Preface
Without appealing to the ancients, from whom there is an abundance of national patriotic material and expressions of
italianità to be found, particularly in Virgil and many other ancient Italian authors, we will instead begin with Dante Alighieri, who is generally considered the first modern Italian patriot.
I. — Dante Alighieri
The national idea came to Dante as part of that essential continuity between ancient Rome and modem Italy which is the key to Italian civilisation. Virgil himself had defined the national aspirations of Italians throughout the centuries, when he placed upon the lips of Aeneas the pregnant words:
Italiam quaero patriam. There was never a time, from the day on which a barbarian conqueror dethroned the last of the old Roman emperors in the west to that on which Victor Emanuel assumed the crown of the united kingdom in 1861, when Italy—in the notorious phrase of the anti-Italian Metternich—was “a mere geographical expression.” As surprising as it may be to those living beyond the Alps, Italy was never a mere geographical expression. The Italians of the early Middle Ages had inherited from the writers of ancient Rome the conception of the Italy of classical literature, whose glories and beauties, whose ancient myths and heroes, had been sung by Virgil and Horace—the Italy which, through the Roman Empire, had given Latin civilisation to the nations whom she united in the Roman Peace. The continuity of the Latin tradition in Italy, kept alive by the grammarians and rhetoricians, by the study of the classics and of Roman law, preserved this conception of an ideal Italian unity after the political unity had been torn to pieces as the result of the Longobard conquest.
We find
Italia in this sense in the letters of Gregory the Great at the very beginning of the Middle Ages, when the political dissolution of the peninsula had but just begun. An anonymous writer of Ravenna, at the end of the seventh century, speaks of that
patria nobilissima quae dicitur Italia (“most noble fatherland called Italy”). There was a notably strong sense of Latin continuity in the eleventh and twelfth centuries; the new, vigorous, many-sided life and activity of the communes was, in part, a conscious renovation in the Italian cities of the spirit of ancient Rome. Thus, the anonymous poet, who celebrates the victory of the Pisans over the Saracens on the African coast in 1088, begins by uniting this new glory of Pisa with the deeds of the Romans of old:
“Inclytorum Pisanorum scriptunis historiam, antiquorum Romanorum renovo memoriam; nam extendit modo Pisa laudem admirabilem, quam olim recepit Roma vincendo Carthaginem.” (“I am going to write the history of the famous Pisans, and revive the memory of the ancient Romans: For Pisa only carries on the admirable glory which Rome once achieved by vanquishing Carthage.”)
And he calls upon not only Pisa, but all Italy, to weep for the fallen hero, Ugo Visconti. A few years later (about 1114), the author of the
Liber Maiolichinus—the poem on the conquest of the Balearic Islands from the Saracens—conceives of the enterprise as a national one in which the Commune of Pisa is, as it were, the representative of the Italian nation. The poem begins with Pisa, “
Pisani populi vires et bellica facta,” and ends with the name of Italy.
This sense of Italian nationality becomes more explicit in the latter part of the twelfth century, during the heroic contest carried on by the Lombard League against the mightiest of mediaeval German Emperors, Frederick Barbarossa. There is sufficient evidence that, above and beyond their respective cities or communes, these Italian burghers recognised the conception of a common Italian native land. A contemporary chronicler, Romoaldus of Salerno, tells us that, when the representatives of the Lombard communes met Pope Alexander III at Ferrara in 1177 (the year after their great victory at Legnano), they claimed to speak in the name of all Italy,
universa Italia, and to have fought
pro honore et libertate Italiae (“for the honor and freedom of Italy”). They will receive peace from the Emperor gladly, but only
salvo Italiae honore:
“We freely grant him what Italy owes him of old, and deny him not his ancient jurisdiction; but our liberty, which we have received by hereditary right from our forebears, we will never abandon, save with life itself; for we would rather meet a glorious death with liberty than preserve a wretched life in servitude.”
The fruits of the victory of Legnano and the peace of Constance were already being lost in the fratricidal conflicts of the Italian cities, when a national consciousness appears vividly in the writings of the grammarian and rhetorician Boncompagno da Signa. Thus, we find him writing in 1201: “I do not believe that Italy can be made tributary to any one, unless it come to pass from the malice and envy of Italians; for it is set down in the laws that Italy is not a province, but the mistress of provinces”—
domina provinciarum, the phrase which we meet again (
donna di provincie) in the Purgatorio of Dante.
But it was Dante who first wedded an Italian national idea to the glorious modem vernacular which is the immediate continuation and development of the language of ancient Rome. It is to Dante, as Casini acutely observed, that we owe the discovery, so significant for our own times, that “language is the character and symbol of nationality.” In the
De Vulgari Eloquentia, he seeks the ideal Italian language, as the character and symbol of the Italian nation, and declares that, although their court in the body is scattered, the Italians “have been united by the gracious light of reason.” A keen sense of Italian citizenship is revealed in the first of his political utterances after his exile: the Latin letter where he addresses “the kings of Italy all and several, the senators of her holy city, her dukes, marquesses, counts, and peoples,” and subscribes himself “the humble Italian, Dante Alighieri, the Florentine.” The respective rulers and peoples are admonished as members of one body; the writer's Italian nationality comes before his Florentine origin; the tidings of joy and hope are announced to Italy as a whole.
In the
De Vulgari Eloquentia and in the
Divina Commedia alike, Dante conceives of Italy as a cultural and geographical unity, from the extreme barriers of the Alps to furthest Sicily—the Alps alone being the northern boundary between the Italian and the German peoples. The cities of Istria are no less Italian than those of Lombardy and Tuscany; the eastern boundaries of Italy are indicated by the Quarnaro Gulf:
“che Italia chiude e suoi termini bagna.” (“which encloses Italy and bathes its borders.”)
Some may object that Dante appealed to a foreign Emperor. But in Dante's theory, the Emperor has two closely associated missions to perform: one universal and international, the other national and Italian. The
Veltro, the symbol of the ideal Emperor in the first canto of the
Inferno, is not only to slay the she-wolf of avarice, but to be the salvation of Italy:
“di quell'umile Italia fia salute.” (“who will be the salvation of that humble Italy.”)
The position of the Emperor with respect to Italy is clearly stated in his letter to the princes and peoples:
“Awake, then, all ye dwellers in Italy, and arise before your king, ye who are reserved not only for his empire, but, as free men, for his rule.”
Like the other nations, Italy is included in the Empire, but she has the special privilege of having the Emperor himself as her king. It is true there is no explicit call in Dante for a fusion of the different Italian states; but the realisation of such an Italian kingdom would obviously imply political unity and the end of the temporal power of the Pope. In any case, the Emperor elect must
drizzare Italia (“redress Italy”), he must
inforcar li suoi arcioni (“jump
on her saddle”), before he can fulfill his imperial mission of universal peace and liberation.
The nationality of this imperial deliverer from strife and anarchy was, to use a scholastic phrase,
accidental; for Rome alone could confirm and give its sanctity to the choice of the Electors, and the tradition that he represented would be Latin. And, further, when we examine the
De Monarchia, we find that Dante's “imperialism” is merely the outward form of his conception. He looks to the goal of civilisation, the function proper to humanity as a whole; and he finds it to be the actualising, the bringing into play, of all the potentialities of the human mind for thought and for action. For this to be realised, the first requisite is universal peace, and the second is freedom, “the greatest gift bestowed by God on human nature.”
In its ultimate analysis, the Empire meant for Dante the unity of civilisation: a unity of civilisation, originally Italian because the continuation of that Latin civilisation which Rome and Italy had of old given to the world, but now universal in accordance with the diverse needs of the new nations of Europe. It meant the realisation of the principles of justice embodied in Roman law, with full liberty to the individual nations and states to regulate themselves by their own particular laws and customs, according to the special conditions of each. There is a striking sentence in the letter to the Florentines, where Dante rebukes his fellow-citizens because they are striving “that the civic life of Florence may be one thing, that of Rome another.” In this
Romana civilitas—this civic life in the Empire under Roman law—he sees all the nations included. But, among these nations, Italy has high prerogatives of her own; she has been
donna di provincie (“mistress of the provinces”); and she is still “the garden of the Empire,” “the noblest region of Europe.”
There is no opposition between Dante's nationalism and his imperialism, for his imperialism is itself essentially Italian. Rome is not only the seat of the Papacy and the capital of the Empire, but it is an Italian city, the centre and rallying point of the Italian people. In the letter to the Italian cardinals, Dante speaks of Rome as
Latiale caput: “The head of Latium must be reverently loved by all Italians, as the common source of their civic life.” The phrase
Latiale caput is from Lucan; but, for Dante, it means “the capital of Italy”.
In the
Convivio and the
De Monarchia, Dante insists that the Empire is necessary for the well-being of the world, primarily in order to set a check upon illegitimate national aspirations and the greed of kingdoms for increase of territory, and to provide a supreme court of arbitration. In its essence, the world regime of his imagination was a Europe in which the individual characteristics and rights of races, nations, and states would be preserved and developed in the freedom and peace required for the realisation of the goal of civilisation: freedom and peace secured by an Empire which, translated into modern language, becomes a supreme international tribunal of arbitration, armed with authority to compel the quarrels of princes and peoples to be submitted to it, and with power to enforce its impartial decisions for the temporal welfare of humanity. The traditions of such a tribunal, in Dante's eyes, would be Italian, its centre of necessity—by divine predestination, as he would deem—Rome. Thus it was the leading part of Italy in a restored European unity of civilisation in peace and freedom to which Dante's thoughts were directed, rather than towards her political unity as a nation; but he indicated that unity as part of her heritage in the sacred name of Rome, and foreshadowed the ideal of European Catholic unity.
II. — From Petrarch to Boiardo
We pass into another atmosphere with Petrarch. It has been said: “The
italianità of Petrarch is one of his finest and most salient characteristics; that
italianità still somewhat mediaeval, still somewhat enamoured of ancient Rome, but which already presents and foretells modern Italy.”
“From my boyhood,” Petrarch writes, “I have been inflamed—beyond all my contemporaries whom I have known—with a love of the name of Italy.” He exalts her beauty above that of all other lands, declaring that she lacks nothing—save only peace. And that peace is constantly upon his lips.
“I'vo gridando: Pace, pace, pace” is the closing line of the great canzone,
Italia mia; in which, as prelude to this peace, he confidently asserts that Italian arms can still achieve the destiny of the nation:
“Vertú contra furore prenderà l'arme; e fia'l combatter corto; ché l'antiquo valore ne l'italici cor non e ancor morto.” (“Virtue will take up arms against fury, and make the battle short, because ancient valor in Italian hearts is not yet dead.”)
When war breaks out between Venice and Genoa, he bids the contending states to remember that they are both Italian, exhorting them to cease their fratricidal conflict and turn their arms against the foreigner. “If there is any reverence left for the Latin name,” he writes to the Doge of Venice, “remember that those whose ruin you are preparing are your brothers.” In the most famous of his lyrics,
Spirto gentil che quelle membra reggi, the address to the new ruler of Rome (whether Cola di Rienzo or another), the man of destiny on the Capitol must restore Rome to her ancient way as a prelude to the regeneration of Italy, for Italy herself is not yet aroused:
“Ma non senza destino a le tue braccia, che scuoter forte e sollevar la ponno, è or commesso il nostro capo Roma. Pon man in quella venerabil chioma securamente e ne le trecce sparte, sí che la neghittosa esca del fango.” (“But Rome, our chief, perhaps by destiny, is now entrusted to your arms, and you can use them to awake her, shake her up. So thrust your hand into those unkempt locks, those tangled, ancient tresses, and help raise this poor and slothful creature from the mud.”)
But the poet has no settled convictions as to how this peace of the nation in the fulfillment of her destinies is to be accomplished. Petrarch dreamed constantly of the restoration of the sovereignty of the Roman People. First he set his hopes upon the Angevin monarchy of Robert of Naples, then upon the new Roman Republic of Cola di Rienzo, then in the Holy Roman Empire, then in the
papa angelico (“angelic pope”) of the religious ideal—whose features, despite his disgust with the corruption of the preceding French popes and their neglect of Italy, he seemed for a moment to discern in Pope Urban V. For a patriot like Petrarch, the liberty and unity of Italy was the ideal and supreme goal; so long as this unity would be accomplished, he cared not who conducted the mission, whether it be monarch, emperor, republican or pope.
The second half of the fourteenth century offers a notable series of political lyrics. Fazio degli Uberti, an exiled Florentine and great-grandson of that Farinata whom Dante saw rising indomitable from his fiery tomb in the
Inferno, composed—probably in 1368—a striking canzone (
Di quel possi tu ber che bevve Crasso), in which he brings the Italian nation herself upon the scene to rebuke the degenerate Emperor, Charles IV of Luxembourg:
“Sappi ch' i sono Italia che ti parlo” (“Know that it is Italy which speaks unto thee”)
Cursing the German crowns of Aachen, Milan and Rome, he declares that Italy will accept no more greedy adventurers from Germany, but calls upon God to take from their hands the “sacred sign”, the imperial eagle, which they have dishonoured, “and give it back, thus defaced, again to my Italians and to the Romans.”
Uberti's
Ai Signori e Popoli d'Italia describes the state of fourteenth century Italy as an “age of despots”, when princes fought wars using bands of foreign mercenaries. For Uberti, only an Italy united under a single monarch could restore the fortunes of the peninsula and evict the foreign soldiers.
A definite national idea, even an anticipation of the political unity of Italy, appears in other poets as well. It is found most explicitly in the famous “Canzone di Roma” (
Quella virtú che'l terzo cielo infonde), formerly attributed to Fazio, but now recognised to be by Bindo di Cione, a poet from Siena. The poet prays Love to give him grace to recite in defence of Italy what he has heard in a vision from a white-haired lady, who told him that she was the personification of Rome. She has appeared to him, stately in aspect, but in mourning attire, poor and in need, surrounded by the ghosts of the heroes of antiquity. To restore her to her throne, to secure peace and stamp out tyranny, there is only one way:
“Se Italia soggiace a un solo re.” (“Italy must be subject to a single king.”)
Let Italians accept one sole king, who shall found a line of hereditary sovereigns; thus will Italy, “questa ch'è donna dell'altre province” (“she who is mistress of the provinces”), ascend to new greatness:
“Canzon mia, cerca l'italo giardino chiuso da' monti e dal suo proprio mare, e piú là non passare.” (“My canzone seeks the Italian garden enclosed by the mountains and by its own sea, and those beyond do not pass.”)
In this poem, composed in 1355, the writer does not seem to have any particular Italian prince in mind, but nonetheless yearns for a national king to deliver Italy.
Towards the end of the century, a bevy of poets hailed the coming redeemer of Italy in the first Duke of Milan, Gian Galeazzo Visconti. A Paduan poet, Francesco di Vannozzo, composed, in 1388, a
cantilena of eight sonnets, in which first Italy herself and then her cities in turn offer homage to the Italian ruler, saluting him as the national Messiah, the chorus closing with the voice of Rome. A few years later, Simone Serdini, a Sienese poet, addressed the Duke with a canzone, exhorting him, “per parte d'ogni vero italiano” (“in the name of every true Italian”), to take the crown of all Italy.
But the time was not ripe for the fulfilment of such aspirations. However, in the following century the balance of power between the five great states (Venice, Florence, Milan, Papal States, Kingdom of Naples), through the diplomacy of the Medici, had almost converted Italy into a federation, and at least gave the peninsula the feeling of independence. The classical revival of the Renaissance confirmed and strengthened a sense of spiritual unity based on the sentiment of the
romanità of Italy. And men prided themselves on working for Italy. Francesco Barbaro, defending Brescia for the Venetians, speaks constantly of the liberty of Italy, declaring that he has striven to fulfil his duty
patriae sed potius Italiae (“for the Italian fatherland”).
In his
De gestis and in his orations, the Venetian diplomat Lorenzo de Monacis compares Venice to Rome and argues that Venice remained free since its foundation and is charged with the divine mission of defending Italian liberty. In his 1425 oration to Doge Francesco Foscari, he characterises the war between Venice and Milan as being waged “not for the expansion of domain, not for a greed for glory, but for the salvation of Italy and our fatherland.”
In 1427 the Florentine humanist Poggio Bracciolini, in a letter to Francesco Foscari, writes: “We who are born in free communes have been brought up to detest tyrants, and we proclaim before the world that we have undertaken this war [against Filippo Maria Visconti] for the protection of liberty in Italy.”
Pope Pius II exclaims in his
Commentaries: “I will help thee, Italy, to the utmost of my power, that thou mayst not endure any masters.” Giovanni Pontano, the great Latin poet who was chief minister of the kings of Naples, foretells that Italy will in future ages be united under one single government and resume the majesty of the Empire, and claims everlasting fame after death, not merely as a poet, but as the statesman who for years had sought the peace and tranqiullity of Italy.
More particularly, as the fatal year 1494 approached, when Lodovico Sforza was preparing to ally with the French against King Ferrante of Naples, and men saw that disaster could not long be averted, the name of Italy—with impassioned intonation—is on the lips of poets and statesmen alike, giving eloquent testimonies to the reality of this national feeling. In the dispatches which Pontano wrote for the old king Ferrante, in his despairing efforts to avert the national calamity, such phrases as
la pace italica (“Italic peace”),
il comune reposo d'Italia (“the common repose of Italy”),
Italia unita (“United Italy”), fall constantly from his pen. And, when Ferrante dies, this is Pontano's advice to the new king, Alfonso, if he wishes to save his throne. Let him say in the hearing of all the nation:
“Non ho io pigliate le armi volontario, ma coatto da altri; non per offendere, ma per defendere; non per me solo, ma per la reputazione d'Italia, in mano et governo de Italiani, non de' Tramontani.” (“I have taken up arms not for myself alone, but for the reputation of Italy, that she may be in the hands and rule of Italians, not of barbarian foreigners from beyond the Alps.”)
The lyrical counterpart of Pontano's letters is the virile canzone of another southern poet, his friend and colleague Chariteo; the vanguard of the invaders had already crossed the Alps, when he exhorted the Italian states to lay aside private ambitions, and combine in the face of the common foe:
“Quale odio, qual furor, qual ira immane, quai pianete maligni han vostre voglie, unite, hor sí divise? Qual crudeltà vi move, o spiriti insigni, o anime Italiane, a dare il Latin sangue a genti in vise?” (“What hatred, what fury, what terrible wrath, here the malignant planets have your cravings, are we united or divided? What cruelties will move, O illustrious spirits, O Italian souls, to give Latin blood in the face of the people?”)
It was with the name of Italy, in the last stanza of the
Orlando Innamorato, that Boiardo, sick to death, drops his pen, too full of apprehension for his native land to continue his story:
“Mentre che io canto, o Iddio redentore, vedo la Italia tutta a fiamma e a foco, per questi Galli, che con gran valore vengon per disertar non so che loco.” (“While I sing, O Redeemer, God! I see all Italy in flame and fire, brought by these Gauls, who with fierce rage come to lay waste our land, I know not where!”)
III. — From Machiavelli to Guicciardini
The independence of the fifteenth century had been extinguished as a result of the Italian Wars, and Italy was the battle ground of the contending armies of her conquerors (though the contest was still undecided between France and Spain), when Machiavelli, in 1513, wrote the
Principe. He is, as it were, crystallizing his observation of the political life of his own time, and his study of ancient history, into the conception of such a prince as he deemed called for by the exceptional conditions of Italy. It closes with that chapter of impassioned eloquence in which the writer appeals to his new prince, backed by a national army, to come forward as the redeemer of Italy from the dominion of the foreigner:
“If it was necessary, in order to behold the virtue of Moses, that the people of Israel should be slaves in Egypt, and to recognise the greatness of the mind of Cyrus that the Persians should be oppressed by the Medes, and the excellence of Theseus that the Athenians should be scattered; so, at the present time, in order to know the virtue of an Italian spirit, it was necessary that Italy should be reduced to that condition in which she now is, and that she should be more enslaved than the Hebrews, more down-trodden than the Persians, more scattered than the Athenians; without a head, without order, beaten, despoiled, torn, overrun, the victim of every kind of ruin… Left without life, she waits to see who it is that shall heal her wounds… We see how she prays God to send her some one to redeem her from these barbarian cruelties and insolence. We see her all ready and disposed to follow a banner, if there be the man to raise it… Then let not this occasion pass, in order that Italy, after so long a time, may see one who shall be her redeemer. Nor could I express with what love he would be received in all those provinces which have suffered from these foreign inundations; with what thirst for vengeance, with what steadfast faith, with what devotion, with what tears. What gates would be barred against him? What people would refuse him obedience? What envy would oppose him? What Italian would deny him homage? This barbarian domination is repugnant to all.”
The figure of the redeemer of Italy again comes before us, in Machiavelli's later work, the
Arte delta Guerra,—and now the prophecy is more explicit. Machiavelli is showing, from the examples of the past and present, how an Italian national army should be raised, equipped, and handled in the field. A prince, of a character totally different from that of those who held sway in the land before the disasters ushered in by the French invasion of 1494, is needed for the purpose:
“I declare to you that, whichever of those who now hold states in Italy shall first enter upon this road, he will—before any other—become ruler of this country; and it will befall his state as befell the kingdom of the Macedonians, which, coming under Philip, who had learned the method of training armies from Epaminondas the Theban, became so powerful by this training and discipline, that, in a few years, Philip was able to occupy the whole of Greece.”
No such clear vision is found in the other political writers of the Cinquecento. If we turn to the poets, Ariosto reveals a sense of nationality in his impassioned denunciation of all Italy's invaders. Frenchman and Spaniard, Swiss and German alike, and vaguely anticipates a time when Italians will have the power to repay them in kind. He gives the answer to Boiardo's dying cry of dismay, in his pictured pageant of the French invasions of Italy and their results:
“E che brevi allegrezze e lunghi lutti, poco guadagno et infinito danno riporteran d'ltalia; ché non lice che 'l Giglio in quel terreno habbia radice.” (“And will bring back from Italy brief joys and long sorrows, little gain and boundless damage, because the lily is not permitted to take root in that land.”)
Ariosto's Italian feelings are inevitably coloured by the politics of his sovereign, the Duke of Ferrara. In general the poets of the Cinquecento bear eloquent witness to the patriotic aspirations that all the mighty armies of Europe could not quench: to the conviction that Italy, in virtue of the Roman idea and the Latin tradition, represented something imperishable, something immeasurably beyond the power of her conquerors to touch or comprehend. Thus, Francesco Maria Molza, in his sonnets on the sack of Rome, taunts the uncouth barbarian with the mighty life of the Romans in the tongue that scorns age and time, and warns him that the noble Latin blood cannot remain long under the vile yoke of Germany and Spain:
“Vivrà, barbaro stolto, la grandezza del gran popol di Marte in quella pura voce, che poco di tua man si cora. E la vecchiezza e 'l tempo insieme sprezza.” (“Foolish barbarian, the grandeur of the great people of Mars will live...”)
“Non potrà molto il Latin sangue adorno sotto giogo sì vil rimaner preso, lo qual più volte alteramente ha scosso.” (“Latin blood cannot remain long under the vile yoke...”)
In a celebrated series of sonnets, Giovanni Guidiccioni exhorts Italy to be true to her former self, urging her, by her memories of old, to recover her lost liberty from those who once adorned her triumphs, closing with an inspired picture of the return of peace and freedom to the land. Nor are such ideas confined to the polished lyrics of the Petrarchists, who may be regarded as merely following in the steps of Petrarch himself. We find them expressed, with uncouth vigour, by the greatest realist among the Italian poets of the Cinquecento: Teofilo Folengo (who used the pseudonym Merlino Coccaio). What his latest editor, Alessandro Luzio, well calls the “magnanimo orgoglio di italianità” (“magnanimous pride of Italianity”), appears alike in the hexameters of his maccheronic epic,
Baldus, and the unpolished octaves of his Italian poem,
Orlandino:
“Italia bella, Italia, fior del mondo, è patria nostra in monte ed in campagna, Italia forte arnese che, secondo si legge, ha spesso visto le calcagna de l'inimici, quando a tondo a tondo ebbe talor tedeschi, Franza e Spagna; ché se non fusser le gran parti in quella, dominarebbe il mondo, Italia bella.” (“Italy, beautiful Italy, flower of the world, is our fatherland...”)
And he can utter his thought with a coarseness of invective unknown to the Petrarchists, when he invokes a horrible curse upon every Italian, rich or poor, who desires the presence of the foreigner within his land.
Finally is also Gian Giorgio Trissino, friend and mentor of Andrea Palladio. His most notable contribution to Italian literature is the epic poem
L'Italia liberata dai Goti (The Liberation of Italy from the Goths). Published in 1548, Trissino's epic follows the wars of sixth-century Roman general Belisarius against the Goths and features a heaven of Christian figures, including of course God and the Virgin. The population of heaven is rounded out by numerous angels, whom Trissino divides into pro-Italian and pro-Goth factions. Over the course of the poem Belisarius's campaigns proceed back and forth across Italy, with alternating victories and defeats as the partisan angels intervene on both sides, turning the tide of battle by means of disguised appearances, strange mists, and similar devices. God is petitioned by an angel “called providence by us” to pity the poor Italians in the poem's opening scene. The epic lasts for twenty-seven books, ending in the final Italian triumph.
Finally there is Francesco Guicciardini, historian and statesman, who wrote his groundbreaking
Storia d'Italia (History of Italy) between 1537 and 1540, which revolutionized the art of historiography. The first edition was published posthumously in 1561. Guicciardini begins the work by stating:
“I have determined to write about those events which have occurred in Italy within our memory, ever since French troops, summoned by our own princes, began to stir up very great dissensions here.”
Now Guicciardini was a Florentine, and the prince in question (who summoned the French to Italy) was the Duke of Milan, a ruler who had little to do with Guicciardini's homeland in the Republic of Florence. What's more, Florence and Milan had an old rivalry and history of war against each other. Yet in the very first sentence of his work, Guicciardini specifically says the French were summoned by “our own princes”, clearly showing the existence of an Italian identity; for Guicciardini it mattered not whether the prince in question was from Florence or Milan or any other city: all are Italians, therefore all are “our own princes”.
Later in the same work Guicciardini laments the fall of the Kingdom of Naples to the French invaders:
“By domestic dissensions, which had blinded the so-renowned wisdom of our princes...a renown and powerful part of Italy fell from Italian rule to the rule of people from beyond the Alps.”
Even if the various Italian states were politically divided, for Guicciardini—an Italian patriot—they are still part of the same land of Italy and therefore are treated as belonging to the same country; moreover, the wars and dissensions among the Italian princes are considered domestic disputes, almost as civil wars, while those from outside of Italy (such as the French) are reckoned as foreigners.
IV. — From Marino to Alfieri
In the period that followed the Renaissance and preceded Napoleon—the period in which Italy first lay under the dominion of Spain, then became again the battlefield of Europe, and finally in great part a political dependency of Austria—there were two states that preserved the Italian independence and remained the depositaries of Italian nationality: the Republic of Venice and the Duchy of Savoy. Bernardo Tasso wrote of Venice:
“Is she not the ornament and splendour of Italian dignity? Does she not represent an image of the authority and greatness of the Roman republic? In this dark and tempestuous age, what other light or splendour remains to hapless Italy? Are we not all servants, all tributaries, I will not say of barbarian, but of foreign nations? of those, I say, whom the noble Italians of old led captive in their triumphs? She alone has preserved her ancient liberty; she alone renders obedience to none save God and her own well-ordered laws.”
The idea of Venice as a beacon of Italian liberty and freedom dated back many centuries and was acknowledged even by non-Venetians. The Tuscan writer Boncompagno da Signa, at the end of his
Amicitia, composed in 1205, wrote:
“The Italian people neither can nor ought to live under tribute, for liberty chose her chief seat in Italy. But, although it is Italy from the strait of Messina and Brindisi unto Aquileia and Susa, there are nevertheless boundaries which liberty in modern times hath not been wont to cross: Rome, Perugia, Faenza, and Treviso for the laws of liberty extend to the bed of the swift-flowing Tagliamento. Assuredly the admirable realm of Venice, which is one of the chiefest members of Italy, preserves Italian liberty in the highest degree.”
This testimony of a Tuscan—writing about 1205—to the
italianità of Venice is noteworthy, and the whole tone of the passage shows that when Italians, in the age of the Communes, spoke of
Italia, they did not mean the restricted
Regnum Italicum of the Middle Ages, but the whole of Italy, from Sicily to the Alps.
Even from the deep south of Calabria the famous Dominican monk Tommaso Campanella extolled Venice in his sonnet
Nuova arca di Noé (The New Ark of Noah), written in the sixteenth century. He likens Venice to Noah's ark for having been a place of shelter for the Romans during the barbarian invasions, and calls Venice the sole bearer of Italian liberty, untainted by foreign subjection. For these reasons, says Campanella, Venice is the loyal heir of Rome:
“New Ark of Noah! when the cruel scourge
Of that barbarian tyrant like a wave
Went over Italy, thou then didst save
The seed of just men on the weltering surge.
Here, still by discord and foul servitude
Untainted, thou a hero brood dost raise,
Powerful and prudent. Due to thee their praise
Of maiden pure, of teeming motherhood!
Thou wonder of the world, Rome's loyal heir,
Thou pride and strong support of Italy,
Dial of princes, school of all things wise!
Thou like Arcturus steadfast in the skies,
With tardy sense guidest thy kingdom fair,
Bearing alone the load of liberty.”
For Italian patriots, the role of Venice in the shaping of the national destiny was to maintain the glory of the Italian name and preserve Latin civilisation on the eastern shore of the Adriatic, bequeathing her rights and tradition to the Italy of today; the role of Savoy was the ultimate fulfilment of Machiavelli's prophecy. There is a noble canzone by Marino, composed in the early years of the seventeenth century, in which Italy appeals to Venice, urging an alliance between the Lady of the Sea and the Unicorn of the Alps, for the deliverance of the nation from the power of Spain. Traiano Boccalini, writing in the shelter of “
la serenissima liberta veneziana” (“the most serene Venetian freedom”), prophesies that the universal monarchy, which Spain is vainly seeking, will return again “
alia nobilissima nazione italiana” (“to the most noble Italian nation”) and styles the Duke of Savoy, Charles Emanuel I., “
il primo guerriero italiano” (“the first Italian warrior”). This phase of Italian political thought, looking to the House of Savoy for deliverance, is represented in the famous poem addressed to Charles Emanuel by Fulvio Testi in 1614:
“Carlo, quel generoso invitto core, da cui spera soccorso Italia oppressa, a che bada? A che tarda? A che piu cessa? Nostre perdite son le tue dimore.” (“Charles, that generous unconquered heart, from which the oppressed Italy seeks hope...”)
“Chi fia, se tu non se', che rompa il laccio onde tant'anni avvinta Esperia giace? Posta ne la tua spada è la sua pace, e la sua liberta sta nel tuo braccio.” (“Who else shall deliver Italy from so many years of captivity, if not you? Your sword is its peace, and its freedom is in your arm.”)
Modena's poet laureate Alessandro Tassoni detested the foreign rulers of Italy, especially the Spaniards. In his 1612 booklet
Le Filippiche he attacks the Spanish domination of Italy and expresses enthusiastic support for Duke Charles Emmanuel I's appeal to pope and princes to join in Italy's liberation from the foreign intruder, Spain:
“How long will we, Italian princes and gentlemen, ...endure being downtrodden by the arrogance and conceit of foreign peoples who...confuse courtesy with cowardice? I speak to the princes and nobles. ... All other people...have nothing more dear than their fatherland. They forget their hostility and hatred and unite to defend her against foreign depredations; indeed, dogs, wolves, lions inhabiting the same region, the same locality, the same forest, join together for the common defense; we Italians alone, so different from all other people and from all other animals, abandon our neighbor, abandon our friend, abandon our fatherland, to join with alien foes! What a sorrowful destiny for Italy this is! ... What fear or hope can induce us to forsake the Duke of Savoy at such a momentous occasion, who is embattled for the reputation of the princes of Italy and for our common liberty, to submit to people, who instead of thanking us for our help hold us in no regard?. ... Of whom do we have fear? That [Spanish] kingdom which once had a robust body is now exhausted by luxury..., and is now an elephant with the heart of a helpless wretch. ... And if [Spain] succeeds to occupy Piedmont, to gain control of the door into Italy, and roam throughout [the peninsula], I am asking you Italian princes and nobles what hope...”
Tassoni urges Italian union against Spain and condemns those Italians who support foreign power:
“But the wise and the pusillanimous say it is impossible; the nobles and knights desire honours and medals, prizes of their servitude. And truly, those unhappy creatures with souls so servile that they enjoy being ruled by a foreign power, are unworthy of the name of Italian.”
The booklet, one of the firmest and most embittered expressions of patriotism of its age, made a lasting impression on Duke Charles Emmanuel, who nominated Tassoni as his secretary in 1618. In 1622 Tassoni published another work,
La secchia rapita (The Stolen Bucket), a satirical poem in which he cleverly criticises the petty wars between Italian states which exhausted the country and allowed Italy to become easy prey for foreigners.
More than a century later, in 1739 (by which time the Dukes of Savoy had attained the title of Kings of Sardinia), we find a southern Italian, Pietro Giannone, writing that the “
antico valor d'Italia” (“ancient valour of Italy”) is preserved alone in the Italian peoples who form the dominions of the princes of Savoy, and calling upon the other Italian rulers to follow their example, and restore in their subjects the ancient military discipline, whereby “they will see Italy delivered from servitude and brought back to her former glory.”
In 1780 the philosopher Gaetano Filangieri, one of the most celebrated publicists of his time, proposes an Italy jointly led by Naples and Piedmont-Sardinia. In the same year the Piedmontese historian and writer Galeani Napione made similar appeals to the House of Savoy. In his works
Osservazioni intorno al progetto di pace di Sua Maestà e le potenze barbaresche (1780),
Idea di una confederazione delle potenze d'Italia (1790) and
Memoria sulla necessità di una confederazione delle potenze d'Italia (1794), he proposes a confederation of Italian states under the supreme leadership of the Papacy in order “to give re-birth to the ancient power and the ancient naval glory of Italy.” Under the influence of Napione, the idea of an Italian confederation is taken up by King Vittorio Amedeo III in 1791, but comes to nothing due to the opposition of other statesmen.
Briefly diverting back to the Seicento, we must mention the famous sonnets of Vincenzo da Filicaia, a Florentine poet and senator. His genius takes its source in deep national and religious feelings. The patriotic ardour that fills his breast for the ancient liberty of Italy is the foremost expression of Italian national sentiment in the entire seventeenth century:
“Italy! Italy! Thou who art doomed to wear the fatal gift of beauty, and possess the dower funest of infinite wretchedness, written upon thy forehead by despair. Ah! Would that thou were stronger, or less fair, that they might fear thee more, or love thee less, who in the splendour of thy loveliness seem wasting, yet to mortal combat dare! Then from the Alps I should not see descending such torrents of armed men, nor Gallic horde drinking the wave of the Po, distained with gore, nor should I see thee girded with a sword. Not thine, and with the stranger's arm contending, victor or vanquished, slave for evermore.”
“Where is thine arm, Italy? Why shouldst thou fight with the foreigners?”
Another man who has a special claim to be remembered is the Jesuit writer Saverio Bettinelli. In a book published in 1773 he was the first writer to give the word
risorgimento a political meaning, though he used it to describe the intellectual reawakening of Italy in the early Middle Ages.
The typically Italian spirit at any epoch reveals itself in the sheer virility of thought and utterance—that virility which St. Catherine so prized even in the mystical life. And this national virility is personified in the poet who arose during the period immediately preceding the Risorgimento. This poet, in whose person Piedmont became identified with Italy, was Vittorio Alfieri.
At the end of one of his works in prose,
Del Principe e delle lettere, completed in 1786, Alfieri speculates upon the form in which the destiny of Italy will be accomplished. Italy, he thinks, will soon be reunited under two princes (evidently the kings of Sardinia and Naples), and these two kingdoms will afterwards, either by marriage or conquest, be reduced to one. At this stage in Alfieri's political creed, king and tyrant were considered synonymous. So he continues that this one remaining sovereign will proceed to abuse his excessive power, and will in consequence be abolished by the Italians, “who by then, being all united and conscious, will have learned to act together and to consider themselves one single people.” The form of government, then to be introduced, he declares elsewhere to be a question which must be solved by the best Italians living at the time of this liberation.
But Alfieri's gift to the nation was not his political reflections, but his poetry. The passion for liberty and hatred of oppression, with the belief in the power of literature as an instrument for national and social regeneration, is the animating spirit of his tragedies. For him the drama, as he says in one of his letters, should be a school in which “men may learn to be free, strong, generous, impelled by true virtue, intolerant of all violence, lovers of their native land, fully conscious of their own rights, and in all their passions ardent, upright, magnanimous.” The aim of the poet in his dramas was the creation of characters of rigid strength and inflexible wills, to inspire and form men and women of virile temper for the
popolo italiano futuro, “the generous and free Italians of the future”—to whom he dedicated his latest tragedy, the
Bruto secondo, in 1789, the year that marks the beginning of the French Revolution.
V. — From Napoleon to Manzoni
Eight years after Alfieri's dedication, those “Italians of the future” saw what was destined to become the symbol of Italy's national aspirations. In January 1797, during the republican movement that accompanied the invasion of Italy by the French revolutionary armies, the future banner of the nation—the tricolour of red, white, and green, representing the spiritual virtues of faith, hope and charity—was raised for the first time at Reggio Emilia.
In spite of the devastations of the French armies and the prepotency of the conqueror Napoleon (himself of Italian name and Italian blood), to whom, in common with a great part of Europe, Italy was made subject, the revolutionary and Napoleonic era stimulated the national consciousness of Italians, turning their thoughts towards an ultimate renovation and unification. “
Potremo sperare di risorgere fra non molto” (“We hope to be resurrected before long”), the poet Giovanni Fantoni had written in 1796. In an ode,
La Repubblica Cisalpina (written at the end of 1797), Giovanni Pindemonte salutes the national banner, uttering the hope that the new republic may liberate all the other Italian states, reign
“sul bel paese intero” (“over the entire beautiful country”) and change its name from “Cisalpina” to “Italica”. He is addressing Milan:
“Oggi in te la Repubblica nascente fonda suo centro e di sua possa il nido; e finor troppo ignoto Italia sente uscir da te di libertade il grido. Il Mincio istesso nel cui forte aiuto il Teutone oppressor vivea tranquillo, sulle torri ondeggiar vede il temuto tricolorato libero vessillo.” (“Today in you the nascent Republic finds its center and its nest; and henceforth the unfortunately unknown Italy hears the cry of liberty coming forth from you. The Mincio river is the same in which the Teutonic oppressor quietly lived, but now the feared free tricolour banner flies from its towers.”)
Vincenzo Monti, in his tragedy
Caio Gracco (finished in exile at Paris in 1800), makes his hero appeal to the Romans in the name of Italian liberty, and receive as answer from the assembled citizens:
“Itali siam tutti, un popol solo, una sola famiglia.” (“We are all Italians, a single people, a single family.”)
“Italiani tutti, e fratelli.” (“All Italians and brothers.”)
Ugo Foscolo, in the days of Napoleon's power, had fearlessly admonished him in the name of Italy. On the return of the Austrians to Milan, in 1815, he chose to leave his native land rather than swear allegiance, “
Cosí Ugo Foscolo diede alla nuova Italia una nuova istituzione, l'esilio” (“Ugo Foscolo gifted the new Italy with a new institution: exile.”) In that same spring, almost exactly a century before Italy drew her sword in the great European war, came the proclamation of Rimini—Murat's abortive call to the Italians from the Alps to Sicily to assert their independence. A poet, then thirty years old, destined in old age to become a citizen of the Rome of United Italy, Alessandro Manzoni, hailed the proclamation in a noble canzone, cut short by the failure of the enterprise:
“Liberi non sarem se non siamo uni.” (“We will not be free if we are not united.”)
It is the first lyric of the Risorgimento.
