“I offer neither pay, nor quarters, nor food; I offer only hunger, thirst, forced marches, battles and death. Let him who loves his country with his heart, and not merely with his lips, follow me.” – Giuseppe Garibaldi
THERE'S A nice irony in the enthusiastic embrace by Silvio Berlusconi – in the platonic, intellectual sense of course – of Giuseppe Garibaldi, the swashbuckler who united Italy. The prime minsiter depends for his survival on Garibaldi's nemesis, Lega Nordleader and coalition partner Umberto Bossi, who is doing all he can to undo both the idea of nation and the unitary state, the anniversary of whose founding is celebrated this week, though not by Bossi. Earlier this month in Vicenza some 200 people, reportedly including some of its elected representatives, burned Garibaldi in effigy. At another event they walked out on the national anthem.
St Patrick’s Day marked 150 years since the deputies of the first Italian parliament, convened in Turin and declared Victor Emmanuel II the first king of a united country, following centuries of rivalry among city-states and foreign occupation along the peninsula.
Forged out of papal states, elements of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in the south the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, and various subservient dukedoms, in truth, modern Italy is still an uneasy Belgian-like alliance of resentful north and south, in which city and regional allegiance and dialect thrive, and still less than half the population speak only their national language.
The Lega Nordadage has it that "Africa begins below Florence", and though it now plays down outright separatism, it campaigns to prevent "northern" taxes being spent in the parasitic south, and has just won from Mr Berlusconi a substantial first step in fiscal devolution. Yet, in truth, as historians and many southerners note, the south, or "Mezzogiorno", owes its economic and political second class status in no small measure to Garibaldi's surrender of his conquests – Sicily, half the Italian peninsula and the vast Neapolitan Royal Navy – to the new king without negotiation or condition. Unification was less merger, more hostile takeover, annexation.
Today’s champions of the nation, the left and the church, which excommunicated the kings of Italy for allowing the new republic to remove its temporal powers, still face an uphill struggle. After unification Piedmontese statesman Massimo DAzeglio, remarked that, having made Italy, “we have to make Italians”. In truth it is still a work in progress.