150 Years of Italy or 21 Centuries of Fatherland?

Written by Paolo Quercia

One Hundred and Fifty Years of the Unified Italian State, but Twenty One Centuries of Italian Nationality and Fatherland

Italy was born in 89 BC, when the Italic people obtained Roman citizenship. Numerous Italian tribes united in a league against Rome and created a state called Italy. Next year we celebrate twenty one centuries of the Italian nation.

How many centuries has Italy existed? Just one and a half, if we judge according to administrative unity. At least double that if we go back to the birth of the historical and political desire for a united Italy – first literary and later actionary – which emerged in our country in the eighteenth century and culminated in the Risorgimento in the nineteenth century. But Italy was in no way born with the Risorgimento, which was only a late political-military achievement. That twofold romantic ambition of the nineteenth century to unify the Italian peninsula and to liberate it from foreigners was by no means a new idea, but rather constituted an old project that goes way back.

We can go back five centuries from now and find in the pages of Machiavelli, the founder of modern political science, proto-Risorgimental arguments which, although conceived in a different historical context, underlined a similar vision, namely the existence of a political concept of Italy towards which the various small communal states and lordships would have to unite in order to create. During the time when the House of Medici ruled Florence, not only did an idea of Italy already exist, but the political desire to unify Italy also existed. The plurality of small fragmented states on the peninsula coincided with the existence of an idea of Italy, and the political thought of its realization took its first steps in a historical context in which the Italic communes and lordships began to deal with the emergence of a new type of state in Europe: the modern State based on nationality.

During the Italian Renaissance you can already trace the seeds of that long and contradictory process that led to conceiving the nation-state as a point of balance between local particularism and imperial universalism. But even the Renaissance Man, who stood at the center of the city and at the center of the universe, and was preparing to live as faber ipsius fortunae, did not fabricate the idea of Italy, but took up an idea that already existed before him. Already some centuries earlier Dante Alighieri gave his own vision by evoking geographical boundaries in Canto XIII of the Inferno, which were very close to today's Italy:

“Even as at Arles, where stagnant grows the Rhone / Even as at Pola near to the Quarnaro / That shuts in Italy and bathes its borders.”

The Italy of Dante, who raised the medieval cathedrals to the heavens and supported the freedom of self-government of the communes and lordships (the most Italic among the political institutions of our peninsula), already began to speak a common language, despite its many regional variations. It was the same language which, in the 13th century, St. Francis had used to raise a hymn of love and freedom to God in the vernacular tongue. A new language, not of the most learned classes but of the popular classes, not a relic of a universal empire that no longer existed, but born from the language of the common people in the long and slow transformation process of Latin into Italian.

This transformation took place on a troubled night in the history of our Fatherland, when we fell asleep speaking Latin upon the fall of the Western Roman Empire, and awoke at the dawn of the 1000's speaking vulgar Italian.

In those five centuries marked by barbarian invasions, feudal anarchy, abandonment of the countryside, reduction of trade and demographic decline, there took place in the Italian peninsula that miraculous transformation of ancient Roman society into a new Italic society. The Italic people suffered from the barbarian invasions coming from the north and the raids of pirates and Saracens coming from the south, but certain fundamental features of our ancient civilization remained intact. During these dark ages we saw, in new forms, the light of the oldest institutions of Roman society: the family, private property, Romance language, common law, technical knowledge and craftsmanship. We began to see the formation of that Italy described by Carducci: “...the rebirth of the Italian people after the dawn of the 1000's”, and noted by Machiavelli: “In Italy there is no want of material into which every form may be introduced; here there is great virtue in the limbs”, meanwhile he urges the Prince to “seize Italy and free her from the hands of the barbarians.”

In the centuries after the 1000's we can clearly see the formation process of what can be called a common Fatherland of the Italic people (or rather many small Italian fatherlands, so long as the feeling of “belonging” remained confined to municipal and local values; so it was for the Ciompi, who, having been expelled from Florence, fought for years to be able to return to their “fatherland” of Florence, even though they were comfortable in exile in other Italian lands). The problem of the political unity of the peninsula emerged with the beginning of the Renaissance, and a solution would not be found until five centuries later.

There is unanimous agreement that the Italian people already existed by the time of the 1000's, when the language of the people was sufficiently differentiated from the ancient Latin language... But if history allows us to travel back at least 1000 years ago in the search to find the origins of our Fatherland, then nothing prevents us from searching even farther back to find symbolic traces of a more ancient Fatherland absorbed within that great political mosaic of peoples and laws that was the universal Empire of Rome.

A search that I believe should lead to 91 BC, when many people in central Italy, militarily subjected to Rome but excluded from the privileges of citizenship, rebelled against Roman rule and gave birth to the first state called Italy. The Marsi, Peligni, Marrucini, Vestini, Piceni, Samnites, Lucanians and Apulians all gathered in the city of Corfinium and there they decided to found a new State which they called Italy. The ancient Corfinium was renamed Italica and was elevated to the status of Capital (Caput imperii sui Corfinium legerant atque appellarant Italicam. Marcus Velleius Paterculus, II, 17). They chose the bull as their symbol, an animal whose etymology leads back to the same root as the word Italy. For two years they minted their own new currency.

The surviving copies of these coins show the face of victorious Italy with a laurel and an engraving underneath with the word “Italia” one one side, and on the other side shows the eight Italic tribes who pledged an oath of union. Other coins show a taurus trampling and defeating a she-wolf. The conflict of the Italians with Rome, which is known in history as the Social War, lasted two years and ended with Rome granting citizenship to all the Italic peoples with the enactment of the Lex Plauta Papiria. The law was a historical landmark. For the first time all residents in Italy could apply to a Roman magistrate and obtain Roman citizenship.

It was in 89 BC that for the first time in the history of the Italian peninsula the concept of citizenship was extended to all the Italic people. Those tribes beyond the Apennines who rebelled against Rome due to the disparity of their political-social status created a short but symbolic State, the first State called “Italy”. In the peninsula Rome was politically and militarily transformed into a city-state. Before the Social War, Roman citizenship was enjoyed by some Greek colonies in southern Italy, but not by the Italic peoples, especially those located beyond the Apennines.

The first Italy was born in rebellion against Rome but survived only three years and was soon absorbed and assimilated by Rome. However, that act of rebellion and, above all, that regulatory act of 89 BC, can be seen as the time in which all the Italic peoples achieved equality in the peninsula and became Romans. It is to this law of equality among the Italic peoples in the Roman Empire that we can trace back the first antecedent of a Fatherland of the Italians. Eighty-nine BC. Twenty centuries ago in 2011. And if we are to celebrate anniversaries, why not reflect and commemorate our two thousand and eleventh anniversary?