I cannot imagine anyone who wouldn’t love Italy. If you don’t like its Etruscan, or Roman, or early medieval past, you may surely love the Italian Renaissance. Or you may love the Italian cinema, or Italian food, or Italian personality and way of life, or Italian fashion, or grappa and sunny seaside. Along with Greece, Italy is the cradle of the European culture, and as such, there is a place for Italy in everyone’s heart and mind.
Little do we know, perhaps, that until March 17, 1861 Italy was not a unified country. For the largest part of its history, Italy could be compared to a patchwork blanket: its many principalities, counties, and republics offered a rich variety of cultures, dialects, and a wide range of political alliances with ‘foreign’ countries. And even though the advocacy for the united Italy may be traced back as far as Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia (1302-05), it literally took ages to transform an idea of the intellectuals into a people’s passion.
This was all to be changed in the 19th c. during the movement known as Il Risorgimento, headed by Giuseppe Garibaldi, in particular. The story rings some personal bells for me: when I was in my third year at the University, in my Modern History exam I had to talk exactly about the unification of Italy. Giuseppe Mazzini was another figurehead whose works I also had to read for the exam.And, of course, the first king of Italy, Vittorio Emanuele II, and the prime minister, Camillo Benso, the countr of Cavour.
Il Corriere della Sera has created a special website celebrating the 150th anniversary – L’Unità d’Italia. The majority of information you are about to find there mostly illuminates the Italian culture. And below is a documentary by Alberto Melloni that traces the pivotal moments on the way to the modern “unique” Italian identity. A full article in Italian: «Va’ pensiero», Legnano, Pontida Quei simboli dell’Italia irredentista.
http://static2.video.corriereobjects.it/widget/swf/CorrierePolymediaShow.swf
