51. Ibid., pp. 105–7.
52. Ibid., pp. 123–33.
53. ‘L’isola sacra’, in La Riforma, 10 June 1882.
54. E. Irace, Itale glorie (Bologna, 2003), p. 176.
55. R. Certini, Il mito di Garibaldi. La formazione dell’immaginario
popolare nell’Italia unita (Milan, 2000), pp. 99–102,117–18.
56. F. Crispi, Scritti e discorsi politici di Francesco Crispi (1849–1890)
(Rome, 1890), pp. 655–8(‘Giuseppe Garibaldi’, 1 June 1884).
57. C. Brice, Monumentalité publique et politique à Rome. Le Vittoriano
(Rome, 1998), pp. 43–4.
58. Irace, Itale glorie, p. 188.
59. S. Montaldo, Patria e a ari. Tommaso Villa e la costruzione del
consenso tra Unità e Grande Guerra (Turin, 1999), pp. 312–13.
60. S. Soldani, ‘Il Risorgimento a scuola: incertezze dello Stato e
lenta formazione di un pubblico di lettori’, in E. Dirani (ed.),
Alfredo Oriani e la cultura del suo tempo (Ravenna, 1985), pp.
154–6.
61. D. Mack Smith, ‘Documentary falsi cation and Italian
biography’, in T. Blanning and D. Cannadine (eds.), History and
Biography. Essays in Honour of Derek Beales (Cambridge, 1996),
pp. 182–4.

15: Sources of Authority

1. Cf. A. C. Jemolo, Chiesa e Stato in Italia negli ultimi cento anni

(Turin, 1963), pp. 175–6,186–7.
2. Cf. P. Scoppola, Dal neoguel smo alla democrazia cristiana (Rome,
1963), pp. 32–68.
3. A. Bertani, Discorsi parlamentari di Agostino Bertani pubblicati per
deliberazione della Camera dei Deputati (Rome, 1913), pp. 372–3
(25 July 1877).
4. Ibid., p. 374.
5. G. Finali, Memorie (Faenza, 1955), p. 525.
6. U. Pesci, I primi anni di Roma capitale (1870–1878) (Florence,
1907), p. 68.
7. D. Pick, Rome or Death. The Obsessions of General Garibaldi
(London, 2005), pp. 1–9,183–200.
8. A. Caracciolo, Roma capitale. Dal Risorgimento allo Stato liberale
(Rome, 1956), p. 121.
9. A. Riccardi, ‘La vita religiosa’, in V. Vidotto (ed.), Storia di Roma
dall’antichità a oggi. Roma capitale (Rome–Bari, 2002), p. 278.
10. G. Pácout, Il lungo Risorgimento. La nascita dell’Italia
contemporanea (1770–1922) (Milan, 1999), p. 286.
11. C. Hibbert, Rome. The Biography of a City (New York, 1985), p.
280.
12. P. Alatri, Gabriele D’Annunzio (Turin, 1983), p. 27.
13. Caracciolo, Roma capitale, pp. 190–92.
14. A. Asor Rosa, La cultura, in Storia d’Italia. Vol. 4: Dall’Unità ad
oggi (Turin, 1975), p. 831.
15. G. Carducci, ‘Roma’, in Edizione nazionale delle opere di Giosuè
Carducci. Vol. 4: Odi barbare e rime e ritmi (Bologna, 1944), pp.
30–31.
16. Carducci, in ibid., Vol. 24: Confessioni e battaglie, serie prima
(Bologna, 1944) pp. 127–8(preface to Levia Gravia, 1881).
17. C. Dossi, Opere, ed. D. Isella (Milan, 1995), p. 1324.
18. L. Pirandello, I vecchi e i giovani, in L. Pirandello, Tutti i romanzi,
Vol. 2, ed. G. Macchia (Milan, 2003), p. 273.
19. D. Mack Smith, Vittorio Emanuele II (Rome–Bari, 1975), p. 334.
20. Cf. U. Pesci, I primi anni di Roma capitale (1870–1878)
(Florence, 1907), pp. 589–91.
21. C. Duggan, Francesco Crispi. From Nation to Nationalism (Oxford,
2002), pp. 379–81.
22. Ibid.; U. Levra, Fare gli italiani. Memoria e celebrazione del
Risorgimento (Turin, 1992), p. 18.
23. A. C. De Meis, Il sovrano. Saggio di loso a politica con riferenza
all’Italia, ed. B. Croce (Bari, 1927), pp. 20,53, 67.
24. S. Romano, Crispi. Progetto per una dittatura (Milan, 1973), p.
121.
25. Nuova antologia, 1 December 1878 (23), p. 535.
26. Duggan, Franceso Crispi, p. 393 (7 December 1878).
27. M. Casciato, ‘Lo sviluppo urbano e il disegno della città’, in
Vidotto (ed.), Storia di Roma dall’antichità a oggi, p. 152.
28. B. Tobia, Una patria per gli italiani (Rome–Bari, 1991), pp. 140–
41.
29. Cf. H. Busch (ed. and trans.), Verdi’s Otello and Simon Boccanegra
(Revised Edition) in Letters and Documents, Vol. 1 (Oxford, 1988),
pp. 29,37–41.
30. A. M. Banti, Storia della borghesia italiana (Rome, 1996), p. 239.
31. A. Mazzoleni, Il popolo italiano. Studi politici (Milan, 1873), p.
322.
32. F. Martini, Confessioni e ricordi (1859–1892) (Milan, 1929), pp.
120–21.
33. G. Lanza, Le carte di Giovanni Lanza. Vol. 9 (luglio 1873–1877),
ed. C. M. De Vecchi di Val Cismon (Turin, 1940), p. 445 (Dina
to Lanza, 20 November 1876).
34. F. De Sanctis, I partiti e l’educazione della nuova Italia (Turin,
1970), p. 380 (11 May 1880).
35. F. De Sanctis, Il Mezzogiorno e lo stato unitario (Turin, 1960), p.
358(L’Italia, 16 February 1864).
36. Duggan, Francesco Crispi, p. 333.
37. F. De Sanctis, Un viaggio elettorale, ed. N. Cortese (Turin, 1968),
p. 32.
38. R. Romanelli, ‘Le regole del gioco. Note sull’impianto del
sistema elettorale in Italia (1848–1895)’, in Quaderni storici, 69
(3) (December 1988), p. 699.
39. Ibid., p. 700.
40. Cf. G. Mosca, Teorica dei governi e governo parlamentare. Studii
storici e sociali (Palermo, 1884), pp. 295–302,318–22; Banti,
Storia della borghesia italiana, p. 243.
41. De Sanctis, I partiti e l’educazione della nuova Italia, p. 389.
42. R. Bonghi, Discorsi parlamentari, ed. G. Gentile (Florence, 1934),
pp. 282,291 (13 May 1881).
43. Atti parlamentari, Camera dei Deputati, Discussioni, 18 June 1881,
pp. 8726–8.
44. La Riforma, 25 April 1891 (‘Il ritorno al collegio uninominale’).
45. F. Crispi, Discorsi elettorali di Francesco Crispi 1865–1886, p. 230
(19 May 1886).
46. F. Soddu, ‘Il ruolo del Parlamento nella costruzione dell’unità
politica e amministrativa’, in L. Violante (ed.), Storia d’Italia.
Annali 18: Il parlamento (Turin, 2001), pp. 102–4.
47. C. Fumian, ‘Patroni e padroni. La grande possidenza tra declino
e metamorfosi’, in S. Lanaro (ed.), Storia d’Italia. Le regioni
dall’Unità a oggi. Il Veneto (Turin, 1984), p. 113.
48. F. Cammarano, ‘Nazionalizzazione della politica e
politicizzazione della nazione. I dilemmi della classe dirigente
nell’Italia liberale’, in M. Meriggi and P. Schiera (eds.), Dalla
città alla nazione. Borghesie ottocentesche in Italia e in Germania
(Bologna, 1993), pp. 144–5.
49. F. Chabod, Storia della politica estera italiana dal 1870 al 1896.
Vol. 1: Le premesse (Bari, 1951), p. 385(Minghetti to Luzzatti, 29
August 1881).
50. G. Sabbatucci, Il trasformismo come sistema (Rome–Bari, 2003),
pp. 18–27.
51. Ibid., p. 26.
52. Martini, Confessioni e ricordi, p. 148.
53. La Riforma, 28 July 1885.

16: Francesco Crispi and the ‘New European Order’, 1887–91

1. F. Martini, Confessioni e ricordi (1859–1892) (Milan, 1929), pp.

213–14.
2. C. W. Dilke, The Present Position of European Politics or Europe in
1887 (London, 1887), p. 251.
3. G. Astuto (ed.), Crispi e Damiani. Carteggio (1876–1899)
(Catania, 1984), p. 15 (Crispi to Damiani, 28 June 1878).
4. P. Turiello, Governo e governati in Italia. Fatti (Bologna, 1889),
pp. 302–3.
5. M. Biancale, Michele Cammarano (Milan–Rome, 1936), pp. 84–
92.
6. F. Chabod, Storia della politica estera italiana dal 1870 al 1896.
Vol. 1: Le premesse (Bari, 1951), p. 14.
7. A. Guiccioli, ‘Diario del 1882’, in Nuova antologia, 16 August
1936, pp. 439–41 (22 April 1882,16 May 1882).
8. R. Bonghi, Discorsi parlamentari, ed. G. Gentile (Florence, 1934),
p. 313 (14–15 May 1883).
9. C. Duggan, Francesco Crispi. From Nation to Nationalism (Oxford,
2002), p. 413 (19 May 1883).
10. Martini, Confessioni e ricordi, p. 224.
11. I documenti diplomatici italiani. Seconda serie: 1870–1896, Vol. 21
(31 July 1887–31 March 1888), ed. R. Mori (Rome, 1968), pp.
450–54 (31 January 1888).
12. Die grosse Politik der europä ischen Kabinette 1871–1914, Vol. 6
(Berlin, 1924–7), n. 1293 (Solms to Herbert von Bismarck, 20
October 1887).
13. Duggan, Francesco Crispi, pp. 515–18.
14. Ibid., p. 531 (Salisbury to Du erin, 28 December 1888).
15. I documenti diplomatici italiani. Seconda serie: 1870–1896, Vol. 22
(1 April 1888–31 August 1889), ed. G. Carocci (Rome, 1994),
pp. 21–2(Goiran to Cosenz, 22 April 1888).
16. Ibid.
17. A. Guiccioli, Diario di un conservatore (Milan, 1973), p. 157 (13
November 1888).
18. La Riforma, 27 May 1889.
19. Duggan, Francesco Crispi, p. 565.
20. Ibid., pp. 567–8.
21. Ibid., p. 567.
22. Ibid., p. 543 (Baron Blanc to Crispi, 10 January 1888).
23. Ibid., pp. 542–3.
24. G. Ferrero, La reazione (Turin, 1895), p. 7.
25. Ibid., pp. 12–15,18–20,28, 31,35–8,44–5.
26. Duggan, Francesco Crispi, p. 550 (1 December 1888).
27. D. Mack Smith, Italy and Its Monarchy (New Haven and London,
1989), p. 95.
28. Cf. N. Labanca, Oltremare. Storia dell’espansione coloniale italiana
(Bologna, 2002), pp. 57–8,70–73,217–34.
29. F. Crispi, Scritti e discorsi politici di Francesco Crispi (1849–1890)
(Rome, 1890), pp. 736–8.
30. Duggan, Francesco Crispi, pp. 599–605.

17: The Fin de Siècle Crisis

1. Public Record O ce, FO 45 700, Edwardes to Rosebery, 6

December 1893.
2. V. Zamagni, Dalla periferia al centro. La seconda rinascita
economica dell’Italia: 1861–1981 (Bologna, 1990), p. 159.
3. N. Colajanni, Banche e parlamentari. Fatti, discussioni e commenti
(Milan, 1993), pp. 236–7; N. Quilici, Banca Romana (Milan,
1935), pp. 74,458–9,514–15.
4. G. Manacorda, Dalla crisi alla crescita. Crisi economica e lotta
politica in Italia 1892–1896 (Rome, 1993), pp. 70–73. Cf. D.
Farini, Diario di ne secolo, ed. E. Morelli (Rome, 1961), pp.
320–22(22–7 August 1893).
 5. Atti Parlamentari, Camera dei Deputati, Discussioni, 20 December
1893.
6. Ibid., 28 February 1894.
7. Cf. F. Fonzi, Crispi e lo ‘Stato di Milano’ (Milan, 1965), pp. xvi–
xxiii.
8. Manacorda, Dalla crisi alla crescita, pp. 97–8; C. Duggan,
Francesco Crispi. From Nation to Nationalism (Oxford, 2002), pp.
640–41.
9. News International Archive, Stillman Papers, William J. Stillman
to Wallace, 18 March 1894.
10. Manacorda, Dalla crisi alla crescita, pp. 113–14.
11. P. Ballini, Le elezioni nella storia d’Italia dall’Unità al fascismo.
Pro lo storico-statistico (Bologna, 1988), p. 124.
12. Duggan, Francesco Crispi, pp. 673–4.
13. A. Guiccioli, Diario di un conservatore (Milan, 1973), p. 172 (16
September 1892).
14. Duggan, Francesco Crispi, p. 677 (2 January 1897); L. Mangoni,
Una crisi ne secolo. La cultura italiana e la Francia fra Otto e
Novecento (Turin, 1985), p. 162.
15. Duggan, Francesco Crispi, pp. 679–80.
16. Ibid., p. 665 (speech in Naples, 10 September 1894).
17. U. Levra, Fare gli italiani. Memoria e celebrazione del Risorgimento
(Turin, 1992), p. 340.
18. Duggan, Francesco Crispi, p. 698.
19. S. Sonnino, Diario 1866–1912, Vol. 1, ed. B. Brown (Rome–Bari,
1972), pp. 209 (10 January 1896), 213(15 January 1896).
20. Guiccioli, Diario di un conservatore, p. 201 (15 January 1895).
21. Duggan, Francesco Crispi, pp. 700–701.
22. La Riforma, 17 January 1896 (‘L’Italia nuova’).
23. H. G. Marcus, The Life and Times of Menelik II. Ethiopia 1844–
1913 (Oxford, 1975), pp. 171–3; A. Del Boca, Gli italiani in
Africa orientale. Dall’Unità alla Marcia su Roma (Rome–Bari,
1976), pp. 645–8,652, 691–2; J. Gooch, Army, State and Society
in Italy 1870–1915 (Basingstoke, 1989), pp. 90–92.
24. G. Candeloro, Storia dell’Italia moderna. Vol. 7: La crisi di ne
secolo e l’età giolittiana (Milan, 1974), p. 60. Cf. U. Levra, Il colpo
di stato della borghesia. La crisi politica della ne del secolo in Italia
(1896–1900) (Milan, 1975), pp. 115–20.
25. L. Ferraris, ‘L’assassinio di Umberto I e gli anarchici di
Paterson’, in Rassegna storica del Risorgimento, 55 (January–
March 1968), pp. 51–4.
26. B. Anatra, ‘Gaetano Bresci’, in Dizionario biogra co degli italiani,
Vol. 14 (Rome, 1972), p. 169.
27. S. Turone, Politica ladra. Storia della corruzione 1861–1992
(Rome–Bari, 1992), p. 80.

18: Rival Religions

1. J. Woodhouse, Gabriele D’Annunzio. De ant Archangel (Oxford,

2001), pp. 59–60.
2. Ibid., p. 167; P. Alatri, Gabriele D’Annunzio (Turin, 1983), pp.
189–90.
3. Woodhouse, Gabriele D’Annunzio, p. 168.
4. Alatri, Gabriele D’Annunzio, p. 196.
5. U. Levra, ‘Il parlamento nella crisi di ne secolo’, in L. Violante
(ed.), Storia d’Italia. Annali 17: Il parlamento (Turin, 2001), p.
163.
6. G. Manacorda (ed.), Il socialismo nella storia d’Italia. Storia
documentaria dal Risorgimento alla Repubblica, Vol. 1 (Rome–
Bari, 1970), pp. 106–7,112, 117(Bakunin, Circolare ai miei amici
d’Italia, 1871).
7. A. De Jaco (ed.), Gli anarchici. Cronaca inedita dell’Unità d’Italia
(Rome, 1971), pp. 212–14.
8. P. C. Masini, Gli Internazionalisti. La banda del Matese 1876–1878
(Milan, 1958), pp. 79–102.
9. Cf. G. Cerrito, Andrea Costa nel socialismo italiano (Rome, 1982),
pp. 209–22.
10. G. Candeloro, Storia dell’Italia moderna. Vol. 6: Lo sviluppo del
capitalismo e del movimento operaio (Milan, 1970), pp. 383–8.
11. Ibid., Vol. 7: La crisi di ne secolo e l’età giolittiana (Milan, 1974),
pp. 158–64,362–3.
12. V. Zamagni, Dalla periferia al centro. La seconda rinascita
economica dell’Italia: 1861–1981 (Bologna, 1990), pp. 116,121.
13. Ibid., pp. 128–9.
14. B. Mussolini, La mia vita (Rome, 1947), p. 28.
15. A. Labriola, Spiegazioni a me stesso (Naples, 1945), p. 118.
16. Cf. D. Cinel, The National Integration of Italian Return Migration
1870–1929 (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 172–6,230–31.
17. T. De Mauro, Storia linguistica dell’Italia unita (Rome–Bari,
1984), pp. 62–3.
18. R. Michels, Storia critica del movimento socialista italiano. Dagli
inizi no al 1911 (Florence, 1926), p. 191. Cf. L. Ellena, ‘ “Una
donna nel quadro può venire in prima linea con essi”:
genealogia di un’immagine’, in M. Nani, L. Ellena and M.
Scavino, Il Quarto Stato di Pellizza da Volpedo tra cultura e
politica. Un’immagine e la sua fortuna (Turin, 2002), pp. 65–7.
19. R. Monteleone, Filippo Turati (Turin, 1987), p. 16.
20. Ibid., pp. 15–30.
21. C. Petraccone, Le due civiltà. Settentrionali e meridionali nella
storia d’Italia (Rome–Bari, 2000), p. 183.
22. Monteleone, Filippo Turati, pp. 146–7.
23. Ibid., p. 148.
24. C. G. Lacaita, ‘Politica e istruzione popolare nel movimento
socialista’, in G. Genovesi and C. G. Lacaita (eds.), Istruzione
popolare nell’Italia liberale. Le alternative delle correnti di
opposizione (Milan, 1983), p. 25.
25. G. Turi, ‘Intellettuali e propaganda nel movimento socialista’, in
S. Soldani and G. Turi (eds.), Fare gli italiani. Scuola e cultura
nell’Italia contemporanea. Vol. I: La nascita dello Stato nazionale
(Bologna, 1993), p. 490.
26. R. Michels, Storia critica del movimento socialista italiano. Dagli
inizi no al 1911 (Florence, 1926), pp. 356–7.
27. Ibid., p. 197.
28. Turi, ‘Intellettuali e propaganda nel movimento socialista’, p.
487.
29. Michels, Storia critica del movimento socialista Italiano, pp. 367–
8.
30. Ibid., p. 197.
31. Manacorda (ed.), Il socialismo nella storia d’Italia, Vol. 1, p. 156.
32. Cf. S. F. Romano, Storia dei Fasci siciliani (Bari, 1959), pp. 230–
37.
33. I. De Begnac, Vita di Benito Mussolini. Vol. I: Alla scuola della
rivoluzione antica (Verona, 1936), pp. 319–20.
34. Michels, Storia critica del movimento socialista italiano, p. 218.
35. Monteleone, Filippo Turati, p. 146.
36. D. Mack Smith, Modern Italy. A Political History (New Haven and
London, 1997), p. 185.
37. C. Treves, ‘Giolitti’, in G. Pischel, Antologia della Critica Sociale,
ed. G. Arfè (Manduria, 1992), p. 85 (1 August 1899).
38. Discorsi parlamentari di Giovanni Giolitti pubblicati per
deliberazione della Camera dei Deputati, Vol. 2 (Rome, 1953), pp.
632–3(4 February 1901).
39. G. Giolitti, Memorie della mia vita, Vol. 1 (Milan, 1922), p. 166.
40. A. M. Banti, Storia della borghesia italiana (Rome, 1996), p. 293.
41. A. Capatti, A. De Bernardi and A. Varni (eds.), Storia d’Italia.
Annali 13: L’alimentazione (Turin, 1998), p. xxxv.
42. Michels, Storia critica del movimento socialista italiano, p. 374.
43. L. Allegra, ‘Il parroco: un mediatore fra alta e bassa cultura’, in
Storia d’Italia. Annali 4: Intellettuali e potere, ed. C. Vivanti
(Turin, 1981), p. 945.
44. D. I. Kertzer, ‘Religion and society, 1789–1892’, in J. A. Davis
(ed.), Italy in the Nineteenth Century 1796–1900 (Oxford, 2000),
p. 198.
45. U. Pesci, I primi anni di Roma capitale (1870–1878) (Florence,
1907), p. 48.
46. G. Miccoli, ‘Chiesa e società in Italia dal Concilio Vaticano I
(1870) al ponti cato di Giovanni XXIII’, in Storia d’Italia. Vol. 5:
I documenti (2) (Turin, 1973), pp. 1508–9.
47. I. Porciani, La festa della nazione. Rappresentazione dello Stato e
spazi sociali nell’Italia unita (Bologna, 1997), pp. 189–90.
48. M. Isnenghi, ‘I luoghi della cultura’, in S. Lanaro (ed.), Storia
d’Italia. Le regioni dall’Unità a oggi. Il Veneto (Turin, 1984), pp.
348–9.
49. S. Pivato, Pane e grammatica. L’istruzione elementare in Romagna
alla ne dell’800 (Milan, 1983), pp. 128–9.
50. Ibid., pp. 131–4.
51. Isnenghi, ‘I luoghi della cultura’, p. 357.
52. Ibid., pp. 137–8.
53. Pivato, Pane e grammatica, p. 135.
54. Michels, Storia critica del movimento socialista italiano, p. 373.
55. M. Clark, Modern Italy 1871–1995 (London, 1996), p. 149.
56. Giolitti, Memorie della mia vita, Vol. 2, pp. 307–8.
57. G. Pini and D. Susmel, Mussolini: l’uomo e l’opera, Vol. 1
(Florence, 1953), pp. 111,146–7.
58. G. Salvemini, ‘Il ministro della malavita’, in Opere di Gaetano
Salvemini. Vol. 4: Il Mezzogiorno e la democrazia italiana (1)
(Milan, 1962), pp. 73–141.
59. Michels, Storia critica del movimento socialista italiano, p. 255.
60. J. E. Miller, From Elite to Mass Politics. Italian Socialism in the
Giolittian Era, 1900–1914 (Kent, 1990), p. 8(Avanti, 12 May
1903).
61. Mussolini, La mia vita, pp. 60–61,69–71.
62. Ibid., pp. 25–6; Pini and Susmel, Mussolini: l’uomo e l’opera, Vol.
1, p. 32.
63. Pini and Susmel, Mussolini: l’uomo e l’opera, Vol. 1, p. 42.
64. De Begnac, Vita di Benito Mussolini, Vol. 1, p. 321.
65. R. Bosworth, Mussolini (London, 2002), p. 53.
66. D. Mack Smith, Mussolini (London, 1983), p. 15.
67. Pini and Susmel, Mussolini: l’uomo e l’opera, Vol. 1, p. 147.
68. R. De Felice, Mussolini il rivoluzionario 1883–1920 (Turin, 1965),
p. 116.
69. De Begnac, Vita di Benito Mussolini, Vol. 1, p. 239.
70. Pini and Susmel, Mussolini: l’uomo e l’opera. Vol. 1, p. 56; De
Felice, Mussolini il rivoluzionario, p. 14.
71. Ibid., p. 77.
72. G. Prezzolini, La Voce 1908–1913. Cronaca, antologia e fortuna di
una rivista (Milan, 1974), p. 933(Vita trentina, 3 April 1909).

19: Nationalism

1. G. D’Annunzio, ‘Canto di festa per calendimaggio’, in Tutte le

opere di Gabriele D’Annunzio. Versi d’amore e di gloria, Vol. 2
(Milan, 1952), pp. 543–8.
 2. G. D’Annunzio, La Nave, in Tutte le opere di Gabriele D’Annunzio.
Tragedie, sogni e misteri, Vol. 2(Milan, 1950), pp. 3–210.
3. P. Alatri, Gabriele D’Annunzio (Turin, 1983), pp. 343–4(to
Maurice Paláologue, 16 June 1914).
4. Discorsi parlamentari di Antonio Salandra. Pubblicati per
deliberazione della Camera dei Deputati, Vol. 1 (Rome, 1959), p.
375(9 December 1901).
5. Ibid., Vol. 2, p. 792 (17 December 1913).
6. G. Amendola, Carteggio. Vol. I: 1897–1909, ed. E. d’Auria
(Rome–Bari, 1986), p. 87 (to Eva Kuhn, 6 June 1904).
7. ‘Gian Falco’ (G. Papini), ‘Campagna per il forzato risveglio’
(Leonardo, 1906), in D. Frigessi (ed.), La cultura italiana del ’900
attraverso le riviste. Vol. I: ‘Leonardo’, ‘Hermes’, ‘Il Regno’ (Turin,
1960), pp. 312,314.
8. G. Prezzolini, L’italiano inutile. Memorie letterarie di Francia, Italia
e America (Milan, 1953), p. 93.
9. G. Prezzolini, ‘Le due Italie’ (Il Regno, 1904), in Frigessi (ed.), La
cultura italiana del ’900 attraverso le riviste, Vol. 1, p. 502.
10. E. Corradini, ‘Tornando sul nostro programma’ (Il Regno, 1904),
in Frigessi (ed.), La cultura italiana del ’900 attraverso le rivirte,
Vol. 1, p. 518.
11. G. Prezzolini, La Voce 1908–1913. Cronaca, antologia e fortuna di
una rivista (Milan, 1974), pp. 758 (11 August 1910), 761(28
August 1910).
12. Ibid., p. 327 (1 September 1910).
13. G. Prezzolini, ‘A chi giova la lotta di classe?’ (Il Regno, 1904), in
Frigessi (ed.), La cultura italiana del ’900 attraverso le riviste, Vol.
1, p. 490.
14. L. Valli, ‘Che cosa è e che cosa vuole il nazionalismo’, in F.
Perfetti, Il movimento nazionalista in Italia (1903–1914) (Rome,
1984), pp. 185–6.
15. Prezzolini, La Voce 1908–1913, p. 701 (2 March 1911).
16. Perfetti, Il movimento nazionalista, p. 67.
17. A. Asor Rosa, ‘La cultura’, in Storia d’Italia. Vol. 4: Dall’Unità ad
oggi (2) (Turin, 1975), p. 1254.
18. G. Busino, ‘Il nazionalismo italiano e il nazionalismo europeo’,
in La cultura italiana tra ’800 e ’900 e le origini del nazionalismo
(Florence, 1981), p. 67.
19. G. Pascoli, ‘La grande proletaria si è mossa’, in Prose di Giovanni
Pascoli. Vol. I: Pensieri di varia umanità (Milan, 1952), pp. 557–
69.
20. G. Fortunato, Carteggio 1865/1911, ed. E. Gentile (Rome–Bari,
1978), pp. 397–8 (18 December 1911).
21. G. Fortunato, Carteggio 1912/1922, ed. E. Gentile (Rome–Bari,
1979), p. 89 (6 October 1912).
22. A. Del Boca, Italiani, brava gente? (Vicenza, 2005), pp. 110–
12,122.
23. Ibid., pp. 115–16.
24. Ibid., p. 116.
25. V. Zecchini (ed.), Futurismo e fascismo: manifesti e programmi
(Bologna, 2000), p. 20.
26. S. Bono, Morire per questi deserti. Lettere di soldati italiani dal
fronte libico 1911–1912 (Catanzaro, 1992), p. 27.
27. Ibid., p. 20.
28. N. Revelli, Il mondo dei vinti. Testimonianze di vita contadina, Vol.
2 (Turin, 1977), pp. 124–5.
29. Fortunato, Carteggio 1912/1922, pp. 97–8(8 November 1912,10
November 1912).
30. M. De Giorgio, Le italiane dall’Unità a oggi. Modelli culturali e
comportamenti sociali (Rome–Bari, 1992), pp. 160–62.
31. E. Gentile, La grande Italia. Ascesa e declino del mito della nazione
nel ventesimo secolo (Milan, 1997), p. 63(Critica sociale, 16 April
1911).
32. S. Sighele, Il nazionalismo e i partiti politici (Milan, 1911), p. 118.
33. B. Croce, Cultura e vita morale. Intermezzi polemici (Bari, 1955),
p. 163(‘Fede e programmi’, 1911).
34. Discorsi parlamentari di Antonio Salandra. Vol. 3, p. 1429 (19
October 1913).
35. Ibid., Vol. 2, p. 893 (2 June 1914).
36. A. M. Banti, Storia della borghesia italiana (Rome, 1996), p. 335.
37. Ibid., p. 335(‘Il Parlamento contro l’Italia’, in Idea Nazionale, 15
May 1915).
38. Discorsi parlamentari di Antonio Salandra. Vol. 3, pp. 1444–5 (2
June 1915).

20: The Great War, 1915–18

1. Cf. P. Pieri, L’Italia nella prima guerra mondiale (Turin, 1965), pp.
77–90,111–21,128–36.
2. G. Rocca, Cadorna (Milan, 1985), pp. 255–60.
3. C. Falls, Caporetto 1917 (London, 1965), p. 75.
4. Cf. P. Melograni, Storia politica della grande guerra 1915–1918
(Rome–Bari, 1977), pp. 420–23.
5. A. Gibelli, La grande guerra degli italiani 1915–1918 (Milan,
1998), p. 272 (quoting G. Minozzi, Ricordi di Guerra).
6. C. Malaparte, La rivolta dei santi maladetti (Rome, 1923), p. 248.
7. A. So ci, La ritirata del Friuli. Note di un u ciale della Seconda
Armata (Florence, 1919), pp. 138–9,202.
8. G. Fortunato, Carteggio 1912/1922, ed. E. Gentile (Rome–Bari,
1979), p. 248(4 October 1915).
9. Ibid., pp. 268,275–80,282–3.
10. Lanaro, ‘Da contadini a italiani’, in P. Bevilacqua (ed.), Storia
dell’agricoltura italiana in età contemporanea. Vol. 3: Mercati e
istituzioni (Venice, 1991), p. 957.
11. M. Clark, Modern Italy 1871–1995 (London, 1996), pp. 187–8.
12. E. Forcella and A. Monticone, Plotone d’esecuzione. I processi
della Prima guerra mondiale (Rome–Bari, 1968), pp. 434,442.
13. Gibelli, La grande guerra degli italiani, pp. 123–4.
14. N. Revelli, Il mondo dei vinti. Testimonianze di vita contadina, Vol.
2 (Turin, 1977), p. 247.
15. Cf. G. Procacci, Soldati e prigionieri italiani nella grande guerra.
Con una raccolta di lettere inedite (Rome, 1993), pp. 150–72.
16. G. Rochat, ‘La prigionia di guerra’, in M. Isnenghi (ed.), I luoghi
della memoria. Strutture ed eventi dell’Italia unita (Rome–Bari,
1997), p. 389.
17. Gibelli, La grande guerra degli italiani, p. 158.
18. Ibid., p. 152.
19. Revelli, Il mondo dei vinti, Vol. 2, p. 174.
20. Gibelli, La grande guerra degli italiani, p. 96.
21. Revelli, Il mondo dei vinti, Vol. I, p. cvi.
22. B. Croce, Pagine sulla guerra (Bari, 1928), p. 134.
23. Ibid., p. 222(Giornale d’Italia, 24 September 1917).
24. Ibid., pp. 142–3.
25. R. De Felice, Mussolini il rivoluzionario 1883–1920 (Turin, 1965),
pp. 378–9(Unità, 29 November 1917).
26. Filippo Turati–Anna Kuliscio . Carteggio. Vol. 4: 1915–1918 (2),
ed. F. Pedone (Turin, 1977), p. 811 (21 December 1917).
27. R. Bosworth, Mussolini (London, 2002), p. 118.
28. Ibid., p. 119; De Felice, Mussolini il rivoluzionario, p. 392.
29. B. Mussolini, Opera omnia, Vol. 10, eds. E. and D. Susmel
(Florence, 1951–62), pp. 86–8.
30. M. Macmillan, Peacemakers. The Paris Conference of 1919 and Its
Attempt to End War (London, 2002), p. 289.
31. Gibelli, La grande guerra degli italiani, p. 304.
32. F. T. Marinetti, L’alcova d’acciaio: romanzo vissuto (Milan, 1921).
33. P. Alatri, Gabriele D’Annunzio (Turin, 1983), pp. 392–3.
34. P. Monelli, Le scarpe al sole. Cronaca di gaie e di tristi avventure
d’alpini, di muli e di vino (Milan, 1929), pp. 182–3.
35. R. Serra, ‘Esame di coscienza di un letterato’, in R. Serra, Scritti
letterari, morali e politici. Saggi e articoli dal 1900 al 1915, ed. M.
Isnenghi (Turin, 1974), pp. 543,547.
36. Gibelli, La grande guerra degli italiani, pp. 284–9.
37. Ibid., pp. 309–10.
38. M. Isnenghi, Giornali di trincea 1915–1918 (Turin, 1977), pp.
53–66.
39. A. Salandra, Discorsi parlamentari di Antonio Salandra. Pubblicati
per deliberazione della Camera dei Deputati, Vol. 3 (Rome, 1959),
pp. 1448–51.

21: Civil War and the Advent of Fascism, 1919–22.

1. M. Clark, Modern Italy 1871–1995 (London, 1996), p. 190.

2. V. Zamagni, Dalla periferia al centro. La seconda rinascita
economica dell’Italia: 1861–1981 (Bologna, 1990), pp. 277–9.
3. A. Gibelli, La grande guerra degli italiani 1915–1918 (Milan,
1998), p. 183.
4. Cf. D. Forsyth, The Crisis of Liberal Italy: Monetary and Financial
Policy 1914–1922 (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 101–24,247–51,254–
7.
5. C. Petraccone, Le due civiltà. Settentrionali e meridionali nella
storia d’Italia (Rome–Bari, 2000), pp. 251–2.
6. Cf. C. Duggan, Fascism and the Ma a (New Haven and London,
1989), pp. 99–118.
7. G. D’Annunzio, ‘La preghiera di Sernaglia’, in G. D’Annunzio,
Versi d’amore e di gloria. Vol. 2: Laudi del cielo del mare della terra
e degli eroi (Verona, 1952), pp. 1112–21.
8. M. Macmillan, Peacemakers. The Paris Conference of 1919 and Its
Attempt to End War (London, 2002), p. 289.
9. Ibid., pp. 120,293.
10. Ibid., p. 292.
11. Ibid., p. 292.
12. D. Mack Smith, Mazzini (New Haven and London, 1994), p.
221.
13. Macmillan, Peacemakers, p. 310.
14. G. Gentile, Mazzini (Caserta, 1919), pp. 27,30–35,67.
15. Macmillan, Peacemakers, p. 288.
16. Ibid., pp. 308–9.
17. Ibid., p. 306.
18. Ibid., p. 311.
19. G. D’Annunzio, Prose di ricerca, di lotta, di comando, di conquista,
di tormento, d’indovinamento, di rinnovamento, di celebrazione, di
rivendicazione, di liberazione, di favole, di giochi, di baleni, Vol. I
(Verona, 1947), pp. 870–71,878–80,892–3.
20. J. Woodhouse, Gabriele D’Annunzio. De ant Archangel (Oxford,
2001), p. 327.
21. G. Giudice, Benito Mussolini (Turin, 1969), pp. 281,284.
22. B. Mussolini, Opera omnia, Vol. 13, eds. E. and D. Susmel
(Florence, 1951–62), pp. 154,160.
23. Ibid., p. 72.
24. R. Bosworth, Mussolini (London, 2002), p. 133.
25. Giudice, Mussolini, p. 295.
26. Ibid., p. 293.
27. M. Ledeen, D’Annunzio a Fiume (Rome–Bari, 1975), p. 88.
28. E. Susmel, La città di passione. Fiume negli anni 1914–1920
(Milan, 1921), pp. 241–3.
29. O. Sitwell, Noble Essences or Courteous Revelations (London,
1950), pp. 118–19.
30. Ibid., p. 123.
31. Ledeen, D’Annunzio a Fiume, p. 203.
32. Mussolini, Opera omnia, Vol. 14, p. 475(25 September 1919).
33. E. Gentile, Storia del partito fascista 1919–1922. Movimento e
milizia (Rome–Bari, 1989), pp. 42–3.
34. Ibid., p. 49.
35. G. Belardelli, L. Cafagna, E. Galli della Loggia and G.
Sabbatucci, Miti e storie dell’Italia unita (Bologna, 1999), p. 112.
36. M. Franzinelli, Squadristi. Protagonisti e tecniche della violenza
fascista 1919–22 (Milan, 2003), p. 64.
37. Santa Riscossa (Alcamo), 30 November 1924.
38. Cf. S. Noiret, La nascita del sistema dei partiti nell’Italia
contemporanea. La proporzionale del 1919 (Manduria–Rome–Bari,
1994), pp. 169–74.
39. H. Sachs, Toscanini (London, 1978), p. 140.
40. G. Aliberti, La resa di Cavour: il carattere nazionale italiano tra
mito e cronaca, 1820–1976 (Florence, 2000), p. 122.
41. E. Codignola, Il problema dell’educazione nazionale in Italia
(Florence, 1925), pp. 331–6.
42. G. Giolitti, Memorie della mia vita, Vol. 2 (Milan, 1922), pp.
596–7.
43. Franzinelli, Squadristi, p. 62.
44. Gentile, Storia del partito fascista, p. 153.
45. R. De Felice, Mussolini il rivoluzionario 1883–1920 (Turin, 1965),
p. 657.
46. Franzinelli, Squadristi, pp. 56–7.
47. Mussolini, Opera omnia, Vol. 18, p. 457.
48. Franzinelli, Squadristi, p. 251.
49. Gentile, Storia del partito fascista, p. 503.
50. Ibid., pp. 516–18.
51. Mussolini, Opera omnia, Vol. 16, pp. 445–6 (21 June 1921)
52. Gentile, Storia del partito fascista, p. 250.
53. R. De Felice, Mussolini il fascista. Vol. I: La conquista del potere
1921–1925 (Turin, 1966), pp. 173–89.
54. Franzinelli, Squadristi, p. 113.
55. Ibid., p. 103.
56. Gentile, Storia del partito fascista, pp. 545–51.
57. Ibid., pp. 604–9.
58. Ibid., p. 610.
59. Woodhouse, Gabriele D’Annunzio, pp. 361–4.
60. G. Albanese, La Marcia su Roma (Rome–Bari, 2006), pp. 70–71.
61. Mussolini, Opera omnia, Vol. 18, p. 412 (20 September 1922).
62. Gentile, Storia del partito fascista, p. 670.
63. A. Lyttelton, The Seizure of Power. Fascism in Italy 1919–1929
(London, 1973), pp. 86–7.
64. Gentile, Storia del partito fascista, pp. 679–80.
65. Cf. Bosworth, Mussolini, p. 170.
66. Albanese, La Marcia su Roma, pp. 113–19.
 22: The Establishment of a Dictatorship, 1922–5

1. Cf. D. Mack Smith, La storia manipolata (Rome–Bari, 1997), pp.

91–7.
2. B. Mussolini, Opera omnia, Vol. 19, eds. E. and D. Susmel
(Florence, 1951–62), pp. 17–23(16 November 1922).
3. G. Albanese, La Marcia su Roma (Rome–Bari, 2006), pp. 134–5.
4. D. Mack Smith, Mussolini (London, 1983), p. 123.
5. Mussolini, Opera omnia, Vol. 19, p. 50.
6. Ibid., p. 192.
7. Ibid., Vol. 20, p. 18.
8. Ibid., p. 62.
9. Ibid., Vol. 19, p. 195; ibid., Vol. 20, p. 72.
10. Ibid., Vol. 20, p. 72 (30 October 1922).
11. Ibid., p. 62(28 October 1923).
12. Ibid., p. 213 (23 March 1924).
13. Ibid., Vol. 19, p. 117(Gerarchia, January 1923).
14. Ibid., p. 254 (8 June 1923).
15. A. Lyttelton, The Seizure of Power. Fascism in Italy 1919–1929
(London, 1973), pp. 163–5.
16. Cf. F. Gaeta, Nazionalismo italiano (Naples, 1965), pp. 203–
5,227–31.
17. Mussolini, Opera omnia, Vol. 20, pp. 63(28 October 1923),
108(16 November 1923).
18. Ibid., Vol. 19, p. 191 (30 March 1923); ibid., Vol. 20, p. 289 (29
May 1924); ibid., Vol. 21, pp. 97–8 (4 October 1924), 221–2 (11
December 1924).
19. Ibid., Vol. 20, p. 149 (12 January 1924).
20. Mack Smith, Mussolini, pp. 69–71.
21. J. Barros, The Corfu Incident of 1923. Mussolini and the League of
Nations (Princeton, 1965), pp. 20–79.
22. Mack Smith, Mussolini, p. 85.
23. Mussolini, Opera omnia, Vol. 20, p. 63 (28 October 1923).
24. Barros, The Corfu Incident of 1923, p. 46.
25. R. Bosworth, Mussolini (London, 2002), p. 188.
26. Barros, The Corfu Incident of 1923, p. 93.
27. R. De Felice, Mussolini il fascista. Vol. I: La conquista del potere
1921–1925 (Turin, 1966), pp. 562–3.
28. Mussolini, Opera omnia, Vol. 21, p. 344 (6 June 1925).
29. Barros, The Corfu Incident of 1923, pp. 68–9.
30. A. Cucco, Il mio rogo (unpublished MS), p. 8.
31. Lyttelton, The Seizure of Power, pp. 128–34.
32. Ibid., pp. 136–7.
33. De Felice, Mussolini il fascista, Vol. 1, pp. 585–6.
34. P. Nenni, Sei anni di guerra civile (Milan, 1945), pp. 174–8.
35. M. Canali, Il delitto Matteotti. A arismo e politica nel primo
governo Mussolini (Bologna, 1997), pp. 106–7.
36. Ibid., pp. 161–73.
37. Bosworth, Mussolini, pp. 188,211.
38. Mack Smith, Mussolini, p. 90.
39. Ibid., p. 91.
40. Ibid.
41. Bosworth, Mussolini, p. 196.
42. Ibid., p. 198.
43. De Felice, Mussolini il fascista, Vol. 1, p. 645.
44. Lyttelton, The Seizure of Power, p. 243.
45. Mussolini, Opera omnia, Vol. 21, p. 39 (2 August 1924).
46. Ibid., Vol. 21, p. 78 (22 September 1924).
47. Ibid., pp. 236–40.
48. De Felice, Mussolini il fascista, Vol. 1, p. 723.

23: The Fascist Ethical State

1. A. Asor Rosa, ‘La cultura’, in Storia d’Italia. Vol. 4: Dall’Unità ad

oggi (2) (Turin, 1975), p. 1407.
2. B. Mussolini, Opera omnia, Vol. 24, eds. E. and D. Susmel
(Florence, 1951–62), pp. 283–4 (27 October 1930).
3. L’Ora (Palermo), 6 May 1924,8 May 1925; Archivio di Stato,
Palermo, Gabinetto Prefettura, 53, programme of Mussolini’s
visit to Sicily; E. D’Alessandro, Brigantaggio e ma a in Sicilia
(Messina, 1959), p. 107.
4. Mussolini, Opera omnia, Vol. 22, p. 373 (26 May 1927).
5. Ibid., Vol. 21, p. 425 (28 October 1925).
6. Ibid., Vol. 22, pp. 467–70 (5 January 1927).
7. C. Duggan, Fascism and the Ma a (New Haven and London,
1989), pp. 147–63,237–43.
8. R. De Felice, Mussolini il fascista. Vol. 2: L’organizzazione dello
stato fascista 1925–1929 (Turin, 1968), p. 187.
9. C. Mori, Tra le zagare oltre la foschia (Florence, 1923), pp. 14,74;
C. Mori, Con la ma a ai ferri corti (Milan, 1932), pp. 79,81.
10. Mussolini, Opera omnia, Vol. 23, p. 523(Carta del Lavoro).
11. P. Mignosi, ‘La ma a’, in La Rivoluzione liberale, 4,38 (25
October 1925).
12. Duggan, Fascism and the Ma a, p. 145.
13. Mori, Con la ma a ai ferri corti, pp. 46–7; Duggan, Fascism and
the Ma a, p. 209.
14. Ibid., p. 210.
15. Ibid., pp. 215–16.
16. Ibid., p. 214.
17. C. G. Chapman, Milocca. A Sicilian Village (London, 1973), p.
155.
18. Duggan, Fascism and the Ma a, pp. 264–70.
19. Ibid., p. 263.
20. M. Barbagli, Disoccupazione intellettuale e sistema scolastico in
Italia (Bologna, 1974), p. 169.
21. Mussolini, Opera omnia, Vol. 20, p. 130 (13 December 1923).
22. Barbagli, Disoccupazione intellettuale, pp. 203–4.
23. T. Koon, Believe, Obey, Fight. Political Socialization in Fascist Italy,
1922–1943 (Chapel Hill, 1985), p. 55.
24. Ibid., p. 51.
25. E. Codignola, Il problema dell’educazione nazionale in Italia
(Florence, 1925), pp. 149,225–6.
26. Mussolini, Opera omnia, Vol. 23, p. 23 (5 December 1925).
27. A. Lyttelton, The Seizure of Power. Fascism in Italy 1919–1929
(London, 1973), p. 408.
28. Koon, Believe, Obey, Fight, p. 65.
29. Ibid., pp. 71,84.
30. Asor Rosa, ‘La cultura’, pp. 1465–9.
31. Cf. J. Charnitzky, Die Schulpolitik des faschistischen Regimes in
Italien (1922–1943) (Tubingen, 1994), pp. 257–60.
32. Koon, Believe, Obey, Fight, p. 80.
33. Ibid., pp. 72,79–80.
34. Ibid., p. 70.
35. Ibid., p. 86.
36. Barbagli, Disoccupazione intellettuale, pp. 213–15,237, 245.
37. Chapman, Milocca, p. 148.
38. M. Clark, Modern Italy 1871–1995 (London, 1996), p. 278.
39. G. Aliberti, La resa di Cavour. Il carattere nazionale italiano tra
mito e cronaca, 1820–1976 (Florence, 2000), p. 149.
40. Ibid., p. 145.
41. Mussolini, Opera omnia, Vol. 21, p. 362.
42. Ibid., Vol. 26, p. 259 (26 May 1934).
43. Koon, Believe, Obey, Fight, p. 97.
44. R. Bosworth, Mussolini’s Italy. Life under the Dictatorship 1915–
1945 (London, 2005), p. 290.
45. Koon, Believe, Obey, Fight, pp. 101–3.
46. Lyttelton, The Seizure of Power, p. 409.
47. Bosworth, Mussolini’s Italy, p. 290.
48. P. McCarthy, ‘The beginnings of Italian sport’, in Journal of
Modern Italian Studies, 5,3 (2000), p. 324.
49. Clark, Modern Italy, p. 168.
50. Bosworth, Mussolini’s Italy, p. 410.
51. S. Martin, Football and Fascism. The National Game under
Mussolini (Oxford, 2004), pp. 125,137.
52. Ibid., pp. 185–9.
53. S. Jacomuzzi, ‘Gli sport’, in Storia d’Italia. Vol. 5: I documenti
(Turin, 1973), p. 929.
54. Mussolini, Opera omnia, Vol. 20, pp. 364–5 (26 May 1927).
55. Ibid., Vol. 23, pp. 209–16.
56. S. Lanaro, ‘Da contadini a italiani’, in P. Bevilacqua (ed.), Storia
dell’agricoltura italiana in età contemporanea. Vol. 3: Mercati e
istituzioni (Venice, 1991), p. 965.
57. M. Isnenghi, ‘Il ruralismo nella cultura italiana’, in Bevilacqua
(ed.), Storia dell’agricoltura italiana, pp. 903–5.
58. C. Ipsen, Dictating Demography. The Problem of Population in
Fascist Italy (Cambridge, 2002), p. 85.
59. D. Mack Smith, Mussolini (London, 1983), p. 186. Cf. E. Ludwig,
Colloqui con Mussolini. Riproduzione delle bozze della prima
edizione con le correzioni autografe del duce (Verona, 1950), pp.
164–6.
60. Koon, Believe, Obey, Fight, p. 25.
61. Mack Smith, Mussolini, p. 186.
62. Ipsen, Dictating Demography, pp. 165–9.
63. P. Willson, Peasant Women and Politics in Fascist Italy. The
‘massaie rurali’ (London, 2002), pp. 58–61.
64. Ibid., pp. 64,90–92,178–9.
65. Ipsen, Dictating Demography, p. 179.

24: Community of Believers

1. Cf. R. Bosworth, Mussolini (London, 2002), pp. 207–8,211–12.

2. B. Mussolini, Opera omnia, Vol. 22, eds. E. and D. Susmel
(Florence, 1951–62), pp. 197–8 (18 August 1926).
3. L. Passerini, Mussolini immaginario. Storia di una biogra a 1915–
1939 (Rome–Bari, 1991), p. 43.
4. R. De Felice, Mussolini il duce. Vol. I: Gli anni del consenso 1929–
1936 (Turin, 1974), p. 50.
5. D. Mack Smith, Mussolini (London, 1983), p. 145.
6. L. Passerini, Fascism in Popular Memory. The Cultural Experiences
of the Turin Working Class (Cambridge, 1987), p. 113.
7. T. Koon, Believe, Obey, Fight. Political Socialization in Fascist Italy,
1922–1943 (Chapel Hill, 1985), p. 17.
8. Ibid., p. 79.
9. M. Sarfatti, Dux (Milan, 1926), p. 185.
10. Passerini, Mussolini immaginario, p. 90.
11. P. Willson, Peasant Women and Politics in Fascist Italy. The
‘massaie rurali’ (London, 2002), pp. 155–6.
12. Q. Navarra, Memorie del cameriere di Mussolini (Milan, 1972),
pp. 208–11.
13. A. Giardina and A. Vauchez, Il mito di Roma. Da Carlo Magno a
Mussolini (Rome–Bari, 2000), pp. 217–18.
14. E. Ludwig, Colloqui con Mussolini. Riproduzione delle bozze della
prima edizione con le correzioni autografe del duce (Verona, 1950),
p. 121.
15. M. Berezin, Making the Fascist Self. The Political Culture of
Interwar Italy (Ithaca and London, 1997), pp. 202–3.
16. Ibid., p. 120 (La Nazione, 26 October 1934).
17. C. Lazzaro and R. J. Crum (eds.), Donatello among the Blackshirts.
History and Modernity in the Visual Culture of Fascist Italy (Ithaca
and London, 2005), pp. 36–7.
18. Ibid., pp. 46–8. Cf. J. T. Schnapp, Anno X. La Mostra della
rivoluzione fascista del 1932 (Pisa, 2003), pp. 45–6,51–60.
19. B. Mussolini, The Cardinal’s Mistress, trans. H. Motherwell
(London, 1929). Cf. Mack Smith, Mussolini, p. 20.
20. S. Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle. The Aesthetics of Power in
Mussolini’s Italy (Berkeley, 2000), pp. 64–5 (published in La
Tribuna, 25 July 1927).
21. Cf. A. C. Jemolo, Chiesa e stato in Italia negli ultimi cento anni
(Turin, 1963), pp. 437–40,447–50,486, 502–3.
22. J. F. Pollard, The Vatican and Italian Fascism 1929–1932: A Study
in Con ict (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 49–50.
23. C. G. Chapman, Milocca. A Sicilian Village(London, 1973), pp.
155–6.
24. Jemolo, Chiesa e stato in Italia, p. 487.
25. M. Clark, Modern Italy 1871–1995(London, 1996), p. 256.
26. E. Albertoni, E. Antonini and R. Palmieri (eds.), La generazione
degli anni di cili (Bari, 1962), p. 170.
27. N. Revelli, Il mondo dei vinti. Testimonianze di vita contadina, Vol.
1 (Turin, 1977), p. 60.
28. G. Ciano, Diario 1937–1943, ed. R. De Felice (Milan, 1980), pp.
444–5 (21 June 1940).
29. Ibid., pp. 394 (7 February 1940), 418 (11 April 1940).

25: A Place in the Sun, 1929–36

1. V. Zamagni, Dalla periferia al centro. La seconda rinascita

economica dell’Italia: 1861–1981 (Bologna, 1990), pp. 324–30.
2. C. T. Schmidt, The Plough and the Sword. Labor, Land, and
Property in Fascist Italy (New York, 1938), p. 165.
3. M. Clark, Modern Italy 1871–1995 (London, 1996), p. 267.
4. ‘Autostrada’, in Enciclopedia italiana, Vol. 5 (Rome, 1930), p.
589.
5. Zamagni, Dalla periferia al centro, pp. 337, 378–80 ; G. Toniolo,
L’economia dell’Italia fascista (Rome–Bari, 1980), pp. 245–56 ,
337–42.
6. G. Salvemini, Under the Axe of Fascism (London, 1936), p. 10.
7. Cf. V. De Grazia, The Culture of Consent. Mass Organization of
Leisure in Fascist Italy (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 100–126.
8. G. P. Brunetta, Storia del cinema italiano, 1895–1945 (Rome,
1979), p. 285.
9. S. Cavazza, Piccole patrie. Feste popolari tra regione e nazione
durante il fascismo (Bologna, 1997), p. 99.
10. Ibid., p. 206.
11. G. Procacci, La dis da di Barletta. Tra storia e romanzo (Milan,
2001), pp. 79–90.
12. B. Mussolini, Opera omnia, Vol. 20 , eds. E. and D. Susmel
(Florence, 1951–62), p. 289 (29 May 1924).
13. C. G. Segrè, L’Italia in Libia. Dall’età giolittiana a Gheda (Milan,
1978), p. 188.
14. Mussolini, Opera omnia, Vol. 27, p. 159 (2 October 1935).
15. Ibid., Vol. 22, p. 386 (26 May 1927).
16. Ibid., pp. 381–2.
17. D. Mack Smith, Le guerre del Duce (Rome–Bari, 1976), pp. 46–7.
18. A. Del Boca, Italiani, brava gente? (Vicenza, 2005), pp. 153–5.
19. A. Del Boca, Gli italiani in Libia. Dal fascismo a Ghedda (Rome–
Bari, 1988), p. 6.
20. Ibid., p. 84.
21. Ibid., p. 16.
22. Del Boca, Italiani, brava gente?, pp. 175–6.
23. Del Boca, Gli italiani in Libia, pp. 179–89.
24. Ibid., p. 183.
25. Ibid., pp. 196–7.
26. Ibid., p. 207.
27. Ibid., p. 230.
28. E. Ludwig, Colloqui con Mussolini. Riproduzione delle bozze della
prima edizione con le correzioni autografe del duce (Verona, 1950),
p. 17.
29. V. Vidotto, ‘La capitale del fascismo’, in V. Vidotto (ed.), Storia
di Roma dall’antichità a oggi. Roma capitale (Rome–Bari, 2002),
pp. 398–9.
30. Mussolini, Opera omnia, Vol. 20, p. 234 (21 April 1924).
31. T. Koon, Believe, Obey, Fight. Political Socialization in Fascist Italy
1922–1943 (Chapel Hill, 1985), p. 21.
32. Mussolini, Opera omnia, Vol. 22, p. 48 (31 December 1925);
ibid., Vol. 25, p. 86 (18 March 1932).
33. J. Welge, ‘Fascism Triumphans. On the architectural translation
of Rome’, in C. Lazzaro and R. J. Crum (eds.), Donatello among
the Blackshirts. History and Modernity in the Visual Culture of
Fascist Italy (Ithaca and London, 2005), pp. 87–8.
34. P. Cannistraro, ‘Mussolini’s cultural revolution: Fascist or
Nationalist?’, in Journal of Contemporary History, 7 (1972), p.
127.
35. G. Rochat, Le guerre italiane 1935–1943. Dall’impero d’Etiopia
alla disfatta (Turin, 2005), pp. 15–19.
36. Mussolini, Opera omnia, Vol. 27 , pp. 158–9 (2 October 1935).
37. A. Del Boca, Gli italiani in Africa orientale. La conquista
dell’impero (Rome–Bari, 1979), p. 423.
38. N. Revelli, Il mondo dei vinti. Testimonianze di vita contadina, Vol.
1 (Turin, 1977), pp. cxii, 130.
39. Rochat, Le guerre italiane, pp. 32–8.
40. Ibid., pp. 66–7; Del Boca, Gli italiani in Africa orientale, pp. 490–
91.
41. Ibid., p. 489.
42. Mack Smith, Le guerre del Duce, p. 97.
43. Del Boca, Italiani, brava gente?, p. 198.
44. I. Montanelli, ‘Dentro la guerra’, Civiltà fascista, 3 , 1 (January
1936), p. 40.
45. V. Mussolini, Voli sulle ambe (Florence, 1937), pp. 27–8 , 48 ,
78–9 , 141 , 150.
46. Mussolini, Opera omnia, Vol. 27 , pp. 268–9.
47. Rochat, Le guerre italiane, p. 96.
48. Ibid., p. 83.
49. Del Boca, Italiani, brava gente?, pp. 217–21.
 26: Into the Abyss, 1936–43

1. A. Del Boca, Gli italiani in Africa orientale. La conquista

dell’impero (Rome–Bari, 1979), p. 711.
2. Carteggio D’Annunzio–Mussolini (1919–1938), eds. R. De Felice
and E. Mariano (Milan, 1971), pp. 364, 376.
3. R. Bosworth, Mussolini (London, 2002), p. 310.
4. Del Boca, Gli italiani in Africa orientale, p. 713.
5. Ibid., pp. 717–20.
6. R. De Felice, Mussolini il duce. Vol. 2: Lo stato totalitario 1936–
1940 (Turin, 1981), pp. 265–6.
7. Ibid., p. 266.
8. M. Knox, Mussolini Unleashed 1939–1941. Politics and Strategy in
Fascist Italy’s Last War (Cambridge, 1982), p. 6.
9. V. Zamagni, Dalla periferia al centro. La seconda rinascita
economica dell’Italia: 1861–1981 (Bologna, 1990), p. 341.
10. De Felice, Mussolini il duce, Vol. 2 , pp. 182–90.
11. L. Passerini, Fascism in Popular Memory. The Cultural Experiences
of the Turin Working Class (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 189–90.
12. B. Mussolini, Opera omnia, Vol. 28 , eds. E. and D. Susmel
(Florence, 1951–62), pp. 69–71.
13. D. Mack Smith, Mussolini (London, 1983), p. 250.
14. Mussolini, Opera omnia, Vol. 28 , pp. 248–53.
15. G. Ciano, Diario 1937–1943, ed. R. De Felice (Milan, 1980), p.
45 (14 October 1937). Cf. ibid., p. 70 (19 December 1937).
16. R. J. Crum, ‘Shaping the fascist “new man”: Donatello’s St.
George and Mussolini’s appropriated Renaissance of the Italian
nation’, in C. Lazzaro and R. J. Crum (eds.), Donatello among the
Blackshirts. History and Modernity in the Visual Culture of Fascist
Italy (Ithaca and London, 2005), pp. 136–7.
17. Mussolini, Opera omnia, Vol. 29, pp. 188–9.
18. M. Gibson, Born to Crime. Cesare Lombroso and the Origins of
Biological Criminality (Westport, 2002), p. 118.
19. E. Collotti, Il fascismo e gli ebrei. Le leggi razziali in Italia (Rome–
Bari, 2003), pp. 37–8.
20. Mussolini, Opera omnia, Vol. 29, pp. 190–91.
21. Ibid., pp. 188–90.
22. Collotti, Il fascismo e gli ebrei, pp. 42–3.
23. S. Zuccotti, Under His Very Windows. The Vatican and the
Holocaust in Italy (New Haven and London, 2000), pp. 44–51.
24. R. Bosworth, Mussolini’s Italy. Life under the Dictatorship 1915–
1945(London, 2005), p. 421.
25. Ibid., p. 419.
26. Cf. La menzogna della razza. Documenti e immagini del razzismo e
dell’antisemitismo fascista, ed. Centro Furio Jesi (Bologna, 1994).
27. Collotti, Il fascismo e gli ebrei, p. 84 (Ernesta Bittanti-Battisti).
28. Ibid., p. 114.
29. Cf. R. De Felice, The Jews in Fascist Italy (trans. R. Miller) (New
York, 2001), pp. 448–72.
30. G. Rochat, Le guerre italiane 1935–1943. Dall’impero d’Etiopia
alla disfatta (Turin, 2005), p. 183.
31. Ibid., pp. 216,233–4.
32. De Felice, Mussolini il duce, Vol. 2, pp. 508–10; Mack Smith,
Mussolini, p. 259.
33. Mussolini, Opera omnia, Vol. 29, p. 192.
34. Mack Smith, Mussolini, p. 263
35. D. Mack Smith, Le guerre del duce (Rome–Bari, 1976), pp. 218–
23.
36. Ciano, Diario, pp. 326–33.
37. Mack Smith, Le guerre del duce, p. 265.
38. De Felice, Mussolini il duce, Vol. 2, p. 670 (1 September 1939).
39. Ciano, Diario, p. 349 (18 September 1939).
40. Mack Smith, Mussolini, p. 289.
41. R. De Felice, Mussolini l’alleato 1940–1945. Vol. 1: L’Italia in
guerra 1940–1943 (Turin, 1990), pp. 683–4.
42. Mussolini, Opera omnia, Vol. 29, pp. 403–5.
43. Rochat, Le guerre italiane, pp. 249–51.
44. Mack Smith, Le guerre del duce, pp. 306–7.
45. Rochat, Le guerre italiane, pp. 296–7.
46. De Felice, Mussolini l’alleato 1940–1945, Vol. 1, pp. 298,329–32.
47. Mack Smith, Mussolini, p. 329.
48. M. Clark, Modern Italy 1871–1995(London, 1996), p. 290.
49. Bosworth, Mussolini’s Italy, p. 476.
50. Ibid., p. 477.
51. D. Rodogno, Il nuovo ordine mediterraneo. Le politiche di
occupazione dell’Italia fascista in Europa (1940–1943) (Turin,
2003), pp. 400–410, 416–26.
52. De Felice, Mussolini l’alleato 1940–1945, Vol. 1, pp. 1383–1402.
53. Rochat, Le guerre italiane, pp. 427–30.
54. C. Pavone, Una guerra civile. Saggio storico sulla moralità nella
Resistenza (Turin, 1991), pp. 43–8.
55. N. Revelli, ‘La ritirata di Russia’, in M. Isnenghi (ed.), I luoghi
della memoria. Strutture ed eventi dell’Italia unita (Rome–Bari,
1997), p. 374.
56. B. Croce, Scritti e discorsi politici (1943–1947), Vol. 1 (Bari,
1963), pp. 223–4.
57. E. Gentile, La grande Italia. Ascesa e declino del mito della nazione
nel ventesimo secolo (Milan, 1997), p. 225 (Nuova antologia, 1
 January 1944).
58. S. Romano, Giovanni Gentile. La loso a al potere (Milan, 1984),
p. 299.
59. Gentile, La grande Italia, p. 229.
60. S. Berlusconi, Una storia italiana (Milan, 2001), p. 6.

27: The Foundations of the Republic, 1943–57

1. G. Bianchi and F. Mezzetti, Mussolini aprile ’45: l’epilogo (Milan,

1979), pp. 52–63.
2. Cf. P. Milza, Mussolini (Paris, 1999), pp. 879–81.
3. Bianchi and Mezzetti, Mussolini aprile ’45, p. 95.
4. Ibid., p. 100.
5. S. Luzzatto, Il corpo del duce. Un cadavere tra immaginazione,
storia e memoria (Turin, 1998), pp. 45–6. Cf. F. Bandini, Le
ultime 95 ore di Mussolini (Milan, 1959), p. 329.
6. A. Zanella, L’ora di Dongo (Milan, 1993), pp. 502–3.
7. Luzzatto, Il corpo del duce, p. 64.
8. Cf. G. Pansa, Il sangue dei vinti (Milan, 2003), p. 39.
9. C. Malaparte, La pelle. Storia e racconto (Rome–Milan, 1949), pp.
40–42.
10. C. Alvaro, Quasi una vita. Giornale di uno scrittore (Milan, 1959),
pp. 341–3,354.
11. N. Gallerano, ‘L ’arrivo degli Alleati’, in M. Isnenghi (ed.), I
luoghi della memoria. Strutture ed eventi dell’Italia unita (Rome–
Bari, 1997), p. 460.
12. E. Gentile, La grande Italia. Ascesa e declino del mito della nazione
nel ventesimo secolo (Milan, 1997), pp. 240,307.
13. Ibid., p. 235.
14. Cf. C. Pavone, Una guerra civile. Saggio storico sulla moralità nella
Resistenza (Turin, 1991), pp. 169–89.
15. Cf. S. Peli, La Resistenza in Italia. Storia e critica (Turin, 2004),
pp. 224–8.
16. C. Dellavalle (ed.), 8 settembre 1943: storia e memoria (Milan,
1989), p. 209.
17. R. Battaglia, Storia della Resistenza italiana (Turin, 1964), p. 662.
18. Cf. M. Franzinelli, Le stragi nascoste. L’armadio delle vergogne:
impunità e rimozione dei crimini di guerra nazifascisti 1943–2001
(Milan, 2002), pp. 17–60.
19. Pavone, Una guerra civile, pp. 479–92.
20. Gentile, La grande Italia, p. 239.
21. A. Pizzoni, Alla guida del CLNAI. Memorie per i gli, (Bologna,
1995), p. 297.
22. N. Revelli, Il mondo dei vinti. Testimonianze di vita contadina, Vol.
1 (Turin, 1977), p. cxiv.
23. M. Clark, Modern Italy 1871–1995 (London, 1996), pp. 306–7.
24. Luzzatto, Il corpo del duce, pp. 98–112.
25. A. Lepre, Storia della prima Repubblica. L’Italia dal 1943 al 1998
(Bologna, 1999), p. 64.
26. G. Andreotti, 1947. L’anno delle grandi svolte nel diario di un
protagonista (Milan, 2005), p. 57.
27. Gentile, La grande Italia, p. 344 (La Civiltà cattolica).
28. Ibid., pp. 350–51 (‘Ritorniamo italiani’, in Adesso, 15 March
1949).
29. C. Pavone, ‘La continuità dello Stato. Istituzioni e uomini’, in
Italia 1945–48. Le origini della Repubblica (Turin, 1974), p. 221.
30. P. Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy. Society and Politics
1943–1988 (London, 1990), p. 187.
31. Pavone, ‘La continuità dello Stato’, p. 242.
32. S. Lanaro, Storia dell’Italia repubblicana. Dalla ne della guerra
agli anni novanta (Venice, 1992), p. 33.
33. Pavone, ‘La continuità dello Stato’, p. 252.
34. Ibid., pp. 249, 253.
35. Luzzatto, Il corpo del duce, pp. 123–4.
36. Cf. P. Spriano, Le passioni di un decennio 1946–1956 (Milan,
1986), pp. 78–9.
37. Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy, p. 92.
38. Luzzatto, Il corpo del duce, pp. 208–12.

28: The Economic Miracle, 1958–75

1. P. Scoppola, La repubblica dei partiti (Bologna, 1991), p. 90.

2. G. Vecchio, ‘Tricolore, feste e simboli dello Stato nel primo
decennio repubblicano’, in F. Tarozzi and G. Vecchio (eds.), Gli
italiani e il tricolore. Patriottismo, identità nazionale e fratture
sociali lungo due secoli di storia (Bologna, 1999), p. 353.
3. Ibid., pp. 344–8.
4. Ibid., pp. 342–3.
5. Cf. G. Miccoli, ‘L Chiesa di Pio XII nella società italiana del
dopoguerra’, in Storia dell’Italia repubblicana. Vol. 1: La
costruzione della democrazia. Dalla caduta del fascismo agli anni
cinquanta (Turin, 1994), pp. 596–602.
6. P. Spriano, Le passioni di un decennio 1946–1956 (Milan, 1986),
p. 153.
7. S. Gundle, Between Hollywood and Moscow. The Italian
Communists and the Challenge of Mass Culture, 1943–1991
(Durham and London, 2000), pp. 31, 65–7.
8. P. Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy. Society and Politics
1943–1988 (London, 1990), p. 171 (Paolo Bonomi).
9. Ibid.
10. Cf. A. Lepre, Storia della prima Repubblica. L’Italia dal 1943 al
1998 (Bologna, 1999), p. 98.
11. Cf. P. P. D’Attorre, ‘Sogno americano e mito sovietico nell’Italia
contemporanea’, in P. P. D’Attorre (ed.), Nemici per la pelle.
Sogno americano e mito sovietico nell’Italia contemporanea (Milan,
1991), pp. 45–6.
12. S. Lanaro, Storia dell’Italia repubblicana. Dalla ne della guerra
agli anni novanta (Venice, 1992), pp. 165–6.
13. Ibid., p. 166.
14. Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy, pp. 214–15
15. J. E. Miller, The United States and Italy. The Politics and
Diplomacy of Stabilization (Chapel Hill, 1986), pp. 250–55.
16. Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy, p. 214.
17. V. Zamagni, Dalla periferia al centro. La seconda rinascita
economica dell’Italia: 1861–1981 (Bologna, 1990), p. 418.
18. Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy, pp. 223–4.
19. Lepre, Storia della prima Repubblica, p. 175.
20. Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy, pp. 217–18.
21. P. P. Pasolini, ‘Le Madonne oggi non piangono più ’ (Lettere
luterane, 5 June 1975), in P. P. Pasolini, Saggi sulla politica e sulla
società, eds. W. Siti and S. De Laude (Milan, 1999), p. 593. Cf.
ibid., pp. 578–9, 651–2, 696–7.
22. Gundle, Between Hollywood and Moscow, pp. 79–80.
23. A. Ventrone, ‘L’avventura americana della classe dirigente
cattolica’, inP. P.D’Attorre (ed.), Nemici per la pelle, p. 150.
24. Lanaro, Storia dell’Italia repubblicana, p. 187.
25. Cf. M. Caroli, Proibitissimo! Censori e censurati della
radiotelevisione italiana (Milan, 2003), pp. 31–8.
26. S. Gundle, ‘L’americanizzazione del quotidiano. Televisione e
consumismo nell’Italia degli anni Cinquanta’, in Quaderni storici,
Vol. 21, 62 (1986), p. 588.
27. S. Burgalassi, Il comportamento religioso degli italiani (Florence,
1968), pp. 19, 27.
28. E. Gentile, La grande Italia. Ascesa e declino del mito della nazione
nel ventesimo secolo (Milan, 1997), pp. 355–6.
29. Ibid., p. 369 (D. Bartoli, ‘Italia centenaria’, in Corriere della Sera,
18 April 1961).
30. Ibid., p. 360.
31. Ibid., p. 363 (L’Unità, 9 May 1961).
32. Ibid., p. 364 (R. Romeo, ‘Gli abusi feudali’, in Il Mondo, 25 July
1961).
33. A. L. Lepschy, G. Lepschy and M. Voghera, ‘Linguistic variety in
Italy’, in C. Levy (ed.), Italian Regionalism. History, Identity and
Politics (Oxford, 1996), p. 74–5.
34. Gentile, La grande Italia, p. 373.
35. Cf. D. Marchesini, ‘Nazionalismo, patriottismo e simboli
nazionali nello sport: tricolore e maglia azzurra’, in Tarozzi and
Vecchio (eds.), Gli italiani e il tricolore, p. 313; Lepre, Storia della
prima Repubblica, p. 146.
36. A. Schiavone, Italiani senza Italia (Turin, 1998), p. 40.
37. Cf. Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy, pp. 132–40.
38. M. Caciagli, Democrazia Cristiana e potere nel Mezzogiorno. Il
sistema democristiano a Catania (Florence, 1977), pp. 274–9.
39. Cf. J. Chubb, Patronage, Power and Poverty in Southern Italy
(Cambridge, 1982), pp. 67–71, 135–8.
40. Ibid., p. 89 ; P. Allum, Politics and Society in Post-War Naples
(Cambridge, 1973), p. 38.
41. Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy, p. 179.
42. E. Ban eld, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society (Glencoe,
1958).

29: Towards the ‘Second Republic’

1. Cf. F. Ferrarotti, Rapporto sulla ma a: da costume locale a
problema dello sviluppo nazionale (Naples, 1978), pp. 34–41, 62–
3, 280–82.
2. P. Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy. Society and Politics
1943–1988 (London, 1990), pp. 333–4.
3. G. Galli, Storia del partito armato (Milan, 1986), pp. 13–15 ; G.
Bocca, Il terrorismo italiano 1970–1978 (Milan, 1979), pp. 7–8.
4. A. L. Braghetti and P. Tavella, Il prigioniero (Milan, 2003), p. 45.
5. L. Sciascia, L’a aire Moro (Palermo, 1978), pp. 31–7.
6. Cf. A. Giovagnoli, Il caso Moro. Una tragedia repubblicana
(Bologna, 2005), pp. 75–80.
7. G. Bocca, ‘I Dalla Chiesa’, in Morte di un generale. L’assassinio di
Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, la ma a, la droga, il potere politico
(Milan, 1982), pp. 15–16, 22.
8. N. Cattedra, ‘Cronaca dall’interno di una città violenta’, in ibid.,
p. 188.
9. Cf. A. Stille, Excellent Cadavers. The Ma a and the Death of the
First Italian Republic (London, 1996), pp. 22–5.
10. Cf. S. Lupo, Storia della ma a (Rome, 1993); J. Dickie, Cosa
Nostra. A History of the Sicilian Ma a (London, 2004).
11. L. Sciascia, ‘I professionisti dell’antima a’, in Corriere della Sera,
10 January 1987, and ‘Contro la ma a in nome della legge’, in
ibid., 26 January 1987.
12. P. Ginsborg, Italy and Its Discontents 1980–2001 (London, 2001),
p. 22.
13. Ibid., p. 340.
14. Cf. P. Ginsborg, Silvio Berlusconi. Television, Power and Patrimony
(London, 2004), pp. 32–44.
15. Cf. C. Trigilia, ‘Dinamismo privato e disordine pubblico.
Politica, economia e società locali’ in F. Barbagallo et al. (eds.),
 Storia dell’Italia repubblicana. Vol. 2: La trasformazione dell’Italia:
sviluppo e squilibri. 1: Politica, economia, società, pp. 736–44.
16. V. Zamagni, Dalla periferia al centro. La seconda rinascita
economica dell’Italia: 1861–1981 (Bologna, 1990), p. 438.
17. A. Lepre, Storia della prima Repubblica. L’Italia dal 1943 al 1998
(Bologna 1999), p. 305.
18. Ginsborg, Italy and Its Discontents, p. 58.
19. Ibid., p. 6.
20. Ibid., p. 155 ; D. Lane, Berlusconi’s Shadow. Crime, Justice and the
Pursuit of Power (London, 2004), pp. 57–8.
21. Cf. D. della Porta, Lo scambio occulto. Casi di corruzione politica
in Italia (Bologna, 1992), pp. 125–42, 162, 184, 243–7.
22. M. Andreoli, Andavamo in Piazza Duomo (Milan, 1993), p. 166.
23. Ginsborg, Italy and Its Discontents, pp. 182, 254.
24. M. Clark, Modern Italy 1871–1995 (London, 1996), pp. 396–7.
25. Cf. K. Dyson and K. Featherstone, The Road to Maastricht.
Negotiating Economic and Monetary Union(Oxford, 1999), pp.
523–5.
26. Ginsborg, Italy and Its Discontents, p. 268.
27. G. Bocconi, ‘Tangentopoli in Parlamento’, in L. Violante (ed.), Il
Parlamento. Storia d’Italia. Annali 17(Turin, 2001), pp. 1066–9.
28. S. H. Burnett and L. Mantovani, The Italian Guillotine. Operation
Clean Hands and the Overthrow of Italy’s First Republic(Lanham–
Oxford, 1998), p. 122.
29. I. Diamanti, La Lega. Geogra a, storia e sociologia di un nuovo
soggetto politico(Rome, 1993), pp. 69–85.
30. Cf. S. Lanaro, Storia dell’Italia repubblicana. Dalla ne della guerra
agli anni novanta(Venice, 1992), pp. 235–43.
31. Cf. J. Morris, ‘Challenging Meridionalismo: constructing a new
history for southern Italy’, in R. Lumley and J. Morris (eds.), The
 New History of the Italian South: the Mezzogiorno Revisited(Exeter,
1997), pp. 1–19.
32. Clark, Modern Italy, pp. 422–3.
33. G. E. Rusconi, Se cessiamo di essere una nazione. Tra
etnodemocrazie regionali e cittadinanza europea(Bologna, 1993); S.
Romano, Finis Italiae. Declino e morte dell’ idiologia risorgimentale.
Perchè gli italiani si disprezzano(Milan, 1995); E. Galli Della
Loggia, La morte della patria. La crisi dell’idea di nazione tra
resistenza, antifascismo e Repubblica(Rome–Bari, 1996).
34. Ginsborg, Italy and Its Discontents, p. 290.
35. P. McCarthy, ‘Forza Italia: the new politics and old values of a
changing Italy’, in S. Gundle and S. Parker (eds.), The New
Italian Republic: From the Fall of the Berlin Wall to
Berlusconi(London–New York, 1996), pp. 134–40.
Index

Aberdeen, George Hamilton-Gordon, Lord 187

Abruzzi 54, 357, 574
Acerbo Law (1923) 441–2
Action Party (Partito d’Azione) 539
Acton, Sir John 22, 26
Addis Ababa 504, 505, 506, 520
Adel a 60
Adua, Battle of (1896) 347, 351, 375, 379, 381, 415, 493, 500, 502
Agnelli, Giovanni 355
agriculture 108, 145, 167, 264, 271, 325, 336, 339, 354, 363
and abolition of feudalism 21, 49–50
under fascism 457, 489–90, 556, 563
and land occupations 410, 556
and land reform (after 1860) 343, 556
in south 107, 265
in Tuscany 104, 107
see also peasants
Agrigento 565
Aigues-Mortes 340, 342
air force 494, 515, 518, 519
Albania 329, 412, 439, 516, 519
Alberti, Leon Battista 281
Albertini, Luigi 440, 502
Al eri, Vittorio 14–15, 16, 27–8, 34, 35, 38, 46, 97, 112, 114, 150,
470
Algarotti, Francesco 5
Almirante, Giorgio 513, 529
Alvaro, Corrado 534
Amari, Michele 99, 120, 121, 188–9
Amendola, Giovanni 374, 377, 379, 423
America, South 106–7, 134, 356
anarchism, anarchists 263, 280, 307–8, 340, 343, 349, 352–3, 371,
387, 416, 423, 570
Ancona 16, 18, 429
Andreotti, Giulio 541, 558, 563, 572, 579
Angell, Norman 379
Angevins 6
Angiolini, Gasparo 4–6, 25
Ansaldo ( rm) 409
Antologia 117, 118, 146
Antonietti, Colomba 296
Antonuzzo, Antonio 557
Aosta, Amedeo, Duke of 365
Aosta, Emanuele Filiberto, Duke of 417, 431–2
Apofasimeni 127
Appiani, Andrea 40, 72
Aquinas, Thomas 368
Arabs 6, 189, 219
see also Libya
Aragonese 6
Archimedes 182
Arconati, Marchioness Costanza 181
arditi (shock troops) 415–16, 418, 425
Arese, Count Francesco 87, 88
Aretino, Pietro 182
Arezzo 492
Ariosto 40
Armellini, Carlo 178
army, military service 77, 235–6, 245, 251, 329, 431, 459
in Africa 347–8, 381
and conscription (after 1860) 220–21, 232, 247, 285–8, 290
under fascism 437, 457, 494, 501, 503, 507, 510–11
in First World War 391–8, 400, 401–3, 457
and Italian monarchy 251, 309, 332
in Kingdom of Piedmont–Sardinia, 77, 159–60, 171, 203
and maintenance of law and order 225, 228, 309, 341
in Napoleonic period 51–2, 56
and ‘nation in arms’ 120, 284–5
as ‘school of the nation’ 272, 274, 283–4, 288–90, 381
in Second World War 515, 517–18, 519–20, 523–4, 536
Arpinati, Leandro 468
Ascoli, Graziadio Isaia 277
Aspromonte (1862) 245–6
Asproni, Giorgio 136
Auber, Daniel 56, 122
Audisio, Walter (‘Valerio’) 530–32, 547
Augustus, emperor 499, 500
Austria, Austrians 7, 65–6, 123, 160, 186, 193, 327, 412
and annexation by Nazi Germany 501, 510
and Bosnia–Herzegovina 324, 376, 387
and Crimean War 192
and First World War 388–9, 391–3, 396, 402, 403–4
and Restoration states (1815–48) 74–6, 83, 84–6, 88, 158, 168
and revolutions of 1848–9 171, 173, 174–5, 182
and Triple Alliance 324, 328, 330, 387
and war of 1859 200–205
and war of 1866 249, 250–53
Avanti! 354, 386, 416, 442
Aventine secession (1924–6) 445–6, 448
Azeglio, Massimo d’ xviii, 91, 102, 157, 181, 234, 243, 247, 435,
449
as artist 126, 150
and Cavour 190, 203
as novelist 117, 121–2, 160
political views of 160, 168
and revolutions of 1848–9 172–3, 175
and views on Italian character 175, 188, 217, 226, 249
Azzariti, Gaetano 546
Babeuf, Gracchus 371
Baciocchi, Elisa 38
Badoglio, Pietro 392, 496, 501, 503, 504, 505, 506, 509, 515, 520,
523–4, 533, 539
Bakunin, Mikhail 352
Balbo, Cesare 91, 104, 120, 144, 157–9
Balbo, Italo 407, 428, 429
Balilla 150, 465
see also fascism: and youth organizations
Balla, Giacomo 383
Balsamo, Paolo 63
Banca Romana scandal see scandals
Bandiera, Attilio and Emilio 136, 140–42, 436
bandits, banditry 264, 312, 395, 422, 534
and criminal anthropology 267–8, 269
during Napoleonic period 54–6
in 1860s 219–20, 224–5, 228, 265
in Sicily 452, 540
banks, banking 105, 262, 265, 302, 340, 341, 343, 354–5, 365,
409, 490
Baratieri, Oreste 346, 347, 348, 502
Barbarossa, Emperor Frederick 97, 150, 177, 239–40, 583
Barberini family 301
Bari 429
‘Barletta, duel of’ (‘Dis da di Barletta’) 121–2, 141, 239, 493
Barracu, Francesco 531–2
Bartoli, Domenico 561–2
Basilicata 103, 184, 263–4, 357, 363
Beauharnais, Eugène de 28, 31, 65, 66
Beccaria, Cesare 5, 92, 112, 383
Belgioioso, Cristina di 178
Bellegarde, Heinrich von 78
Belli, Giuseppe 109
Bellini, Vincenzo 154, 201
Benedict XV, Pope (Giacomo della Chiesa) 399
Benetton ( rm) 575
Bentham, Jeremy 189
Bentinck, Lord William 44, 63–5, 74
Berchet, Giovanni 80–81, 92, 118
Bergamo 52
Berlin, Congress of (1878) 324
Berlinguer, Enrico 577
Berlioz, Hector 152
Berlusconi, Luigi 525–6
Berlusconi, Silvio 526, 568, 575, 577, 585–6
Bertani, Agostino 178, 264, 278, 300
Berthier, Louis Alexandre 18–19
Biblioteca italiana 79–80
Bismarck, Prince Otto von xix, 251, 323, 327, 330, 331–2
Bissolati, Leonida 352, 358, 386
Bixio, Nino 178, 217
Bizzoni, Achille 294
Blondel, Enrichetta 92
Bluntschli, Johann Kaspar 318
Boccaccio, Giovanni 96, 108
Boccheciampe, Pietro 141
Boccioni, Umberto 369, 383
Bologna 16, 17, 54, 109, 123, 124, 125, 292, 353, 375, 424, 428,
468, 544, 570
Bolshevism, the Bolsheviks, 393, 407, 410, 420, 421, 425, 437
see also Russian Revolution; Soviet Union
Bombacci, Nicola 420–21, 531–2
Bonaparte, Jérôme 200
Bonaparte, Joseph 30, 54, 55
Bonaparte, Napoleon see Napoleon I
Bonghi, Ruggero 243, 315, 319, 324, 325
Bonomi, Ivanoe 386, 425, 428
Borghese, Camillo 189
Borjes, José 227
Borrelli, Francesco Saverio 581, 582
Borromeo, Carlo 110
Borsellino, Paolo 573
Bosnia–Herzegovina 324, 376
Bossi, Giuseppe 39, 72
Bossi, Umberto 582–3
Botta, Carlo 99–100, 150
Bottai, Giuseppe 480, 490, 495, 513, 522
Boulanger, Georges 327, 328, 329
Bovio, Giovanni 336
Braghetti, Anna Laura 571
Breda ( rm) 409
Breganze, Giacomo 48
Bresci, Gaetano 349
Brescia 16
Britain, the British 83, 191, 192, 200, 238, 417, 438, 508, 562,
576–7
and Corfu incident (1923) 439–40;96) 328–9, 337, 345–6
and Ethiopia (1935–6) 501, 503,
and First World War 388, 397, 403
and Munich conference (1938) 515–16
and occupation of Sicily (1806–15) 62–4
and opposition in Italy to Napoleon 55, 56–7, 58, 64–5
and Paris peace conference (1919–20) 412–13, 414
as political model for Italy 241, 249, 289, 308, 345
and post-war settlement (1945–7) 541, 544
and relations with Italy in Africa 324, 337
and Second World War 517, 519, 523, 524, 530, 533
and support for Italian uni cation 187, 195, 199, 202–3, 206,
208
Bronzini, Angelo 397
Brosses, Charles de 20
Browning, Robert 186
Bruno, Giordano 331, 463
Bu arini Guidi, Guido 514
Buonarroti, Filippo 8, 58, 60, 118, 123, 127, 132, 135, 137
Buonarroti, Michelangelo 8, 34, 150, 481, 487
bureaucracy 33, 239, 315, 335
under fascism 461, 490
and ‘Piedmontization’ (1860s) 232, 248
in Republic 544, 546, 563, 565
in Restoration states 75–6
see also prefects
Burke, Edmund 26, 63
Buscetta, Tommaso 573, 574
Byron, Lord 71, 117
Byzantium, Byzantines 6, 304, 375–6
see also Rome: as symbol of corruption

Cadorna, Luigi 391

Cadorna, Ra aele 255, 256
Caesar, Julius 12, 468
Ca è, 117
Ca ero, Carlo 353
Cagol, Margherita 570
Cairoli, Benedetto 308, 310
Cairoli (family) 295
Calabria 22, 54, 56, 103, 139, 140–41, 142, 363
Calamandrei, Franco 538
Calamandrei, Piero 534
Calderari 58
Caldesi, Vincenzo 258
Cammarano, Michele 325
camorra 247, 269, 409, 572
Campania 184, 196, 353
Campoformio, Treaty of (1797) 13
Canova, Antonio 32, 38, 72, 150, 290
Cantù, Cesare 149
Capello, Luigi 391
Caporetto (1917) 267, 391–4, 398, 400, 402, 403, 415, 502
Capponi, Gino 275
Capranica family 302
Carbonari, Carboneria 58–60, 64, 82, 83, 84, 87, 123, 127, 128,
175
Carducci, Giosuè 15, 239–40, 301, 369, 371, 375
and Crispi 333, 336, 357
and disparagement of liberal Italy 257–8, 303–4, 319
and monarchy 282, 358
Carducci, Valfredo 371
Carlo Alberto, King of Piedmont–Sardinia 109, 126, 133, 291, 309
character of 159
and Piedmontese revolution (1821) 84–5, 124
and revolutions of 1848–9 170, 171–5
and views on Italian independence 159–60
Carlo Felice, King of Piedmont–Sardinia 85, 87, 159
Carlyle, Jane 134
Carlyle, Thomas 134
Carmagnola, Francesco da Bussone, Count of 94, 150
Carnera, Primo 468
Carrà, Carlo 369, 383
cars, car production 355, 490, 521
see also FIAT
Casalduni 222–3, 224
Cassa per il Mezzogiorno 564, 574–5
Castagnola, Stefano 259
Castlereagh, Robert Stewart, Lord 65, 66
Castracani, Castruccio 150
Catania 563–5
Catholic Action 367–8, 386, 466–7, 484, 485, 543, 550, 552
Cattaneo, Carlo 99, 137, 146, 184, 209, 296, 582
Cavallotti, Felice 325, 342, 343–4, 345, 348
Cavour, Count Camillo Benso di xvi, 104, 187, 196, 211, 229, 230,
239, 333, 362, 377, 436, 449, 501
and alliance with France 191, 199–201
becomes prime minister 190–91
and belief in progress 147–8, 189
business activities of 108
and centralization 206, 231
character of 181, 189, 200, 202, 205, 235
and Crimean War 192–3
and hostility to the democrats 181, 196, 208–9, 234–5
and lack of familiarity with Italy 109, 181, 183
 and parliamentary politics 190, 237, 318
posthumous cult of 295, 296, 297, 438, 561
and relations with Church 191, 221
and uni cation (1860) 208–9
views on Italy and Italian unity 190, 195, 226
and war of 1859 201–5
Cavour, Michele Benso di 189
censors, censorship 87, 88, 153, 154–5, 167, 169
under fascism 451, 477, 492, 503
in liberal Italy 248, 343, 400
in Lombardy – Venetia (1815–60) 81, 182
in 1950s 558–9
in Piedmont (1815–60) 159, 238
in Tuscany (1815–60) 146
Chamberlain, Neville 515–16
Championnet, Jean Étienne 19–20, 21
Charcot, Jean-Martin 359
Charlemagne 95, 167, 233
Charles X, King of France 122
Chartism, Chartists 139, 145
Cherubini, Luigi 306
Chiesa, Mario 578–9, 581
Christian Amity 58
Christian Democracy (Democrazia Cristiana) 486, 543, 544, 571,
577
and attitude to Europe 555, 579
 and centre-left reforms 566–7
and clientelism 562–5
and corruption 567, 569, 581
and land reforms (1950) 556, 563
and party organizations 552
and relations with Church 541, 550–51, 558, 560–61, 562
in Second World War 521, 536, 539
Chrzanowski, Wojciech 175
Church, Catholic xvii, xix, 97, 178, 333, 371, 467, 563, 567, 573
and elections 238, 344, 386, 550–51
and establishment of Republic 541, 542–3
and fascism 435, 445, 459, 460, 463, 466, 472, 476, 483–6, 533
and First World War 399, 410
and hostility to liberal state 221, 243, 248–9, 298–300, 315, 385
and invasion of Libya 381
and links with masses 77, 111–12, 131–2, 220, 278, 364–5
under Napoleon 50, 56
and ‘neo-Guelphs’ 157, 159
in the 1950s 557–9
and racial laws (1938) 512–13
and relations with Christian Democrats 550–51, 558
and responses to socialism 293, 365–8
and sale of ecclesiastical property 50, 54, 301–2
in Restoration states 75–6, 77, 87, 159
welfare organisations of 261–2, 299
 see also papacy; Papal States; religiosity, popular
Churchill, Winston 530, 533, 539
Cialdini, Enrico 222, 245, 251–2
Ciani, Filippo and Giacomo 135
Ciano, Galeazzo 509, 510, 516–17, 518, 520, 522, 535
Cibrario, Luigi 181
Ciccotti, Ettore 357, 359
Cimabue 5
Cincinnatus 177, 361
cinema 367, 471, 478, 492, 521, 543, 554, 557, 558, 560
Cipriani, Amilcare 371
Cipriani, Lidio 511
Cirillo, Domenico 23
Cisalpine Republic 11, 16, 17, 29–31
Cispadane Republic 11
Clarendon, George Villiers, Lord 191
Clausewitz, Karl von 77
Clemenceau, Georges 411, 412, 413, 414
Clement XIV, Pope (Giovanni Ganganelli) 39
Clotilde of Savoy 200
Cobden, Richard 167
Codignola, Ernesto 460
Colajanni, Napoleone 409
Coldiretti 552
Colletta, Pietro 22, 33, 99
Collodi, Carlo see Lorenzini, Carlo
Columbus (Cristoforo Colombo) 40, 88–9, 149, 354
Como 471
commerce see trade
Commune, Paris (1871) 261, 353
Communist Party, Italian (Partito Comunista Italiano) 441, 533,
561, 565, 569
and consumerism 553–4
and Constituent Assembly 540–41
foundation of (1921) 424–5
and ‘historic compromise’ 577–8
in 1990s 581, 584
and onset of the Cold War 542, 543, 546
organizations of 551–2
and regional government 544, 566
and resistance (1943–5) 521, 529, 530, 536, 537, 539
Conciliatore, Il 81–2, 83, 92, 117
Confalonieri, Federico 48, 65, 66, 81, 87, 111
con no 451, 546
Consalvi, Cardinal Ercole 38
Consistorials 76
Constant, Benjamin 189
Constituent Assembly (1946–7) 540–41
constitution (1948) 541, 544
Contarini, Salvatore 439
Coppino, Michele 280
Coppino Law (1877) 276–7, 296
Corfu 140, 439
Corradini, Enrico 369, 374, 377, 379, 380, 417, 462
Corriere della Sera 279–80, 381, 445, 560
Corriere Italiano, Il 444
Corsica 11, 518
Cosa Nostra 573–4, 582, 583 see also ma a
Cosenz, Enrico 329, 332
Costa, Andrea 354, 371
Costa, Nino 131
Cousin, Victor 86
Craxi, Bettino 577, 578, 579, 581, 585
crime, criminality 267–71, 367, 453–4, 456, 458
see also bandits; camorra; Cosa Nostra; ma a
Crimean War 187, 192–3
Crispi, Francesco 170, 233, 237, 256, 293, 296, 312, 325, 357,
372, 385, 480
and Banca Romana scandal 340, 343–4
character of 323, 334
and Church 331, 333, 344, 366
and cult of Garibaldi 294–5
and cult of monarchy 306, 307, 309
and fascism 438
foreign policy of (1887–91) xx, 326–33, 336–7, 382, 412, 509
foreign policy of (1895–6) 345–8
and moral regeneration of Italy 303, 324, 326, 347
 and parliamentary government 247, 308, 316, 318, 335, 338,
344
reforms of (1887–91) 326, 334–5
and Sicilian Fasci 339, 341–3
and social question 263–4, 335
and uni cation of Italy (1859–60) 205–6, 207, 210, 235, 236
and war of 1866 250, 253
Critica fascista 513
Croce, Benedetto 369, 385, 398, 435, 445, 460, 462, 502, 524,
541, 549
Cronaca bizantina 314
Cuccia, Francesco 451–2, 453, 454
Cucco, Alfredo 454, 457
Cuoco, Vincenzo 24, 25–9, 34, 49, 53, 67, 89, 92, 99, 156
Curcio, Renato 570
Custoza, Battle of: (1848) 173, 192 (1866) 251–2, 253, 254, 256,
288, 305, 325, 345, 502
Cyrenaica 383, 496 see also Libya
Czechoslovakia 515, 516

Dalla Chiesa, Carlo Alberto 571–3

Dallolio, Alfredo 408
Dalmatia 388, 411, 414, 415, 542
Damiani, Abele 325–6, 329
Damiano, Andrea 506
D’Annunzio, Gabriele xx, 15, 302–3, 354, 369, 370, 381, 486
character of 350, 374
 and fascism 425–6, 428, 430, 463, 478, 506–7
and First World War 388, 401
and Fiume 410–11, 415–20
and national regeneration 374–7
as parliamentary deputy (1898–1900) 350–52, 374
Dante Alighieri 5, 35, 37, 40, 96, 100, 108, 114, 149, 239, 311,
319, 352, 362, 371, 375, 379, 411, 449, 475
Daodiace, Giuseppe 497
Darwin, Charles, Darwinism 268, 282, 319, 379
David, Jacques-Louis 32
De Amicis, Edmondo 250, 285–6, 287, 357, 360, 401
De Bono, Emilio 503, 522
De’ Capitani, Giuseppe 444
De Courten, Ra aele 524
De Gasperi, Alcide 529, 542, 543, 555
De Gregorio, Epifanio 220, 221, 223
De Meis, Angelo Camillo 307
De Nicola, Carlo 23
De Pinedo, Francesco 467
De Sanctis, Francesco 16, 233, 265, 277, 561
background and character of 229
and concern with gymnastics 284, 467
and electoral corruption 311–13, 314
and ‘Guicciardini man’ 260, 464, 538
and moral education of Italians 230, 240, 261
and need for two-party system 241, 318
 and war of 1866 250
De Sica, Vittorio 554
De’ Stefani, Alberto 435
De Vecchi, Cesare Maria 464, 494, 522
De Zerbi, Rocco 325
Debrà Libanòs 505
Delacroix, Eugène 150
Democratic Party of the Left (Partito Democratico della Sinistra)
581
democrats (during the Risorgimento) 125, 129, 151, 160, 202, 243,
290, 293
backgrounds of 136
disillusionment of 1860s 234–5, 244, 247
during 1850s 229, 184–5, 205
and exile 134–5, 183, 193
political ideas of 136–7, 138, 161, 184–5, 310
during revolutions of 1848–9 174–5, 176–7
and sense of religious mission 135–6
see also Cattaneo; Garibaldi, Giuseppe; Mazzini; Pisacane
Dempster, Thomas 29
Depretis, Agostino 295, 303, 310, 315, 319, 324, 326
dialect see Italian language Di Breme, Ludovico 66
Di Giorgio, Antonino 458
Di Pietro, Antonio 581–2, 586
Diaz, Armando 392, 403, 412, 434
diet (of Italians) 107, 218, 263, 283, 363, 521, 554
Difesa della razza, La 513
Dilke, Charles Wentworth 324
diseases 107, 218, 283, 284, 309, 335
Disraeli, Benjamin 191
Dodecanese islands 412, 439
Dogali (1887) 323–4, 325, 336
Dollfuss, Engelbert 501
Donatello (Donato di Niccolò) 510
Donati, Gaspero 275
Donati, Italia 275–80
Donizetti, Gaetano 152, 154–5
Dopolavoro see fascism
Doria, Andrea 177
Doria Pamphili (family) 301
Dos Passos, John 553
Dossi, Carlo (Carlo Alberto Pisani Dossi) 304, 328, 357
duels, duelling 247, 348, 350–51, 370, 374, 444
Dumini, Amerigo 443–5
Dunant, Jean Henri 205
Durando, Giacomo 161
Durando, Giovanni 172

earthquakes 219, 363

‘economic miracle’ (1950s–60s) 491, 554–7, 560
Egypt, Egyptians 497
El Alamein, Battle of (1942) 522
elections, parliamentary 178, 183, 262, 343, 349, 362, 369, 580
and Catholics 238, 344, 368, 550–51
conduct of 248, 267, 311–13, 441–2
under fascism 485
and su rage reform (1882) 310, 315–16
and su rage reform (1912) 385
in 1861 237–8
in 1895 344
in 1913 386
in 1919 422
in 1921 427
in 1924 441–2
in 1948 546
in 1992 583
in 1994 584, 585–6
in 2001 586
in 2006 587
see also plebiscites
electricity see energy
Eliot, George 187, 235
Emanuele Filiberto, Duke of Savoy 238
emigration 106–7, 264, 275, 336, 356–7, 490
see also migration
energy 339, 355, 555
Engels, Frederick 361
Eritrea 337, 346, 493, 500
Erizzo, Marco Miniscalchi 317
Esperia 140
Ethiopia 324, 336–7, 520, 545
and war of 1895–6 346–8
invasion of (1935) 463, 473, 488, 500–507
Etruscans 29, 89
European Economic Community, European Union 555–6
see also European Monetary System; Maastricht
European Monetary System 579–80
exhibitions, national 296, 384–5, 482–3, 500, 560

Fabre, François Xavier 38

Fabrizi, Nicola 134–5, 137, 139, 185
Facta, Luigi 428, 431
Falcone, Giovanni 573–4
Fanfani, Amintore 563
Farinacci, Roberto 446, 453, 513
Farini, Domenico 338
Farini, Luigi Carlo 132, 225–6
Fasci, Sicilian see Sicilian Fasci (1892–4)
Fasci di combattimento (1919–21) 416–17, 420, 422
fascism, fascist regime 360, 369, 401
and Battle for Grain 457, 489
and corporativist state 489, 491
and cult of Rome (romanità) 498–500
 and demographic policies 469–70, 471–2, 473–4, 484, 493
and Dopolavoro 492
economic policies of 476, 488–91, 508–9
and intellectuals 462, 486
and Nazi Germany 466, 501, 507, 508, 509, 511, 515, 516–17
and occupation of Fiume 417, 418
and race 463, 465, 471, 504, 511–12, 545, 546
and ‘reform of customs’ 510–11, 512
and rurality 456, 470–71
and secret police 444, 447, 545
and sport 467–9, 485
and squadrismo 424–6, 427–9, 431, 436, 437, 438, 446–7, 453,
494
and women 460, 464, 465–6, 467, 472, 473
and youth organizations 465–7
see also Fascism, Grand Council of; Fascist Militia; Fascist Party;
Fascist Revolution, Exhibition of; Mussolini; Salò, Republic of
Fascism, Grand Council of 437, 441, 453, 462, 474, 522
Fascist Militia (MVSN) 437, 443, 445, 446, 461, 480, 535
Fascist Party (PNF) 428–9, 437, 446, 453, 454, 463, 473, 479
Fascist Revolution, Exhibition of 482–3
federalism, federal ideas 9–10, 91, 97, 99, 137, 144, 146, 155–6,
161–2, 173, 184, 186, 200, 342, 582
see also Cattaneo; Northern League; regionalism
Federzoni, Luigi 380, 417, 434, 438, 445, 522
Fellini, Federico 555
Ferdinand II, King of the Two Sicilies 142, 170, 172, 173, 176, 195,
196, 200
Ferdinand III, Grand Duke of Tuscany 74, 76
Ferdinand IV, King of Naples (Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies) 19–
20, 22, 55, 62–3, 75, 77, 82, 83
Ferramonti 514
Ferrara 16, 424, 426
Ferrari, Cardinal Andrea 365
Ferrari, Giuseppe 91, 137, 184, 224
Ferrero, Guglielmo 333–4
Ferri, Enrico 357, 511
Ferruccio, Francesco 98, 101, 150, 151
FIAT 355, 408, 429, 490, 509, 515, 551, 554
Fieramosca, Ettore 98, 122, 169
Filadel a 60
lms see cinema
nances, public (after 1860) 255, 262–3, 343, 409, 423, 476, 490,
508–9, 565, 567, 576, 579–80
Finzi, Aldo 444, 512
First World War 387, 390, 456, 457, 463, 480, 482, 494, 517, 550
economy in 407–10
and intervention crisis 388–9
Italian battles of 391, 403–4
morale of soldiers in 394–5, 397–8, 415
and national education 394, 398, 403
treatment of soldiers in 395–7, 403
Fiume 411, 412, 414, 415, 416–20, 423, 425, 463, 542
Florence 34, 38, 105, 111, 168, 204, 265, 292, 308, 420
as capital of Italy (1865–70) 248
under fascism 468, 481, 492, 510
siege of (1530) 97, 98, 141, 151, 239, 243
Foa, Vittorio 536–7
Fonseca Pimentel, Eleonora 20, 21, 23
football 366, 467–9, 550, 562, 585–6
Forche Caudine 314
Fortunato, Giustino 254, 271, 382, 384, 394, 409
Forza Italia 586
Foscolo, Ugo 14, 15, 32, 37, 49, 79, 92, 109, 114
in exile 67, 86, 118
and hostility to Napoleon 13, 35–6, 49
and On Tombs (Dei sepolcri) 34–5, 38, 481
Fourier, Charles 145
France, the French 45, 83, 109, 130, 182, 185, 251, 314, 318, 319,
340, 345, 576
economic links with 106, 339
and Ethiopia (1895–6) 346, 415
during fascist period 438, 501, 507, 514, 516, 518
and First World War 388, 397, 403
and foreign policy of Crispi (1887–91) 326, 327–33
Italian hostility to (1796–1815) 15–16, 18, 49
and Italian uni cation (1858–60), 199–205, 206, 208, 210
in Napoleonic period (1796–1815) 4, 11–12, 13, 19, 28, 31
 and occupation of Tunis (1881) 324, 381, 415
and Paris peace conference (1919) 412, 414
and policy towards Italy (1850s) 191, 195
and revolutions of 1830–31 122–4, 127
and Roman Republic (1849) 178–9
and Rome (1861–70) 243, 245, 247–8, 256
and Sicilian Fasci 338, 342
Franceschi Ferrucci, Caterina 165
Francesco IV, Duke of Modena 66, 74, 76, 122–3, 124
Francesia, Giovanni Battista 366
Franchetti, Leopoldo 259, 266, 398, 453
Francis I, Emperor of Austria 78–9, 87
Franco, Francisco 508
Franklin, Benjamin 148
Franz Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria 376
Franzini, Luigi 18
Frederick II, King of Prussia 509
Freemasons, Freemasonry 57, 366, 566
Friuli 401
Froude, James 187
Fucini, Renato 279
Futurism, Futurists 374, 383, 388, 394, 401, 410, 416, 418, 504

Gaber, Giorgio 548

Galileo Galilei 5, 34, 36, 37, 40, 150, 261, 281, 283, 462, 481
Galluppi, Pasquale 139
Galvani, Luigi 96
Garibaldi, Giuseppe 197, 201, 212, 221, 237, 239, 247, 301, 333,
560
and Aspromonte (1862) 244–6
character and views of 117, 207, 211, 227
cult of after death 293–5, 296, 349
in exile in South America 134, 167
and fascism 431, 436, 438, 482, 535
and Mentana (1867) 256
popular appeal of 207, 234, 275, 483
and relations with Cavour 207, 236, 297
in revolutions of 1848–9 173–4, 177, 178–9
and socialism 353, 359, 361, 372
and support for Victor Emmanuel II 194, 208, 210
and the Thousand (1860) 185, 207–11, 229, 230, 420
and war of 1859 204, 206
and war of 1866 251
and Young Italy 133
Garibaldi, Peppino (Giuseppe) 417
Garofalo, Ra aele 269
Genoa 7, 11, 65, 74, 171, 175–6, 354, 358, 429, 471, 507
Gentile, Giovanni 369, 423, 450, 464
assassination of 525
and manifesto of fascist intellectuals 462
as Minister of Education (1922–4) 434, 459–60
views on Mazzini 413–14, 462
Germany, the Germans 64, 129, 345, 415, 541, 554
and Anschluss (Austria) 501, 515
economic relations with 343, 508
and First World War 388, 391, 392, 396, 402, 404
and formation of Axis (1936) 507, 509–10
and Italian armistice (1943) 523–4, 533
military convention with (1888) 327–8
and outbreak of Second World War 515–17
and plans for war with France (1888–90) 329–33
and Republic of Salò 535, 537, 538
in Second World War (1940–43) 519, 521–2
and Triple Alliance 324, 387, 412
and Zollverein (customs union) 147, 167
Giannini, Guglielmo 540
Gigli, Beniamino 471
Gini, Corrado 469, 471
Ginori (family), 104
Gioberti, Vincenzo xix, 91, 144, 150, 161, 166, 191, 242, 269, 296
early links of with Mazzini 132, 134, 137
and On the Civil Renewal of Italy 183–4
and On the Moral and Civil Primacy of the Italians 29, 155–7
in revolutions of 1848–9 174–5
Gioia, Giovanni 564
Gioia, Melchiorre 9, 10, 17, 49, 281, 283
Giolitti, Giovanni xx, 336, 378, 400, 407
and Banca Romana scandal 340, 343–4
and Catholics 365, 368, 386
character and ideas of 362
and fascism 427, 429, 441, 446
and intervention crisis 388–9
and invasion of Libya 381, 385–6
opposition of intellectuals to 364, 369, 370, 379
as prime minister (1892–3) 309, 338, 340, 343
as prime minister (1920–21) 423–4, 427, 428
reforms of 363, 377, 380, 385
and socialists 362–3, 368, 385–6
Giordano, Cosimo 220–22, 224
Giornale Italiano, Il 27
Giovanni delle Bande Nere 150
Giovine Italia (secret society) see Young Italy
Giovine Italia, Il (periodical) 132, 149
Giussano, Alberto da 240, 583
Gladstone, William 187, 191, 193, 413
Gluck, Christoph Willibald von 4
Gobetti, Piero 423, 455
Goiran, Giovanni 329–30
Goldoni, Carlo 109
Gorizia 391
government, local 276, 315, 424
and Catholics 299
 and clientelism (after 1945) 563–4, 578 1889
reform of 335
under fascism 451
under Napoleon 33, 77–8
in united Italy (1859–65) 248, 262
see also prefects
Govone, Giuseppe 247
Goths 6, 97, 302
Gramsci, Antonio 542, 553
Grandi, Dino 428, 522
Granville, Augusto Bozzi 64
Graziani, Rodolfo 495–7, 505, 520, 535
Greece, the Greeks 86, 118, 384, 439, 514, 516, 517, 519, 520, 570
Gregorio, Rosario 97
Gregory XII, Pope (Angelo Correr) 113
Gregory XVI, Pope (Bartolomeo Cappellari) 157, 160
Grossi, Tommaso 126
Guadalajara 508
Guala, Filiberto 558–9
Guarantees, Law of (1871) 298–9, 333
Guarnacci, Mario 29
Guel a 61–2
Guerrazzi, Francesco Domenico 117, 138, 150, 151, 174, 182, 275
Guerzoni, Giuseppe 283, 294
Guicciardini, Francesco 99, 260, 464, 538
Guiccioli, Alessandro 325, 346
Guizot, François 189

Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia 502, 504, 520

Hamilton, Emma 19, 26
Hamilton, Sir William 19
Hankey, Sir Maurice 414
Hare, Augustus 302
Hayez, Francesco 72–3, 82, 88, 92, 118, 120, 121, 125, 135, 179–
80
Hegel, Georg 144, 463
Hermes 378
Herzen, Alexander 90
Hilverding, Franz 4
Hitler, Adolf 399, 501, 509, 510, 515, 516–17, 518, 519
Hohenstaufen dynasty 6
Hugo, Sigisbert 56
Hugo, Victor 463
Huns 6
Hunt, Leigh 187

Iacobelli, Achille 221, 222

Ibsen, Henrik 463
illiteracy 108–9, 148, 219, 265, 277, 280, 357, 464
see also Italian language; schools Ilva ( rm) 409
Indian Mutiny 200
industrialists 104–5, 434–5, 489, 491, 555
industry, manufacturing 51, 361
and boom of 1896–1908 354–6, 363
and ‘economic miracle’ 554–6
under fascism 489–90
in First World War 408–9
growth of in 1880s 264, 339
in 1970s and 1980s 574–6
in restoration states (1815–60) 105, 145, 159, 167
in southern Italy 105, 232, 262, 564, 569, 574
see also‘economic miracle’; FIAT; industrialists
International Working Men’s Association (the International) 261,
280, 353
irredentism 376
Istituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale (IRI) 490–91, 555, 559
Istria 376, 388, 411, 542
Italian character xvii, 9–10, 43, 188, 254, 293, 311, 345, 347, 373,
520
decadence and e eminacy of 44–6, 156–7, 158–9, 175, 271–3
and ‘Guicciardini man’ 260, 464
and liking for strong leaders 334, 477
and need to develop martial spirit 15, 28, 120–21, 157, 369,
379, 465, 487, 510
and need for discipline 271–2, 435, 465
and need for political education 230, 249, 281–2, 450
and physical education 284, 465–7, 510
and racial ideas 270, 271, 512
 and separation of thought and action 240
Italian history (before 1796) 6–7, 160, 180, 239, 318, 373
contested readings of 90–91, 93–5, 96–100, 560–61, 583
and decadence 100, 158, 273, 311, 375–6
and national character 117, 271–3, 384, 450
and problem of Rome 243
as source of national identity 36, 91, 149–50, 161
teaching of (after 1860) 296–7, 462
Italian language 51, 181, 288, 557
and dialect 108–9, 219, 277, 493, 561, 583
and primary schools 277, 583
as source of nationhood 35, 109
and Tuscan 96, 108
Italic Legion 137
Italico, L’ 64
Italy, Kingdom of (under Napoleon) 30–32, 37, 49
Italy, representations and images of 38–41, 46–7, 114, 179, 290–
91, 417, 550

Jacini, Stefano 319

Japan 510, 554, 555
Jews 75, 87, 417, 512–14, 535, 545
see also fascism; race, racial ideas
John XXIII, Pope (Angelo Roncalli) 559
journals see newspapers
judiciary, judges 182, 232, 428, 544–5, 565
Jung, Guido 512

Kant, Immanuel 463

Kassala 337, 346
Khrushchev, Nikita 553
Kinsey Report 558
Knoller, Martin 39
Korherr, Richard 470
Kuliscio , Anna 361, 399

La Farina, Giuseppe 151, 183, 194–5, 201, 204, 206, 208–9

La Scala (opera house) 5, 52, 110, 201
La Torre, Pio 572
Labriola, Arturo 356, 502
Lajolo, Davide 486
Lamarmora, Alfonso 176, 192, 242, 245, 248, 251–2, 288, 305
Lamartine, Alphonse de 96, 100, 116–17, 398
Lamennais, Félicité de 157
Landor, Walter Savage 187
Lanza, Giovanni 256, 257
Lapi, Niccolò dei 150
Lateran Pacts (1929) 484–5, 541, 560
Laudamo, Antonio 169
Laugier, Marc-Antoine 73
Lausanne (1922) 438
League of Nations 415, 438, 439, 440, 502, 507, 508, 510
Le Bon, Gustave 477
Leccisi, Domenico 547
Left (in parliament, after 1860) 241, 295, 302, 310, 315, 318
see also democrats
Legnano, Battle of (1176) 97, 98, 117, 172, 177, 239, 583
Leidesdorf, Max 359
Leo XIII, Pope (Vincenzo Pecci) 331, 350, 366
Leonardo 378
Leonardo da Vinci 12, 275
Leopardi, Giacomo 71, 113–15, 150, 182
Leopardi, Monaldo 18, 112
Leopold II, Grand Duke of Tuscany 147, 170, 172, 174
Lessona, Michele 281, 282
Leto, Guido 545
Lewes, George Henry 187
Liberal Party (Partito Liberale Italiano) 551
liberalism, liberty 118, 145, 167, 178, 314, 318, 413–14, 450
criticisms of 271–2, 299, 377, 430
and fascism 433, 436, 440–41, 451
and national education 226–7, 230, 289
and national unity 160–62, 194, 239
Libya 493, 500, 545
fascist campaigns in 473, 495–8, 520, 522
invasion of (1911–12) 381–4, 385–6, 387, 388, 439
Liguria 132, 275
Lima, Salvo 564
Lincoln, Abraham 244, 413
Lissa, Battle of (1866) 253, 254, 256, 288, 325, 345, 502
Livorno 65, 429
Lloyd George, David 411–12, 415, 508
Lollobrigida, Gina 555
Lombard League (twelfth century) 97, 100, 160, 583
see also Northern League
Lombards (invaders) 6, 95, 97
Lombardy 11, 65–6, 87, 145, 148, 366
economy of 105, 339, 577
and revolutions of 1848–9 173, 174, 175, 182
and socialism 293, 335, 342, 577
and uni cation 204, 342
Lombardy – Venetia, Kingdom of 74, 77, 78–9, 87, 185, 204, 231
Lombroso, Cesare 267–70, 287, 319, 357, 359, 511
Lomonaco, Francesco 51
Longanesi, Leo 525
Loren, Sophia 555, 584
Lorenzini, Carlo (Carlo Collodi) 274, 281–2
Lotto, Lorenzo 113
Louis-Philippe, King of France 122, 124, 170
Louise, Countess of Albany 15, 38
Ludovisi (family) 302

Maastricht Treaty (1992) 580, 586

Machiavelli, Niccolò 27, 34, 35, 36, 37, 45, 149, 159, 182, 260–61,
433, 449, 481, 495
Mack von Leiberich, Karl 19, 20
Maestri, Pietro 188
ma a, ma osi 184–5, 259, 409, 410, 422, 566, 571, 583
and Christian Democrats 564, 569
discussions of (1870s) 266–7, 269
and elections 267, 312
fascist campaign against 451, 452–8
rst references to 247, 255, 266
in 1970s and 1980s 572–4
in Second World War 534, 540
Magenta, Battle of (1859) 203
Maistre, Joseph de 26
Malaparte, Curzio 393–4, 462, 534
Malatesta, Errico 353, 372
Malta 11, 518
Mameli, Go redo 47, 101, 179, 230, 296, 549–59
Mamiani, Terenzio 295–6
Mancini, Pasquale Stanislao 324
Manin, Daniele 173, 191, 193–4, 295
Mantegazza, Paolo 281
Manzoni, Alessandro 14, 67–8, 93, 99, 100, 114, 157, 230, 243,
501
background and character of 91–2
and Italian language 96, 109, 277
 and The Betrothed 95–6, 522
and The Count of Carmagnola 92, 94
March on Rome see Rome, March on
Marconi, Guglielmo 462, 502
Margherita of Savoy, Queen of Italy 282, 307, 308
Margolfo, Carlo 223
Maria Carolina, Queen of Naples 19, 22, 63
Maria Luisa, Duchess of Parma 74, 76, 153
Mariani, Mario 398
Marinelli, Giovanni 444
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 369, 383, 401, 416, 420, 462, 468
Marsala 62, 422
Marselli, Nicola 274, 289
Marshall Aid 555
Martini, Ferdinando 311, 327
Marx, Karl 205, 261, 360, 361
Marzabotto 538
Marzocco, Il 378
Masci, Ippolito 313
Massari, Giuseppe 226
Massaua 323–4, 325, 329, 336
Matapan, Cape (1941) 520
Mattei, Enrico 555
Matteotti, Giacomo 442–4, 446
Mayer, Enrico 148
Mazzini, Giuseppe xviii, xix, xx, 27, 84, 95–6, 138, 141, 158, 168,
235, 237, 275, 290, 296, 333, 341, 360, 416, 529, 560, 561
character and background of 86, 128–9, 132
conversion of, to national idea (1821) 86–7
early conspiracies of 132–3, 135
in exile in London 134, 186–8
and fascism 426, 431, 436, 438, 462, 535
and idea of ‘mission’ 129, 378
and ‘insurrection by armed bands’ 119
and Italian uni cation (1859–60) 206, 209
and liberty 130, 161, 194, 436
and papacy 128, 131, 167
and political initiatives (1850s) 184, 185–7, 195
and popular education 125, 128, 148–9, 154
posthumous reputation of 296, 378, 413–14
religious views of 116, 120, 126, 128–31, 135, 293
and republicanism 127, 186
and Roman Republic 174, 176–8
and Rome 128, 131, 242, 243, 257
and socialism 128, 186, 352–3, 358
and views on Italian nation 102, 130–31, 137, 155, 230
and Young Italy 127–9, 132, 135, 139
Mazzolari, Primo 543
Mecola, Nunziato 225
Medici, Giacomo 178
Melegari, Carlo 222
Melegari, Luigi 133
Meli, Giovanni 109
Meluso, Giuseppe 140
Melzi d’Eril, Francesco 30–32, 58, 66
Menabrea, Luigi 281
Menelik II, Emperor of Ethiopia 336–7, 346, 347
Mentana (1867) 256, 291, 415, 482
Mercadante, Saverio 142, 152, 169
Mercantini, Luigi 197
Meredith, George 235
Messe, Giovanni 522
Messina 363
Metternich, Prince Clemens von 74, 78–9, 83, 132, 168, 170
Michelangelo, see Buonarroti, Michelangelo
Michels, Roberto 360, 370
Mickiewicz, Adam 130
migration 106, 356, 457, 471, 556–7, 559, 566
see also emigration
Milan 3, 4, 66, 109, 291, 304, 365, 387, 570, 577
and ‘Bribesville’ scandal 578, 581
cultural life of 6, 82, 110–11, 360
economy of 105–6, 339, 356
and 1853 insurrection 186
and 1898 rising 309, 348
and fascism 416, 429, 471
 under Napoleon 6, 12, 16, 17, 30, 32, 40, 52
and opposition to Austrian rule 79–80, 82, 87
and revolution of 1848–9 170–71, 173
in Second World War 521, 532
and uni cation (1859–60) 204, 342
Mill, John Stuart 134
Miller, Giuseppe 140, 141–2
Milocca 456, 457, 464, 485
Minghetti, Marco 247, 248, 296, 318, 319
Minozzi, Giovanni 395
Misdea, Salvatore 287, 288
Misley, Enrico 123, 124
Modena, Duchy of 7, 12, 16, 74, 76, 122, 123, 173, 206
moderates (during the Risorgimento) 125, 137, 174, 243, 295
and contribution to uni cation 212, 293
and federalism 155, 168
and liberty 160–61
and views on ‘people’ 125, 148, 151–2
see also Azeglio; Balbo; Cavour; Gioberti
Mogadishu 494
Molise 574
Moltke, Helmuth von 284, 328, 346–7
monarchy (Italian) 297, 357, 397
and fascism 430–31, 480, 540
and 1946 referendum 540
 as symbol of national unity 233–4, 272, 290, 307–8
Monelli, Paolo 402
Monitore napolitano 21
Montalembert, Charles de 157
Montanelli, Giuseppe 46, 120, 138, 166, 169, 174, 176, 179, 184,
275
Montanelli, Indro 504, 546
Montecatini ( rm) 409
Montecuccoli, Raimondo 35
Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, Baron de 9
Monti, Antonio 482
Monti, Vincenzo 32, 37, 42, 92
Mordini, Antonio 250, 333
Mori, Cesare 428, 452–8, 571
Moro, Aldo 570–71
Mosca, Gaetano 314, 369
MSI (Movimento Sociale Italiano) 529, 584
see also National Alliance; neofascism
Munich (1938) 515–16
municipalism 110–11, 161, 230, 313
as historical problem 6–7, 9–10, 49, 137, 282, 288, 316
under Napoleon 16–17, 54
in 1831 revolutions 124–5
Murat, Joachim 30, 56, 64, 66, 67–8, 83
Murat, Lucien 195, 200
Muratori, Ludovico Antonio 95, 150
Murri, Romolo 367
Musolino, Benedetto 138
Mussolini, Alessandra 584
Mussolini, Alessandro 361, 371, 372, 479
Mussolini, Arnaldo 444, 477, 479
Mussolini, Benito xx, 350, 407, 456, 466, 467, 469, 480, 481, 482–
3, 498, 521, 540, 544, 578
apologies for (after 1945) 546, 584–5
and attack on Corfu 438–40
background and character of 356, 370–71, 433–4, 507
and campaign against the ma a 451–2
and cult of Rome 498–500
death of 530–31, 532
and demography 469–70, 471, 493
dismissed as prime minister (1943) 522–23
and education 459, 461–2, 464
and fascist movement (1919–21) 416, 420, 422, 426–8
in First World War 388, 399–400
and invasion of Ethiopia 488, 500–502, 503–5, 506
and invasion of Greece 519, 520
and March on Rome 431–2
and Matteotti crisis 441, 443–8
and national regeneration 372–3, 431, 435
and outbreak of Second World War 515–18
personality cult of 461–2, 468, 473, 475–9, 483–4
private life of 471, 472, 476, 479–80, 512, 522
 and racial ideas 470, 508, 511–12
and reform of Italian character 435, 449, 450, 465, 487, 491,
510–11, 520
and relations with Church 435, 484–5
and relations with D’Annunzio 416–17, 420, 430, 506–7
and relations with Hitler 501, 509–10, 515–16
and relations with monarchy 430–1, 434, 43, 4595
and Republic of Salò 535
as revolutionary socialist 372, 386, 387, 469
and squadrismo 426, 428–9, 437, 453
theft and reburial of body of 539, 546–7
and views on liberty 436, 460
and views on parliament 369, 435–6, 437
and views on war 465, 487, 494
Mussolini, Bruno 504
Mussolini, Rachele 472
Mussolini, Rosa 370–71, 479
Mussolini, Vittorio 492, 504

Nabab 314
Naples 19, 33, 137, 195, 196, 309, 313, 340–41, 363, 540, 572
cultural life in 20, 265, 292
economy of 145, 564
and lazzaroni 20–21, 23
population of 20, 106, 304
and revolution of 1848–9 170, 182
 and Second World War 533, 534
and uni cation of Italy (1860) 209, 211
see also camorra; Neapolitan Republic
Naples, Kingdom of (Kingdom of the Two Sicilies) 7, 19, 26, 33,
186, 195, 198, 231
becomes ‘Kingdom of the Two Sicilies’ 75, 77
economy of 104–5
and revolution of 1820–21 82–4
and revolution of 1848–9 169–70, 173, 176, 182
and uni cation 208–10
see also Ferdinand II; Ferdinand IV; Naples; south (of Italy);
‘southern question’
Napoleon I, Emperor 34, 36, 38, 39–40, 42, 53, 55, 67, 75, 79, 91,
150, 179, 233, 418, 476
and constitutional arrangements in Italy 29–33, 39–40, 50
and 1807 visit to Italy 48–9
and rst Italian campaign (1796–7) 3–4, 9, 11–13, 51
and views on Italians 31
Napoleon III, Emperor 178, 185, 190, 195, 237, 239
and annexation of Nice and Savoy 200–201, 206
background and character 124, 191,
and meeting with Cavour at Plombières 199–200
and question of Rome (1861–70) 243, 245, 246, 256
and uni cation xvi, 208, 210
and war of 1859 204–5
and war of 1866 252, 253, 256
Nardi, Anacarsi 116, 140
National Alliance (Alleanza Nazionale) 584, 586
National Society, Italian 194, 195, 201, 204, 210
Nationalism, the Nationalists 372–3, 376, 416, 432, 504
and fascism 434, 437–8, 441, 445, 453, 469, 489, 511
and First World War 388–9, 400, 410
and invasion of Libya 381, 385–6
main ideas of 378–80, 389
origins of 377–8
NATO 555
navy, Italian 251, 252–3, 329, 381, 413, 494, 515, 518, 519–20,
524
Nazism, the Nazis 501, 509, 511, 537, 551
see also Germany; Hitler
Neapolitan Republic (1799) 20–23, 26, 55
Necker, Jacques 41
Negri, Pier Eleonoro 222–4
Nélaton, Auguste 246
Nelson, Horatio 19, 20, 23
Nenni, Pietro 442
neo-fascism (after 1945) 529, 539, 547, 551, 567, 570, 584
Nervi, Pier Luigi 468
Newman, Cardinal Francis 187
newspapers, journals 21, 297, 314
and Catholicism 365–6, 543
under fascism 478, 513, 521
 in First World War 390, 403
and Nationalism 378
in Restoration states 81–2, 146, 148–9
and socialism 360
see also individual titles
Niccolini, Giovanni Battista 150
Nice (Nizza) 200–201, 205, 206, 207, 329, 518
Nicholas I, Tsar 122
Nicolai, Otto 152
Nicolson, Harold 412
Nicotera, Giovanni 178, 311
Nietzsche, Friedrich 350, 359, 371–2
Nievo, Carlo 227
Nievo, Ippolito 227, 236
Nigrisoli, Bartolo 463
Nitti, Francesco Saverio 409, 415, 416, 417, 432
Normans 6
Northern League (Lega Nord) xxi, 568, 582–3, 586
Novara, Battle of (1849) 175, 190, 192
Nuremberg trials 545

Odescalchi (family) 301

Oggi 558
oil see energy
Omar el Mukhtar 496, 497
opera, opera houses 20, 152–5, 167, 169, 177–8, 201
Opera dei Congressi 299, 364–5, 367
Orano, Paolo 475, 512
Oriani, Alfredo 242, 463
Orlando, Leoluca 573
Orlando, Luigi 333
Orlando, Vittorio Emanuele 319, 410, 417, 429
and fascism 440–41, 502
in First World War 400, 403
at Paris peace conference 411–12, 413, 414–15
Orsini, Felice 136, 199
Osservatore Romano 445, 484
Ottomans, Ottoman Empire 158, 345–6, 382
Owen, Robert 145

Paganelli, Giovanni Battista 365

Pagano, Mario 26
Palagi, Pelagio 72, 88
Palermo 56, 62, 106, 154, 292, 410, 454, 564
and 1866 rising, 254–5
and ma a 184–5, 247, 269, 569, 572
and revolution of 1848–9 169–70, 176
and uni cation (1860) 207, 208–9
Palestine 519
Pallavicini, Emilio 245–6
Pallavicino-Trivulzio, Giorgio 87, 88, 160, 193–4
Palmerston, Henry Temple, Lord 191, 206, 246
Panizzi, Antonio 118, 134
papacy 155–6, 157, 158, 166, 184, 298–9, 331
see also individual popes
Papal States 7, 123, 131, 168, 186, 302
invasion of (1860) 204, 209–10, 243
under Napoleon 18, 30, 50,
reactionary rule in (1815–46) 74, 76, 77, 87, 160
reforms in (1846–8) 166–7
see also Rome
Papini, Giovanni 377, 378
Pappalardo, Salvatore 573
Pareto, Vilfredo 359, 369, 380
Parini, Giuseppe 5, 35
parliament 160–61, 178, 247, 289, 330, 343, 397, 480
and Chamber of Deputies (building) 232, 301
conduct of deputies in 317–18, 324, 345, 348, 388
criticisms of (1880s–90s) 303, 314, 319, 324–5, 338, 344
criticisms of (1900–1915) 369, 378, 380
factionalism in 311, 319
under fascism 435–6, 445, 446–8, 485
negative images of (1860s–70s) 239–41, 255, 298, 310
and post-war crisis (1919–22) 410, 422–3, 430
and relation of deputies to voters 272, 311–13, 316, 563–4
under Republic 541, 580
and Statuto 182–3, 240–41, 447
 in Turin (1861) 232–3, 237
before uni cation 178, 190, 238–9
see also Christian Democracy; Communist Party; elections; Left;
parties; Right; scandals; Socialist Party
Parma 429
Parma, Duchy of 7, 12, 74, 76, 123, 173, 198, 206
Parravicini, Luigi Alessandro 149
parties, political 241, 436, 567, 581
in liberal period 310, 314, 316, 318–19, 422
negative image of (in Risorgimento) 161, 239
Pascoli, Giovanni 369, 381, 501
Pasolini, Pier Paolo 548–9, 557
Pavia 18
Pavolini, Alessandro 468, 531–2
peace conference (Paris, 1919) 410–15, 417
peace treaty (1947) 541–2
peasants, peasantry 17, 281, 336, 381, 403, 493, 552, 548–9
and common lands 50, 53, 218
economic conditions of 106, 218, 261–2, 264, 283, 354, 457,
556
under fascism 456–7, 464, 470–71, 472–3, 486–7, 490, 556
and ‘Italy’ (in Risorgimento) 66, 119, 179, 184
and opposition to landowners 21, 410, 540, 544
and opposition to the State (after 1860) 263–4, 395
patriotism of (after 1860) 275, 382, 394, 502, 538
religiosity of 18, 53, 278, 364
 and socialism 340, 352–3, 354, 359, 360–61, 364, 421
see also agriculture; emigration; migration; schools
Pellico, Silvio 81, 87–8, 111
Pellizza da Volpedo, Giuseppe 357
Pelloux, Luigi 348, 351
Pepe, Gabriele 116
Pepe, Guglielmo 82, 84, 117, 118
Percoto, Caterina 149
Persano, Carlo 252–3
Pertini, Sandro 578
Peruzzi, Ubaldo 295
Pesaro 476
Pesaro, Francesco 38
Petacci, Claretta 522, 530–32
Petacci, Marcello 530
Petitti di Roreto, Ilarione 147
Petrarch 12, 35, 40, 96, 100, 108, 449
Pezza, Michele (Fra Diavolo) 55–6, 98, 221
Piana dei Greci 451–2
Pico della Mirandola 5
Piedmont 75, 148, 339
Piedmont–Sardinia, Kingdom of 7, 77, 133, 181, 238, 262
administration in 75–6, 167–8
constitutional government in 170, 182–3, 190, 191
dynastic ambitions of 158–9, 171, 193, 195, 199–200, 233
 and national question 183, 193–4
and revolution of 1821 84–6
and revolution 1848–9 171–2, 173–6
and war of 1859 201, 203–6
see also Carlo Alberto; Cavour; ‘Piedmontization’; Victor
Emmanuel II
‘Piedmontization’ of Italy (after 1860) 229–33, 235, 262
Pignatelli, Francesco 20
Pillitteri, Paolo 578
Pilo, Rosalino 136, 170, 207
Pini, Giorgio 462
Pirandello, Luigi 305, 369, 433, 445, 462
Pirelli, Giovan Battista 339, 355
Pirelli ( rm) 575
Pisa 10, 169, 308
Pisacane, Carlo 136, 178, 184, 185, 196–7, 436
Pitrè, Giuseppe 259
Pittaluga, Vittorio Emanuele 418
Pius VII, Pope (Barnaba Chiaramonti) 30, 112
Pius VIII, Pope (Francesco Saverio Castiglioni) 123
Pius IX, Pope (Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti) 182, 302, 364–5
election of 165–6,
and Law of Guarantees 298–9
and loss of Rome (1870) 257
and opposition to united Italy 221, 243
and revolution of 1848–9 170, 172–4, 178
Pius X, Pope (Giuseppe Sarto) 367–8
Pius XI, Pope (Achille Ratti) 441, 478, 484–5, 512–13
Pius XII, Pope (Eugenio Pacelli) 542–3, 558
Pizzoni, Alfredo 538
plebiscites (1859–60) 198, 206, 210
Poerio, Carlo 182
Poland, the Poles 130, 187, 516–17
police, policing 152, 248, 267, 343, 370, 546
under fascism, 437, 451, 535, 537
and rise of fascism (1919–22) 424, 428
see also prefects
Politecnico 146
Pontelandolfo 217–24, 228, 237
Pontine marshes 473
Popolo d’Italia, Il 399, 416, 420, 444, 477, 482
Popular Party (Partito Popolare Italiano) 422, 427, 429, 434, 441,
448
Porro-Lambertenghi, Luigi 87
Porta, Carlo 109
Pozzo, Vittorio 469
Prati, Giovanni 149
Predappio 356, 361, 370, 372, 473, 479, 546
prefects 248, 343, 335, 453, 546
Prezzolini, Giuseppe 369, 377, 378, 379, 423, 433
Prussia, the Prussians 202, 205, 249, 252, 253, 256, 285
Puccini, Niccolò 149–51
Puglia 103, 265, 354, 574

Quinet, Edgar 90

race, racial ideas 268–71, 417, 438, 463, 465, 470, 471, 504, 583
see also Lombroso;
fascism;
racial laws
racial laws (1938) 511–14
Radetzky, Johann 175, 561
railways 103, 145, 147, 167, 271
Ranza, Giovanni 10
Raphael (Ra aello Sanzio) 149
Rastrelli, Bartolomeo 5
Rays, Society of 25, 48, 57, 58
Recanati 113–15
Red Brigades (Brigate Rosse) 570–71
Redipuglia 473
Reggio (Emilia) 16, 17
regional government (after 1946) 541, 544, 566
regionalism 8, 9–10, 137, 248, 252, 318, 327, 385, 410
and army 288, 289
and parliament 240–41
and regional autonomy 206, 231
see also municipalism; regional government
Regno, Il 378
religiosity, popular 18, 111–12, 220, 361, 367
see also Church
Republican Party (Partito Repubblicano Italiano) 551, 578
Rerum Novarum 350, 366
resistance 529–31, 536–8, 539, 543, 545, 549, 584–5
Revelli, Nuto 524, 538
Ricasoli, Bettino 104, 232, 295
Ricci, Luigi 89, 152
Ricci, Renato 465, 466
Ricciardi, Giuseppe 137
Riccione 476
Ridol , Cosimo 147, 295
Rienzo, Cola di 98, 302
Riforma, La 346
Right (in parliament, after 1860) 241, 318
see also moderates
Risorgimento, as national myth 212, 293–7, 438, 462, 481–2, 560
roads 51, 102–3, 263, 489, 490, 559, 564
Roatta, Mario 508, 522, 523
Rocco, Alfredo 438, 445
Romagna 160, 275, 277, 278, 361, 447
anarchism in 263, 353
annexation of (1859–60) 205, 206
communism in 544, 566
riots in (1869) 256, 261
sectarians in (before 1860) 87, 123, 139, 165
socialism in 293, 335, 342
Romagnosi, Gian Domenico 81, 146
Roman Republic: (1798–9) 18–19, 24 (1849) 131–2, 176–9, 182,
296
Romania 51
romanità (under fascism) 498–500
Rome 174, 182, 208, 209, 211, 231, 358, 554
capture of (1870) 256–8, 292
ceremonies in 112, 292, 364
debates about, as capital 242–4
development of (1870s–80s) 301–3
under fascism 499–500
language in 108
population of 106, 304, 471
rioting in (1880s–90s) 339, 340
in Second World War 521, 523, 539
and September Convention (1864) 247–8
as symbol of corruption 304–5, 378
as symbol of national regeneration 128, 130–31, 156, 166, 174
statues in 295–6, 331
see also papacy;
Roman Republic;
Rome, ancient;
Rome, March on;
Vittoriano
Rome, ancient 89, 302, 375, 381, 414, 449
as model to emulate 28, 156, 177, 303, 351
as problematic model 91, 100, 243
and fascism 462, 480, 495, 512
see also romanità
Rome, March on (1922) 430–32, 436, 480, 481, 482
Rommel, Erwin 392, 522
Roosevelt, Franklin D. 539
Rosmini, Antonio 157
Rossellini, Roberto 560
Rossetti, Gabriele 118
Rossi, Cesare 443, 444, 446
Rossi, Pellegrino 174
Rossini, Gioachino 72, 153, 154, 281, 283
Rossoni, Edmondo 429
Rotella, Giuseppe 54–5
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 40, 42, 98, 463
Rudinì, Antonio di 338
Ru o, Cardinal Fabrizio 22–3, 55
Rumor, Mariano 563
Russell, Lord John 193, 206
Russia, the Russians 83, 192, 327, 328, 342, 345–6, 389
see also Russian Revolution;
Soviet Union
Russian Revolution (1917) 410, 415
Russo, Vincenzo 26

Sadowa, Battle of (1866) 252

Sa , Aurelio 178
Saint-Cère, Jacques 323
Saint-Jorioz, Carlo Bianco di 119, 127, 133, 135
St Petersburg xv, 4, 5
Saint-Simon, Claude Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de 128–9, 166
Salandra, Antonio 377, 387–8, 395, 404, 432, 440, 441, 446
Salisbury, Robert Cecil, Lord 323, 329, 331, 337, 346
Salò, Republic of 421, 514, 520, 524, 535–6, 537, 545, 584
Salvemini, Gaetano 357, 369, 384, 399, 403, 409, 491
San Martino, Battle of (1859) 203, 306
Sand, George 186
Santarosa, Santorre di 84–6, 112, 124
Sardinia 30, 33, 75, 289, 544, 557
Sarfatti, Margherita 477, 512
Savonarola 182
Savoy 133, 200–201, 205, 206, 238
see also Piedmont–Sardinia
Sbarbaro, Pietro 314
scandals, parliamentary 314, 567
Banca Romana (1893–4) 340, 343–4
Tangentopoli (‘Bribesville’) 578, 581, 585
tobacco monopoly (1868–9) 255, 310
Scapitta, Capo 55
Scelba, Mario 563
Schiller, Friedrich 80
Schlegel, August Wilhelm von 41, 80
schools 145, 151, 232, 276, 288, 360, 566
attendance at 272, 277, 357, 464
under fascism 435, 455–6, 459–63, 486, 513
language in 277–8
syllabus in 280–81, 283, 296–7, 460, 461–3
see also Coppino Law;
teachers;
universities
Schopenhauer, Arthur 463
Sciascia, Leonardo 571, 574
Scott, Walter 81, 86, 191, 229
Scotti, Alessandro 396
secret societies (in the Risorgimento)
see Adel a;
Apofasimeni;
Calderari;
Carbonari;
Christian Amity;
Consistorials;
Esperia;
Filadel a;
Guel a;
 Sons of Young Italy;
Sublime Perfect Masters;
Trinitari;
True Italians;
Young Italy
Sedan, Battle of (1870) 256, 285, 327
Sella, Quintino 228, 244, 301, 303, 362
Senior, Nassau William 181
September Convention (1864) 247–8
Serao, Matilde 279–80
Serra, Renato 402
Settembrini, Luigi 96, 155, 182, 289, 198
Sicilian Fasci (1892–4) 309, 338, 340–42, 361
Sicily 11, 33, 83, 108, 139, 189, 195, 231, 245, 259, 354, 357, 544
British occupation of (1806–15) 62–4
economic conditions in 62, 104, 263, 343, 457, 569
and military service 77, 232, 247
and opposition to Naples 62, 207, 238
peasant squads in 170, 184–5
and revolution of 1820–21 82, 83–4
and revolution of 1848–9 169–70, 173, 176
and rising of 1866 254–5, 266
and Second World War 522, 523, 534, 540
and uni cation (1859–60) 205–6, 207–10
see also Cosa Nostra;
 ma a;
Palermo
Siena 493
Sighele, Scipio 369, 380
Sironi, Mario 383, 482
Sirtori, Giuseppe 236, 482
Sismondi, Simonde de 41, 72, 81, 96–8, 137, 150
Sitwell, Osbert 418
Smiles, Samuel 187, 280–81
Social Democrats (Partito Socialdemocratico Italiano) 551
socialism, socialists 261, 307, 314, 318, 365, 366, 367, 374, 378,
379, 380, 426, 540
and criminal anthropology 268
and democrats (in Risorgimento) 128, 136, 184, 186, 197
in 1880s 293, 299, 325, 353–4, 361
and fascist violence 416, 424–6, 427–9, 441
and First World War 398, 398–9, 400
and intellectuals 351–2, 357–9
and labour unrest (1919–22) 420–21 423–4, 429, 436
and local government 335, 424
and popular education 360–61
and ‘Red Week’ (1914) 387
religious character of 360–61, 377
repressive measures against (1890s) 343, 348
and Second World War 521, 533, 536, 537
in Sicily 340–41, 361
 see also anarchism;
strikes;
trade unions
Socialist Party (Partito Socialista Italiano) 420, 448, 459, 467, 561
and creation of Republic (1946–8) 541–2, 543, 546
and First World War 389
foundation of (1892–5) 342, 354
and Libyan war 385–6
and maximalists 368–9, 370, 386
and minimalists (reformists) 361–2, 369–70, 386
in 1980s 577–8
organizations of 354, 492
in parliament 344, 348–9, 422
and revolution (1919–22) 420–21, 423–4
and Soviet Union 551
and strikes 363, 370, 415, 421, 429
Society of the Heart of Jesus 58
So ci, Ardengo 394, 462
Solera, Temistocle 144
Solferino, Battle of (1859) 205
Somalia 493, 494–5, 500, 520
Sonnino, Sidney 250–51, 263, 266, 298, 343, 388, 410, 412, 413,
414
Sons of Young Italy 138
Sorel, Georges 369, 372, 380
Sousa Holstein, Pedro de 42
south (of Italy), attitude of
northerners to 102, 183, 184–5, 195, 217, 220, 225–8, 236, 409,
574, 583
‘southern question’ 265–6, 268–9, 270–71, 363, 409–10, 569, 574–
5, 583
Soviet Union 510, 517, 521, 580
Italian Communist Party and 542, 543, 551, 581, 585
Italian Socialist Party and 542, 551, 580
Spadolini, Giovanni 578
Spain, the Spanish 7, 64, 65, 82, 97, 118–19, 135, 161, 353, 508
Spengler, Oswald 469
Spontini, Gaspare 32
Staël, Madame de 20, 24, 41–6, 79–80, 92, 110, 129
Stalin, Joseph 542, 551, 553
Stalingrad 521
Starace, Achille 442, 510, 532
Statuto 170, 182–3, 230, 239, 241, 344, 434, 447, 522
Statuto, Festival of the 291–2, 365
Steinbeck, John 553
Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle) 6, 17, 32, 52, 110–12, 114
Sterza, Andrea 364
strikes 325, 335, 363, 370, 372, 380, 408, 415, 421, 423, 489, 521
Strozzi, Filippo 150
Stuart, Charles Edward 15
Sturzo, Luigi 441
Sublime Perfect Masters 119
Sulis, Edgardo 479
Switzerland 11, 97, 562
syndicalism, revolutionary 370, 372, 388, 416, 489

Taine, Hippolyte 319

Talleyrand, Charles Maurice de 30
Tangentopoli (‘Bribesville’), 578, 581
Taranto 520
Tasso 114, 150
taxes, taxation 21, 33, 53, 76, 218, 221, 255, 263, 284, 343, 508
evasion of 339, 576, 579
grist 256, 263
teachers 275–8, 455–6, 459, 461, 464
television 557–8, 559, 568, 575, 585
Tennyson, Alfred 145
Terragni, Giuseppe 482
terrorism (1980s) 570–71
Terruzzi, Regina 473
Thaon di Revel, Paolo 434, 440
Thierry, Augustin 93
Tivaroni, Carlo 212
Tocqueville, Alexis de 144
Togliatti, Palmiro 541, 542, 553
Tolstoy, Leo 463
Tommaseo, Niccolò 157
Torrigiani, Ra aello 276, 278
Toscanini, Arturo 422
trade 50, 62, 76, 103–4, 147, 339, 490, 508
trade unions 424, 566
Catholic 421, 552
fascist 429, 489, 491
socialist 354, 363, 387, 421, 429, 445, 551–2
transformism (‘trasformismo’) 318–19
Treaty of London (1915) 388, 411, 412
Trento, Trentino 211, 388, 391, 404, 411, 413
Trieste 388, 404, 411, 413, 420, 549
Trinitari 58
Triple Alliance 324, 327, 333, 345, 387, 412
Tripoli, Tripolitania 329, 333, 345, 382, 495
see also Libya
Troya, Carlo 157
True Italians 135, 137
Tunis, Tunisia 319, 324, 329, 333, 415, 483
Turati, Filippo 269, 342, 352, 358–62, 368–9, 383, 386, 399, 429
Turiello, Pasquale 271–2, 282, 379
Turin 84, 147, 183, 238, 265, 305, 358, 509, 521, 557
as capital of Italy (1861–5) 232, 247–8
exhibitions in 296, 384, 560
industry in 408
see also FIAT;
Piedmont–Sardinia Turkey 516
Tuscany 14, 108, 275, 277, 354, 447, 544
Tuscany, Grand Duchy of 74, 76, 99, 168, 182, 186, 231
and annexation (1859–60) 198, 204, 205, 206
cultural life in 146–7, 148
economic activities in 104, 145, 167
and revolution of 1848–9 174, 176
Two Sicilies, Kingdom of see Naples, Kingdom of
Tyrol, South 211, 376, 388, 411

Uccialli, Treaty of (1889) 336–7

Umberto I, King of Italy 308, 330, 348, 361, 372
and African colonies 336, 346
assassination of 349
and Banca Romana scandal 340, 343
character and interests of 307, 309
Umberto II, King of Italy 540
Umbria 354, 544
unemployment 231, 232, 245, 264, 415, 490, 575
Unità, L’ 544, 551, 552
United States of America 244, 349, 355, 541, 550, 558
emigration to 356, 490
and post-war reconstruction 543, 544, 555
and Second World War 523, 530, 533, 534, 539
universities 365, 459, 460, 462, 464, 513, 566
Uomo Qualunque 540
Valerio, Lorenzo 148
Valli, Luigi 379
Vandals 302
Vassallo, Francesco 564
Vecchi, Ferruccio 416
Veneto 211, 249, 252, 253, 339, 366, 393
Venice 48–9, 154, 375–6, 401, 170, 173, 176
Venice, Republic of 7, 12–13, 74
Vercellana, Rosa 233, 257, 301, 305
Verdi, Giuseppe xv–xvi, 91, 118, 144, 167, 169, 281, 309, 333,
372, 549
in parliament 237–8
as ‘patriotic’ composer 121, 153–4, 177–8
Verga, Giuseppe 287
Verne, Jules 360
Verona 18
Versailles, Treaty of 440, 493–4
see also peace conference (Paris, 1919)
Vespers, Sicilian (1282) 98, 101, 117, 121, 141, 150, 189, 239
Verri, Pietro 4, 7, 8, 92, 96, 146
Vico, Giambattista 26, 29, 89, 150, 156, 260
Victor Emmanuel I, King of
Piedmont–Sardinia 75–6, 82
Victor Emmanuel II, King of
Piedmont–Sardinia;
King of Italy 175, 190, 200, 218, 221, 239, 255, 297, 324, 333
 and Aspromonte (1862) 245
becomes king of Italy 198, 233
character and interests of 182, 192, 193, 233
and Crimean War 192
cult of, after death 293, 295, 308–9, 365, 438, 560
death and funeral of 292, 305–7
dislikes being in Rome 242, 298, 300–301
and hostility to democrats 235
‘pilgrimage’ to tomb of (1884) 292, 308
popularity of 233–4
and relations with Cavour 191, 205
and relations with Garibaldi (1860) 206, 210–11
and taking of Rome (1870) 256, 257
and war of 1859 201, 203, 205
and war of 1866 251, 252
Victor Emmanuel III, King of Italy 375, 420, 429, 434, 513
and abdication 540
and armistice (1943) 523–4, 533
assumes imperial title 505, 506
dismisses Mussolini (1943) 522–3
and March on Rome 431–2
and Matteotti crisis 445, 446, 447
Victoria, Queen 193
Vienna, Congress of 73–4
Vieusseux, Gian Pietro 116, 146, 150, 275
Villafranca, Peace of (1859) 205, 206
Villari, Pasquale 91, 254, 344
Villella, Giuseppe 268
Virgil 12, 23, 40, 62, 361, 500
Visconti, Ermes 81, 92
Visconti Venosta, Emilio and Giovanni 108
Vittoriano (monument) 291, 295, 308, 385, 480, 499, 504
Vittorio Amedeo II, King of Piedmont–Sardinia 238
Vittorio Veneto (1918) 403, 410, 432, 456
Voce, La 372–3, 378, 379
Volpe, Gioacchino 369
Volpi, Giuseppe 495

war, as tool of nationalization xix, 120, 250–51, 272–3, 290, 304,

376–7, 379–80, 383–4, 487
welfare 335, 363, 472, 490, 564, 566–7, 575
Wilhelm II, Kaiser 327, 330
Wilson, Woodrow 410, 411, 413, 414, 415, 417

Young Europe 134

Young Italy (Giovine Italia) 127, 132, 137, 139
Yugoslavia 412, 415, 514, 517, 519, 521–2, 542

Zanichelli, Domenico 318

Zola, Émile 360
Zoli, Adone 547
* The allegation advanced by some historians that Winston
Churchill had dispatched Intelligence Service o cers to in ltrate
the partisans and ensure that Mussolini was shot (perhaps to prevent
damaging evidence of the British Prime Minister’s personal
correspondence with the Italian leader coming to light) and not put
on public trial, as the Americans wanted, has never been
substantiated.