Despite the struggling economy and a leader heading to the docks, Italian pride remains
AS ITALY last night officially set the ball rolling on the 150th anniversary celebrations of Italian unification, a telling little joke was doing the rounds. In reference to the Italian “Liberator” and unification hero, Giuseppe Garibaldi, Northern League wags observed: “It’s not so much that Garibaldi united Italy, as that he divided Africa”.
This is an updated version of the old (Northern) adage which would have us believe that “Africa begins below Florence”. In other words, there remains a modern, industrialised, honest and efficient Italy, north of Tuscany while below the Arno, there is only backwardness, poverty and organised crime.
It would be nice to think such crude visions belong to the dustbin of history, with as much relevance to today’s Italy as the horseless carriage and wax cylinder recorders. Yet, the embarrassing reality of Italy’s unification celebrations is that, to some extent, they seem to be working overtime to convince us all that Italy remains anything but unified.
For a start, when the Italian cabinet discussed the celebrations a few weeks ago, there was a major difference of opinion as to whether today, March 17th, should be declared a national holiday. March 17th, 1861, of course, was the day when the deputies of the first “Italian” parliament, convened in Turin, declared Victor Emmanuel II, king of Italy. Ten days later, the parliament provocatively named Rome as the capital of the new Italy, even if at the time it remained very much the capital, not of the new kingdom, but rather of the Papal States.
At that recent cabinet meeting, two Northern League ministers voted against declaring today to be a holiday while education minister Mariastella Gelmini originally declared that schools would remain open. Even the president of Confindustria, the Confederaton of Italian Industrialists, Emma Marcegaglia, publicly suggested that the last thing that crisis-ridden Italy needed was another public holiday.
Why so much bah humbug? To a large extent, the blame lies with the federalist Northern League, the government coalition partner along with the People of Freedom (PDL) party of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. For years now, the Northern League has devoted its energies to underlining the supposed ontological difference between that mythical fabrication “Padania” (northern Italy) and the south.
Lest anyone failed to get the point, Northern League leader senator Umberto Bossi underlined it during a party rally in Cabiate, near Como, 14 years ago. Noticing an Italian tricolour flag flying from the roof of a schoolhouse close to the stage on which he was speaking, Bossi said: “When I see the tricolour, I get mad. That thing, I use it to wipe my arse . . .” Those remarks earned Bossi a 16-month suspended sentence for “public insult” but they probably also earned him a lot of votes.
If the current federalist reform minister can express such sentiments, it is hardly surprising that there are those in Bossi’s northern regions who took to burning a dummy Garibaldi some days ago. Hardly surprising either that the president of bi-lingual Alto Adige, Luis Burnwalder, should argue (admittedly for different reasons) that his semi-teutonic, northern region has “nothing to celebrate”.
In an Italy in which automobile giant Fiat appears to be shifting its operational headquarters to Detroit, in which one of the most famous archeological heritage sites in the world, namely Pompeii, is falling apart and where industrial icon, jeweller Bulgari, has been sold off to France, are Italians about to kiss goodbye to a sense of patriotism and unity? Curiously, the answer would appear to be “no”.
The enthusiasm with which the audience at the Rome opera house the other night took to its feet to sing the Slaves’ Chorus from Verdi’s Nabucco, a chorus often considered an anthem for Italian unification, would argue otherwise.
The enthusiasm with which Italian rugby fans stomped out the Mameli national anthem during the desperate final minutes of last Saturday’s historic Six Nations win over France would also suggest otherwise.
As would the standing ovation afforded to former Oscar winner, Roberto Begnini, when he closed his gig at last month’s San Remo song contest with an unaccompanied rendition of the same national anthem. (Curiously the national anthem remains a “contentious” issue as illustrated by the fact that the Northern League representatives at the Lombardy Regional Council on Tuesday chose to walk out while the anthem was being played).
As Italy struggles to deal with 30 per cent youth unemployment, with an ageing prime minister about to go to court on underage prostitution related charges and with a stagnant economy, some people seem to have rediscovered national pride. To paraphrase D’Azeglio, have Italians finally been “made”?