A History of Italy

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Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England
A History of Italy

Claudia Baldoli
© Claudia Baldoli 2009
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 Contents

List of Maps, Chronologies and Boxes

Acknowledgements
Introduction

1 The ‘Barbarian’ Middle Ages: Invasions, Culture, Religion

‘May you live in harmony’: Latin and Gothic populations in Italy
A province of the empire
A project for Italian unification? The Lombards in the peninsula
The myth of Rome in the Germanic empire
A new language
Further reading

2 The Middle Ages of the Cities

Year 1000 and thereabouts
Monastic art and holy wars: the Roman Church in the new
millennium
The Maritime Republics
Landscape, cities and countryside
City-states
Southern Italy
Literary texts, music and art
Further reading

3 The Middle Ages of the Courts

Rebirth after plague: the Age of the Signorie
 The papacy between Rome and Avignon
Saints and cities
Saints, witches, or mothers: images of women between the Middle
Ages and the Renaissance
The Italian language in the age of Dante and Petrarch
The birth of an Italian cuisine
Further reading

4 Renaissance Italy: From the European Model to the ‘End of

Italy’?
Italian politics in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries
Renaissance and humanism
Artists and architects
Courtiers
The Counter-Reformation, the new Rome and Italy in the sixteenth
century
Literature and Italian language in the sixteenth century
Further reading

5 Under Popes and Distant Kings: Italy in the Age of the

Baroque
Italian politics in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
The post-Tridentine social world
A violent country?
An age of hunger
Philosophy, science and religion
Clergy, saints and magic
Art, architecture, literature and music in the Baroque age
The continuing language debate
Further reading

6 A National Melodrama: The Epic of the Risorgimento

The Italian Enlightenment
The legacy of the French Revolution and Napoleon
 Language and nation
Romanticism and Risorgimento
The development of a national discourse
The Revolution begins: 1848
The impossible restoration
Wars and revolutions from Genoa to Rome – via Palermo, Naples
and Venice
Further reading

7 Liberal Italy
Celebrating the new nation
Contesting the nation: the Catholic Church
Contesting the nation: socialist Italy
Contesting the nation: banditry and the ‘southern question’
Italians abroad
Towards industrialization: women’s work between fields and
factories
‘La Belle Epoque’: the Giolitti age
Further reading

8 From Hunger to Hedonism: Italy in the Twentieth Century

The Italian people between peace and war
The defeat of Italian democracy
Mussolini’s Italy
Words that did not become reality: Fascist wars and defeats
Italian art of the reconstruction
Italian society during the Republic
A consumer society
Further reading

9 Conclusion

Bibliography
Index
 List of Maps, Chronologies
and Boxes

MAPS

1.1 The division of Europe at the beginning of the sixth century

2.1 The cities of the Lombard League
4.1 Political divisions in Renaissance Italy
5.1 Italy in the eighteenth century
6.1 Italy after the Napoleonic invasion (1797)
6.2 Italy after the Congress of Vienna (1815)
6.3 Unified Italy (1870)

CHRONOLOGIES

Chapter 1: The ‘Barbarian’ Middle Ages

Chapter 2: The Middle Ages of the cities
Chapter 3: The Middle Ages of the courts
Chapter 4: Renaissance Italy
Chapter 5: Italy in the age of the Baroque
Chapter 6: The epic of the Risorgimento
Chapter 7: Liberal Italy
Chapter 8: Italy in the twentieth century

BOXES
1.1 Arianism
1.2 Statements by Theodoric
1.3 Some of the great monuments of Ravenna
2.1 Arnaldo of Brescia
2.2 The Normans
2.3 Commerce with the East
2.4 The peasant world and cities in the Po Valley
3.1 The tumult of the Ciompi
3.2 Dante and Rome
3.3 Letters from Catherine of Siena to Pope Gregory XI
3.4 Frate Alberto (Decameron)
3.5 Petrarchism
3.6 Culture at the court of Frederick II
4.1 Vasari’s Lives of the Artists
4.2 The Index of Forbidden Books
5.1 Description of the bravi in Manzoni’s The Betrothed
5.2 A sixteenth-century Italian gastronomic itinerary
5.3 Carlo Goldoni and Venetian theatre
6.1 Cafés and revolution
6.2 The birth of the Italian flag
6.3 Buonarroti on secret societies and Mazzini’s Young Italy
6.4 Italy’s national anthem (1847)
7.1 Social protest and music in liberal Italy
7.2 The Bronte episode
7.3 The Futurist manifesto (1909)
8.1 Bourgeois anti-Fascism: Non Mollare (‘Do not give up’)
8.2 The Jews and Italian society before the racial laws
8.3 Italy under the bombs
8.4 The Republican Constitution
8.5 Two intellectuals reflect on the strategy of tension
8.6 The anti-Mafia reaction in Palermo in the early 1990s
 Acknowledgements

As just one of the many possible histories of Italy, this book has been
influenced by readings and experiences that have accompanied me
since my years at the Liceo in Brescia. Over the years since then,
teachers, students and colleagues have inspired me with reading
suggestions, discussions and exchange of ideas. The Department of
History at the University of Venice has been an extraordinary place in
which to study in critical and at times unconventional ways, for
example during the La Pantera occupation of 1990, or during
fieldwork at the Roma camps established as a consequence of the
war in the former Yugoslavia in 1992–3. In particular I wish to thank
Piero Brunello for many discussions we have had since the early
1990s, and for commenting on the modern chapters of this book.
Collaboration with Mario Isnenghi has been an exciting intellectual
experience, including collective work with his seminar group, which
has continued to meet in the History Department in Venice down the
years. In the School of Historical Studies of Newcastle University I
have found an extraordinarily lively environment, both intellectually
and socially. I am particularly grateful to the ‘gang’ (Livia, Neelam,
Martin, Alejandro, Matt, James, Luc and Xavier) for the great time
spent together between Newcastle and Italy while I was writing the
book. As a historian of modern Italy, the most difficult task has been
working on the pre-modern chapters; while any remaining mistakes
are my own responsibility, these chapters have been improved greatly
by comments from Trevor Dean, Chris Wickham and John Marino.
Megan Trudell has been a great proofreader and adviser. My father,
Mario Baldoli, provided invaluable help during the early stages of the
book. Richard Overy, Tim Kirk, Camilla Russell, Marcella Sutcliffe and
Matt Perry have read and commented on parts of the typescript. My
family in Italy has been a constant source of ideas, affection and
good times, and I wish to dedicate this book to them: Maria, Mario,
Giaime and nonna Sandra.
CLAUDIA BALDOLI

The author and publishers wish to thank the following for permission to reproduce copyright
material:
Harvard University Press for: Procopius of Cesarea, Gothic Wars, in History of the Wars,
translation by H. B. Dewing (1960–8); The Poetry of Giacomo da Lentino, Sicilian Poet of the
Thirteenth Century, ed. by E. F. Langley (1915); E. L. Eisenstein, The First Professional
Revolutionist: Filippo Michele Buonarroti (1761–1837) (1959).
Laterza for: A. Barbero, Terre d’acqua. I vercellesi all’epoca delle crociate (2007); I. Fosi, La
giustizia del papa (2007); M. Montanari, Convivio: storia e cultura dei piaceri della tavola
dall’antichità al Medioevo (1989); F. Bartolini, Rivali d’Italia: Roma e Milano dal settecento a
oggi (2006); A. Paravicini Bagliani, La vita quotidiana alla corte dei papi nel Duecento
(1996).
Manchester University Press for T. Dean, The Towns of Italy in the Later Middle Ages (2000).
Shambhala for Francis of Assisi, Canticle of the Sun, Boston and London (2002).
Paulist Press for Jacopone da Todi, ‘On the Heart’s Jubilation’, in The Lauds, translated by S.
and E. Hughes (SPCK: 1982).
Cantagalli for G. Boccardi, ed., Caterina da Siena. Una santa degli europei. Dalle lettere di
Caterina: un fervido messaggio per l’Europa dello spirito, alla ricerca delle proprie radici
cristiane (2003).
Carcanet New Press for Literature in the Vernacular (De vulgari eloquentia), translation by S.
Purcell(1981), book I.
Oxford University Press for: B. Cellini, My Life, translated by J. Conaway Bondanella and P.
Bondanella (2002), book I, 40; C. Abba, The Diary of One of Garibaldi’s Thousand (1962); R,
Griffin, Fascism (1995); maps from John A. Davis, Italy in the Nineteenth Century (2000).
J. M. Dent (Orion Publishing) for A. Manzoni, The Betrothed, ed. by D. Forgacs and M.
Reynolds (1997).
Il Melangolo for Stendhal, I briganti in Italia (2004).
Yale University Press for J. Locke, Two Treatises of Government and A Letter Concerning
Toleration, ed by Ian Shapiro (2003).
Calder for Stendhal, Rome, Naples and Florence (1959 – repr. Oneworld Classics, 2008).
Peter Owen for E. De Amicis, Cuore: the Heart of a Boy (1986) p. 17; for C. Pavese, The
House on the Hill, translated by W. J. Strachan (1965).
Dedalus for G. Verga, ‘Liberty’, in Short Sicilian Novels, translated by D. H. Lawrence (1984).
Feltrinelli for G. Salvemini, Memorie di un fuoruscito (1973).
Einaudi for N. Revelli, Le due guerre: guerra fascista e guerra partigiana (2005).
The Hogarth Press for N. Ginzburg, Family Sayings, translation by D. M. Low (1967).
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently
omitted the publishers would be pleased to make the necessary arrangement at the first
opportunity.
Photograph by Giaime Baldoli
 Introduction

The picture that precedes this introduction shows a typical Italian

square with arcades. It is a neo-classical square in the medieval
centre of Brescia in northern Italy built in 1823 in order to relocate
the grain market. The statue that gives the square its name was
erected in 1882 and dedicated to Arnaldo of Brescia, a twelfth-
century monk who opposed the worldliness and opulence of the
Roman Church and was burnt at the stake by order of the Pope. The
statue of Arnaldo, with its severe and rather menacing aspect, points
towards the city centre, and in particular in the direction of the
Cathedral square, as if to indicate who was responsible for his death.
The inscription at the base of the monument reads: ‘Brescia
remembers in liberty their Arnaldo, the precursor, the martyr of
Italian free thought’. In the climate of anti-clericalism that followed
Italian unification in 1870 (Rome had become the capital of Italy
only twelve years earlier, terminating the temporal power of the
Papacy), the unveiling of the statue was a hotly contested occasion,
bringing to the city representatives of political and cultural
associations from all over Italy. They not only signified the new
liberal Italy, but also the ideas that had run through Italian history
from the twelfth to the nineteenth centuries: ideas of the renovation
of the Church, of the liberation of Rome (Arnaldo had supported one
of several attempts to create a republic in the papal city), and the
messianic hopes of the poor masses. Today, the square is a symbol
of the city’s consumerism, surrounded by bars and restaurants, and
crowded until late at night with wealthy and fashionable youth. The
history narrated by the square synthesizes the content of this book:
an exploration of Italian history down the centuries, and in particular
of the cultural, political and social aspects that shaped Italian
identity long before Italy became a nation. In the square and its
architecture it is indeed possible to observe the coexistence of a
centuries-long religious history (of the Catholic Church, of its deep
influence on Italian values and culture, its idealism and social
welfare, mediation and opposition to the secular arm as much as in
its complicity through censorship and intolerance, corruption and
abuse of power that spawned a consequent history of anti-
clericalism) alongside the birth of the Italian nation, and the
transformation of Italy into a hedonistic consumer society in the
second half of the twentieth century.
The book has a social and cultural focus, and is organized around
the major themes that have characterized Italy’s history from the
Middle Ages to the present. It examines the development of ideas
about Italy’s frontiers and the perception of foreigners (the Alps, the
Mediterranean, the concept of ‘barbarian’); the cultural and social
relationship between cities and countryside; social, political and
religious strife, and its legacy on collective identities; localism and
cosmopolitanism (framed by foreign invasions, the mass emigration
after unification, and the period of the Italian Republic and of the
European Community). It explores the characteristics that have
shaped the country, such as literature, music, architecture, politics,
art and food. Although the chapters have a strong chronological
thrust, they are not based principally on a narrative of military and
political events, but instead they integrate this narrative with the
broader thematic elements of the story.
It is possible to describe Italy as a nation only from 1860, and
while the idea of Italy, and indeed the word itself, already existed
during the period from the earliest Middle Ages to the nineteenth
century, until the eighteenth century it had only a weak geographical
connotation. This book will therefore deal with the history of Italy as
a country (paese), rather than as a nation (nazione); and will discuss
the development of a modern national idea only from the eighteenth
century onwards. Before that time, to be ‘Italian’ meant to identify
with a number of collective memories, not with a ‘national’ memory.
Florentines of the fourteenth century would have felt themselves to
be very different from the inhabitants of Venice or Calabria. Yet even
though they did not speak entirely the same language, they were all
seen and defined abroad as ‘Italians’. This book will help to explain
this paradox by exploring the elements of continuity in the country’s
history over the past 1,500 years.
The history of Italy as a country means the intertwining (and not
just the ‘sum’) of various local histories. The fact that Italy did not
have a centralized state until unification in the nineteenth century
does not mean that Italy had no state(s). Indeed, the existence of a
central administration does not constitute the most important
parameter in the definition of a country, and even of a nation; for
example, countries with a longer unitary tradition have continued to
experience the most violent centrifugal tendencies (for example,
Basque separatism in Spain and the Corsican independence
movement in France); the differences in climate, food and habits can
be more significant, for example between Brittany and
Mediterranean France, than between northern and southern Italy,
though France has been a nation for a longer time. Moreover, the
state does not represent a fixed body but rather a construction, and
one that continues to change.
This book considers Italy as a geographical entity, a distinct
country, from the fall of the Roman Empire and throughout the
invasions that followed. The legacy of the Roman Empire, and
particularly the legacy of Roman law and Christianity, has continued
throughout the centuries to influence Italy’s culture and self-
perception. The book will examine how this legacy developed and
was at times revived. The country was always dismembered into a
number of regional states and principalities in the centuries that
followed Roman rule; however, it will be argued here that it is
nevertheless still possible to trace a unitary history of the country
that stretches geographically from Sicily to the Alps. As historian
Ruggiero Romano suggested, the history of Italy can be regarded as
an opera, where soprano and tenor, bass and baritone are not
united: what matters is not each individual voice but the sound they
make together in concert.
After the Roman Empire (when a unified state had been centred
on, and revolved around, the capital city, Rome), the Italian
peninsula and its islands were occupied by numerous invaders. In
the south, the passage of Byzantines, Arabs, Normans, Angevins,
and Aragonese constituted, from the early Middle Ages to the
nineteenth century, a distinct political world separate from the
regions north of Rome, where power was concentrated in the local
communes and city-states such as Milan, Venice or Florence.
However, a common cultural, religious and social identity, built from
regular exchange between the regions, continued to run in the veins
of the country as a kind of underground history. After 1870, the
nation was born in defiance of the Papacy, which fitted well with a
historiographical tradition which saw the Church as a permanent
obstacle to unification, from the Lombard age onwards.
Of all the powers that sought to control Italy between the early
Middle Ages and the Napoleonic period, none of them ever genuinely
succeeded. Byzantines, Lombards, Swabians, Angevins from Naples,
Visconti from Milan, all came close to the final goal but did not
accomplish it; and when Napoleon’s turn came, the Italians were
already preparing for their own unification. It was impossible for any
state to expand its power in Italy without coming into conflict with
the Papacy; however, this was not the only obstacle to unification,
for the loyalties of Italians were also traditionally divided between
two conflicting ‘universal’ rulers, the Pope and the emperor, between
religious and secular power. City-states were also an obstacle to
unification: proud of their liberty and economic success, the Italian
communes only formed alliances when they were confronted by
common enemies (often, in the case of central-northern city-states,
the Germanic emperor). This made Italian politics a complicated and
shifting system of alliances, interests, loyalties and disloyalties; and
this is where the idea developed in other European countries of
Italians as double-dealing and cunning, classically Machiavellian. This
view of the Italian people persisted until recent times, and was
revived during the wars of independence and again during the two
world wars.
The responsibility of the Germanic invasions and the interference
of the Papacy in the fragmentation of Italy have been matters of
controversy over the centuries. Questions about the unification of
Italy have been especially contentious in the modern period,
focusing in particular on the two most celebrated periods in national
memory: the Renaissance and the Risorgimento. This has at times
produced an interpretation of the history of Italy as periods of light
and darkness – of moments when an Italian ‘model’ triumphed and
others when it declined; but the ‘dark centuries’ were never
completely dark, and if a ‘global’ model collapsed, some areas of
light might remain or even prosper. During the Counter-Reformation,
the problem of controlling knowledge became a pressing issue,
because scientific progress was, as historian Paula Findlen has
observed, ‘as much a religious as a philosophical question’, and local
Inquisitions particularly targeted heresies concerned with the
interpretation of the natural world; nevertheless, Italy remained until
the mid-sixteenth century the centre of the scientific world in
Western Europe. The birth of melodrama and of Baroque
architecture and music during the period produced cultural
movements that spread out over the rest of Europe. Even when the
national cultures of France, England and the Netherlands deprived
Italy of its cultural primacy in the seventeenth and the eighteenth
centuries, the peninsula continued to attract poets, architects and
musicians from all over Europe.
The ingredients that made Italy a country between the time of
the communes and the Renaissance were evident from the way in
which political life was organized and conducted, and from common
economic practices and institutions, as well as ways of cooking and
dressing. Italians from different parts of the peninsula created these
ingredients, which were each regularly described by foreigners as
‘Italian’. The urban phenomenon that created the city-states and
their cultural achievements was based on a flourishing economic
system. In the thirteenth century, Venice, Genoa and Florence began
to mint gold coins, around which all European finance revolved:
foreign kings borrowed money from Italian bankers, and Italian
businessmen had a prime position at trade fairs all over Europe. On
the basis of this economic preponderance, Italian cities created the
splendour that is still visible today in Italy’s many public and private
palaces, cathedrals and universities, and it was from those same
cities that artists and writers of the quality of Giotto and Dante,
Petrarch and Boccaccio emerged. By the fifteenth century, Italy had
become what the French historian Fernand Braudel called the
‘governess’ of Europe. Wealthy English merchants sent their children
to study or train for their profession in Italian cities; Flemish market
squares only became internationally significant when Italian
companies took part in their trade fairs; and Italian cookery books
were translated into many different languages. This ‘model’ declined
in the sixteenth century, when French fashion shops began to
appear in Italian cities and French chefs began to influence Italian
cuisine. French predominance continued for several centuries; for
example, in 1766, an anonymous treatise published in Turin carried
the title The Piedmontese Cook Perfected in Paris. However, Italy
remained the favourite destination in the age of the Grand Tour
between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries, when the
European aristocracy travelled to the peninsula to complete their
artistic education, studying in particular the Renaissance art and
architecture.
Italian fashion flourished during the Renaissance, when dresses,
like the architecture, assumed the sobriety of classic style and a
perfect arrangement of colour, which is evident in the paintings of
the time. From the fourteenth century onwards, fashion changed
rapidly, and for the wealthy classes it was no longer enough to dress
in luxury clothes, but necessary to ‘appear fashionable’, to follow the
‘fashion of the day’. It was the sixteenth-century Dutch humanist,
Desiderius Erasmus, who claimed ‘all of us who are educated are
Italian’; anyone who wanted to be fashionable in Europe began to
dress ‘Italian style’. Italian cuisine also reached a golden age during
the Renaissance, but by the sixteenth century had begun to decline,
becoming increasingly obsessed with mere presentation and luxury.
Both in the case of food and of dress, the Italian aristocracy became
more and more ostentatious between the Renaissance and the
period of the Baroque. Literature also began to focus on the beauty
of words, on rhetoric, rather than on content, particularly because of
censorship at the time of the Counter-Reformation. The sixteenth-
century French humanist, Christophe de Longueil, lamented that
Italian scholars preferred eloquence to the search for truth. This was
not an isolated polemic, but represented one of the ways in which
Italians came to be perceived abroad: they privileged beauty over
verity. Rhetoric, fashion, luxury banquets, the baroque bella figura or
‘fine figure’: by the seventeenth century, what mattered in Italy was
not life but appearance.
Nationalist nineteenth-century intellectuals defined the period that
followed the Renaissance, from the second half of the sixteenth
century, as a dark era. Parts of Italy were either invaded or
controlled by France, Spain, and later Austria. They saw the decline
of the Italian ‘model’ in the Counter-Reformation and triumph of
Catholic intolerance (with the subsequent attacks on science and
philosophy); the growth of a bureaucratic aristocracy, which
increased corruption and nepotism; the weakness of the armies; the
fragmentation of the states; and, as was underlined by the
sixteenth-century writer and political thinker Niccolò Machiavelli, the
separation between princes and peoples that caused continuous civil
wars. When Machiavelli and the historian Francesco Guicciardini laid
down rules of political science in the early sixteenth century, Italy
was already losing weight internationally; with the discovery of
America, the European economy acquired new dimensions,
independent of Italy.
The period between the French Revolution (and Napoleon’s
occupation) and the unification of Italy is defined as the
Risorgimento, the rebirth of Italy that many intellectuals all over the
peninsula had been anticipating for centuries; at the end of the
eighteenth century, patriotic poets such as Vittorio Alfieri believed
that only literature could rescue Italy from what he perceived to be
its cultural and political decline. In the twentieth century, both
Fascists and anti-Fascists believed they were heirs to the ideals of
the Risorgimento; both Fascism and the wartime Resistance
proclaimed that they could produce the rebirth of the nation. After
the Second World War, an Italy covered in ruins began a period of
reconstruction, and this too was perceived as the rebirth of a
‘model’: contemporary foreign commentators described the
economic ‘miracle’ as a new Italian Renaissance. The ‘miracles’ of
the 1960s and of the 1980s sought to make Italians forget about the
divisions of the Fascist period and of the civil war (1943–5); but
years of radical politics in the 1970s and the end of the Cold War in
the early 1990s brought back divisions. Indeed, the prosperity and
extension of material goods to a broader spectrum of society raised
expectations and overlooked divisions that emerged and were
expressed in politics, but came to the fore through economic
recession and hard times.
These developments in the history of Italy can be studied through
the life of its squares. The square mentioned at the start of this
Introduction, which now exemplifies the consumer values of an
Italian city with its rite of the evening aperitif, is only a few yards
away from three other squares: Piazza Duomo contains a twelfth-
century cathedral, the palace of the medieval commune and the
newer eighteenth-century Baroque cathedral, and has served a
mainly religious purpose down the centuries, though it often hosts
music events during the summer; Piazza Vittoria is the result of an
urban development in the city centre carried out during the 1930s,
and represents an extreme example of Fascist architecture; Piazza
Loggia is the symbol of the Renaissance city and the location of the
town hall: this is the site of political demonstrations, and was where
one of the neo-Fascist bomb outrages against the Left movement
took place in the 1970s – a plaque there bears the names of the
victims. With their mixed architecture and disparate uses, Italian
squares narrate the changing political and cultural landscape that
has influenced public life throughout the centuries; this book will
attempt an exploration of this history.
 1
........
The ‘Barbarian’ Middle Ages:
Invasions, Culture, Religion

CHRONOLOGY
410 The Visigoths sack Rome
455 The Vandals sack Rome
476 Formal end of the Roman Empire, with overthrowing of Romulus Augustus
476–93 Odoacer in Italy
493–
The Goths in Italy (Theodoric)
553
535–53 Byzantine–Gothic wars in Italy
554–68 Justinian’s attempt to re-establish imperial authority in Italy
569–
The Lombards in Italy
774
590 Gregory I (the Great) is elected Pope
The Lombards capture Ravenna, the Exarchate and the Pentapolis from
751–2
Byzantium
Pope Stephen II asks King Pippin of the Franks for assistance against the
754
Lombards
754; Pippin defeats Lombard King Aistulf, who promises to give territories back to the
756 Pope
758 Lombard King Desiderius refuses to give territories to the Pope
773–4 King Charlemagne of the Franks conquers the kingdom of the Lombards
800 Charlemagne is crowned Emperor by Pope Leo III in Rome
814 Death of Charlemagne, succeeded by his son, Louis the Pious
824–30 Muslims seize strongholds in Sicily
 841 Muslims occupy Bari
875–6 Byzantines reoccupy Bari and other strongholds in southern Italy

When did the Middle Ages start? The German mathematician Johann
Christoph Keller, who lived at the end of the seventeenth century,
suggested that they began between 313 (when Constantine’s Edict
legalized Christianity) and 326 (when the capital of the Roman
Empire moved to Constantinople), though he also considered 395,
the date of the division of the Empire by Theodosius. Others
proposed different dates, such as the capture of Rome by the
Visigoths (410) or the death of Justinian, the emperor of the eastern
Roman Empire (565). The Belgian historian Henri Pirenne (author,
among many works, of the 1937 classic Mohammed and
Charlemagne) argued that only with the Islamic invasions around 650
was it possible to really confirm the end of the Roman tradition, and
so he dated the Middle Ages from that time.
By convention, we now regard the start of the Middle Ages as 476,
the year when the King of the Eruli and a general of the Roman army,
Odoacer, deposed Romulus Augustolus, the last western Roman
emperor. That date had no significance for the population of the time,
because throughout the fifth century, the western Roman Empire was
invaded repeatedly while its organization crumbled. However, in
recent decades a new concept of late antiquity has been used, which
comprises the third to seventh centuries, therefore eliding a specific
turning point or decisive break and emphasizing a slow and
imperceptible transition between ancient times and the Middle Ages.
The end of the Middle Ages is often considered to coincide with the
discovery of America in 1492, a date that was also meaningless to
contemporary populations. It is evident that all these dates function
only to produce a superficial periodization and offer little help in
understanding the slow dialectic of continuity and change provoked
by repeated crises and contingencies.
Despite the impossibility of defining precise temporal shifts, some
factors did determine the new age and the ways in which Italy took
shape as a country from the end of the Roman Empire: the diffusion
of Christianity and the organization of the Church; the migration of
Germanic peoples with the consequent creation of an ethnically
mixed society; the end of the imperial economic system; the
beginning of processes which contributed to a separation between
East and West, bringing religious unity to crisis point.
During the imperial age, populations external to Roman civilization
were called barbarians. There was a distinction between those who
were allowed to reside within the borders of the Empire and obtained
the status of federati (allies of Rome), and those who remained
outside. The latter included numerous Germanic tribes from the west
(Angles, Saxons, Suevi, Burgundians, Alemanni, Franks, Lombards)
and tribes from the east (Sciri, Goths, Turcilingi). Under King Alaric,
the Visigoths attacked Italy directly and sacked Rome in 410. The
Vandals (with the Anglo-Saxons the only sailors among the
barbarians), founded a kingdom in 429 in Roman Africa. From there,
they conquered the Balearic islands, Sardinia and Corsica, and in 455
sacked Rome for fourteen terrible days: this is the origin of the
expression ‘vandalism’, still used today. In 443, the kingdom of the
Burgundians was established in Gaul, the Franks occupied the lower
Rhine, and the Suevi occupied western Iberia. In 449 the Angles and
the Saxons penetrated Britain and integrated with the Celts, creating
seven small kingdoms.
Map 1.1 The division of Europe at the beginning of the sixth century

From the time of the barbarian invasions, Italy and the

Mediterranean had been major attractions for northern peoples, as
Pirenne and Braudel emphasized in their seminal works about the
Mediterranean during the Middle Ages. One of their concerns was to
integrate history and geography as closely as possible, and they
regarded the nature of the land and the climate as fundamental
reasons for the invasions. According to Pirenne, the invaders’ dream
was ‘to settle down, themselves, in those happy regions where the
mildness of the climate and the fertility of the land were matched by
the charms and the wealth of civilization’. Most of the chosen
countries for the fifth-century invasions were in the Mediterranean;
the invaders’ objective was the sea, ‘that sea which for so long a time
the Romans had called, with as much affection as pride, mare
nostrum’. The invaders saw Italy as the garden of the Mediterranean,
an area of abundance and wealth. The Mediterranean had also been
the seat of Greco-Roman hegemony and the region of classical
culture – an idea later emphasized during the Renaissance, and one
that encouraged continual cultural migrations, culminating in the
Romantic perception of the Mediterranean shared by Protestant
reformers and other northerners in the age of the Grand Tour, from
the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries.
The wars that followed the ‘barbarian invasions’, or, as they are
also called, the ‘great migrations’, provoked a terrible demographic
crisis. As Chris Wickham has argued, Italy was ruined not by
barbarian rule but by a succession of wars during the sixth and the
seventh centuries. By then, Italy was no longer at the centre of the
Western Empire as a whole, and consequently lost important tax
revenue. Rome in particular suffered from the loss of African tax
payments. The city, which had almost a million inhabitants at the end
of the fourth century, was reduced to around 30,000 by the seventh
century, even though it was still the second-largest European city
after Constantinople. Indeed, the crisis was not specifically Italian: in
the third century, Europe had an estimated 65 million inhabitants; but
by the middle of the eighth century there were fewer than 30 million.
Populations were decimated by wars and massacres, but also by
famine, terrible fires and catastrophic floods. As Bryan Ward-Perkins
has recently argued, archaeological evidence shows a dramatic
decline in Western standards of living between the fifth and the
seventh centuries. The Lombard poet and historian, Paul the Deacon,
born around 720 of a Lombard family in Friuli and educated at the
grammarian Flavianus’s school in Pavia, wrote: ‘A deep silence
reigned over villages and towns. Only dogs remained barking outside
the houses, and cattle wandered in the moors without cowherds.’ An
Italian prayer known throughout the Middle Ages probably originated
from this time: A peste a fame et bello libera nos Domine (‘From
plague and hunger and war free us, O Lord’).
The contemporary building of churches demonstrates that, while
the Roman heritage survived, new buildings were dramatically
smaller. The materials of classical architecture were re-used; capitals,
funerary epigraphs and columns were embedded in the structure of
new buildings. Artisan workshops were established inside decaying
ancient Roman villas and fires were lit on the mosaic floors. As a
consequence of the Gothic War, cities were poorer than they had
been in Roman times. Archaeological evidence demonstrates that
cities experienced a serious crisis, and only slowly began to recover,
from the eighth century onwards. Nevertheless, and unlike other
parts of the Empire, Italian cities maintained their ancient structure,
and that urban continuity is still visible today.

‘MAY YOU LIVE IN HARMONY’: LATIN AND GOTHIC POPULATIONS IN

ITALY

When the invaders settled, Italy became characterized by Roman–

Barbarian kingdoms, so-called for their dual aspect: Latin-speaking
and Germanic populations did not integrate, but coexisted. The
double legal system, which continued until the Ostrogothic period,
allowed people to be judged respectively by either Roman or
Germanic law; in the same way, two different religions were
observed, Christian and Arian.

Box 1.1 Arianism

Arianism is the doctrine claiming that Jesus Christ is inferior to
the Father. The name came from Arius, a theologian who lived in
the third/fourth centuries. He was condemned at the first Council
of the Church at Nicea (325), summoned by Emperor
Constantine, but, thanks to Bishop Ulfila, who translated the Bible
 into the Gothic language, Arianism established roots among many
of the barbarian tribes.

In the state administration, Roman laws, institutions and

organization persisted almost unchanged, but political power and the
army were in the hands of the victors, who continued to follow their
own traditions. The invaders were a small minority of the population,
between 2 per cent and 20 per cent depending on the area.
Government duties required a specific culture and training, and since
many Germanic military chiefs were illiterate, they had to keep
functionaries from the Roman administration. For this reason, many
public institutions survived, particularly those related to the
administration of justice and taxation.
The Germans imitated the symbols of Roman power, although no
barbarian king proclaimed himself emperor until Charlemagne. The
invading peoples underwent profound transformations, through a
slow fusion between victors and vanquished, becoming the
progenitors of the populations of modern Europe. The role that
Germanic immigrants had on the creation of Italy has been a
contested area for a long time. Recent historiography has moved to
what Chris Wickham calls a ‘Romanist direction’, contesting an
overemphasis on Germanic influence in the Roman provinces. The
elites of the new populations, always small minorities, tended to
‘make the best of what they found’, even though the Roman state, its
entire fiscal system and its economic networks had collapsed.
Odoacer was the first barbarian to govern Italy, from 476 to 493.
He occupied Dalmatia, developed good relations with the Visigoths
and the Vandals (who granted him Sicily as a tribute), and
strengthened the northern borders of the empire at the eastern Alps.
Although his religion was Arian he created no problems for the
existing Church. However, Zeno, emperor of the Eastern Empire
(which originated from the division of the Roman empire into a
Western and an Eastern part after the death of Theodosius I in 395),
who was either nervous of Odoacer’s power or hoped to get rid of the
Ostrogoths on his Balkan border, persuaded the Ostrogoths to fight
Odoacer. The Ostrogoths were led by Theodoric, who had lived in
Constantinople for ten years and had been educated in the values of
Roman civilization. They defeated Odoacer, and Zeno granted
Theodoric the title of king of the Goths in Italy.
The Ostrogoths were a tiny minority compared with the Roman
populations in Italy, but as rulers they only had to live alongside and
deal with the Roman elites, not with the majority of the population.
Their settlement was not homogeneous, but was concentrated mainly
in the centre-north. Under Theodoric, the Roman Church found itself
inside a kingdom run by a barbarian of Arian belief, which it
considered a heretical version of Christianity. The Arian Church had
its own sacred sites and properties. In the urban centres where Goths
and Romans cohabited there were Arian churches for the former and
Roman churches (much more numerous) for the latter.
Differences between Romans and Goths were also evident in their
ways of life. The Romans cut their hair and beards short and wore
tunics and, among the upper classes, the toga. Goths had long hair
and beards, and wore trousers. The transition from the ancient world
to the Middle Ages can be interpreted as a vast process of cultural
transformation that resulted from the encounter/clash between
classical and barbaric civilizations. This is true also from a dietary
point of view: the Greco-Roman civilization had taken shape in a
Mediterranean environment, where cereal growing, and grapevine
and olive tree propagation had a primary role, alongside some sheep
farming, with limited use of uncultivated forests. The dietary culture
was therefore based on wheat, oil and wine, supplemented with milk
and cheese, though many animal bones have also been found on
Roman sites. In mountainous areas, particularly from the ninth
century onwards, cereals were replaced by chestnuts, which were
also used to make flour. The food consumption of Celtic and
Germanic populations north of the Alps was different, marked
principally by the lack of olives: the economy was based mainly on
forest and pasture, on the exploitation of uncultivated woods through
hunting, fishing, the picking of wild fruit and pig breeding. However,
cereal growing was central too, mainly used in the production of beer,
which replaced wine. Once in Italy, however, Germanic peoples ate
what the Italians ate.
The Roman influence became evident, particularly among
Germanic elites. A famous treasure found by archaeologists in the
Republic of San Marino in 1893, considered to be one of the most
important finds from Italy under the Goths, includes the luxurious
trousseau of an upper-class woman. The use of the bonnet and the
veil, as well as the type of jewellery decoration, is typical of
contemporary Mediterranean style, indicating a high degree of
acculturation among Gothic communities. As an admirer of Latin
civilization, Theodoric co-operated with the Romans, choosing for a
number of years Senator Aurelius Cassiodorus, a prestigious
intellectual from Calabria, as his adviser and secretary, and placing
the philosopher Severinus Boethius, from a powerful Roman family,
briefly at the head of his administration. Theodoric proclaimed the
Edict of Theodoric which kept Romans and Ostrogoths apart,
maintaining Roman law for the former and barbaric law for the latter.
He restored fortifications, monuments and aqueducts that had been
damaged by the invasions, and created new buildings in Verona,
Pavia and Ravenna.
Theodoric regarded himself as the king of both Goths and Romans.
To make clear his common kingship over the two peoples, he was
buried at his request in a sarcophagus made of porphyry inside a
funeral monument built for the occasion just outside Ravenna, near
the lighthouse of the port. The tomb’s cupola is 34 metres in
circumference and made from a single block of Istrian stone. At the
church of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo, a mosaic portrays Theodoric as a
Byzantine emperor (though his name was later erased and replaced
by that of Justinian, emperor of the Eastern Empire).
Theodoric’s attempts to reconcile Latins and Goths failed, because
of Justinian’s intervention: the new Eastern emperor proclaimed an
edict of persecution against the Arians in 524, which was extended to
Italy, demonstrating that he still considered Italy to be his possession.
The period of war between the Goths and the Eastern Empire from
535 to 553 was the worst time for the population of Italy since the
first invasions in the fifth century. The Byzantine general, Belisarius,
at the head of Justinian’s army, attacked from the south, first
conquering Sicily and proceeding without hindrance up to Naples.
There, and later elsewhere, he finally faced stubborn resistance; the
population endured a state of siege, in which they suffered violence
from both sides.
Theodoric, already old and persuaded that there were conspiracies
against him, condemned to death Pope John I, Symmachus, the head
of the Senate, and the philosopher Severinus Boethius, who wrote
from prison On the Consolation of Philosophy, a prose and poetry
work protesting against barbarism in the name of spiritual values.
Embittered by the failure of the policy of uniting Latins and Goths,
Cassiodorus retreated to Vivarium, near Squillace, in Calabria, to a
convent he had founded, and there wrote the Institutions, to promote
the study and transcription of classical pagan and Christian
masterpieces. He also inaugurated the differentiation between the
arts of Trivium (grammar, rhetoric, logic) and Quadrivium (arithmetic,
geometry, music, astronomy).

Box 1.2 Statements by Theodoric

Theodoric to the Goths and Latins to live in harmony
We love all of you equally, but those of you who are fond of the
laws and demonstrate a wish for peace will be most dear in our
heart. We do not like anything that is against civilisation and we
loathe criminal arrogance and its perpetrators: our clemency is
horrified by violence. In litigation, the law, and not strength, shall
prevail... Both peoples, do listen to our wish. To you, Goths, may
the Romans share their affection just as they share their land.
And you, Romans, must love the Goths, who make the population
more numerous in peacetime and who defend the whole state
during wartime. (Cassiodorus, Variae)
Theodoric to Emperor Anastasius (Eastern Empire)
Our kingdom is an imitation of yours, it is the concrete realisation
of a good system, a special example within the wider empire;
therefore, the more we become similar to you, the easier it will be
 to overcome other peoples ... We are certain that you do not
want the persistence of discrepancies between the two states,
which have always formed a single body under the emperors of
the past. On the contrary, it is necessary that our states be united
with peaceful love, and that they help each other. May the will of
the Roman Empire always be unique, may its thought always be
unique. (Cassiodorus, Variae)

At roughly the same time as Cassiodorus was writing the

Institutions, the first Benedictine monastery was founded in 529 at
Montecassino, near Frosinone. After three years of prayers and
meditation in a cave on the river Aniene, Benedict of Nursia (480–
547) spent time in a number of monasteries, an experience that
persuaded him to forge his own path by founding a monastery on a
site where – according to Pope Gregory I (called Gregory the Great) –
there had once been a temple to Jupiter. The surrounding land was
deforested and turned into vegetable gardens; fields and fruit trees
were planted. The motto of the monastery, ‘Pray and Work’,
prescribed that the hours of the day should be divided between work,
study and prayer. As a result, work was revalued in a society in which
it had been thus far reserved for the inferior classes and slaves.
Immersed in the silence of the abbeys, anonymous scribes
illuminated manuscripts of the masterpieces of ancient authors and
Church founders.
At the same time, the Church began to reform the calendar,
progressively replacing pagan feasts or adapting them to its own
needs. In mid–December, for example, the Romans used to celebrate
the Saturnalia, days of noisy partying; these were considered to be
too close to Christmas, so the Church moved them to February–
March, the time of Carnival. Around 525, Pope John I entrusted a
monk, Dionysius Exiguus, with the duty of compiling a table for the
calculation of Easter. Easter falls on different days depending on the
lunar cycle. Not only did Dionysius establish the time of Easter for the
coming 100 years, but he also proposed establishing a dating system
from the birth of Jesus, calculating it as 25 December in the Roman
year 753. Until then, years were counted from the foundation of
Rome, which in today’s chronology would be the equivalent of 753
BC. This innovation had huge symbolic value (although it was not
used very often in Italy until the tenth century) as the birth of Christ
became the turning point of history, the event that divided before and
after. The date was probably wrong, as today it is thought that Christ
was born around 7–6 BC, but Dionysius’ calendar has been adopted
in the Christian world.

A PROVINCE OF THE EMPIRE

As the Western Roman Empire ceased to exist, the Eastern Empire

showed great vitality and lived on for another millennium, until the
Turks seized Constantinople in 1453. Its longevity was a result of
minimal pressure from the barbarians at its borders, the favourable
geographic position of its major cities (which were generally located
on the coast), and a well-organized bureaucracy. Emperors were
absolute monarchs, with both political and military powers as well as
being the religious leaders of the state, God’s representatives on
earth. The bishops of Constantinople were dependent on them, and
they could appoint bishops, summon councils, and promulgate laws
on religious matters. By contrast, the bishops of Rome, who were
becoming the highest religious authorities in the Western world,
increasingly acquiring more autonomy from the emperors, had never
ceded these prerogatives.
The difficult relationship between the Roman Church and
Byzantium became particularly evident after the latter’s victory over
the Goths and the surrender of most of the peninsula to the Eastern
Empire. The Gothic Wars, which lasted for almost twenty years (535–
53), sacked and ruined the peninsula, causing the worst famine in its
history. The contemporary Byzantine historian, Procopius of
Caesarea, left testimony to the terrible results in his book The Gothic
Wars:
In the Picene no fewer than 50,000 peasants starved, and many more did so on the
other side of the Ionian gulf. I can describe what they looked like and in which way they
died, because I have been a spectator of those facts. Their faces became emaciated and
 pale. Their dry skin looked like leather and seemed to adhere to the bones while their
expression became horribly absent. If some of them, tortured by hunger, saw even a
herb, they avidly leapt on it and, down on their knees, sought to extract it; but they did
not succeed because all their strength was exhausted, and they fell dead on the herb
they were clutching in their hands; nor was there anyone to bury them, because no one
was thinking about providing burial. In the meantime, hunger grew also in Rome, where
almost all the inhabitants looked emaciated and their colour had little by little turned livid,
making them seem like ghosts. Many, while walking and chewing nettles between their
teeth, suddenly fell dead on the ground. And they even ate each other’s excrement.
Many, tortured by hunger, committed suicide as they could no longer find dogs or rats, or
the corpses of other animals to eat.
(Procopius of Caesarea, History of the Wars: The Gothic Wars)

Italy was subsequently annexed to the Empire as a province, and

subjected to heavy taxation. Among all Italian cities only Ravenna,
the capital at the time, reaped some benefits from the Byzantine
government: built by Theodoric and maintained by Justinian, it still
boasts eight monuments that are considered to be world heritage
sites by UNESCO because of their architectural importance and the
extraordinary mosaics they contain.
The masterpiece that made Justinian famous is the Corpus Iuris
Civilis. He decided to re-confirm Roman law throughout the Empire so
that its subjects were equally protected and the emperor’s laws were
clear to all. From 529 to 534 several committees of jurists published
the Corpus, a collection of legal norms divided into three sections:
the Codex Iustinianeus, which brought together laws promulgated
from the time of Emperor Hadrian (117–38); the Pandette or Digest,
which collected together the judgements of Roman jurists from the
classical age; and the New Constitutions, which also contained
Justinian’s Institutes, a manual of law. Justinian’s Corpus remains the
basis of modern law throughout continental Europe. The stratification
of Roman law provided the instruments with which to govern, to
safeguard people’s needs and to resolve conflicts.

Box 1.3 Some of the great monuments of Ravenna

The Mausoleum of Galla Placidia (425–50), which portrays the
Victory of Life over Death;
 The Neoniano Baptistery (end of fourth–fifth century), octagonal
with four niches, decorated with mosaics by bishop Neone;
Sant’Apollinare Nuovo (sixth century) was Theodoric’s church and
has the largest piece of Roman mosaic work still remaining;
The Baptistery of the Arians, an octagonal building with four small
apses;
The Chapel of Sant’Andrea (sixth century) has a cruciform layout;
the mosaics on the superior part represent the glorification of
Christ;
The Mausoleum of Theodoric (520), a great octagonal
construction, is divided into two superimposed orders: in the
upper space there is a porphyry tank where the king is
supposed to have been buried;
The Basilica of San Vitale (consecrated in 548) is among the most
important monuments of early Christian art: a central
octagonal core is surmounted by a cupola and rests on eight
pillars and arches;
The Basilica of Sant’Apollinare in Classe (first half of the sixth
century) is famous for its mosaics and the marble
sarcophaguses of the archbishops arranged along the side
aisles.

After fifteen years of Byzantine dominion, the Lombards entered

Italy, urged on by the Avars (a tribe probably of Turkic origin). The
Lombards arrived from Pannonia (today’s Hungary) led by Alboin.
They enforced confiscations across the entire territory they occupied,
destroyed the administrative organization of the Romans and
fragmented the territory by dividing it into thirty-six duchies governed
by military leaders or dukes. They settled in the Po Valley, in Tuscany
and the Apennine areas of central Italy down to Benevento in the
south. The Byzantines were able to keep Ravenna for two more
centuries, together with the exarchate (territory around Ravenna),
the pentapolis (five cities along the Adriatic coast between present
Romagna and Marche – Rimini, Pesaro, Fano, Senigallia, Ancona),
Venice, and much of the South.
A PROJECT FOR ITALIAN UNIFICATION? THE LOMBARDS IN THE
PENINSULA

When they arrived in Italy in 568–9, the Lombard people numbered

perhaps 100,000–150,000 men, women and children. They came to
stay. They integrated with the Roman world, considered Italy their
land and intended to occupy the whole peninsula. Most of the Po
Valley was called Lombardy from the twelfth century until the early
modern period. For example, in his The Divine Comedy, Dante called
the early-fourteenth-century military leader, Cangrande della Scala
from Verona, ‘the great Lombard’. The Lombards were very skilled in
agriculture and divided the large Roman properties into many smaller
possessions. They improved agricultural techniques and became
attached to their new land. The Italian landscape, after centuries of
disasters wrought by invasions, plague and wars between Byzantines
and Goths, was being reborn.
The Lombard kingdom was composed of an immigrant, ethnically
different population that dominated and politically subordinated a
Roman majority; at the same time the papacy adopted a political role
in defence of the values of Roman Christianity. Much of the
historiography, particularly of the nineteenth century, underlined the
negative aspects of this period, comparing it with contemporary
domination by the Habsburgs: the Catholic–Liberal writer Alessandro
Manzoni, for example, in his tragedy Adelchis, depicted a society in
which Romans were enslaved by Lombard occupiers, symbolizing the
Italians before the Risorgimento. That ‘slavery’ was in fact non-
existent, and the relationship between the two populations evolved
and took different forms throughout the long Lombard age.
Contrasting judgements of that age were given by other authors who
considered Italy’s history and identity in the centuries that followed.
For example, in the sixteenth century, Niccolò Machiavelli saw the
end of Lombard Italy as a missed opportunity for the political
unification of the peninsula, as well as a typical example of the
deplorable habit of inviting foreigners to settle Italy’s internal political
issues (referring to the Papacy’s action in raising the Franks against
the Lombards in the mid-eighth century). The enlightened
philosophers of the eighteenth century admired the Lombard capacity
to restrain the Church and its temporal interference. It remained
important that ‘barbarian Italy’ was still an Italy inhabited mainly by
Romans; the mixed character of Italian culture and institutions at that
time meant that the different components did not remain separate
and hostile, but influenced each other.
The Lombards chose Pavia as their capital. Regional officials
employed by the duke resided in rural areas and controlled
production. Once the first period of invasion and violence came to an
end, daily life under the Lombards did not change very much,
particularly for the peasants. New barbarian landowners replaced
previous Roman landowners. Initially, Lombards and Romans
remained separated socially, juridically and physically (for example,
they may have lived in different areas within the same cities);
however, prolonged coexistence and the Lombards’ numerical
inferiority favoured a slow but steady process of assimilation. In the
cities, the Lombards were a small minority surrounded by a large
Roman population that was organized by bishops and more used to a
settled urban life. The Lombards were constantly coming into contact
with Roman artisans and merchants. In these conditions, it was
impossible for a militarized minority, despite its status as the ruling
power, to remain separate indefinitely. Moreover, no rule forbade
mixed marriages, and another determining force for unification was
the Lombards’ conversion to Christianity (initiated by King Agilulf, who
had his son baptized, for political and diplomatic reasons), a process
that was complete by the seventh century.
The Lombards at first imported an Arianism largely imbued with
Germanic pagan elements, which clashed with local Christianity. This
reignited religious conflict on the peninsula, a conflict that was linked
directly with the political-military wars. Christians felt increasingly
defenceless in the context of the declining power of the Byzantine
Empire. The native Italian dominant class was destroyed in the
decade 574–84, many Roman aristocrats were killed or had to serve
the invaders, many cities were ruined, churches and monasteries
were razed (including the community founded by Benedict at
Montecassino). As recorded by Paul the Deacon, priests were
massacred and bishops emigrated, leaving the churches empty.
Rhetorically, he concluded that only a ‘miracle’ could have prevented
Italic Christianity from disappearing. The new religion, on the other
hand, had little chance of becoming rooted. Not only was it different
from the previous religion, it was antithetical to it and had little
precedent in Italy. It spread through the countryside but not in the
cities, and was never adopted by cultured people. The Roman
hierarchies began talking about an imminent end of the world; the
future Pope Gregory the Great announced it many times, declaring
that he saw signs in the Holy Scriptures. In a letter to the Milanese
clergy in April 593, he wrote that sufficient evidence for such a
demise could be seen by simply looking around: everything was in
ruin, there were only few survivors and they lived under the shadow
of the Lombard sword; the Day of Judgement was coming, and there
was nothing to do but make ready for it: ‘I do not know what is
happening in other parts of the world, but here, in this land where
we are living, the end is not only near: it has already occurred.’
The idea of the end was a powerful impulse in the discovery of a
new religious path: if God’s judgement was near, then all that was left
was retreat, from society and from the Church, with the only
objective being to please God. Many felt it was the right time to re-
found the Christian experience. The common perception was that of a
God who seemed to live in the cities and the villas of the powerful,
taking the side of the Roman aristocrats and of emperors. While
Gregory was no radical, he began describing a God who was not kind
to the emperor, who condemned the rich and took the side of the
poor. Moreover, this God had no interest in the origins of people, so
even a barbarian could become a good Christian and be saved.
Gregory’s concerns were for Italy, for a southern Italy threatened by
the extension of the Lombard invasion but still largely Roman, and for
a northern Italy in the hands of the Lombards apart from a few
Byzantine ‘islands’. The south of Italy became centralized around the
Roman Church; the Roman Christian religion became even more
rooted in this period, to the extent that it was able to resist threats
from Byzantium and Islam. In northern Italy, an explosion of
monasteries replaced the traditional churches that had been
destroyed by the invaders. Gregory relied largely on monasteries, as
well as on the increasing belief in miracles: with the idea of the end
of the world and of God’s judgement, the irrational element in
popular Christianity had greater appeal than anything said in priestly
sermons.
Contemporary sources describe a multiplication of miracles. When
floods threatened, the River Po near Piacenza obeyed the Pope and
returned within its banks; in Verona, the oratory of St Zeno stopped
the river Adige from flooding; at Genoa, the church of St Siro
expelled from its walls the corpse of an unworthy clergyman who was
to be buried there; in Brescia, the bones of the martyr St Faustinus
were said to have rejected the burial of the corpse of a vicious
aristocrat; at the court of Autari, a key of St Peter’s killed an
undignified Lombard and respected a pious one, demonstrating the
power of the Roman God’s justice. Gregory began to be regarded
favourably even by the Lombards, though it was only about a century
later that powerful Lombard kings began to support the monastic
foundations, to such an extent that most of Lombard Italy, from
Tuscia (an area north of Rome) to Friuli (north-east of Venice),
became covered in a dense network of monasteries.
In 593, Agilulf arrived at Rome and laid siege to it, but after
meeting Pope Gregory I he retreated. Such a swift change of heart
generated a legendary account of the event among contemporary
observers, modelled on the encounter between Pope Leo I and Attila
the Hun in the previous century, which became a well-known symbol
of the meeting between a Roman bishop and a barbarian, and of the
beneficial effects of the Pope’s protection for the Roman population.
In the version made public by later sources, Gregory, unarmed, met
the Lombard king on the steps of St Peter’s and frightened him with
the sheer strength of his faith and the power of his prayer. In fact,
the Pope had probably agreed to give the king a substantial financial
tribute, which the king considered more convenient than the
prosecution of a military campaign that was likely to be both onerous
and risky. However, in Rome the event reinforced the idea that,
through the Pope, St Peter (protector of Rome, the cradle of world
civilization) was the guarantor of the lives of the Romans and of the
ethical and cultural values of the Roman–Christian civilization. The
fusion of Lombards and Romans was also demonstrated by the
presence of mixed names (traditional Roman names for the Lombards
and traditional Germanic names for the Romans), and the elements
of a mixed language; however, by the eighth century the Lombard
language was no longer in use.
The years under King Rothari (636–52) were particularly important
for territorial and political consolidation. Rothari took Liguria from the
Byzantines, and his name remained famous for his codification of
Lombard law, hitherto only transmitted orally. In order to avoid the
proliferation of vendettas, he meticulously proscribed all types of
offence. While the way in which cases were dealt with was naïve, the
aim was noble: the end of personal vendetta, to be replaced by
financial compensation. The Lombards’ legislative initiatives
demonstrate an interest in the judicial and civil culture that was at
the heart of their civilization. Important additions to Rothari’s edict
were provided by Liutprand (king between 712 and 744), the most
powerful and ambitious Lombard king, who also contributed to
Pavia’s architecture, emphasizing its role as a capital city. He
presented himself as a Christian king and a defender of the Pope, and
crossed the River Po to occupy the region south of Ravenna, though
his attempts to occupy the city itself were unsuccessful. In 728 he
occupied the town of Sutri near Viterbo and donated it to Pope
Gregory II; this was the first core of the Roman Church’s territorial
power, known as the Donation of Sutri.
The Lombards in Italy were eventually defeated by another
invasion, by the Franks, who came to Italy at the Pope’s request. In
751, the Lombard King Aistulf seized Ravenna, leaving the Byzantines
without their capital and best-defended city. Anxious about the
Lombard threat, Pope Stephen II signed an alliance with the Franks
and obtained the commitment that their king Pippin the Short would
intervene against the Lombards. In two expeditions, the king of the
Franks liberated Ravenna and the surrounding territory and gave
them to the Pope, who continued to enlarge his possessions in
central Italy. The Church by then controlled a strip of land that
stretched from Lazio to the Romagna coast. This was the birth of the
so-called Patrimony of St Peter, the core of the state of the Church, a
political entity that divided Italy in two and survived until 1870; the
present Vatican State is the last residue of this.
Charlemagne, son of Pippin, continued to provide assistance to the
Popes, and in 773 broke the alliance with the Lombards that he had
made when he married Ermengarda, daughter of the Lombard King
Desiderius. When the other king of the Franks, Carloman, died,
Charles occupied his part of the kingdom (from western France to the
Pyrenees), abandoned his wife Ermengarda, and, at the request of
Pope Hadrian I, waged war on Desiderius. He invaded Italy, defeating
and capturing Desiderius at Pavia. He quickly occupied Milan and
Brescia, where it is still possible to see the Lombard monastery of S.
Salvatore, and seized Pavia, which he conquered in 774 after
besieging it for a year. Desiderius was imprisoned in a monastery in
France. Charlemagne then occupied all the Lombard territories apart
from the southern Benevento, which survived as Lombard for three
more centuries. The extreme south of the peninsula and the islands
remained under Byzantine control; a fragile control that was subject
to Arab incursions.
The defeat of the Lombards interrupted an experiment in
coexistence between the barbarian and Roman populations that had
lasted for two centuries. This had huge consequences. It meant that
Italy could not experience, for example, what Visigoth Spain or
Frankish Gaul had done: the consolidation of a kingdom capable of
providing a united government – and identity. This fact, at the root of
Italy’s future complicated political situation, was caused by a number
of contingent factors: the decision of the Roman Papacy to obstruct
the Lombard experiment; the eventual retreat of Constantinople from
the West; the failure of the Lombards to conquer more than a third of
Italy at any given time; and the correspondence of Roman interests
and those of the Franks.

THE MYTH OF ROME IN THE GERMANIC EMPIRE

Unlike the Goths and the Lombards, the Franks did not migrate to
Italy, but sent there only the men who were to rule it. Aristocrats,
warriors and administrators from north of the Alps slowly replaced
the Lombard rulers. As Walter Pohl has underlined, Italians did not
distinguish between their different ethnic backgrounds and called
them, from the tenth century, theotisci (those who speak vernacular),
which was the origin of the term used to define the Germans in Italy,
tedeschi. The Lombards were excluded from this designation, most of
them no longer spoke a Germanic language and they had by then
mixed with the Italians and were perceived as such. One of the most
important writers of the tenth century, Bishop Liutprand of Cremona,
called the inhabitants of Italy interchangeably either ‘Lombards’ or
‘Itali’; and soon after 1000 the term teutonici was also used as the
collective name for all those coming from north of the Alps (used for
the first time in the early eleventh century by John the Deacon in
Historia Veneticorum). The teutonici continued to be regarded as
outsiders, present in Italy only at a political level and only because of
weakness and discord among Italians.
Italy’s social body was not, therefore, significantly altered by the
occupation by the Franks, and Italy continued to be inhabited by
Roman and mixed Roman–Lombard populations. This was despite the
fact that Italy’s regions were controlled politically by different powers:
the Carolingians in the north, and the Byzantines in the south.
Between the two there existed a common thread, particularly at the
level of cultural exchange, which makes it impossible to consider the
period as the beginning of the divergence between the north and
south of the peninsula. Moreover, the Lombard experience did not
end in the south in 774, since their kingdom survived in the
Benevento area. The development of Lombard rule in the south is
exemplified by the monastery of Benevento, which was built on the
model of S. Salvatore in Brescia. The Lombards also enlarged and
strengthened the city, and began the urban redesign of Salerno.
Southern Italy returned to unified rule only with the later Norman
invasion: Salerno was the last Lombard city to fall into the hands of
Robert Guiscard in 1076. Lombard influence in southern Italy did not
end there, however. Its legacy continued under Norman rule, as well
as in many areas (for example, in the law) in northern Italy.
 The Pope granted Charlemagne the title of King of the Franks and
the Lombards. Through successive wars, Charlemagne extended his
power from the Atlantic to the Elbe, from the Ebro river in Spain to
the Danube, from the North Sea to central Italy. He became the most
valuable defender of Christianity for the Church, and provided the
opportunity to replace the Eastern Roman Emperor and therefore
occupy the centre of European politics. On the morning of the
anniversary of Christ’s birth, 25 December 800, Charlemagne entered
St Peter’s Basilica to hear the third Christmas mass celebrated by the
Pope according to ritual. After the oratio, in which people prayed
lying down on the floor, Charlemagne got up and Pope Leo III put a
crown on his head. The Romans immediately understood the
meaning of this gesture and acclaimed Charles as emperor, shouting
the Pope’s words three times: ‘To Charles, pius Augustus, to the great
emperor, bearer of peace, crowned by God, life and victory!’ Until
then, only the Eastern Roman Emperor in Constantinople had been
recognized as the universal emperor, and no French, Goth or
Lombard king had ever disputed the title.
In order to give a theoretical foundation to the Pope’s temporal
power and a judicial foundation to the coronation of kings, the
Roman Church secretly produced a document according to which the
Emperor Constantine had given the Western Roman Empire to Pope
Sylvester as a gift in the same year as the Edict of Milan (313) in
which he had granted Christians the freedom of religion, a gift known
as the donation of Constantine. The history of what is perhaps the
most famous literary forgery of the Western world, written
anonymously in the eighth/ninth centuries, is rooted in the
conversion of the Emperor Constantine. The legend holds that, after
persecuting the Christians, Constantine was punished by God and hit
by leprosy. During the night, he was visited by a vision of Saints Peter
and Paul, sent by Christ to cure him of his illness on condition that he
re-established churches throughout the Empire, abandoned idolatry
and served God’s will. As Constantine woke, Pope Sylvester – having
thus far eluded persecution – explained to the emperor that his
visions were of the apostles, the servants of God. Constantine
converted, was baptized, and halted the persecution of the Christians
in recognition of the superiority of the Roman Church. As a sign of
gratitude, Constantine donated the symbols of imperial power and
the material possession of the Lateran palace, the city of Rome, all
the provinces and cities of Italy and the western regions to the
apostles, through Sylvester and successive Popes, ‘who would sit on
the throne of St Peter until the end of the world’. Thus a mythical
origin was invented to explain the reasons for the growth of papal
power in the West. The fake document also contained an ideological
core, affirming the divine origin of papal superiority in an attempt to
redefine the difficult relationship between Pope and Empire. The
document was created at a time when the temporal power of the
Popes was increasing, and when, under Pope Gregory III (731–41),
the Roman Church was looking to the Franks for possible protection
from the dual menace of Lombards and Byzantines (the Franks
having converted to Christianity with King Clovis at the end of the
fifth century).
The document was finally unmasked in 1440 by the Italian
humanist, Lorenzo Valla (which did not prevent the Popes from
continuing to proclaim the donation’s authority – as shown, for
example, by the painting of it in the Stanza di Costantino in the
Vatican palace under Leo X, or by its defence by Cardinal Caesar
Baronius later in the sixteenth century). However, even in the Middle
Ages, some intellectuals understood the harm the Constantine
donation was doing the Church by prioritizing the pursuit of power
over religion. In the XIX canto of his Inferno, Dante relegated some
Popes to dwell among the simoniacs (those who bought religious
titles) and lamented:
Ah, Constantine, of how much ill was mother,
not your conversion, but that dowry
which the first rich Father took from you!

For centuries the German emperors supported the myth of Rome

because they needed to be crowned by the Pope as a sign of
legitimacy. In May 996, for the first time since Charlemagne, a 15-
year old German prince, the future Emperor Otto III, entered Rome
to receive the crown from Pope Gregory V. The solemn occasion was
greeted by Roman crowds and German imperial aristocrats. That
scene was repeated many times until 1328: German kings descended
on Italy with their armies, were crowned by the Popes in the ancient
Church of St Peter, built by Constantine in the Vatican on the alleged
site of the apostle’s martyrdom. The emperors generally remained in
Rome for some time, which resulted in friction between the
aristocracy and the population. Occasional revolts and urban guerrilla
action took place, after which the – often defeated – emperor and his
army would retreat back north of the Alps.
Despite repeatedly disappointing results, German emperors
continued travelling to Rome for centuries to be awarded the
prestigious title of Roman Emperor and Servant of the Roman Church
– the highest political and religious consecration. Only Rome as the
cornerstone of political universalism, and the Pope as the head of the
Church in the West, could entitle the emperors to proclaim
themselves successors to Constantine and Charlemagne – the two
Christian emperors, treated by some as saints, and the memory of
whom was diffused throughout the entire Christian world. Rome’s
prestige was felt universally; even though by around the year 1000
the city that had once had about a million inhabitants had shrunk to
30,000, it was still larger than any other city in Latin Europe of the
period. However, Rome’s fame was dwarfed by the splendour and
power of Byzantium. By the end of the first millennium,
Constantinople, first called the ‘new Rome’ by Constantine (who
founded it on the site of the Greek town Byzantium), was one of the
great metropolises of the Eastern world alongside Cairo, Damascus
and Baghdad. Despite this, Rome, with its classic monuments, was
able to synthesize an impressive number of memories and myths on
which new ideological claims could be founded, as expressed by an
anonymous seventh-century poet, quoted by the Venerable Bede:
So long as the Colosseum stands/Rome stands/When the Colosseum falls/Rome
falls/When Rome falls/The world falls.

From the end of the fourth century, the Roman Church had insisted
that its possession of the relics of the Saints Peter and Paul, the
founders of the Church and propagators of the Gospel, gave it the
unique right to lead the Christian world. No doubts could remain that
Rome was the mother and Constantinople the daughter – a daughter
with a great political prestige, the capital of the Empire in the East,
but inferior in rank to Roma Christiana. If pagan Rome had
dominated the world physically, Christian Rome was going to
dominate its souls; the city retained both temporal and spiritual
powers.
One of Rome’s main legacies was the idea of empire. While the
kings of France and England were creating the bases for powerful
national monarchic states and the Italian city-states were increasingly
affirming their autonomy, during the Middle Ages – and not only in
Germany – the concept of empire remained strongly rooted, as
illustrated by Charlemagne’s prestige in popular imagery. It was
widely believed that God wanted the empire in order to favour the
diffusion of the Christian faith and justice in the world. The medieval
empire was to lead people to salvation through laws in the temporal
sphere, while the Roman Church was responsible for their souls. The
two powers, as underlined in a letter by Pope Gelasius to the
Emperor Anastasius I as early as 494, were distinct and
complementary.

A NEW LANGUAGE

Latin and Greek were the two principal languages in Europe until the
barbarian invasions. In the second century, the cultural prestige of
Greek was matched by the use of Latin in administration, in the
military and in Roman colonies throughout the Empire. Many cities
were bilingual. Thanks to literary rules, the spread of schools and
Rome’s prestige, Latin was the same language everywhere,
expressed in different accents but not distinct dialects. Local ruling
classes wanted to be recognized as Roman and took their example
from Rome’s senatorial class; the unification of law, commercial
networks, and the presence of the administration and the army,
avoided the fragmentation of the language.
The barbarian groups of Germanic speakers who were allowed to
settle on the border along the Rhine–Danube axis in the second
century had no significant influence on the language. The populations
that invaded the Empire in the fourth century spoke heterogeneous
languages and their influence on Latin was only superficial. After the
fall of the Empire, rules remained in the written language at school
level, but schools themselves generally only survived in convents. The
language began to diverge into different local forms.
Between 600 and 1000, Europe underwent a great linguistic
transformation. Latin began to be modified under pressure from
diverse languages. For almost two centuries from 600, a period of
transition brought about a substantial break between a literary and
written Latin, practised by small groups of cultured people, and the
spoken language called vernacular (language of the people), used by
the majority of the inhabitants of the Roman–Germanic empire.
Languages live and change with the people who speak them, and so
it was for the Latin of the Romans, which slowly mixed with the
various local languages. According to the Romance philologist and
scholar of comparative literature, Erich Auerbach, the original
language left for future generations was:
a residue of pronunciation habits, together with morphological and syntactical patterns
that the newly Romanized people made a part of the Latin they spoke. They also kept a
few words of their former language, either because they were deeply rooted or because
there were no equivalents in Latin. This is especially true of the names of plants,
agricultural implements, clothing, food, etc, in short, all those things which are closely
tied to differences in climate, rural customs and regional traditions.
(Auerbach, 1961, p. 23)

Despite the collapse of the common language and local spoken

languages becoming more widely used, Latin remained the language
of the Church, schools, written law and administration, philosophy,
theology and science throughout the early Middle Ages. During the
age of Constantine, at the beginning of the fourth century, in the city
of Rome alone there were twenty-eight libraries, numerous private
collections, and schools with their own teachers and books. Following
the sacking of Rome by Alaric in 410 and the Vandals’ fourteen days
of fire and pillage, the great majority of books fell into disuse, while
circulation and copying stopped. Books rapidly deteriorated and were
lost. Since these texts were all hand-copied, only those present in
high numbers or those preferred by the Christians were rescued. The
classics survived: Virgil and Cicero, for example, which – apart from
their literary quality – constituted the model of Latin poetry and
prose; great historical works, some technical manuals of agriculture,
grammar and medicine were also saved. Between the seventh and
eleventh centuries, parchment was difficult to obtain, so ancient
parchment was re-used, the original scripts being washed out and
written over. Manuscripts treated in this manner, known as
palimpsests, can be read today, including their deleted sections,
which can now be revealed by the use of X-ray equipment.
The enormous task of transcribing the texts of the classical era
began in the religious houses. In order to write in good Latin, such as
that of Caesar or Cicero, it was necessary to be able read their texts.
In the service of God, clergymen made copies of an immense
quantity of ancient literary production as well as the love poems of
pagan poets, rescuing extraordinarily beautiful works in this way and
transmitting past knowledge from ancient times to the present.
Indeed, little has remained of the original Latin texts, and everything
we read today (most of which had been copied in France) was
transcribed in the Middle Ages. Monk scribes usually transcribed
classic texts in the libraries of monasteries. A note in a codex from
the seventh century bears witness to the terrible efforts that
characterized such work:
Dearest reader, pick up the book only after having washed your hands with care, turn the
pages with gentleness, keep your finger far away from the written text so that you do not
spoil it. Those who do not know how to write believe that there is no effort involved. On
the contrary, how excruciating the art of writing is: it strains one’s eyes, bends one’s
back, and all the limbs are painful. Only three fingers write, but the whole body suffers.

The books that came out of the scribes’ hands looked like a series of
pamphlets made of folded sheets inserted one inside another (in
Latin called codex). The sheets were made of parchment (which was
made from goatskin and replaced Egyptian papyrus). The pamphlets
were then sewn together and enclosed between wooden covers
bound in leather. The scribes wrote with quill pens (generally of
goose feather, which was thin and hard) and the calamus (which
contained ink). The miniatores (painters) illustrated the manuscripts,
the antiquarii (experts in calligraphy), the scriptores (helpers) and
rubricatores (painters of the initial words of paragraphs and chapters)
all contributed to the final result of the manuscript.
The transition that led to the spoken Romance languages took
place over a long time: the new languages were formed over five
centuries across a vast territory. An oral culture developed among the
populations, often popular and folkloristic, diffused by actors who
recited love poems and the first heroic poems in the Germanic
language in the courts. The Romance languages, which did not come
from literary Latin but from the changes to which spoken Latin had
been subjected, were Italian, Dalmatian, Sardinian, Ladino (spoken in
the Grigioni, Tirol and Friuli), Spanish or Castilian, Portuguese,
Catalan, Provençal (occitanian or langue d’oc), French (or langue
d’oïl) and Rumanian. Only in the late Middle Ages did spoken
(vernacular) languages become written languages, giving birth to
national literatures. The appearance of texts in these languages
demonstrated that there was a new consciousness of the existence of
two different (now written) languages. The transition to non–Latin
texts derived from the emergence of new social needs, specifically a
new demand for knowledge and entertainment that could no longer
be satisfied in traditional terms. This demand came from a new
cultured public, defined by Auerbach as ‘a high level society that
expressed itself in the popular language’: this was a milieu where
both the producers and the consumers of literature written in the
vernacular came together. The exchange between different milieux,
the circulation of common values, the contact between popular
themes, and the new official culture developed from the top down,
through pilgrimages, feasts and mass movements promoted by the
Crusades. As Mikhail Bakhtin has illustrated in his studies of the
carnival-like origin of some literary genres, popular mentalities also
penetrated dominant culture. The seigneurial culture was a secular
culture in both its institution (the court) and its contents. From the
eleventh century onwards, two cultures were established, one secular
and the other religious, that at times would be in conflict and
competition, at times influencing and penetrating each other.
However, while in most of Europe the vernacular was the most
suitable instrument to express this new culture, in Italy the common
use of Latin survived until the late twelfth-early thirteenth centuries.
The following are the first documents written in Italian vernacular
that have survived: the Veronese riddle; the Placitum of Capua; the
Postilla amiatina; and the inscription of S. Clement. The Veronese
riddle, later discovered in the chapter-house library of Verona, was
written towards the end of the eighth/beginning of the ninth
centuries, and is the most ancient example of Italian vernacular. It
was probably produced by a copyist in the margin of a liturgical
codex. It revived the genre of the enigma of the Latin early medieval
tradition:
Se pareva boves, alba pratalia araba,
albo versorio teneba, et negro semen seminaba.
Gratias tibi agimus omnipotens sempiterne deus.
(He pushed oxen in front of him, ploughed white fields,
carried a white plough, and sowed a black seed.
We thank You, eternal almighty God.)

The first two lines are in vernacular, while the third is a Latin formula.
The copyist must therefore have had some fun in mixing high and
low styles. The solution to the riddle is the scribe, compared to a
peasant who pushes the oxen (his fingers), ploughs white fields
(paper), and sows a black seed (ink). The transformation of the Latin
‘i’ (nigrum) into ‘e’ and the disappearance of the endings are typically
vernacular. From the lexical point of view, these are terms of Venetian
vernacular.
The Placitum capuano of 960 is a sentence handed down by a
judge who had to solve a border dispute between the monastery of
Montecassino and a private individual. The judge reported the words
of a witness in vernacular in order to be understood by all the
participants in the case:
Sao ko kelle terre, per kelle fini que ki contene, trenta anni le possette parte
Sancti Benedicti.
(I know that those lands, within the borders here indicated, were
for thirty years the possession of the monastery of S. Benedict.)
The Latin endings of words and verbs were dropped, except for the
Latin construction of parte Sancti Benedicti. The document is
considered much more important than the one from Verona because
it is an official document.
In the Postilla amiatina of 1087, the notary Rainerio, who had
collected a donation for the St Salvatore abbey on Mount Amiata,
added a personal comment: ista cartula est de caput coctu ille
adiuvet de ill(u) rebottu qui mal consiliu li mise in corpu (‘This paper
is Capocotto’s [a derogatory nickname of one of the two donors
which means ‘hot head’, perhaps because he was drunk or in love]
and may help him against the devil who put an evil suggestion into
his body.’). The words have a clear Latin derivation, but are altered
by the vernacular pronunciation, and the tone is playful and light-
hearted. The inscription of S. Clement is from the years 1084–1100
and is situated in the underground chapel of the S. Clement Basilica
in Rome. It was added to a fresco which portrays a miracle, and it is
a mixture of vernacular and incorrect Latin. This inscription, a parody
of paganism, was the first comic-strip of Western culture.
As the next chapter will describe, a period of high emigration
during the eleventh and twelfth centuries from the centre-north to
southern Italy and Sicily favoured the birth of an Italian poetic
language, while the use of Greek and Arabic fell into irreversible
decline. In the thirteenth century, in a period of extraordinary
economic and cultural development, Tuscany became the new centre
of written Italian, which then spread towards the other regions.

SELECTED FURTHER READING

C. Wickham, Framing the Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400–800 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2005) combines history and archaeology, and is the most complete
comparative history of the early medieval period. An excellent overview is M. C. La Rocca
(ed.), Italy in the Early Middle Ages, 476–1000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). P.
Horden and N. Purcell, The Corrupting Sea. A Study of Mediterranean History (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1999) is a fascinating synthesis of pre-modern Mediterranean history. B. Kreutz,
Before the Normans: Southern Italy in the Ninth and Tenth Centuries (Philadelphia, Pa.:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991) provides a political and cultural history of pre–
Norman southern Italy. H. Wolfram, History of the Goths (Berkeley, Calif.: University of
California Press, 1988) is a thorough examination of the history of the Germanic invasions.
 2
........
The Middle Ages of the Cities

CHRONOLOGY
1013–
Arrival of the first Normans in southern Italy
17
1015–
Muslims expelled from Sardinia by Pisa and Genoa
16
Fall of Bari to the Normans (Robert Guiscard) ends Byzantine rule in southern
1071
Italy
1072 Fall of Palermo to the Normans
1072–
Consolidation of Norman rule in Sicily
90
1144–5 Roman Commune in revolt against the Papacy
1152 Frederick I Barbarossa becomes German king
1155 Frederick I Barbarossa is crowned Emperor in Rome
With the Diet of Roncaglia, Barbarossa demands taxes from northern Italian
1158
communes
1162 Destruction of Milan by Barbarossa
1163–7 Formation of the Lombard League by northern Italian cities against the Emperor
Defeat of Barbarossa by League of Northern Italian communes at the Battle of
1176
Legnano
1183 Treaty of Constance between the Emperor and the communes
Barbarossa’s son, Henry VI, crowned at Palermo; birth of his son, the future
1194
Frederick II
1204 Capture of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade; Venice extends its territory
1220 Frederick II crowned Emperor
1239 Frederick II excommunicated by Pope Gregory IX
 1248 Frederick II defeated by Lombard rebels at Parma
1250 Death of Frederick II in southern Italy
1266 Charles I of Anjou seizes control of southern Italy and Sicily
1282 Revolt of the Vespers in Palermo; invasion of Sicily by King Peter III of Aragón
Pope Boniface VIII creates a kingdom of Sardinia and Corsica, and confers it on
1297
James II of Aragón

YEAR 1000 AND THEREABOUTS

In the period leading up to 1000 there were fears that the millennium
might herald the end of the world. Even though people did not
necessarily expect the end of the world in that exact year, the
eleventh century recovery appeared like the reawakening of a society
which, as the historian Henri Pirenne observed, ‘for a long time had
seemed oppressed by a distressing nightmare’. The decades around
the year 1000 were times of transition; economic and social changes
intensified people’s need for the kinds of reassurance typical of pre-
industrial ages, and these years were characterized by mysticism,
belief in miracles, heresy, and opposition to the corruption and
worldliness of the clergy. As Georges Duby showed, that age of hope
and fear was marked by epidemics, eclipses and famine; monks
interpreted astrological signs as prefiguring the end of the world. This
atmosphere of impending doom persisted for two centuries, and is
the origin of many monastic orders, such as that founded by Joachim
of Fiore on a mountain near Cosenza in Calabria at the end of the
twelfth century. Joachim offered a bridge to make the transition less
traumatic between a world in decline and a new age of hope, which
was optimistically expected but still threatened by uncertainties. He
did so by promoting through his writing an isolated way of life and
detachment from the material world, and by founding forms of
monasticism in central and southern Italy known as Florens. Like
other similar experiments, this activity gave a boost to monastic
architecture; the most important example of Florens architecture is
the thirteenth-century Florens Abbey at S. Giovanni in Fiore. The
hermitical choice was a reaction against the changes brought about
by modernization and economic development, a radical opposition to
the new commercial values of a society that was becoming more
secular, and a revolt against a Church that was taking advantage of
those changes to increase its wealth and power.
In the eleventh century, Italy maintained undisputed economic
supremacy in Europe. The French medievalist Yves Renouard has
described Italian businessmen at this time as ‘the first capitalists of
Europe’. Commercial movement from the Mediterranean came from
the east through Venice and from the west through Pisa and Genoa,
converging in Lombardy; as Pirenne described it, ‘in this wonderful
plain, cities blossomed with the same vigour as the harvests’. All the
ancient cities were reborn to a new life, one much livelier than in
Roman times. While in most of Europe the aristocracy despised the
new wealthy social classes, in Italy aristocratic families did not
hesitate to increase their fortunes by financing commercial activities;
they did not share the prejudice that becoming involved in commerce
entailed a loss of dignity – a prejudice that was common to most of
Europe’s nobility until the end of the ancien régime. The Church’s
attitude to commerce was, in theory, unfavourable, as it believed that
commercial life endangered the salvation of the soul. In fact,
however, the Church was so linked to the aristocracy and the
economic system that it would have been impossible to sustain
enmity between churchmen and merchants; and businessmen took
part in religious events. During the Middle Ages, Italy was the first
country to construct a society of cities, republican and commercial,
city-states and merchant-cities, which united the political with the
economic principles of ‘civil life’ and the ‘practice of trading’. These
aspects of Italian development were later explored by generations of
political scientists, from Machiavelli to Antoine Barnave and Karl Marx.
Among the important developments during the period later known
as ‘the age of the communes’, or ‘city-states’, were the reconstruction
of cities as centres of social, political and economic life; the
instigation of reforms in the Church following pressure from lay
movements and the launch of the first crusades against Islam; the
foundation of what would become the kingdom of the Two Sicilies in
southern Italy, as a result of the Normans’ conflict with the
Byzantines and Muslims; demographic growth among both peasant
and aristocratic families, as in the rest of Europe; changes in the
landscape, with the extension of cultivated land resulting in the loss
of areas of woodland; the beginning of a period of rebirth of
commerce, thanks mainly to the importance of two European centres
– Venice and southern Italy on the one hand, and the Flemish coast
in the north on the other; and the beginnings of an Italian literature
that spread across the peninsula from Sicily. Historians have tended
to define this period as a golden age in Italian history. Despite
continual wars between cities and between Popes and emperors, it
was indeed an age in which some distinctive elements of the
country’s history began to appear: the close interdependence of cities
and countryside; the involvement of the aristocracy in trade, city
politics and architecture; the high levels of urban literacy; and the
development of a legal culture.

MONASTIC ART AND HOLY WARS: THE ROMAN CHURCH IN THE

NEW MILLENNIUM

As was seen in the previous chapter, when Charlemagne defeated

Desiderius in 774 and took over Lombard territory (apart from
Benevento), the regions previously under the exarch of Ravenna
became Frankish territories. The Popes continued to control an area
that corresponded roughly to the present region of Lazio: this
remained the basis of their temporal power in the centuries that
followed. However, in the ninth and tenth centuries the Empire was
not strong enough to protect the Church, which was subjected to the
overbearing behaviour of the Roman aristocracy. For the latter,
controlling the Papacy meant access to the economic resources and
government of the city. For decades until the mid-tenth century, the
Roman aristocracy produced a high number of Popes; and they were
often inept and vindictive individuals who brought about the
considerable degeneration of the Church. For example, in 897, Pope
Stephen VI removed the corpse of his predecessor, Formoso, from its
coffin and brought it to trial, judging him guilty of having become
Bishop of Rome when he was already a bishop somewhere else, and
subsequently throwing the corpse into the River Tiber; Stephen VI
was later imprisoned and strangled in his cell; Leo V was another
Pope imprisoned by a rival: eventually, both he and his rival,
Christopher, were murdered by the new pope, Sergius III. To
conclude the series of papal crime and corruption stories, between
1044 and 1046 there were three Popes at the same time – Benedict
IX, Sylvester III and Gregory VI. The high clergy was no better: it
privileged political and military activities over spiritual ones, spent
time banqueting or hunting, and kept concubines. Nor was the lower
clergy much of an improvement; they were inadequate and ignorant
to the extent that priests were not even able to read the Bible.
An effort to remedy the situation was prompted not by Rome but
by the Empire. In 1046 the Emperor Henry III arrived in Rome,
removed the three quarrelling Popes and appointed a new one,
Clement II, the first of a series of German Popes. There was also a
reaction against the Church from below, which took various forms,
was generally spontaneous, and came from different sections of
society. Because of its heterogeneous character, there was no
common organization to lead the protests, which meant they were
later absorbed and led by the Papacy itself. These movements
appeared mainly in the cities, where the social body was more
dynamic, ideas circulated more widely, and direct attacks on bishops
were possible. Criticism of the Church by lay movements was
generally more radical than that by monastic orders: the former
wanted to transform ecclesiastical organization completely; but the
reformist clergy often disputed the extreme views of these
movements, as they represented a subversive threat to the existing
order. However, there were some common issues. Among the
principal targets of all reformers were the abolition of the two ‘stains’
that shamed the Church of the time: nicolaitism (the fact that
clergymen lived with women, be they wives or mistresses); and
simony (the trading of ecclesiastic careers and of sacred objects).
The word ‘simony’ came from the legend of Simon Magus, who
allegedly sought to buy from the apostle Peter the gift of making
miracles. In the mid-eleventh century in Milan, the movement of
Pataria (from the word patee, which meant rags, indicating the
humble origins of its followers) stirred the lower strata of the
population against the rich clergy, rejecting any sacrament given by
priests who committed simony.
These impulses for religious reform were already present north of
the Alps, with a centre at the abbey at Cluny in the tenth century;
but how did they reach Rome? They were initiated by Emperor Henry
III, who liberated the Papacy from the local aristocracy so that it
could be brought under the Emperor’s control; at the same time, the
changes attracted those who wanted to be active in the reform of the
Church. Gregory VII was thus able to re-establish papal authority
between 1073 and 1085, igniting a conflict around the question of
investiture (both the Pope and the Emperor believed they had the
right to ‘make’ bishops), which concluded with the Concordat of
Worms in 1122 (which established that emperors had the right to
invest bishops with secular, but not sacred authority in the territories
they governed). The ancient ecclesiastical system, founded on close
collaboration between the Papacy and the Empire, was therefore
drawing to a close. In such a period of uncertainty and division
among the clergy (for example, in Lombardy there were often two
bishops in one city, one on the side of the Pope and one on the side
of the Emperor), ecclesiastical institutions were sometimes too weak
to be able to absorb the protest movements, which were generally
led by charismatic preachers.
New types of religious life based on the renunciation of material
possessions, but which did not provoke radical challenges to the
Papacy, were absorbed by the Church, among them the mendicant
orders of Dominicans and Franciscans. The core of the religious
experience for Dominican preachers was study; every convent had a
theology teacher and the time there was spent praying, preaching
and studying. The Franciscans had a similar educational structure,
and believed in the evangelical power of example, the life of St
Francis having been one of sacrifice and penitence, in imitation of
Christ’s experience. The city populations, which had been growing for
a century, were fertile ground for the new orders. These new
missionaries were welcomed by people worried by the lifestyles of the
new city bourgeoisie. One of the most famous Dominican preachers,
Giordano of Pisa, wrote at the start of the fourteenth century: ‘It is so
difficult to live in cities, just as it is difficult to stay in a fire without
burning, or to walk in the mud without getting dirty.’

Box 2.1 Arnaldo of Brescia

Born around the year 1100, Arnaldo became known in his
hometown from 1138 for his criticism of the clergy’s wealth and
lifestyle, and for leading a popular insurrection against the bishop
Manfredo, who was supported by Pope Innocent II. Condemned
by the Pope, he fled to Paris and then to Zurich, where he led
more anti-clerical protests. After Innocent’s death, he returned to
Italy where he was absolved by the new pope, Eugenius III, and
moved to Rome just as the city was witnessing a popular revolt
for a communal republic, which forced the Pope out in 1146.
During the insurrection, Arnaldo preached that the clergy should
abandon temporal power, and that the Church should return to
apostolic life. He believed that the Pope’s rule over Rome was
illegitimate, and that the only suitable government for the city
was a communal republic with the ancient city as its point of
reference. With the return of Pope Hadrian IV in 1155, Arnaldo
was expelled by conservative elements in the senate who felt
threatened by his democratic speeches. The Pope condemned
Arnaldo to death in Rome in June that same year, his body was
burnt and his ashes scattered in the River Tiber.

The Dominicans, adopting a life of apostolic poverty and stressing

the value of obedience, presented the Church with few problems. The
immense following and legacy of St Francis was at first more difficult
to deal with. Franciscans identified wealth with evil, a stance clearly
unacceptable to the immensely rich Church. However, it was not
difficult for the Papacy to find allies within the Franciscan order, who
needed the Papacy as the formal owner of religious houses.
Remaining dissenters, inspired by the writings of Joachim of Fiore
and St Francis, referred to themselves as ‘spirituals’, because they felt
the Church had lost its spirituality. The Dominican and Franciscan
orders generally appeared at the margins of the populated areas of
cities. For example, in Florence, the Franciscan Church of St Croce
and the Dominican Church of St Maria Novella were built outside the
second circle of city walls but within the third. The mendicant orders
left a magnificent architectural legacy for many cities. While in
accordance with the orders’ constitutions the construction of
churches had to avoid the use of precious materials and any form of
luxury, some of their churches are examples of exceptional
dimensions and wealth. The best examples are perhaps the Basilica
at Assisi – further embellished in later years by some of the greatest
painters of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, such as Cimabue
and Giotto – and the Church of St Dominic in Bologna. Despite their
beauty, the materials chosen were generally poor and local, though
the orders often received magnificent works of art as gifts from rich
followers. Franciscan art was typical for the diffusion of plates bearing
images of St Francis and his life. These, along with frescoes, acquired
a remarkable propagandistic value.
In 1053–4, a final break occurred between the Western Church
and Constantinople, when Pope Leo IX and the Patriarch
excommunicated each other and split the Church into Roman and
Orthodox, a separation that still exists today. At the root of the
schism were the Pope’s claim to be the only representative of the
universal Church, and the theological issue surrounding the Filioque
clause in the Creed (which was added at the First Council of
Constantinople in 381, and emphasized that the Son, Jesus, was an
equal divinity with the Father), which was not accepted by Greek
orthodoxy. Leo IX also began to confront the Normans in southern
Italy but, when defeated militarily by them, decided to forge an
alliance. Their kingdom was founded in 1130 by Roger II and
included the whole of southern Italy and Sicily (taken from the
Arabs). The Normans became the principal allies of the Papacy in the
twelfth-century conflicts with the Empire.
From the eleventh century, the Papacy concentrated its efforts
mainly on international politics – the conflict with both Eastern and
Western Empires for the control, respectively, of Christianity and of
Italy; and the Crusades. The Crusades were wars to recover Christian
holy places from Islamic occupation, though one of them was waged
against the Orthodox Byzantine Empire. They often had economic
and political motives, but the religious motive was used in order to
justify the attacks and to mobilize participants; however, this religious
motivation, of seeking to rescue holy places, and to earn spiritual
benefits (such as the remission of pain in purgatory), was very real
and forceful for many of those who took part. The Crusades were
started by the Christians in the name of the Cross – despite the fact
that Christianity had been born as a non-violent religion (though it
had not been so since Constantine’s time) – against Islam which, in
contrast, had never rejected war and had incorporated the idea of the
jihad into its doctrine. The first Crusade was preached by Pope Urban
II in 1095, and its justification was at least consistent with eleventh-
century thought; the Church decided to accept St Augustine’s concept
of a ‘just war’, as a war to defend and expand Christianity. From the
conflict against Islam, the Crusade concept was later extended to the
persecution of any form of religious dissent in the West. Through
political alliances, Crusades and the repression of dissent, the Church
strengthened its role remarkably during the twelfth century,
becoming increasingly able to function as a spiritual government over
the Western world. The Papacy’s wars were described as religious
missions, glorified and made sacred. The Pope persuaded other
Italian and European states to take part in them; the maritime cities,
for example, saw the wars as ways of improving their commercial
control over the Mediterranean coasts. Genoa, Pisa and Venice took
part in the first Crusade, even though at the time they were fighting
each other for control of the seas – the conflict between Venice and
Genoa continued until the fourteenth century. For the maritime cities,
the crusades were a source of wealth; for the Pope, the republics’
participation was crucial, since their naval superiority was
unassailable by the Muslims, and they were responsible for the
transportation of soldiers.

Box 2.2 The Normans

 The Normans were descendants of the Vikings, who moved from
Scandinavia at the end of the eighth century and settled first in
the northern part of France, consequently called Normandy,
during the ninth and tenth centuries. The Normans converted to
Christianity and spoke French. They arrived in Italy in small
numbers, and employed local people in the construction of the
new state. The adjective ‘Norman’ was largely a dynastic label,
and they mixed, through marriage, with the southern Italian
aristocracy. Apart from their personal names, they slowly lost
their links with their duchy in Normandy.

In 1145, Pope Eugenius III established, in the bull Quantum

Praedecessores, that the Crusaders would be granted a remission of
their sins. More bulls by subsequent Popes confirmed what came to
be called indulgentia peccatorum (indulgences). As the philosopher,
theologian and saint Thomas Aquinas (1224–74) underlined,
throughout the thirteenth century participation in the Crusades
remained the only way to obtain plenary indulgence (forgiveness for
all sins) (Quodlibet, II, 14–16). The Papacy reached an age of
triumph under Innocent III (1198–1216). In 1204, a Crusade took
place, supported by a number of Western rulers, against the Christian
Empire of Byzantium, considered schismatic since 1054. The Latin
occupation of Constantinople was short-lived (lasting until 1261) but
was long enough to allow the Roman Church to export and impose its
institutions despite the steady resistance of the local clergy. Innocent
III became famous also for his endeavours to suppress any form of
religious dissent, underlining the link between the Crusades and the
fight against heresy. Lay movements that criticized the Church for its
wealth and corruption were condemned. Many of these movements
expressed dissatisfaction with the existing political and social order,
and heterodox religious doctrines spread widely among the marginal
and the poor, often acquiring an explicit political character and
becoming the object of the Church’s condemnation and repression.
The Church expected secular authorities to collaborate and repress
heretics after they had been denounced by the Church: political and
religious dissent were thus united under the same label and exposed
to repression by the authorities, both secular or religious. However,
this happened mainly outside Italy, as Italian movements critical of
the existing society (Pataria, Franciscans, and the followers of
Joachim) were not at the same time heretical.
The Church established a tighter control on the faithful by
imposing compulsory communion and confession in 1215, and by
creating the first structures of the tribunal of Inquisition. The latter
was responsible for searching out and condemning heretics before
delivering them to the political authorities, who carried out the
verdicts, many of which were death penalties. The tribunal of the
Inquisition became increasingly efficient during the thirteenth century
– and perfecting itself in subsequent centuries – with the publication
of instruction manuals for inquisitors, the regular use of torture in
order to force confessions, and by involving the new Franciscan and
Dominican monastic orders in the process, both of which gave
valuable help. In 1215, Innocent III opened the Fourth Lateran
Council, which specified various ways of repressing heresy, including
measures to persecute Jews, who were forced to wear visible signs of
recognition whenever they were among Christians.
However, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the Church was
not seriously threatened by popular heresy; but a more intellectually
sophisticated attack came from translations of Greek and Arabic
philosophy, which introduced to Italy the writings of pagans such as
Aristotle, and neo–Platonic, Hebrew and Muslim philosophers. The
Papacy sought to forbid the reading of these texts, and Gregory IX
decided in 1231 that they could only be diffused in expurgated
versions. However, it soon became clear that it was impossible to
prevent their use at universities, since they were among the most
important and stimulating texts of ancient philosophy. It was
necessary to answer some of the theological questions posed by
those books, something the Dominicans, particularly St Thomas
Aquinas, began to address in earnest.
The other threat to the Papacy came from the German Empire.
The conflict between the two powers was reinforced on both sides by
reference to the rhetoric of Roman universal authority and tradition,
and was prompted each time by the emperors’ claims that their own
power came directly from God, without the Pope’s intercession. That
theoretical offensive accompanied the military attacks against
northern Italy by Frederick I Barbarossa, who began the first
campaign for the control of Italian cities and destroyed Milan in 1161.
The Pope, Hadrian IV, responded by reinforcing his alliance with
William, the Norman king of Sicily. The next Pope, Alexander III,
arranged an alliance with a league of Italian cities, which defeated
Barbarossa at the famous battle of Legnano in 1176.
The final conflict between the two powers was declared inevitable
by Pope Gregory IX (Pope in 1227–41) in the following century. The
Pope alleged that Frederick II, king of both Germany and Sicily, who
was crowned Emperor in 1220, had shown little interest in the
Crusades, and decided to excommunicate him. The Papacy invaded
Neapolitan territory, but was defeated by Frederick II. The Papacy
represented Frederick II as a murderer and a heretic, the
personification of the anti–Christ; for his part, the Emperor laid claim
to the Roman imperial tradition, proposing Rome and Italy as the
authentic centres of imperial power and claiming his right to them.
Gregory died in 1241; a few years later, the new Pope Innocent IV
decided to find a new military ally and protector. He moved to France
and, after a Council at Lyon in 1245, persuaded King Louis IX of
France to wage a Crusade against the Emperor, by now defeated in
two major battles in Italy by the cities of Parma and Bologna.
The French prince, Charles of Anjou, brother of Louis IX, defeated
Manfred (Frederick’s son and successor) at Benevento in 1266,
marking the end of the German imperial dream of restoring power in
Italy, and placing the south under French dominion. The Papacy had
finally triumphed over the emperors, but, as we shall see, only to find
itself held hostage by the French king, and being forced some fifty
years later to move its seat from Rome to Avignon.

THE MARITIME REPUBLICS

A European economic recovery manifested itself in the coastal cities

even before the eleventh century; even in difficult times, these had
been able to maintain a relative vitality thanks to their relationship
with the Eastern Empire. During the Germanic migrations of the sixth
and seventh centuries, inhabitants of the mainland around the area
that is now Venice moved out on to small islands, divided between
them by canals and protected by the sandy belt of a lagoon. When
Constantine became the first Christian Roman Emperor, the
conversion of Venetia was assured by the establishment of an
Episcopal see in Aquileia. In 403, Aquileia was attacked and
destroyed by the Goths, and its inhabitants found refuge on the
islands along the coast. According to later Venetian legends, this
event marked the foundation of Venice on the islands of the Rivo Alto
in 421. In fact, the presence of Venetians on the islands of the lagoon
was not permanent at that time; many still lived on the mainland and
continued to seek to repopulate Aquileia.
Having no land to cultivate, and with fish and salt as their only
resources, the Venetians dedicated themselves to commerce under
Byzantine protection. The islands of the lagoon had an amazing effect
on visitors. The intellectual Cassiodorus, minister of the Ostrogoth
King Theodoric, wrote in the sixth century: ‘Your houses are similar to
the nests of sea birds, one moment they are resting on the earth and
the next they are gently rolling on water.’ A similar amazement was
still evident in the thirteenth century; when Crusaders from all over
Europe gathered in Venice in 1202, they were astonished to see a city
where people lived without working in the fields and walked among
canals and bridges.
The maritime cities were the most technologically advanced
communes and realized the first forms of self-government (hence the
term Maritime Republics used by historians). Their merchants
undertook long journeys by land and sea – most famously, Marco
Polo (1254–1324), who journeyed to the court of Kublai Khan in
China. In memory of this maritime tradition, the current flag of the
Italian navy has at its centre the symbols of the four Maritime
Republics. The first Italian Maritime Republic was Amalfi, which had
trade arrangements with the Eastern Empire and the Arabs of Tunisia,
Spain and Egypt by the tenth century. The Amalfi merchants bought
luxury goods to sell to the rest of Europe. They also wrote the first
code of maritime navigation, the Tavole amalfitane, which remained
in use for centuries. The city was ruled by independent dukes until
1039, then by the Normans under Robert Guiscard, and was finally
annexed to the Kingdom of Sicily in 1131.

Box 2.3 Commerce with the East

The Maritime Republics provided the East with slaves (captured in
what is currently Germany and Poland, and in other Slav
countries), wood and weapons, woollen cloth and linen. The
Venetians sold glass and gems produced and fashioned by
Venice’s own artisans. From the East they brought spices (pepper,
cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, cloves), which were used in the
preparation of foods, in pharmacy and for beauty products. They
also brought perfumes, grey amber, and musk and incense, balm,
ivory and precious stones (emeralds, rubies, turquoise, jade),
carpets, silk, ceramics and dye products.

In Mediterranean Italy, navigation experienced technical

improvements in the eleventh and twelfth centuries with the diffusion
of the compass, the wind rose, the portolano (a book of sailing
directions, charts and harbours), the astrolabe, and the triangular sail
(called the ‘Latin sail’, though it was originally discovered in the East
in the seventh century). In the thirteenth century, the rudder fixed at
the stern of the boat replaced the simple oars that could easily be
broken by violent waves. There were two types of ships: galea
(galleys) and cargo ships. The first were used for military purposes;
they were slim, fast, up to fifty metres long, and propelled by many
oars. Cargo ships were mainly powered by sails. Later, from galea,
the term ‘galeotto’ originated, which means ‘condemned to stay on
the galea’, often for life, chained to the oars.
Pisa, linked to the sea by the River Arno, grew by fighting the
Saracens (Muslims, principally from north Africa) and conquering the
islands of Elba, Corsica and Sardinia. However, defeated by Genoa in
1284, it began a rapid decline. Like Pisa, Genoa successfully fought
the Saracens, but from the early thirteenth century it was governed
by an oligarchy that was in continuous conflict with the population.
From the fifteenth century, the oligarchy often allowed other powers
to govern the city, such as the Visconti family of Milan; or France or
Spain. After many wars against Venice up to the fourteenth century,
Genoa was finally defeated by its rival, which became the master of
the Mediterranean (though Genoa kept many eastern Mediterranean
ports).
The superiority of Venice came largely from a special relationship
with Byzantium. The first steps towards the independence of Venice
from Byzantium came partly as a consequence of the religious
struggle between the East and West of the Empire in the eighth
century. In 726, a Byzantine decree by Emperor Leo III declared the
official religion to be iconoclastic, prohibited the veneration of
religious images and ordered that existing ones be destroyed. In
Constantinople and in the eastern provinces this decree was imposed
by the Emperor’s representatives and was generally observed. In the
West, and particularly in Italy, it caused wide distress and proved to
be unenforceable. The Pope challenged the decree, and all Italian
cities rallied around him as a rumour was spread that he would be
arrested and killed by the Emperor if he refused to obey. Encouraged
by the Lombards, a rebellion against Byzantium spread all over Italy,
and the Venetians joined the revolt. Though the rebellion was swiftly
and cruelly repressed, the Emperor conceded a certain local
autonomy to Venice, and recognized Orso (as recent historiography
has suggested) as the first governor, or local dux – known as a ‘doge’
in Venice. The doge, at first an imperial functionary, became the
signore of the city in the following centuries, surrounded by a general
assembly and by counsellors who represented the nobility and limited
his power. From the ninth century, the Venetian doges continued to
act as Byzantine functionaries, when in fact they created their own
form of republican government, generally run by members of local
powerful families. The republic therefore owed very little to the
Eastern Empire from a political point of view. At the end of the ninth
century, Venice had become the liveliest site of commercial exchange
between East and West. The converging interests of Venice and
Byzantium kept the Adriatic free from Slav and Arab pirates.
The full sovereignty of Venice as a city-state is generally
considered to have begun at the time of the doge Pietro Tribuno
(888–912), though the independence of the city was not the result of
any violent or dramatic event, and no precise date can be attributed
to the phenomenon, which happened progressively during the ninth
century. Independence was based on an ambiguous attitude on both
sides: Venice continued formally to recognize Byzantine supremacy,
and Constantinople considered the city its subject. Venice’s birth as
an independent city-state did not change its relationship with
Byzantium. Its so-called bizantinismo continued well into the twelfth
century, illustrated by its involvement in joint military actions (in the
name of common strategic interests) and the many signs of
Byzantine cultural influence on Venetian institutions, art and society.
In the eleventh century, the balance of European power began to
shift from East to West. At the beginning of the century, the
Byzantine Empire under Basil II was the vastest and richest, but by
the end of the century the German emperors appeared superior to it,
the Pope had declared the Patriarch of Constantinople to be
schismatic and virtually a heretic, and the Normans were threatening
from southern Italy. However, Venice needed, for important material
reasons, to continue its relationship with Byzantium – the Byzantine
ports of the eastern Mediterranean were crucial areas for Venetian
commerce, and Byzantine art and culture was admired and imitated
to make Venice more splendid. The most magnificent monument to
Byzantine influence on Venice is the Basilica of St Mark, built in the
eleventh century on the foundation of a church erected in the ninth
century and destroyed by a fire in 976. The monument was a public
demonstration and celebration of Venice’s new wealth and power, but
the architects and decorators took their inspiration from Byzantium.
The church was structured along the lines of St Sophia at
Constantinople, and St Mark’s principal architect was a Greek from
Constantinople.
This special relationship was based on the fascination that
Byzantium exerted over Venice – its lifestyle as much as its art and
architecture. Members of the Venetian aristocracy and doges went on
occasion to find wives in Constantinople and brought them back to
Venice, importing as they did so ways of life and manners typical of
the Byzantine elite. In 1004, the son of Doge Pietro II Orseolo,
Giovanni, married Maria, who was, according to Venetian chroniclers,
the niece of Basil II of Constantinople. A contemporary account by
Peter Damian, a hermit from Ravenna and later Bishop of Ostia,
reports the extremely sophisticated habits of the ‘lady from
Constantinople’, who caused a scandal for refusing to wash in
common water, eating with golden forks and using perfumed incense
in her bedroom. These habits were clearly unknown in the Venetian
society of the time and were the expression of a more sophisticated
court. From the eighth to the eleventh centuries, Byzantium granted
the Venetian doges their noble titles, a privilege shared by dukes in
Naples, Amalfi and Gaeta, all of which had been ruled originally by
Byzantium. These titles were quite independent of political
subordination, and reinforced the political and personal prestige of
these Italian rulers, a further indication of the importance that
Byzantium had for Italy’s collective imagery. Byzantium granted these
titles in gratitude for services rendered (which, in the case of Venice,
were often military), and the Italian dukes increased the influence of
their families as a result.
The military support that Venice provided to Byzantium continued
until Venice was in a position to assert genuine independence. In
1071, the port of Bari, the last Byzantine stronghold in southern Italy,
fell to the Normans. When the Normans attacked Dalmatia three
years later, it became evident that Byzantium was no longer able to
defend the Adriatic coast. Venice took the initiative, triumphantly
defeating the Normans and boosting its already impressive naval
superiority. Consequently, Doge Silvio summoned the representatives
of the Dalmatian cities and asked them to take an oath that never
again would they allow Normans on to their land. The document that
records this event shows the changed attitude of Venice, which could
now act as a new Byzantium. As a result, Venice obtained full
freedom of commerce with the Eastern Empire in 1082, with
complete exemption from customs duties, and permission to trade in
Asia Minor, Greece, Syria and Constantinople. The city’s symbol
became the lion, representing its patron saint, Mark the evangelist,
whose body, according to legend, had been stolen by some Venetian
sailors from Alexandria where it had been buried.
Once it became powerful, Venice did not hesitate to take part in
the fourth Crusade, which ended in the sacking of Constantinople. On
that occasion, the Venetians stole many treasures, among them the
famous golden horses that today adorn the Basilica of St Mark. When
Constantinople reverted back to Byzantium in 1261 it was no more
than a shadow of its former magnificence and power, as large parts
of the Empire remained under Western control. Genoa and Venice
continued to fight each other for the remains of the Empire. Venice
came to control most of the eastern Adriatic, including crucial ports in
Dalmatia such as Zara, Split, Dubrovnik and Durazzo. Venice
celebrated its control of the Adriatic on Ascension Day with the feast
of the ‘marriage with the sea’ (sposalizio del mare), when the doge,
arriving on a luxurious boat at the entrance of the port, threw a ring
into the sea and proclaimed: ‘We marry you, our sea, as a sign of our
true and everlasting domination.’
From the first half of the thirteenth century, the Mediterranean
balance of power was threatened by the Turks, who caused the final
collapse of Constantinople in 1453. As the Turks also represented a
threat to Venice, the city sent its fleet to defend Constantinople, but
it arrived too late. Many Venetians (as well as other Westerners) were
in Constantinople and fought to defend the city until the end. A great
deal of the Byzantine legacy lived on in Venice; for example, in the
colonies in the Levante, or in the conservation and promotion of a
Greek culture in the city, among the vast Greek community of
refugees.
The plain and fertile Venetian mainland, very different from the
harsh lands around Amalfi and Genoa, allowed the city, from the
fifteenth century, to conquer a vast territory that extended westwards
to the River Adda, east of Milan, building an important agricultural
and commercial base. Its ships could navigate the River Po to Pavia,
where goods were sourced and transported to central and northern
Europe. The Republic of Venice had a long life, which ended only with
the Austrian occupation of 1797.

LANDSCAPE, CITIES AND COUNTRYSIDE

Inevitably, the economic development centred on Venice expanded

through trade to the cities beyond the lagoon: Venice imported wine
and wheat from them, and exported Eastern products in return.
Through the River Po, it made contact with Pavia, which benefited
from Venice’s vitality. Lombardy and Tuscany also experienced a
period of commercial reawakening. In the south, Bari, Taranto,
Naples and above all Amalfi maintained similar relationships with
Constantinople to those held by Venice. They were commercially very
active, and, like Venice, did not mind conducting business with
Muslim ports, though they took part in Crusades with the aim of
freeing the Mediterranean from the Muslims and restoring it as a
‘Western’ sea. Pisa and Genoa, in particular, presented themselves as
soldiers of Christ and of the Church, and brought back immense
wealth from their triumphs. Pisa Cathedral, built after the sack of
Palermo in 1064, symbolizes both the mysticism of the victors and
the wealth that maritime trade could bring.
The Risorgimento historian, Carlo Cattaneo, argued that the ‘ideal
principle’ of Italian history in any age was the city; that Italy’s history
was an urban history. From the mid-thirteenth century onwards, the
government of cities often switched between Guelph (supporters of
the Pope) and Ghibelline (on the side of the Emperor), however, as
Cattaneo explained, the difference between the two was not enough
to have an impact on the long-term development of Italian communal
life, just as ‘the wind and the tides of the sea are not the principle
that makes the ship float and cleave the waves, nor are they the
motive of the journey’.
Naturally there were many ‘Italies’, and the ‘Italy of cities’
presented many varieties. First of all, the history of the Italian city
was not purely an urban history; the countryside penetrated the city,
and the city embraced the countryside. In Cattaneo’s words, ‘the city
formed with its territory an inseparable body’, ‘a political person, an
elementary state, permanent, indissoluble’. The general framework of
Italy’s Middle Ages is therefore constituted by the binary concept
‘city-countryside’, within which historians have explored the complex
and shifting relationships between commerce and land, aristocracy
and democracy, ‘feudalism’ and ‘capitalism’. North of the Alps,
European cities developed in contrast to, rather than in unification
with, the countryside. In Italy, the evolution developed in the
opposite way. The ancient community of the civitas was not
separated into city and surrounding territory, and the cities were not
classified merely as mercantile corporations. In Italy, culture and
society were more ‘civil’ and ‘urban-centred’ than in the rest of
Europe.
North and central Italy was, alongside Flanders, the most
urbanized region of Europe, because of the number, dimension and
complexity of its urban communities. Because of Italy’s unique
position in the post–Roman world, and its role as the frontier
between East and West, many cities began to act as commercial and
international centres of exchange. From Lombardy to Sicily, the
landed aristocracy preferred not to be confined to the countryside,
and the cities remained under their political control. In the fifteenth
century, the Tuscan Renaissance poet, Cristoforo Landino (describing
Florence), affirmed that it was primarily the re-urbanization of the
nobility that revived Italian cities after the decline of the post–Roman
period. Indeed, the class of merchants and artisans, the so-called
‘bourgeois’, was only one of the urban social classes, and commerce
and manufacture represented only a fraction of city activities.
Urbanization was not simply synonymous with commerce; even in
commercial cities, aristocracy and land continued to prevail over
other classes and activities. This was also true at a political level; in
the history and fortunes of the cities, their control and the defence of
their freedom was in the hands of the landed aristocracy – the
possessores.

Box 2.4 The peasant world and cities in the Po Valley

 Outside the Roman world it was possible for the peasantry to live
without contact with cities, which were few and could be located
hundreds of kilometres apart. But in the Po Valley, even when
cities were degraded and depopulated, like under the Lombards
and Charlemagne, no peasant ever lived more than one day’s
walk from one, and often even two or three cities ... In the age of
deforestation and the Crusades, cities began to grow again, and
occupy a greater presence in the peasants’ horizon. Cities had
markets, where everyone went to sell, and more rarely to buy,
products; cities consecrated the priests who served mass for the
peasants and baptized their children; cities were where nobles
and monks went to settle their litigations; cities conserved the
precious relics that everyone, when possible, went to worship.
(Barbero, 2007, p. 14)

It was precisely that aristocratic class and its lifestyle, rather than
the merchants, that gave rise to a new, peculiarly Italian, urban
landscape characterized by palaces (case gentilizie) and towers built
within the city; it was the nobility that led the movement towards city
autonomy, to the rebirth of the city-state and the foundation of the
commune. Like its ancient predecessor, the new city-state was, first,
an aggregation of important families, though socially mixed.
Therefore, as Philip Jones has argued, Italian cities did not develop as
‘non feudal islands within feudal seas’, as in the north. They were
hybrids, bringing together two traditions, the ancient and the
medieval, and reuniting two identities, the political and the economic
– as much aristocratic as bourgeois, a double character recently
emphasized also by other historians.
Another aspect of the central Middle Ages was the deforestation of
woodlands to create space for agriculture. In the early medieval
period, the parts of the Po Valley closest to the river were covered in
forest. Wood was fundamental to the life of medieval humankind –
the aristocracy used the forests for hunting, cut wood was used to
heat dwellings, to create peasant tools, building materials, weapons
and other items; and until the early modern period, animals – mainly
cattle and horses, but also pigs, sheep and goats – were pastured in
forests. Between the fifth and the eleventh centuries, saints were
believed to spend most of their time in the forests, away from the
cities for prolonged periods, while nobles spent most of the day
hunting. One of the most venerated saints from the late Middle Ages
was St Eustachio, who was a supposedly stubborn and ferocious
hunter before his conversion. According to legend, while hunting, he
met a deer with a lit cross between its horns and immediately
dropped his weapons. This changed his life completely – he never
hunted again and became an illustrious saint. Today, he is the patron
saint of hunters and game wardens. The aristocrats obviously did not
follow his example: to be able to continue their favourite hobby, they
recreated woodland where it had been eliminated in favour of
cultivated land. But from the twelfth century, northern and central
Italian cities grew in number and population, and the inhabitants
began to reduce the woods drastically and replace them with
cultivated land, thus replacing a pastoral economy with agriculture.
The extension of agricultural land in this way brought dramatic
consequences. When forests could still be fully exploited by human
beings, food was more varied and there was a wider range of foods
available. This is probably why, according to Massimo Montanari,
famines were mentioned less frequently, and with less dramatic
results, in the early than in the late Middle Ages (although we must
remember that we have much more evidence for the later period). In
the earlier times, even if the production of cereals fell below the
norm, there were more alternatives than there were later, when
bread and flour, soup and (in the early modern period) polenta had
become the principal ingredients of the diet of rural populations. The
peasant diet became poorer, reaching its lowest levels in the modern
age, when a diet based mainly on maize undermined the health of
the population of the northern countryside right up to the early
twentieth century.
Moreover, during the central Middle Ages, new relationships of
property and production emerged that excluded peasants from the
use of forests. Before the eleventh century, uncultivated land was
common, but after that, the propertied classes began to prevent its
free use. For this reason, meat, or at least some types of meat,
became a kind of status symbol, a sign of social distinction. Most of
the rural population suffered from the progressive expropriation of
previously held rights. Production increased, but only to the
advantage of a few people, and the population also increased. There
were more people, fewer areas in which to look for food, and a more
limited diet. All these changes occurred progressively and slowly
across the Middle Ages, rather than through abrupt changes.
The Po Valley area was at that time, and right up to the nineteenth
century, an area rich in water. Towns and cities were criss-crossed by
rivers and artificial canals that were navigated intensively and
presented an alternative and effective transport system to the roads.
In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, cities gave an
unprecedented impetus to the construction of canals, as the growth
of commerce required quick and safe means of transport. Canals
were safer than natural rivers because they were less affected by the
weather, and were constructed in a rational way to allow for easy
navigation. Boats and barges enabled the transportation of people,
animals and goods in much larger quantities than did carts drawn by
horses or oxen. Boats were also easier to defend from raiders’
attacks. As early as the time of the Canossa dynasty (from Mantua) in
the eleventh century, Boniface, and later his daughter Matilda, made
the waters of the Po safer by creating a kind of armed fleet which
kept the river free from pirates.
The Po Valley in the Middle Ages was also characterized by a
flourishing of cities. Mantua was chosen by the powerful Canossa
family as the capital of their state, which controlled most of the lower
Po Valley, from Piacenza to the Adriatic Sea below Ferrara. Boniface,
who created one of the first shipways of the Po Valley (called Fossa
Bonifacia and uniting the Po with the Tartaro at Ostiglia), also
became Duke of Tuscany and therefore controlled all the traffic
between northern and central Italy towards Rome. This created
problems for the Emperor, who regarded Boniface’s control as an
interference with his traditional route into Italy and the Pope’s city.
The long-term prosperity of the Po Valley cities began on the basis
of artisan, financial and agricultural activities that were both
prompted and improved by the availability of a vast commercial
outlet, of which waterways were a fundamental feature. From a
political point of view, cities were able to unite in a league called the
Lombard League in the twelfth and again the in thirteenth centuries
against the German emperors. The second half of the twelfth century
was the ‘golden age’ of the Lombard communes, first at Milan, which
defeated the Germanic Empire militarily and became the hegemonic
city on Lombard territory. It was in this period (1177–9) that Milan
built the Naviglio Grande (great canal) outside the city.
Monasteries played a crucial role, alongside cities, in both politics
and the economy during the Middle Ages. From the time of the
Lombard communes, monks implemented important agricultural
changes; cultivated lands bordered, and at times moved inside, city
walls. All cities had at least a partially rural aspect, for agriculture was
also an urban phenomenon. The monastic orders had an impact on
this too, as they were self-sufficient and planted large vegetable
gardens and vineyards. Consumption of wine was not only justified
by the churchmen’s liturgical needs, but also by a belief in its
therapeutic, or at least invigorating, quality. Franciscans and
Dominicans integrated easily with the urban environment: instead of
retreating into open and quiet areas, they founded their religious
homes among the streets, participating in the lives of the poor and
the artisans with the aim of providing spiritual direction.

CITY-STATES

The phenomenon of city-states is more than just a medieval

experience; as historian Mario Ascheri has recently recognized, it was
a founding event of Italian history. Despite the fact that the
communes created allegiances to cities rather than regions, Cattaneo
described them as the first step towards a possible (though never
realized) federalism: ‘the Communes,’ he wrote, ‘are the Nation: the
Nation in the most intimate asylum of its liberty’. The relationship
between cities was generally one of competition; once a city had
‘conquered’ the surrounding territory, it came into contact with the
next nearest city, which was involved in a similar operation to control
rivers and road access to expand commercial activity. Unable to forge
a common front against traditional powers – with the important
exception of the experience of a number of leagues between the
twelfth and the fifteenth centuries – the city-states illustrated as early
as in the eleventh century the reasons for the failure of federalism in
Italy. Many lively ports in southern Italy ensured communication and
exchange with both Italian and other ports around the
Mediterranean. However, conflicts in the south between Byzantines,
Muslims and Normans brought southern cities to their final
incorporation into the Norman kingdom of Sicily from 1130. In the
centuries that followed, links between the north and south of the
peninsula were mainly those of culture, through the development of
an Italian language and literature, which originated in Sicily and then
moved to Tuscany, and of religion, in the form of the power of the
Roman Church and the cult of saints.
Despite being ruled formally by the German Empire, cities began
to create forms of self-government, motivated by the strength of their
dynamic economy and society. Conscious of their uniqueness, cities
began to use the term commune in the last decades of the twelfth
century. Juridically, the city-state included people of both Roman and
Lombard laws and habits; from the twelfth century onwards cities
began increasingly to use Roman law, which they thought was more
appropriate to contemporary conditions. It began to be studied at
universities, which were founded in many cities in imitation of the
University of Bologna (the oldest university in the Western world,
founded in the early twelfth century). But ancient law was not
enough, and new decisions had to be taken that arose from the
contemporary situation: cities, for example, needed to decide what
attitude to take regarding the representatives of the Papacy, the
Emperor, or the nearest city that might create obstacles to, or impose
taxes on, the circulation of goods. To address such problems, cities
needed to exercise full political and legislative power. During the wars
against Emperor Barbarossa it became evident that both the
representatives of the commune and significant numbers of young
men were ready to serve and sacrifice their lives, and that they
understood that the freedom of the city lay in the hands of its
citizens. The Roman concept of being a citizen (civis) became central
once more. Citizens were all those who habitually resided in the city,
independent of their social role and position. They identified
themselves with their city, not with the Empire, which was far away,
evanescent, and at times even an enemy.
The Roman tradition played an important cultural role. Every city
could do as Rome had done. Once they had begun the process of
creating forms of self-government, the promulgation of laws, the
construction of walls, how could cities accept the impositions of an
emperor who was considered unresponsive to local needs? Cities
began to refuse interference in their government and their
relationship with the surrounding territory. The sense of identity was
transmitted not only through universities, but also to the wider public,
through public ceremonies that were normally organized by the
Church, such as processions dedicated to local saints. We have
evidence of this mature urban civilization thanks to internal sources
(city statutes and chronicles) and reports by foreigners, who
described the Italian cities of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as
wonderful places, rich in goods and beautiful churches, palaces,
roads and other public investments, all realized under the local public
authority. Very few similar examples could be found abroad, apart
from great cities to the east on the scale of Constantinople.
In the mid-twelfth century, Bishop Otto of Freising, Barbarossa’s
uncle, observed that what most distinguished Italian cities was the
absence of kings, who were only found on the other side of the Alps.
The German bishop also complained that Italian cities did not observe
the Emperor’s laws, welcomed the Emperor coldly whenever he
passed by, and only obeyed him when they had no choice – for
example, when he defeated them in war, as in the 1161 imperial
destruction of Milan and the imposition of royal rights (regalia – the
‘regalian rights’, mainly fiscal rights, that had been usurped by the
communes). With the regalia, Barbarossa sought to prevent the
northern cities from creating leagues, and to restore normal rule over
the region. The creation of leagues did not guarantee that all cities
allied against the Emperor; since the main loyalty was to the city and
not the region, cities whose survival was threatened by larger cities
nearby – as, for example, were Como, Lodi or Cremona by the
aggressive expansion of Milan – could ally themselves with the
Emperor in the hope of maintaining their independence. None the
less, most northern cities were able to reach a common political and
diplomatic policy on the basis of parity, which was impossible in the
alliance between small cities and the Empire. Created in 1167, the
Lombard League, the Societas Lombardie, was the best known of the
leagues. It included most of the largest and strongest cities in
Piedmont, Lombardy and Venetia. The Lombard League defeated the
Emperor at the legendary battle of Legnano in 1176, and in 1183
agreed a peace at Constance, where it obtained a charter of liberties
for the Italian communes. Constance established the formal
foundation of communal autonomy; for example, the cities’ freedom
to elect their own consuls and make local laws. These leagues never
became stable political federations, however. After the battle of
Legnano, the Milanese wrote to the commune of Bologna (which had
supported the league):
We announce that we have triumphed over our enemies. The dead, the drowned and the
prisoners are countless. We have taken the shield, the ensign, the cross and the spear of
the Emperor. In his chests we have found gold and silver. It is impossible to evaluate the
booty. It goes without saying that we do not consider it our own stuff, but the common
inheritance of the Pope and of the Italians.
(Dean, 2000)

The perception of having fought an Italian war was not only because
of the support received from other cities and the Papacy, but also
because the enemy was a king who spoke a different language, and
was therefore felt to be external to Italy. As the historian Girolamo
Arnaldi has observed, the struggles of the communes against a
foreign king contributed to the creation of a common sense of
belonging, which was later interpreted (particularly during the
Risorgimento, and even more by the neo–Guelphs, who wanted a
united Italy under the control of the Papacy) as the birth of an Italian
sentiment.
Map 2.1 The cities of the Lombard League
Source: adapted from Daniel Waley, The Italian City–Republics (London: Weidenfeld &
Nicolson), p. 129.

Among the city-states, Rome was a special case: having ceased to

be the ‘capital of the world’, abandoned for Ravenna and for
Constantinople, it had been left to the Pope by the Emperors. By
continuing to reside in Rome, the Pope had made it his own city.
However, the image of a passive city entirely dependent on the Pope
is misleading, particularly in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries,
when Rome engaged in the world of the cities and communes. The
commune was active in international commerce, forging many
treaties – particularly with Pisa and Genoa – and controlling a large
part of the central Tyrrhenian coast. Roman merchants could be
found at trade fairs in England and Ireland, and in what are now
Belgium, Switzerland and France. The Papacy gave financial support
to the most powerful and dynamic social groups. The shift towards
closer control by the Papacy and the local aristocracy came during
the thirteenth century, with the formation of a powerful restricted
elite of around fifteen families, who had accumulated unprecedented
possessions and power.
The Papacy had to acknowledge that the new political class that
governed the cities made a distinction between the temporal and the
spiritual, which had always been intertwined in people’s daily lives. As
Lauro Martines has observed, ‘the more political discourse avoided
religious metaphors and diction, the more it made a new track for
itself’. While this process took centuries to complete, the first steps of
‘secular political feeling’ were taken in thirteenth-century Italy, rooted
in the strong local patriotism of the time. A lay urban culture
continued to develop, particularly at the level of universities and
schools for notaries, and a lay written language was becoming
increasingly important in the age of commercial expansion. The
resulting conflict between Church and laity saw the emergence of
great poets such as St Francis, Cecco Angiolieri and Dante in the
cities – the spread of their ideas being made possible by a rich
cultural background and critical tradition. Many complex questions
provoked controversial debates: Who is the good citizen? The good
merchant? The good Christian? This culture had an impact on both
civil and religious architecture, particularly in the examples of
Romanesque style in the cities and countryside in Lombardy and
Emilia. According to Daniel Waley, the achievements of Italian
communes in art and thought ‘was to prove hardly less influential
than that of ancient Greece’.
 Cities in the north-western region of Piedmont were the first to
develop into a regional state. The rulers of the Pedemontana (literally
‘at the feet of the mountains’) were either foreign signori who
occupied the region from time to time (such as the Anjou, or signori
from Milan), or local signori (for example, the Saluzzo and Monferrato
families) who did not possess sufficient strength to create an
interregional power until the House of Savoy, of external origin but
well integrated south of the Alps, was able to create a regional state.
The House of Savoy arrived on the Italian side of the Alps as a result
of marriage arrangements in 1045. Their expansionist policy was
particularly successful under Thomas I (1189–1233), who obtained
many declarations of vassal-like loyalty from important Piedmontese
families by offering them military protection. The success of the
House of Savoy in Piedmont as a regional state was unusual
compared with others who took power in parts of the peninsula only
in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries – perhaps with the exception
of Milan, which already had a strong regional presence before the
Visconti came to power at the end of the thirteenth century. Cities
such as Verona (under the Della Scala) or Ferrara (under the Este)
built a city signoria (the control of the city by a powerful family, which
became a typical phenomenon in central-northern Italy from the mid-
thirteenth century) and only later a regional one, which had
consequences for the relationship between city and countryside, as
new rules were imposed on the people living in conquered areas. The
House of Savoy, also because its members came from outside, did
not chose one city as their centre, and the relationship between
urban and rural citizens was more equal. Chambéry, in what is now
France, was the headquarters of the administration, but there were
no dominant cities.
In the twelfth century, Italian city governments were led by
consuls (the number of whom varied) and by a general assembly.
Everywhere, the government of cities was under the influence of a
few important families, and the nobility dominated the consulate,
though notaries and jurists (in the thirteenth century generally
holding university degrees) also participated in the assemblies. The
culture of lawyers and notaries in Lombard and Tuscan cities reached
a sufficiently high level of professional preparation to allow them to
have a say in the cities’ politics, which contributed to the idea that
politics had to be conducted by lay rather than religious authorities.
Rich merchants also had an influence in the government of
communal cities, though they were an elite within the middle classes.
In order to nominate consuls, or, for example, to support the
outbreak of war, the whole citizenship was gathered to approve the
measures, usually in the cathedral square. This was not a form of
conscious participation in decision-making, but it nevertheless
maintained the principle of popular entitlement to power. Consuls
changed rapidly, normally every year, and some of them were not
aristocrats but had distinguished themselves in some way – for
example, through a military career. Even though the general
assembly continued to gather, cities soon evolved a council structure,
with which the consuls conferred. When it became difficult, by the
end of the twelfth century, to maintain peace between powerful rival
families, executive power was transferred to a single individual
external to the city, the podestà, who was generally trained in law
and could only hold office for six months or a year. At the beginning
of the thirteenth century, the power of the podestà was no longer
exceptional but had replaced the consuls in most communes.
However, the podestà was not a political ruler but an administrator, at
the head of the judiciary and with police powers, whose initiatives
had to follow city council decisions. The position of podestà became a
regular profession, with its own manuals of conduct, and legal
administrators spent their lives moving from city to city to do their
job.
Particularly in the first half of the thirteenth century, intellectuals
imbued with classical culture began to shape the political science of
the communes. At the same time, literature regarding the
government of the city was developed under the active patronage of
Frederick II in Sicily. The city was described as a fatherland, a patria
for whose freedom it was possible, noble and normal to give one’s
life. Linked with this ideology of ‘good government’ was the
legislation against luxury imposed on many Italian cities from the
thirteenth century onwards. This was needed to reduce the private
ostentation that came from greater material wealth. Rules were
established regarding exaggerated expenditure on clothes, banquets
and jewellery, and fines were introduced against those who did not
comply. In this way, the city-state reaffirmed the primacy of public
over individual interests, even when it entailed the use of illiberal
behaviour and interference in the private sphere. The first law to limit
banquets appeared in Bologna in 1288, with the intention of limiting
excessive spending on food. There was also an international context,
as a similar law was introduced at the same time in France, and a
century later in England (though Italian cities legislated more often
and in greater detail than elsewhere), demonstrating the circulation
of ideas and problem-solving that transcended frontiers – a feature
that became more evident during the Renaissance, when manuals of
social behaviour published in Italy became models for other European
countries. The study of anti-luxury legislation allows historians to
understand what rich people liked to do (for example, how they
dressed), because what was condemned was what people evidently
wanted. Laws on dresses and jewellery also concerned the artisans
who produced them – as stated, for example, in this decision taken
by the commune of Parma in 1258:
From this time forward women’s garments are to be made as long only as to reach the
ground, plus a quarter of a braccio, and no more; and tailors are to be held under oath to
observe this and not to cut longer robes; and if they transgress, they are to pay L3 on
each occasion.
(Dean, 2000)

These proscriptions did not always work, as many rich people could
afford to pay the fines. Also, the magnificence displayed during public
celebrations did not correspond to the discipline that cities sought to
impose at the private level.

SOUTHERN ITALY

As Cattaneo observed, ‘the whole nation did not take part in the
heroic age of cities’. The experience of southern cities, and
particularly the Mediterranean republics, initially shared many
similarities with that of northern communes, but was made different
by foreign invasions. However, the invaders did not destroy local
culture and its links with the rest of Italy, and their political dominion
left some space for local initiative, as ruling families in cities such as
Salerno or Palermo still remained relatively powerful. The Normans in
Sicily, though they favoured the Roman Church, respected the Greek
Church (which still survives there), Islam and the Jews. Norman
culture coexisted with the various, pre-existing cultures on the island.
Emperor Frederick II (1194–1250), son of a German (Swabian)
father and a Sicilian–Norman mother, considered himself a Sicilian.
He described Sicily and southern Italy as his own ‘country’, and Italy
as his own ‘cultural inheritance’. He was horrified by Germany with its
morbid landscapes, long winters, ‘muddy cities’ and ‘primitive’ castles.
Frederick invited poets from different Italian regions to his court.
Dante later acknowledged, in Literature in the Vernacular, the
importance of the national literary and linguistic network created by
this court, and recognized that ‘everything our predecessors have
produced in vernacular must be called Sicilian’. As soon as he became
Emperor, Frederick sought to extend his rule to the communes of
northern Italy. This reignit-ing of the conflict with the communes
resulted in victory for Frederick in 1237, but this was followed by the
communes’ revenge in 1248 at Parma. Frederick died two years after
his defeat.
Encouraged by Pope Clement IV, the French Charles of Anjou
moved to Italy in 1266, defeated Frederick’s successor, Manfred, and
began the period of the Anjou dynasty in southern Italy. The capital
of the Sicilian kingdom moved from Palermo to Naples, which became
one of the major centres for the dissemination of (French) Gothic art
in Italy: the churches of S. Lorenzo and S. Chiara, with the tombs of
the Angevin kings, are testimony of that first phase in the history of
Naples as the capital of southern Italy. Charles of Anjou brought
some improvements to southern Italy – namely, road building, ports
and agriculture. However, these developments benefited mainly
merchants and bankers from outside the region, particularly those
from Tuscany, largely because of Charles’ refusal to develop local
financial initiatives. Rather than encourage the local economy, he
imposed heavy taxation, and regarded Sicily and southern Italy as a
bottomless money-pit. This provoked a revolt among the Sicilian
population. The spark was a row between Sicilian men and some
French soldiers, who harassed a Sicilian woman in 1282 in a church
square in Palermo, where the population was waiting for the religious
service at Vespers. The woman’s husband stabbed to death one of
the soldiers and the crowd began ferociously to attack the others
while the bells were ringing for Vespers. French soldiers and women
who had married Frenchmen were killed without mercy. However,
Charles of Anjou repressed the revolt, and the Pope rejected a
project for supporting a Sicilian federation of communes under his
sovereignty. The Sicilians, who would have preferred anything to
remaining under French rule, had no choice but to ask another
foreign power for help, and they turned to Peter of Aragón for
assistance. Peter had married Constance, daughter of Manfred, and
could therefore lay claim to Sicily. He moved to Sicily in 1282 and
remained there for the rest of his life. The Vespers has remained one
of the major moments in the collective memory of Sicilians, as it
expressed the population’s desire for autonomy for the island. In July
1943, in order to mobilize the Sicilians against the Anglo–Americans,
the Fascist government sought, unsuccessfully, to promote the
formation of ‘volunteers of the Vespers’. Post-1945 Sicilian separatism
also made reference to the medieval event.
The settlement of the Aragonese in Sicily was aided by the Treaty
of Anagni of 1295, a papal initiative, after which Boniface VIII
appointed James of Aragón as king of Sardinia and Corsica. While this
was not substantiated by any legal right, James II began a series of
diplomatic moves to impose his control on Sardinia, whose politics
and culture would be influenced increasingly by Spain in the following
centuries. The history of Sardinia, both prior to and following James’
coronation, had many connections with the rest of Italy, in particular
with Pisa, Genoa and the Papacy, which were constantly involved in
efforts to keep the island free from the Muslims and to ‘latinize’ its
Church.

LITERARY TEXTS, MUSIC AND ART

The work of Francis of Assisi, with the Canticle of the Sun, is one of
the first examples of Italian literature. It was written around 1226, in
Umbrian vernacular, to celebrate God through His creatures, the sun,
moon, stars, wind, fine weather (sereno), water, fire, earth and
death:
Be praised, Thou, my Lord,/With all Thy creatures,/Especially my lord the Sun:/He gives
us the day/And he is beautiful and shines/With great splen-dor./Of Thee, Most High, he is
the sign.//Be praised, Thou, my Lord,/For Sister Moon and the stars :/In the sky Thou
hast created them,/Clear, precious, and beautiful.//Be praised, Thou, my Lord,/For
Brother Wind/And for the air and the clouds/And for the sky serene and all the
weather/Through which Thou givest sustenance/To Thy creatures.//Be praised, Thou, my
Lord,/For Sister Water/Who is very useful and humble/And precious and chaste.//Be
praised, Thou, my Lord,/For Brother Fire/By which Thou lightest the night:/And he is
beautiful and joyous/And hardy and strong.//Be praised, Thou, my Lord,/For our sister
and mother, the earth,/Who sustains and nurtures us:/She brings forth the various
fruits/With coloured flowers and greenery.// .. . //Be praised, Thou, my Lord,/For our
sister bodily death,/From which no living human can escape:/Woe to them who die/In
mortal sin.
(Francis of Assisi, 2002)

This poem, an example of the lauda (from Latin laus), expresses the
happiness of humankind throwing itself into God’s arms, in contrast
to apocalyptic medieval pessimism, and celebrates the relationship
between earthly and divine realities. The lauda was created as a
litany or lamentation in biblical style. It was the fruit of the collective
mysticism of popular religious manifestations, and was influenced by
the climate of renewal from below in the Church. The lauda was one
of the most ancient musical expressions in the vernacular, a
devotional canto sung by the faithful in the streets. It was a simple
chant in syllabic style, intoned by a soloist friar who was joined by a
chorus of children, and it used methods from both liturgical and
secular music. The canto was accompanied by musical instruments:
the viella and the ribeca (ancestors of the violin), the organ, the
trumpet, the lute and the horn.
With Jacopone of Todi (1236–1306) the lauda evolved into sacred
drama. Unfortunately, the music of his laudi (roughly ninety in
number), as well as that of Francis’s Canticle of the Sun, has been
lost. The passionate character of Jacopone, ‘mad with the love of
God’ (impazzato d’amore di Dio), bearer of an exasperated and
aggressive mysticism (he was imprisoned by Boniface VIII for several
years), found its expression in a mixture of cultured and popular
words, raw images and broken syntax, all of which give his poetry a
passionate and violent intonation:
O heart’s jubilation, love and song,/Joy and joy unceasing,/The stuttering of the
unutterable – /How can the heart but sing?//Joy shooting upward uncontrollably,/Where
is the heart to contain it?/O shouting and singing oblivious of all,/Joy brimmed to
overflowing!//O jubilant joy and somersaults of happiness,/Pray, learn to be
prudent:/Sensible people with sensible smiles/Cannot understand the wildness of your
ecstasy !//Learn to conceal the bliss/Throbbing thickly beneath the surface:/There is
meaning all unknown to sensible people/In the joyous gyrations of the wounded heart.
(Jacopone da Todi, 1982, pp. 227–8)

While Francis and Jacopone gave birth to the lauda in central Italy, a
fundamental contribution to the birth of an Italian literary language
arrived from the south of the country: Sicilian poetry. As noted above,
the context was the court of Emperor Frederick II in Palermo, and its
origins can be found in the European troubadour tradition. One of the
earliest European literary movements was created in southern France
at the beginning of the twelfth century; the word trobar meant the
act of composing verses, probably from the popular Latin trovare
(from tropa, a rhetorical figure, and signifying melody, aria or canto
in the language of music). Poetry in the vernacular with musical
accompaniment thus came into being: indeed, its most common form
was the canzone (song). Miniatures of the time depict troubadours
singing accompanied by an instrument. The names of about 400
troubadours are known, some of whom were members of the
aristocracy, and two were female poets: Azalais di Porcoiragues and
the Countess Beatrice di Dia. The troubadours lived at the feudal
courts, and they performed idealized songs of court life. At the centre
of that life was love for a lady, to whom the knight submitted in order
to improve himself as a man. The service of love to a lady was
elaborated by Andreas Cappellanus at the court of Marie de
Champagne. According to Cappellano, real love could only be
adulterous, because it had to be free, while married love was a
compulsory relationship. Therefore, real love could only be imagined
or dreamed. In Lancelot, by Chrétien de Troyes, adulterous love
drives the knight to treason when Lancelot betrays his oath to King
Arthur, whom he was sworn to serve, because of his love for Arthur’s
queen. Dante was attracted to the ambiguity of this tale, and in The
Divine Comedy narrated the story of Paolo and Francesca (Inferno,
V), the adulterous sister and brother-in-law (cognati) who were led
astray by the reading of Lancelot and ended up in hell among the
lascivious.
Troubadour poetry had great importance in Italy, particularly when
the southern courts of France were wrecked by Innocent III’s violent
crusade against the Albigensians (1208–29) and many troubadours
found refuge in Italy. Provençal poetry in Italy, and several of its
authors, are celebrated by Dante in Inferno (XXVIII, 118–42),
Purgatorio (XXVI, 117), and in Literature in the Vernacular (II, ii, 9;
vi, 6; x, 2; xiii, 2), and had an influence, as noted above, on the
Sicilian school. Frederick II encouraged the fusion of different
cultures. His German father had been a poet, his mother was Norman
and he had been educated in both French and German. Beginning in
1220, he encouraged the birth of lyric poetry in the vernacular in
Italy, modelled on the Provençal poets and the German Minnesänger
(romantic poets). The ‘Sicilian school’ was a group of about twenty-
five poets active between 1230 and 1266. The most famous of these
were Giacomo da Lentini, Rinaldo d’Aquino, Giacomino Pugliese,
Stefano Protonotaro and Pier delle Vigne, the latter remembered by
Dante in Inferno among the suicides. However, there were
fundamental differences between them and the Provençal poets.
First, these authors were not aristocrats or knights, but came from
the bourgeois world of the professions, law in particular. They did not
compose music; therefore their poetry was destined only to be read.
Their world was at court but it was no longer a feudal world;
vassalage had receded into the background. The emphasis of their
poetry was no longer on the lady but on the nature and effects of
love. The experience of love thus became analysed through
psychological introspection. This phenomenology of love is evident in
one of the first sonnets written by the notary and poet Giacomo da
Lentini, who invented this poetic form. This is the first quatrain,
based around the polarity of eyes and heart:
 Love is a desire coming from the heart
Through intense delight;
and it is the eyes that first engender Love,
and the heart that feeds it.
(Giacomo da Lentini, 1915)

The metrical and rhetorical structures of Sicilian poetry influenced the

entire Italian lyric tradition, as its original model. The Sicilian poets
were rooted in Provençal poetry, but made no reference to daily
chronicles or political struggles, since the imperial regime did not
encourage the climate of freedom and political argument that had
often been the setting of Provençal poetry. The hendecasyllabic line
became the fundamental metrical structure of Italian poetry; it
originated in the ancient Franco–Provençal lyric, but had fewer rules
and created many different rhythms.
Until the end of the thirteenth century, Florentine literature did not
show any expansionist tendency, as Florence was not yet a political
or economic capital. As Carlo Dionisotti has argued, ‘in the first half of
the thirteenth century a current of new poetry ran from Sicily to the
Tyrrhenian area and Tuscany, crossed the Apennines and grew, but
also stopped, at Bologna’. It was as a result of the relationship
between Frederick II’s imperial functionaries and the communes of
central Italy that this occurred, but also because many of Frederick’s
functionaries came from the law faculty of the University of Bologna,
where many Emilian and Tuscan intellectuals had also studied. In this
way, Sicilian poetry spread to Tuscany and Bologna. The new poets
took from the Sicilians the canzone and the sonnet, but also
experimented with the ballad and the political song. Among the most
original Sicilian–Tuscan poets were Bonagiunta Orbicciani from Lucca
(ca. 1220–90) and Guittone d’Arezzo (ca.1235–94). In Purgatorio
(XXIV, 49–63), Dante conversed with Orbicciani, who conferred on
the poet the honour of having created the stil novo (new style).
Popular poetry and music was transmitted by minstrels, who
performed in squares, in front of churches and in the streets. As Piero
Camporesi argues, their jokes were often obscene and were
sometimes condemned by the Church, but they were extremely
popular – at their performances, ‘the meaning of life seemed to
change rhythm and dimension, farce replaced drama, the joculator,
the comicus, dethroned the tragicus’. Not only did minstrels become
a central feature in popular culture, but they also came to play a
fundamental mediatory role between clerical and vernacular cultures.
Indeed, while the Church hierarchy was opposed to them, there was
often collaboration between local clergy and minstrels.
In all Italian provinces, the thirteenth century was a time of
renovation and transformation of styles, in art as well as literature.
The extraordinary success of St Francis’s preaching had an impact on
both – Assisi became a pictorial laboratory – and the same was true
for the activities of Frederick II (St Francis died in 1226 and Frederick
in 1250). Iconoclasm never took root in Italy, and the movements for
the reformation of the Church which began by preaching austerity
soon became reconciled to the use of artistic resources, which were
eventually vigorously exploited. When Cistercian reform spread from
France through Italy in the twelfth century, during St Bernard’s
journeys to Rome, a new type of monastic architecture was
disseminated and adopted by the mendicant orders, but a
comparison of Cistercian austerity and the decorative wealth and
numerous paintings dedicated to Franciscans and Dominicans showed
how discretion and caution in the use of images did not suit the
Italians. The emphasis on icons continued through the centuries;
after the Reformation in the sixteenth century (which had little effect
in Italy), the Church persisted in demonstrating its loyalty to the cult
of images, echoed in this by the ornamental variety of Italian
luxurious dwellings, public palaces and squares – a constant cross-
fertilization between the secular and the sacred continued to
characterize Italian art.
Late-thirteenth-century Italian art was a reaction to two major
artistic ‘invasions’: those of Byzantine art, which arrived mainly
through Venice after its conquest of Constantinople in 1204 made
possible contact with Greek decorators and mosaicists; and of French
Gothic. At the end of the century, mosaic art developed in particular
in Rome, which became a major centre of innovation. The vitality of
Venice and Rome was matched by a kind of ‘southern Renaissance’,
with the building of castles in Apulia and Sicily under Frederick, such
as the Castel del Monte near Barletta, or the castles of Syracuse and
Catania. These buildings, which bring together the Gothic experience
of the Cistercians, Arabic architecture and Byzantine influence,
demonstrate the cosmopolitanism of Frederick’s reign, while Assisi,
Siena and Rome, in central Italy – home to artists such as Giotto and
Cimabue – became a beacon for artists from all over the peninsula.

SELECTED FURTHER READING

For an overview of this period, see D. Abulafia, Italy in the Central Middle Ages, 1000–1300
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Two indispensable surveys of the Italian city states
are P. Jones, The Italian City–State: from Commune to Signoria (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1997) and D. Waley, The Italian City–Republics (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969). T.
Dean, Crime and Justice in Late Medieval Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2007) provides important insights on Italian criminal justice from the mid-thirteenth to the
end of the fifteenth century. A concise and authoritative study of the relationship between
Venice and Constantinople is D. M. Nicol, Byzantium and Venice: A Study in Diplomatic and
Cultural Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). D. Webb, Patrons and
Defenders: The Saints in the Italian City–States (London: Tauris, 1996) is an interesting
study of the cult of saints in the political life of Italian Medieval city states.
 3
........
The Middle Ages of the Courts

CHRONOLOGY
1300 First Jubilee in Rome
1309–
Robert of Anjou King of Naples
43
1309–
Popes reside in Avignon
77
1347 Cola di Rienzo leads revolution in Rome
1347– First outbreak of the plague kills 3.5 million people (almost 30 per cent of the
50 Italian population)
1378 Revolt of the Ciompi in Florence
1378– Venice defeats Genoa and establishes commercial supremacy in the eastern
81 Mediterranean
1378–
Papal schism
1417
1434–
Cosimo I Medici’s rule in Florence
64
1442 Alphonse of Aragón conquers kingdom of Naples
1447–
Death of Filippo Maria Visconti; Ambrosiana republic in Milan
50
1450 Francesco Sforza becomes Duke of Milan
Peace of Lodi ends wars between Italian states, and spheres of influence are
1454–5 defined between the five major regional states (Milan, Venice, Florence, Rome
and Naples)
1469–
Lorenzo de Medici assumes leadership in Florence
92
 First French invasion of Italy by Charles VIII. Fall of the Medici and new republic
1494
in Florence under Savonarola
1498 Trial of Savonarola in Florence and death at the stake
Second French invasion of Italy by Louis XII, who occupies Milan and expels the
1499
Sforza

REBIRTH AFTER PLAGUE: THE AGE OF THE SIGNORIE

In the fourteenth century a terrible plague, known as the ‘Black

Death’, hit Italy. It arrived during a period of dynamic commercial
exchange between East and West on ships from the eastern
Mediterranean; ships which also brought the rats carrying the plague
bacillus. In Italy, the plague attacked first in Sicily, originating from
contaminated Genoese ships arriving at Messina from Constantinople
in 1347. From there, the epidemic spread across most of Italy and
into the rest of Europe. The population of Europe was approximately
80 million people at that time, around 25 million of whom died of the
plague. Its effects on Italy were worse than elsewhere because of
the degree of urbanization; the peninsula had more than 150 cities
of over 5,000 inhabitants, and the disease spread more easily where
contact between people was closer. In many cities, the plague killed
citizens a small number at a time, reappearing often after 1348. The
population reached its lowest point in the first decades of the
fifteenth century, by which time Florence, for example, had lost two-
thirds of its population (down from 100–120,000 to 37,000). While
cities organized defence measures (medicinal remedies and forms of
social control, as well as processions and rituals invoking God and
the patron saints), many inhabitants moved temporarily to the
countryside, where the plague was less prevalent. At the end of the
fourteenth century, the population of Italy had fallen to 8 million –
from 11 million in 1300 and 9.5 million in 1350. Seeing the many
empty dwellings, built during the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries, when the population was increasing, must have had a
profound impact on contemporaries.
Only after a full century did the peninsula recover its lost
population. By the end of the fifteenth century, Italy once more had
the most populous cities in Europe. Milan, Venice and Naples each
had more than 100,000 inhabitants, matched in Europe only by
Paris, and even small centres were comparable to cities of
international importance abroad. Calabria, for example, had around
ten centres with about 2,000–7,000 inhabitants. Verona, in the
Venetian Republic, had 25,000 inhabitants and a bustling port on the
River Adige. The population of Messina, at the time one of the
busiest ports in the Mediterranean, also stood at 25,000 – as did
that of Rome. Very few non–Italians lived on the peninsula or in
Sicily at the time; the most mixed regions were the Savoy state in
Piedmont, which was still characterized by its interests on both sides
of the Alps, and Sardinia, where the Catalan–Aragonese presence
was stronger than in the rest of the south.
By the mid-fourteenth century, the Italy of communes had turned
into the Italy of despotism, with the rule of dynastic city lords
(signorie). Before the signorie, the communes experienced the
period of podestà rule noted in Chapter 2. The role of the podestà in
the thirteenth century, which emerged from the conflicts between
powerful families, did not in itself lead to peace, but it did create
more stable governments. The podestà was responsible to the
citizens for the results of his work, and at the end of his mandate his
activity was judged by a group of sindici (the procedure was called
sindicatus). Their duty was one of control, in accordance with the
Roman figure of the sindicus-procurator. The podestarile
government brought about an explosion in the official registration of
documents and their conservation, with the first archival rules. The
fact that today we have so many written documents with which to
study the detailed history of every city is thanks to this (medieval)
need to demonstrate everything in a juridically precise manner.
While archives had begun to be collected in the eighth century, their
volume increased in this period, thus enabling Italy to preserve an
unusually large quantity of documents in comparison with other
countries. As John Larner explains, by contemporary European
standards, medieval Italy was indeed ‘an immensely literate,
legalistic, and bureaucratic society in which a great deal was written’.
Written source material is today still distributed over more than
ninety state archives, reflecting the pattern of local governments as
they existed during the late medieval period.
Created as a way to solve conflicts, the podestà government was
challenged from its early years, as the nobility constantly sought to
control it. The signorie of the fourteenth century were rooted in a
period of conflict – between populations and noble families, or
between the Guelph and the Ghibelline parties for control of the city
– during which time the podestà became an increasingly permanent
figure. Unlike the podestà, the signorie were hereditary lordships.
The Guelph–Ghibelline antagonism no longer represented the
factions involved in the struggle between Popes and emperors as it
had during the thirteenth century, but merely tended to mask new
divisions. As John Kenneth Hyde has put it, by the second half of the
fourteenth century Italians ‘were ceasing to think in the traditional
papal-imperialist terms and were beginning to see the parties as
local groups in competition for power’.
The evolution of city-states into signorie was not abrupt or
violent, though the actual moments of transition could indeed be
violent, or at least involve the threat of violence; more often, local
powerful families increased their control over cities to the point that
they were being run by these narrow oligarchies. As shown in
Chapter 2, the countryside continued to influence the city, and
feudal families always had a strong influence on city politics. As
Daniel Waley underlines, ‘the essence of the signoria was the victory
of landed power’; city-states dominated the surrounding territory,
but at the same time, the communes struggled to maintain
independence from the rural lords. In this sense, the feudal system
was never overthrown in Italy, but persisted alongside urban culture.
Conflicts between aristocratic families stimulated academic
debates on the nature of political power: Giovanni of Viterbo and
Brunetto Latini (Dante’s teacher and later chancellor of the Republic
in Florence) wrote about res publica in reference to the city-states;
Ptolemy of Lucca underlined the significance of giving people the
chance to choose their representatives, as opposed to the arbitrary
choices of kings, and considered it appropriate and opportune to
change rulers frequently, since the best government was one made
by the wise and the virtuous. These figures were writing at a time
when monarchical rule was the dominant form of government in
Europe, when people measured their lives by the monarchs who
ruled them, and, as Marc Bloch has demonstrated, where English
and French kings were believed to be thaumaturgic. However, in the
Italian cities, governments were generally anonymous – years were
marked with reference to a particular podestà, and by their
succession; and the history of the cities was becoming largely a
‘human’ history, in which the divine dimension was accorded
relatively little importance. Divine intervention was used to explain
what was external to questions of government, such as inexplicable
events like epidemics or floods. Government was no longer received,
wanted or decided by God.
However, religion still played an important part in the ritual and
action of governments, and was not entirely excluded from city
government, as Church and state shared in the practice of ‘civic
religion’ – a set of religious ceremonies and activities that reinforced
civic solidarities, such as the cult of patron saints, or processions on
important festival days to commemorate political turning points or
military victories. Moreover, daily life in the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries was ruled by religious imperatives. During religious
festivities it was forbidden to work, and cities added civic festivities
to the religious ones, which were not holidays (which did not exist
for the vast majority in society), but were days dedicated to social
events related to the family, group or city. Each city had its own
feast days, but some of these feasts were common to the whole
country: St Valentine, for example, was celebrated everywhere on 14
February, and carnivals took place throughout the whole peninsula;
the use of masks (often mocking famous people) and carnival floats
was already present, from Mantua to Venice, and from Milan to
Florence and Rome. Carnivals celebrated ancient Roman events as
well as contemporary ones. Feasts for patron saints could last more
than two weeks, with rituals, horse races, hunts and tournaments.
Particularly in Venice, which was beginning to acquire the natural
appearance of a theatrical stage, secular traditions and patriotism
involved most of the citizens.
With the emergence of a new class of entrepreneurs and lawyers
in the fourteenth century, lay communal schools began to replace
ecclesiastical ones. It was clear that the latter were orientated
towards a classical and religious culture, which was not satisfactory
for men of action, who needed a more technical and scientific
training. Initially, these lay schools were private, but the communal
authorities quickly began to institute city schools, choosing teachers,
and deciding salaries and holiday times. Education was considered to
be a public service that should benefit the whole collective, though
in fact only rich families could take advantage of it. Schools were not
only created for business purposes but also to meet the needs of the
city administration, so communal schools insisted on the centrality of
classical culture – education was the foundation of the common
good, and the study of Latin remained essential.
Italian cities were riven by internal disputes as well as by rivalries
with other cities. From an artistic point of view, these rivalries
expressed themselves in the construction of great monumental
works, on which cities spent huge sums of money. With a few
exceptions, the fourteenth century persisted as a century of cities,
but no longer of communes and republics. In Florence, all attempts
to turn the government into a dictatorship were unsuccessful until
the sixteenth century, as the final defeat of the popular revolt of the
Ciompi in the second half of the fourteenth century confirmed the
bourgeoisie in government. The other major republics were Venice,
Siena and Lucca, governed by a nobility that had close ties with the
bourgeoisie and was involved in commerce. In most other provinces,
feudal or aristocratic signori succeeded in imposing their power.
Architecture had already expressed city patriotism during the
communal age; during the age of the signorie it expressed dynastic
assertion. In Milan and other Lombard cities, the Visconti family left
visible traces of its long dominion from the fourteenth century. The
Sforza family, which followed the Visconti after a brief attempt to
return to republican government in 1447–50 (the repubblica
ambrosiana), continued in the Visconti’s footsteps by building, for
example, the colossal Sforzesco castle within the walls of the city
centre. Similar activity was carried out by the Este family at Ferrara,
the Gonzaga at Mantua, and the Montefeltro family at Urbino, all of
whom constructed beautiful urban monuments. In line with these
other princes, the Popes felt the need to improve Rome, not only for
reasons of civic pride but also to raise the city’s prestige in the
Western religious world. Links between city signorie and the Popes
were close: cardinals could become Popes and all the families
mentioned above had members who were cardinals. Venice
extended its architectural works to the whole area of the republic as
well as within the city, where important families, including those of
the doges, built many new palaces during the fifteenth century,
particularly alongside the Grand Canal.

Box 3.1 The tumult of the Ciompi

The revolt of the Ciompi is one of the first examples of economic
and social protest in European history. The Ciompi were wool
workers, and one of the lowest social classes in Florence. They
were excluded from political representation and their salary was
at subsistence level in normal times. In 1378, following a time of
economic crisis resulting from the devaluation of the currency
and the consequences of the plague, they occupied the Priori
Palace, asking for political rights and to be able to create their
own corporation. The revolt, described by Machiavelli in The
Florentine Histories a century and a half later, met with
temporary success, but was defeated by 1382. The Ciompi
brought together social protest and mystical beliefs – a reflection
of the apocalyptic period of anxiety that followed the plague.
This mixture of social rebellion and apocalyptic views, typical of
the lower classes at the time, was considered by governments to
be a threat to order.
 The establishment of the signorie reduced civil strife, but not
immediately or completely. Civil instability could still cause the
movement of entire social groups from one city to another. For
example, when Florence conquered Pisa at the beginning of the
fifteenth century, many business families who had previously
developed commercial links with Sicilian cities moved to the island
and made it their home. Family struggles for the control of Florence,
particularly between the Albizzi and the Medici in the fifteenth
century, forced aristocratic families and individuals to move to
Venice, Ferrara, Naples or Rome.
To embellish their cities, governments produced guidelines for the
construction of squares, gardens and palaces to make them worthy
of honouring the city, which was to be respected as if it were a
person. The construction of Milan’s Duomo began under Gian
Galeazzo Visconti at the end of the fourteenth century, the same
time as other famous Lombard cathedrals, such as the Certosa of
Pavia or the Cathedral of Monza, were built. The architects were
persuaded that they had to triumph over the French Gothic style
with spectacular and flamboyant churches. A similar attitude was
held in Venice, where the works for the S. Maria dei Frari began in
1340 and took a century to complete. As contemporary artists
observed, there was in Italian cities a taste for oral criticism and
public discussion on artistic matters; people generally demonstrated
a curiosity about architecture, which was often related to their daily
activities. As the art historian André Chastel noted, ‘everyone
believed themselves to be an artist’ and interfered with the artists’
work by giving their opinions. This was also a way in which people
expressed their municipal loyalty, often in competition with the
nearest city: ‘the instinctive and joyful affection of the Italian for the
celebrity of his province and village, that campanilismo ...
contributed to keep [municipal loyalty] alive’. This did not change
with the slow regional unification achieved by the most powerful
city-states during the fifteenth century (Lombardy, the Venetian
Republic, Florence, the Papal States, and the Kingdom of Naples).
The feudal system and the power of the aristocracy were particularly
strong in southern Italy and Sicily because, as was seen in Chapter
2, the city movement there had been halted by foreign occupation,
principally, after the age of Frederick II, by French and Spanish
conquest.
In Sicily, the instability and war that followed the Vespers in the
thirteenth century, and economic and trade decline as a result of the
plague in the fourteenth century brought further periods of instability
and weak government, which allowed the feudal aristocracy to
expand its privileges. In the fifteenth century, Sicily became
increasingly isolated, subject to the Aragonese monarchy and
governed by viceroys. The separation from Naples continued until
the 1430s, when the Anjou had no more successors and the
Aragonese took control of both regions. As Palermo declined, Naples
enjoyed a period of splendour from the fourteenth century,
connected to the cultural and economic life of the other Italian cities
despite foreign domination. The best writers and artists (including
Petrarch, Boccaccio and Giotto) worked there temporarily. King
Alfonso V, who ruled from 1416, made a deal with the aristocracy,
allowing them to strengthen their power over the local vassal
populations. He often, however, summoned parliament in the hope
of controlling them. As in the rest of Europe, the parliament included
representatives of the nobility, the clergy and the cities – the latter
being called on to balance the power of the nobility. While Sicily and
most of the south was left at the mercy of local barons, Naples
emerged as one of the largest and most culturally progressive cities
in Europe, giving rise, as will be seen in the next chapter, to
extraordinary Renaissance architecture and music.

THE PAPACY BETWEEN ROME AND AVIGNON

With the establishment of the Inquisition, the Church created a fully-

developed system of persecution. In the minds of the persecutors,
violence was justified by the belief that heresy would lead to eternal
punishment. Civil society, however, did not always receive these
ideas favourably, and many cities did not reject the possibility of
pluralism, just as many people did not like what was seen to be
gratuitous violence. The inquisitors were called ‘rapacious wolves’
and the population often protested against their activity, particularly
in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The Waldensian
movement, condemned as heretical by the third Lateran council in
1179, was organized to defend itself successfully and even killed
some inquisitors; the Ghibellines often opposed inquisitors across
Italy; armed families in Florence, Piacenza and Cremona confronted
Dominicans. The Inquisition achieved the expulsion of the religious
movement of the Cathars, or Albigensians, from Venetia and Emilia;
sixty of its members were burned alive at Treviso in 1233, and
around 200 met the same fate in Sirmione a few years after the
inquisitors’ arrival in the town in 1273. At Parma, the burning of two
women in 1279 sparked a popular revolt, and for eight years the
inquisitors could not even enter the city, which was subject to an
interdict imposed by the Pope. In Lombardy, the Dominican
inquisitors had many heretics burned, and persuaded the Pope to
place an interdict on the Ghibelline Bergamo, declaring the city to be
an ‘accomplice’ of the heretics. The spiral of violence led the
inquisitors to create proper armies from the mid-thirteenth century
onwards, a development that further escalated the brutality; for
example, in 1259 a crusade was organized against a Ghibelline ruler
from north-eastern Italy, Ezzelino of Romano, which resulted in his
death in battle and the murder of his relatives.
From the thirteenth century onwards, the Papacy was confronted
in Europe (though not in Italy) by the growth of national states, and
by societies that were developing a ‘bourgeoisie’ of merchants,
artisans, bureaucrats and professionals which favoured the diffusion
of a lay culture, rather than a culture that was, as it had been in the
early Middle Ages, the preserve of the clergy. At this politically and
culturally difficult time for the Church, the Popes sought to increase
the number of pilgrimages to Rome by offering indulgences (partial
remission of temporal punishment for sins) to pilgrims. The value of
these was steadily enhanced, culminating in the plenary indulgence
proclaimed by Boniface VIII for those who took part in the jubilee of
1300. This was the first jubilee in the history of the Papacy, and
granted indulgence to all those who went to Rome and followed a
specific itinerary of various sacred sites. Guglielmo Ventura, a
Piedmontese chronicler in Rome for the jubilee, described the
economic advantage that the Papacy enjoyed as a result of the
pilgrimage:
Bread, wine, meat, fish and oats were cheap; but hay was very expensive; and so were
hotels . . . Leaving Rome on Christmas Eve I saw a huge crowd, which no one could
have counted . .. Several times I saw men and women trampled under other people’s
feet. I managed to escape that danger several times. The Pope received countless sums
of money, because day and night two clergymen stayed at the altars of St Paul with
rakes in their hands, raking up endless sums.

In 1305 a French Pope, Clement V, was elected, and in 1309 he

moved from Rome to southern France. His successor, John XXII also
lived in Avignon, and the French city remained the new capital of the
Papacy until 1374, during which period Avignon underwent
remarkable architectural and economic development, beginning with
the construction of a new palace as the Popes’ residence. There
were a total of seven Avignon Popes, all French, a fact that cast
doubts on the idea of the universality of the Church – the Papacy
simply appeared to be under French control.
As Avignon prospered, Rome declined economically, since the
regular flow of money resulting from the presence of the Papacy
stopped. Respected intellectuals, poets and charismatic religious
figures criticized (though in very different ways) the Church for its
corruption and avidity: for example, the philosopher Marsilius of
Padua (1275–1342) in Defensor Pacis, William of Ockham, Catherine
of Siena, Dante Alighieri in De Monarchia, and Francesco Petrarch.
Catherine of Siena, born in 1347, dedicated her life to the care of the
sick and the poor, and addressed letters to important politicians of
the time from the position of a defender of the peace between the
Italian states and the Papacy. After many letters to Gregory XI, she
went to Avignon in 1376 to persuade him to return to Rome.

Box 3.2 Dante and Rome

 Dante was fascinated by the double function of the city, as both
capital of the Empire and of Christianity. With the election of
Clement V and his departure for France, Rome was widowed.
The city had already been transformed from a city of saints and
martyrs to a city of corruption and intrigue, beginning with the
Constantine donation and reaching a climax with Boniface VIII
(1295–1303). The Emperors had also abandoned the city; and
Dante, who was a convinced Ghibelline and supporter of the
autonomy of temporal power, hoped to see the capital of the
Empire on the banks of the River Tiber. However, even if the two
powers were never going to return to Rome, he thought the city
had to remain at the centre of world civilization, towards which
men would continue to turn (‘And looks at Rome as if it were his
mirror’, Inferno, XIV, 105).

Petrarch described Rome as an ancient matron, still fascinating in

her old splendour but worn out by the Pope’s distance. In the middle
of the fourteenth century, Boccaccio and other chroniclers (such as
Giovanni Villani) declared that Rome, from being the ‘head’ of the
world, had become the ‘tail’. This was a result of the interruption of
architectural commissions by Popes and cardinals, and of the
diminished stream of pilgrims. Commercial activities declined as the
struggle between aristocratic families for control of the city and its
countryside revived, and Tuscan banks and companies decided to
close their Roman headquarters. A considerable number of the rural
population left the villages, which gradually reverted to pasture,
inhabited only by shepherds and bandits. The Roman countryside
remained poor and rife with malaria until the modern age. The
relationship between city and countryside, so important elsewhere in
Italy, dissolved and was only re-established with difficulty after the
return of the Popes. Regular attempts by Roman citizens to establish
communal governments up to the end of the fourteenth century
were finally halted by the full return of the Papacy, which first
abolished the commune’s political autonomy in 1398 after arresting
and killing the organizers of a rebellion against Boniface IX, and then
began to operate a form of absolutism subsequently extended to the
entire Papal States.

Box 3.3 Letters from Catherine of Siena to Pope Gregory

XI
Letter imploring him to cure the ‘plagues’ of the Church and to
persuade him to return to Rome:
O father, sweet Christ on earth, please follow the path of that
sweet Gregory [Gregory the Great] ... Please be no longer
occupied with friends or relatives, nor with your temporal
activity; but only with virtue and with the exaltation of spiritual
things ... I heard that you have made some cardinals. I believe
that it would be God’s honour, and better for us, if you always
chose virtuous men. If the opposite occurred, it will be an insult
to God, and a ruin for the holy Church. No surprise, then, if God
sends punishments and calamities to us.
Letter again imploring his return to Rome:
Alas, father, I am dying from the pain, and still cannot die.
Please, please, do come, and stop resisting God’s will, which is
calling you. And the eager sheep of your flock are waiting for you
to come and hold the seat of your predecessor and champion,
Peter the apostle. Because you, as Christ’s vicar, must rest in
your own place. Therefore please come, and hesitate no longer;
and be comforted, and do not fear anything that could happen,
because God will be with you.
(Boccardi, 2003, p. 92, letter 185; p. 94, letter 196).

Before the return of the Popes, however, some political projects

aimed to restore the greatness of Rome. Cola di Rienzo (1313–54), a
notary and great orator of humble origin, sought to recreate the
republic against the interests and struggles of Popes and the
aristocracy. He gained the support of many men of letters, Petrarch
among them, who saw in his strivings the restoration of Cicero’s
republic, an earlier medieval dream of returning to the Roman age.
Di Rienzo’s was not the first attempt to re-found a Roman
Republic. As early as the twelfth century, a republican representation
of the city had begun to emerge, in contrast with the existing
ecclesiastical and imperial conceptions of Rome. As a result of the
conflicts between Emperors and Popes, sections of the population
became aware of their ability to play a greater political role – for
example, through dependence on the Emperors with the object of
reinforcing autonomist claims against the Popes. Between 1144 and
1149 an emancipation movement led to the establishment of a
bourgeois elite at the council, which asked the Pope to leave the
administration of the city to a communal institution called the
Senato, which met symbolically at the Campidoglio. That civic
republican ideal revived again in the fourteenth century, when Cola
di Rienzo seized power in Rome in 1347. He assumed the title of
tribune and was supported by the middle classes against the
aristocracy. He commissioned a painting in the Colosseum in which
Rome was represented as a mourning female figure in black on a
ship surrounded by waves in a storm, alongside other women, each
representing a different Italian city, whose ships had already sunk.
Cola di Rienzo extended his proposal of renovating Rome and
limiting the power of the aristocracy in the whole of Italy in an
attempt to found a federation of cities under Rome’s leadership. He
summoned a successful assembly of the cities’ representatives,
where he put forward the idea of a renewed Roman republic
delimited by the Alpine frontier; and that Italian cities were Rome’s
sisters and all Italians were Roman citizens. However, the time was
not ripe for republican solutions, either in Rome or in the Italian city-
states, which rejected limitations on their autonomy. Cola di Rienzo,
though defeated, and killed by a mob in 1354, nevertheless left a
permanent mark on the collective memory of Rome and Italy as the
first figure to recognize the end of the imperial dream and to claim
that Rome’s salvation lay in the creation of a political structure based
on the cultural and linguistic unity of the Italian people.
 Many of the revolts that spread to Rome during the Avignon years
were sparked by powerful Italian states such as Milan, Naples and
Florence, all of which sought to expand into Papal territory, taking
advantage of the Popes’ absence and the resulting political
instability. Faced with these territorial challenges, Pope Gregory XI
decided to return to Rome, and in 1378 an Italian Pope was elected
once more – the Neapolitan Urban VI. The French cardinals,
however, refused to recognize the new Pope, claiming that he had
been imposed by the Roman mob, and proclaimed a different Pope,
Clement VII, who moved to Avignon. This move created a new
schism, with two Popes at the same time, one in Italy and the other
in France, who excommunicated each other. The schism was
formally resolved only in 1418 at the Council of Constance, where a
sole new Pope, Martin V of the Colonna family, was elected. He was
the first of an almost uninterrupted succession of Italian Popes, a
pattern that was only broken in recent years. During the schism
period, new expressions of religious opposition appeared, some with
origins in the previous heretical movements, and all criticizing the
Church for its wealth, corruption and temporal power. One famous
heretic was the Bohemian theologian and religious reformer, Jan
Hus, who was burnt at the stake in 1415.

SAINTS AND CITIES

Italian cities were full of images: icons and paintings of saints and
the Virgin Mary were mixed with those of political and military
heroes, celebrating both supernatural and civil achievements. During
the eleventh century, at the time of Popes Gregory VII and Urban II,
the cult of the Virgin Mary had acquired great importance; the image
of the divine mother developed from the emergence of an increased
focus on the humanity of Christ. The cult of the Virgin enjoyed huge
success from that period onwards.
Urbanization in the twelfth century favoured the spread of cults of
local patron saints. Before that time, a saint was essentially a body,
or a fragment of a body, animated – because of the saint’s
conformity with Christ’s life – by supernatural powers that could heal
and protect those who prayed and asked for the saint’s intercession.
The collection and circulation of relics increased the number of altars
in cathedrals, for it was there that relics were deposited once they
had been consecrated, a custom that evolved from the eighth
century onwards. Looting of relics often occurred, particularly by
French and German travellers, as their countries had fewer relics
than Italy. Many saints’ bodies were stolen; for example, the remains
of St Severo were taken from Ravenna to Germany in 836, and in
1162 the relics of the Magi were sent from Milan to Frederick
Barbarossa in Cologne. Throughout the early Middle Ages, Italy
remained a sort of hallowed country for the Western world, where it
was possible to acquire sacred relics cheaply and easily, sometimes
with the help of unscrupulous clergymen.
The cult of patron saints in Italian cities began at the time of the
transition from the ancient to the medieval age. Roman cities that
were transformed into medieval cities in the period of the barbarian
invasions were always centred on the cathedral. Particularly during
the Byzantine–Gothic wars, in an atmosphere of fear and
uncertainty, the bishop became the principal reference point, and the
patron saint the main element of unity. Of all the interpretations of
the Italian commune, the most acceptable is perhaps the one that
emphasizes the convergence of the needs of the city aristocracy, the
new bourgeoisie and the bishop. The aristocracy governing the cities
often played a crucial role in establishing the cult of new local saints.
For example, in Mantua, the cult of a saint clearly connected to the
powerful was that of St Anselm, disseminated by Matilda of Canossa.
Anselm II, Bishop of Lucca, was expelled by the Lucchesi, Henry IV’s
supporters, and found refuge with Matilda, subsequently becoming
Bishop of Reggio and then of Mantua, where he died in 1086. His
biography, detailing the miracles he performed both while alive and
after his death, was written during Matilda’s reign.
However, saints were not always made by the powerful, because
sometimes it was the population who sought proof of miracles. A
popular religiosity emerged that required miracles and manifest
signs, such as, for example, the power of healing. In many cases the
mendicant orders played an important role as they were close to
marginal people, and the latter wanted saints who defended the
poor. The Church was very wary in these cases, since requests were
sometimes made for people who could be considered heretic. For
example, in mid-thirteenth-century Mantua, the Church decided not
to make Giovanni Bono a saint, despite a great many requests from
the people who continued to make pilgrimages to his grave, because
the powerful were uninterested in him and considered him to be a
non-conformist. The Church was also cautious because, towards the
mid-thirteenth century, there was a great proliferation of cults.
The cult of a local saint could also acquire political meaning. For
example, the image of St Ambrose of Milan was present on the city
carroccio (chariot) at the battle of Legnano and, two centuries later,
a legend retold by fourteenth-century Milanese chronicler Galvano
Fiamma stated that St Ambrose led the troops of Luchino Visconti
against the predominantly German and Swiss army of Lodrisio (who
wanted to succeed Galeazzo I and sought to usurp the throne) at
the battle of Parabiago in 1339. Ambrose had allegedly been seen
driving away the enemies, and the victory was attributed to him; a
statue of St Ambrose of Victory was built at Parabiago as a result.
The use of carrocci with images of patron saints is an example of
how city pride and popular religiosity were intertwined. The carroccio
symbolized the unity of the city, and its departure to war was
accompanied by popular processions, important elements in the
construction of civic religion. In Visconti Milan, one of the most
famous Lombard medieval poets, Bonvesin de La Riva, demonstrated
the strong bond between defence of the city and religion in a book
dedicated to his city:
Many foreign tyrants have tried to install here the seat of their tyranny, yet the divine
goodness, with the constant intercession of the blessed mother of our Lord Jesus Christ,
in whose honour our cathedral is built. . . together with that of our patron St Ambrose .
. . has often defended the city from tyrannical rage.
(Dean, 2000)
Cults revering the same saint could be found in different parts of
Italy; for example, the cult of St Pilgrim was followed in villages on
both sides of the Apennines. This was the case with a number of
saints, showing that the mountains were not a barrier between the
populations who lived on either side of them in the Middle Ages, but
on the contrary united them, becoming geographical mediators
through which encounters and exchanges of various kind occurred.

SAINTS, WITCHES, OR MOTHERS: IMAGES OF WOMEN BETWEEN

THE MIDDLE AGES AND THE RENAISSANCE

Matilda of Canossa was probably the most powerful woman of Italy’s

Middle Ages. In 1664, her corpse was transferred from Castel
Sant’Angelo in Rome to the Basilica of St Peter, where it remains
today. She had died five centuries earlier, but she became a heroine
in the collective memory because of the role she had played as the
ally of Pope Gregory VII, when she allegedly helped him defeat the
Emperor. When she died (aged 69) in 1115 in a village near Mantua,
her body was preserved, testimony to the idea that the terrible
events of her own time had not defeated her. On the one hand, she
was a rare example of a female warrior and head of state who had
competed with the most powerful men of the age; yet on the other,
she was a medieval woman who shared the fears and beliefs typical
of her time. She gave substantial gifts to churches and monasteries,
and spent her political life fighting the Emperor (Henry IV) and
serving the interests of the Church. She sought to maintain a large
state under feudal control, though with difficulty, since the cities
were beginning the process leading towards communal autonomy.
Despite her many defeats, her final military victories were largely a
result of the establishment of a chain of castles, which constituted
an invincible barrier from the Apennines to the Po Valley, and which
the Emperor never succeeded in seizing entirely. Matilda’s memory
was particularly valued in the seventeenth century, as she was a
model heroine for a time when the Church needed new allies in the
fight against the Reformation; her monument in St Peter’s was
therefore commissioned from the most distinguished architect of the
time, Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680). Her wars against the
Emperors had been wars on the side of Christ, crusades that the
Church needed to repeat against heresy. Despite her two marriages,
her image remained, in the paintings of the time, of a lonely, isolated
woman married only to God. This image was also depicted in
literature; literary critics argue that Dante described her in
Purgatorio (especially XXVIII and XXXIII) using the name Matelda.
In his account she walked alone with only flowers for company, to
represent a life spent in loneliness and courage, having confronted
without external help events that would have discouraged many
men. Three centuries later, in the Gerusalemme liberata, the poet
Torquato Tasso (1544–95) emphasized her role as a female warrior
who fought and won using her own stratagems. Matilda’s fame had
been so vast that she reappeared in the chivalric romances of the
sixteenth century; at around same time as Tasso’s poem, the artist
Paolo Farinati (1524–1606) depicted her alone on horseback, at the
site where she was later buried at San Benedetto sul Po.
Matilda’s life was exceptional among medieval women. In
medieval society, ordinary women were marginal and considered to
be on a par with children. Women authors of literary texts were rare,
so their views could not be propagated, and almost everything
written about women came from men. The only women who left
written testimony were a few cortese poetesses, some important
saints or nuns (who wrote mainly about mystical experiences), and
some female aristocrats and the wives of merchants. Though their
number increased, in the main they did not defy the poetic and
ethical conventions of their time. Aristocratic and ecclesiastical
theories of women were challenged only with difficulty by the new
commercial classes, and were transmitted to subsequent
generations, therefore continuing to have a profound impact in
successive centuries even under changed social conditions. For
example, many commune statutes specified that husbands were
allowed physically to punish their wives as long as it was done sine
sanguinis effusione (without spilling blood). Women’s lives were
limited in terms of property ownership, inheritance and freedom
within marriage, and all these limitations were scrupulously drawn
up in the statutes. Male privilege in succession was overtly
emphasized from the first communal consue-tudines onwards. The
twentieth-century English medievalist, Eileen Power, observed the
paradox that, among the lower classes, women worked with men in
the fields or the workshops every day, but when they went to mass
on Sunday they were told that, while the Virgin Mary was the
gateway to heaven, women in general were the gateway to hell.
In fifteenth-century aristocratic family books, women appear as
wives and daughters, but especially as mothers – in the physical
sense of being procreators. Data from the Florentine census from
1427 makes it clear that the middle classes and, to a greater degree,
the lower classes, used forms of birth control, but that among the
economic elite, female fertility was the maximum possible in the
biological cycle. Explanations for the high birth-rate must take into
account the high mortality rates: for example, out of twenty children
born to the aristocratic Corsini family in Florence, only ten survived
for one year, while only five lived for more than twenty-four years.
Love was excluded from the marriage practices of the elite, and was
considered at the time to be something for poets and the lower
classes. Sentimental expressions were not common in family
correspondence. Evidence of passion and love were absent, for
example, from the bourgeois family investigated by Renaissance
architect, poet and mathematician, Leon Battista Alberti (1404–72),
who was interested in the study of the mercantile classes. While
Boccaccio celebrated passion as a force of nature, Alberti described
it as a ‘fury’ and the ‘vice of an unstable soul’. In its place, the new
bourgeoisie was meant to live by values of reason and utility.
The Church’s ideas on marriage and family spread across the
Western Christian world, but they were mainly influenced by the
Italian social context. Among the basic rules were that monogamy
was right and divorce was wrong, that incest was a sin, and that
marriage between close kin was forbidden. Although the Church
began to develop a Christian doctrine for marriage in the twelfth
century, it was only at the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century
that theologians made the marriage contract binding. Before Trent,
the Church permitted the expression of mutual consent between
partners as the only requisite for valid marriage.
In medieval society, the typical aversion and distrust towards
women continued despite the increased number of female saints:
women were allegedly weak and prone to sin, and therefore needed
to be controlled and corrected. They needed to be admonished and
disciplined more than men because they were more susceptible to
the demon lust, which explains, for example, why cosmetics were
condemned with such great insistence. Sex played a central role in
the Christian idea of sin, and as a result women were regarded as a
major cause for concern. They were exhorted to surpass themselves
by imitating abstract models of sanctity or, when that was not
possible, to accept marital control and discipline – in either case, to
give themselves up. Nor did the humanist period bring substantial
changes. As Christopher Celenza has noted, the Renaissance
remained a ‘fundamentally misogynistic era’. Women’s virtues
(modesty, humility, obedience to man) were still private and
maternal – the virtues that had denied women active participation in
public life for centuries both before and after the Renaissance.
Indeed, humanists such as Alberti were intellectuals but also social
creatures, inevitably influenced by the habits and the ideals they
lived by.
Some historians suggested that, from the twelfth century
onwards, and gathering pace in the thirteenth, heresy became more
accessible to women. However, this has been questioned by recent
historiography, and the participation of women in religious life does
not seem generally to have followed unorthodox ways. In Italian
cities, groups of women gathered at the margins to live by preaching
and begging as Christ’s followers – the most famous example was
that of Chiara of Assisi; but they were not heretics. Many chroniclers
of the first jubilee in 1300 described a high female participation, and
it is now believed that at least a third of the pilgrims were women.
The gathering of women in pilgrimages had been witnessed long
before 1300, and it increased from that time and included women
drawn from different social classes. For this reason, cities began to
organize associations to welcome and act as hosts for women who
travelled on their own. Women did this for many reasons, not only
from religious devotion: a pilgrimage in which they travelled on their
own or in groups, sometimes facing long and hazardous journeys,
provided them with moments of freedom they could otherwise rarely
experience.
Some pious women became famous for their roles in important
political events. In Italy, the most famous was Catherine of Siena,
who hoped to end the schism in the Papacy, but she was not the
only one; those who followed her included Angela of Foligno and
Chiara of Montefalco. These women attained a real significance in
the political-religious field; the percentage of canonized women had
never been as high as it was during the last three centuries of the
Middle Ages, when about a quarter of all the new saints were
female, and many of them even wives and mothers. However, their
exclusion from serving mass and the sacraments within the official
Church was never seriously challenged.
In the fifteenth century, the fixation with magic phenomena that
had followed the plague began slowly to be replaced by a more
specific obsession – that of the Devil and his power over human
beings. Miracles and the desire for miracles, though accepted by the
Church’s official culture, had already begun to raise suspicions in the
thirteenth century, as the work of Jean–Claude Schmitt shows. While
these concerns existed in every medieval century, in 1232, under
Pope Gregory IX, enquiries over sanctity began to include official
questions designed to verify that the miracle was not the work of the
Devil, while women who devoted themselves to magic or spells were
accused of being possessed by the Devil. The beginning of witch-
hunting, which raged through Europe from the fifteenth to the
seventeenth centuries (though it was never strong in Italy), can be
traced back to the equation of magic with heresy established by
Pope John XXII in the fourteenth century with the bull Super Illius
Specula of 1326, though it was officially promoted only in 1484–6
with Innocent VIII’s bull Malleus Maleficarum. At the same time,
magic and astrology continued to prosper. This was partly for
political reasons in Italian cities, where both communes and signorie
paid magicians and astrologers to cast evil spells on rival cities, and
between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, astrology was very
popular in universities and courts all over Italy.
By the sixteenth century, the spirituality and prestige of female
sanctity had lost its importance. As a consequence of the
Reformation and Counter–Reformation, facts, arguments and
theological preparation became more important than divine
inspiration. In the seventeenth century, as female spirituality
continued to be regarded, as always, with suspicion, the place of
women was no longer the altar but the torture chamber of the
Inquisition and the stake. The nocturnal excursions of witches had
replaced the inspired ecstasy of spiritual women as an image of
womanhood.

THE ITALIAN LANGUAGE IN THE AGE OF DANTE AND PETRARCH

The culture of the Italian communes reached its highest point with
the poetry of Dante Alighieri. All the aspects of medieval life (social,
philosophical, religious, political, artistic and scientific) converge in
his work. Born in Florence in 1265 to a family from the minor Guelph
nobility, he studied rhetoric with Brunetto Latini and became friends
with Stil Novo (New Style) poets such as Guido Cavalcanti. Married,
as was normally the case, according to his father’s will, he instead
loved Beatrice, who was married to another man and who died in
1290. To this love he dedicated many New Style sonnets – for
example, Rime and Vita Nuova – a book which contains some of his
most beautiful poems, such as Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare. He
took an active part in Florentine political life, which was
characterized at the time by the aggression between two alliances:
the Bianchi, who maintained the need for autonomy, and the Neri,
linked to the Papacy by mercantile interests. Dante sided with the
Bianchi, and had to leave the city after the ferocious repression that
followed the Neri victory under Pope Boniface VIII. He lived in exile
at the courts of northern Italian cities such as Verona (with
Bartolomeo Della Scala), Treviso and in Lunigiana, and it was as an
exile that he wrote The Divine Comedy, the Convivio, and Literature
in the Vernacular.
With Vita Nuova, Dante created the first text of Italian literature
to contain love poems as well as political and philosophical rhymes,
all of which took the lyric tradition to its highest level; in the
Convivio, he offered one of the first models of scientific-philosophical
prose in the vernacular, and in the Divine Comedy an unparalleled
example of poetry and narration. Finally, in Literature in the
Vernacular, he defended the vernacular and determined its literary
tradition. The Divine Comedy in particular constituted an element of
Italian identity that involved all social classes, and it remained a
watershed of moral and political judgement as well as artistic
expression in the centuries that followed.
The theme of Literature in the Vernacular, written in Latin, is the
definition of a literary vernacular, bringing Latin and other forms of
expression together, as well as a review of rhetorical forms (metrics
and style) to be used in the new Italian language. The work, written
in 1303/4, was unfinished (it was intended to be divided into four
volumes, but Dante did not complete even the second). In it, Dante
demonstrates the nobility of vernacular, which he regarded as
superior even to classical Latin, which in his view was an artificial
language:
We shall hasten on to define the vernacular as that which children learn from those
around them, when they first begin to distinguish words; or, more briefly, that which we
acquire without any rule, by imitating our nurses. From this we have another, secondary
language, which the Romans called ‘grammar’ . . . Now of these two the nobler is the
vernacular, first because it was the first type to be used by the human race; secondly
because the whole world employs it, albeit divided into different pronunciations and
forms of expression; finally because it is natural to us, while the latter is more an
artificial creation.
(Alighieri, 1981, Book I, p. 15)

After acknowledging the formation in southern Europe of three

languages, oc, oïl and sì, Dante turned his attention to the
vernacular of sì, which was spoken in Italy. He analysed fourteen
varieties of vernacular on a linguistic and geographical basis, none of
which corresponded to the illustrious vernacular used by writers.
Consequently, it became necessary to define it in its ideal
characteristics, which could not be found in any specific region but in
the work of the best writers:
Now we have hunted over the glades and pastures of Italy without finding the panther
we are tracking, let us pursue it in a more rational way, that we may with diligent care
trap in our nets this creature whose scent is everywhere and whose person nowhere . . .
And so having reached our goal, we may say that it is an illustrious, cardinal, courtly and
curial vernacular in Italy, which belongs to every city in Italy and is not seen to be the
property of any one, by and against which the vernaculars of all Italian towns are
measured and weighed and compared.
(Alighieri, 1981, Book I, pp. 33–4)

According to Dionisotti, Literature in the Vernacular proposed an

ideal linguistic and literary unity, a unity that could be based on
existing varieties of language, but could at the same time surpass
them.
In the nineteenth century, when Italian intellectuals supported the
idea of a united nation, they looked on Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio
and the Renaissance humanists as the founders of the language.
They believed that only a common native language could become
the true vehicle for the transmission of a national culture; as a
result, as Christopher Celenza has emphasized, the study of
Renaissance Latin was doomed. Despite the importance of the first
examples of Italian vernacular (and despite these nineteenth-century
preferences), it is indeed necessary to remember that, during the
Renaissance, Latin remained a universal language, and all
humanists, just like medieval writers, were bilingual.
More than any other work of Italian literature, Dante’s Divine
Comedy was disseminated immediately and extensively. It was
promptly transcribed and commented on, read among the nobility,
studied in intellectual circles, and sung by people in the streets. Its
spread took it to differing cultural and social milieux and to a wide
geographical area. Multiple copies were made in response to popular
demand, produced by fourteenth-century amanuenses and writers
as well as by simple workers in Florentine copyist shops, all of which
helped to increase commercial circulation. In the sixteenth century,
by which time printing was well established, the philologist Vincenzo
Borghini wrote that Florentine copyists ‘were mainly people who had
a shop and earned their living by copying and selling books; and it is
said that one of them married off I don’t know how many daughters
by producing one hundred copies of Dante’.
The fantastic journey through the afterlife of hell, purgatory and
heaven described in the book (a typical motif of both classical and
medieval literature) was intended as a liberation from sin. Dante’s
work is divided into 100 cantos grouped into three parts: the 34
Inferno cantos, one of which is an introduction to the work in its
entirety, and two further parts of 33 cantos each. Virgil leads Dante
through hell and purgatory, and Beatrice, the dead woman he loved,
leads him to heaven, completing a journey from the knowledge of
evil to the experience of the sacred good. It is striking that Dante’s
afterlife, particularly in Inferno, is connected to and determined by
life on earth. In the episode of Farinata and Cavalcante (Inferno, X),
Dante is led by Virgil to the heretics’ and atheists’ circle, where he
converses with Farinata, the head of the Ghibelline in Florence, who
died shortly after Dante’s birth, and with Cavalcante de’ Cavalcanti,
the poet and father of Dante’s friend, Guido Cavalcanti. Despite
being condemned to live in hell, Farinata has not changed his views,
and his chief thoughts are for the political conflict in Florence. Erich
Auerbach has argued that the same is true for Cavalcante, entirely
absorbed by the passions of his earthly life, primarily by his love and
concerns for his son. Similarly, Guido da Montefeltro asks of the
poet: ‘Say, if the Romagnouls have peace or war’ (Inferno, XXVII).
Gradually, interpretation of the Comedy also assumed a metaphorical
character. Sandro Botticelli (1445–1510), the greatest Florentine
painter of the late fifteenth century, produced a long series of
paintings of the Comedy. But, in Botticelli’s representation, Inferno is
peopled with writhing and contorted human beings, a depiction
intensified in Purgatory, while Paradise has images of the saved in
various states of ecstasy, surrounded by a sumptuous and unreal
landscape.
The success of The Divine Comedy decided the question of the
language: it signified the ascendancy of Tuscan and the beginning of
the decline to the status of dialect of the other Italian spoken
languages. The Divine Comedy was followed by Petrarch’s
Canzoniere and Boccaccio’s Decameron, both written in Tuscan and
adopted as models elsewhere shortly afterwards. As Dante
acknowledged, this new Italian language was based on the Sicilian
tradition of the thirteenth century, disseminated in Tuscany and
transcribed in Tuscan versions. With Florentine merchants trading all
over Italy, and with the nomadic life of many intellectuals who, like
Petrarch and Boccaccio, went into exile because of internal political
struggles, the superiority of Tuscan was established by the end of
the fourteenth century. It was then that a unitary literary language
was established throughout urban Italy. Dante, Petrarch and
Boccaccio were imitated in every centre of high culture in both
northern and southern Italy. The Venetian publisher, Aldus Manutius,
played a fundamental role in the spread of the language by
publishing accessible copies of Dante’s and Petrarch’s works in 1501–
2.
Another of Dante’s historical and political concerns was the
destiny of Rome, which appears at a number of points in The Divine
Comedy and forms the main theme of the third part of his treatise
De Monarchia. This was written in Latin and consisted of three
books; in the first, Dante argued, with reference to ancient writers
such as Homer and Aristotle, that universal monarchy was necessary
for the wellbeing of humankind; in the second, that supreme
authority belonged to the Roman people; and in the third, that the
Emperor, as the titular head of the Roman monarchy, and the Pope,
as the head of Christianity, were independent of each other, and that
both received their authority from God. The right of the Romans to
dominate the world, wrote Dante, came from both earthly and divine
sources. The Roman people, he argued, had been the most noble
and virtuous, and power should be a prize awarded to the virtuous.
Perfection could also be attained with the aid of miracles, and, as
miracles pleased God, they were clear signs of His will; since the
Roman Empire had also reached its perfection with the help of
miracles, then its perfection must be desired by Providence. Stories
of these miracles, like the Capitoline geese that saved Rome from
the Gauls, or the hail that stopped the Carthaginians, were reported
by Livy and other ancient writers. Dante mixed these points with
more rational ones, in particular the history of Roman law and the
thoughts of Cicero. The most significant and modern part of the
work is in the third book, where Dante denies that the authority of
the Empire depended on that of the Church, ‘as a labourer depends
on the architect’. Anticipating the scientific and philological work of
the humanists, he proclaimed that the Constantine donation must be
a forgery, on the grounds that the Emperor could not donate
territory to the Church since it would contravene the duty entrusted
to him to maintain undivided rule over his subjects (‘it is illegal for
the Emperor to divide the Empire’); and the Church could not accept
it because Christ had refused temporal power (‘my kingdom is not of
this world’). The figure of Dante pervaded Tuscan culture even
before the poet’s death in 1321, and continued to do so long after
that date.
Giovanni Boccaccio was born in 1313 in Tuscany, the illegitimate
son of an unknown mother who was brought up by his father, a
merchant and member of the Neapolitan Banco de’ Bardi. While very
young, he was sent to work in Naples with the Bardi, the bank of the
Anjou court. There he came into contact with merchants, sailors and
members of the lower classes as well as the nobility, and acquired a
knowledge of the habits of the different social classes of the
Mediterranean, of which Naples was a major economic and political
centre. After this experience, he lived partly in Florence and partly in
the Romagna, and it was in Florence in 1348 that he witnessed the
terrible plague described in the introduction to the Decameron,
which he began writing the following year. The background to the
work is the plague, an event that disrupted the daily life and habits
of ordinary people in extreme ways; many of the characters in the
novellas were still living, or had died only recently. The action is set
in precisely defined places, generally the cities of Italy’s merchant
and bourgeois class such as Venice, Naples or Siena. The reader of
Decameron will not find wars, knights, heroes, or conflicts between
Church and Empire in its pages, but rather the active bourgeoisie of
the Italian communes, with its convictions, tastes and daily
existence. Only after it had been described by Boccaccio did the
merchant class begin to be part of Italian literature.
Descriptions of the experience of love in Decameron categorically
abandoned the court tradition and became characterized by
everyday gossip. Love in the Decameron is wholly human and
physical. Boccaccio also described the erotic adventures of
churchmen, generally priests who made love to married women and
organized diversions to keep their husbands away. However, the
Decameron distinguished between the clergy and the sacred: only
the former was mocked. This was typical of society at that time,
when criticism and mockery of the Church was widespread, but
never entailed a lack of respect for the traditional Christian heritage.
Following the principles of De Vulgari Eloquentia, Boccaccio explored
a spoken vernacular with idioms from different Italian dialects
(literary critics refer to his ‘multilingualism’): some novellas are
characterized by typical expressions from Bologna, Genoa, Pisa,
Naples, Sicily and so on. Building on Dante’s work, he therefore
realized in the Decameron a linguistic geography of fourteenth-
century Italy. As critics have pointed out, the Decameron could never
have been written without Dante’s Divine Comedy; Boccaccio
brought Dante’s lively world and language to a stylistic level that was
less scholarly and more popular. However, it is important to notice
that, after writing the Decameron, Boccaccio continued to write in
Latin. The evolution towards the vernacular was indeed not
considered inevitable by his contemporaries. Moreover, Latin could
communicate to an international audience, it was more linguistically
stable, and had a long tradition (which was linked to the history of
ancient Rome, symbol of the glorious origin of Italy).
 Box 3.4 Frate Alberto (Decameron)
In Frate Alberto (the second novella of day IV), a priest
persuades a gullible Venetian popolana that an angel has fallen
in love with her and wishes to visit her at night while her
husband is busy in Flanders on merchant business. For several
nights, the priest disguises himself as an angel and enjoys
intimate encounters, which the popolana appears to like. He is
finally exposed through the gossip between her and other
Venetian women, who do not believe the story of the angel. The
dialogues, as in many of the novellas, include both popular
language and the use of dialect.

In contrast with Dante and Boccaccio, Petrarch created a new

type of intellectual – the ‘pure’ scholar, detached from social
commitment and devoted only to his inner life and his poetry. In a
country torn for centuries by tyranny, internal wars and foreign
domination (and later by the Catholic Counter–Reformation from the
sixteenth century) this attitude became both convenient and
dominant. Much more than Dante, whose political horizon was that
of the universal powers and the city-states, Petrarch had a precise
idea of an Italy to which he dedicated the famous canzone, Italia
mia, benché ‘l parlar sia indarno. This poem deplores the continuous
civil wars in Italy and the use of German armies, themes that were
later taken up by Machiavelli and Guicciardini. The conclusion asks of
the arrogant lords who ruled the courts and made the wars:
Who will defend me?
I cry out with pain: Peace, peace, peace.

Box 3.5 Petrarchism

The renewal of vernacular poetry in the second half of the
fifteenth century was based on the imitation of Petrarch. In
1501, the Venetian humanist Pietro Bembo edited the
Canzoniere, which became a fashionable book that was reprinted
 167 times over the century. Since then, Petrarchism has become
the compulsory precept of Italian and some European lyric
poetry, expressing a taste for an elaborate and affected form
much used by lesser poets. Its decline began with the rise of
romanticism, and the return of sincerity and ‘inspiration’ as
central poetic concerns. In Zibaldone (1817–32), the poet
Giacomo Leopardi observed that Petrarch had been imitated so
much ‘that we have heard each of his sentences a thousand
times, to the point where he himself seems to be an imitator’.

Francesco Petrarch was born in 1304 in Arezzo, where his father, a

notary, had moved two years previously after being exiled from
Florence when the Neri faction prevailed over the Bianchi. He moved
between different parts of Italy and France, particularly Avignon
(during the time of the Popes), where he met Laura, the inspiration
for his poetry, as Beatrice had been for Dante. In 1350, on his way
to Rome to take part in that year’s jubilee, he met Boccaccio in
Florence, and subsequently exchanged many letters with him that
are revealing about both his personality and his poetry. A typical
problem for Italian intellectuals was the sense of having a divided
identity, caused by the physical presence of the Roman Church.
Petrarch was torn between his love for literature and admiration for
classical culture, and his religious sense of guilt. In the last year of
his life, he denounced his love for Laura, an act that stimulated him
to write the Canzoniere, his principal poetic work. Women became,
for Petrarch too, a source of corruption.
Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio all dedicated verses to Italy,
representing the country as a wounded and defiled woman. For
example, in Literature in the Vernacular, Dante counterposed
German political unity (which existed in his imagination rather than
in reality) with Italian cultural unity: ‘although we lack a Prince, it
would be false to say that the Italians have no Court, since we have
one indeed, albeit spatially dispersed’. Later in the sixteenth century,
at the end of The Prince, Machiavelli called on the Medici to liberate
all Italy, rather than just Florence. From the thirteenth to the
eighteenth centuries, long before the Risorgimento, there was a
sense of belonging to an Italian literary community, founded on the
civilization of the courts as the rich literary heritage of the age of
Dante.

THE BIRTH OF AN ITALIAN CUISINE

Recipes for food also cultivated links between different parts of Italy.
From the thirteenth century, dried pasta was widely used in Liguria;
before that, its production was restricted to Sicily, where it had
probably been brought by the Arabs, who had known the technique
from the early Middle Ages. The term ‘macaroni’ was used for the
first time in Liguria in the thirteenth century for dried pasta, drawn
into long strips with a hole through the middle, which could be
preserved for some time. In the fourteenth century, documents from
Genoa mention ‘lasagna makers’ and show that dried pasta had
become part of the rations on ships. Other regions, beginning with
Apulia, started producing long-life dried pasta in the fifteenth
century, and it became popular, first in Naples and then throughout
Italy, from the seventeenth century. A science of gastronomy was
developed from the fourteenth century, anticipating the culinary
boom during the Renaissance.
The Renaissance was the golden age of Italian cuisine, a model
much imitated abroad – at least among the elite. The development
of regional recipes began to spread, creating a Po Valley tradition, a
Roman–Tuscan tradition and so on. Their European hegemony
continued until the beginning of the seventeenth century, when
Italian cuisine fell from favour and was replaced in elite fashion by
French cooking. One of the most famous cookery books of the late
Middle Ages was the Sicilian Liber de Coquina, written in a form of
spoken Latin full of vernacular terms. It was the progenitor of a
number of gastronomic treatises written in vernacular throughout
Italy in the fourteenth century. The Tuscan Libro di cucina was
largely a translation of the Liber into vernacular, and the Venetian
Libro del cuoco also carried recipes from the Liber in Venetian
dialect. These works circulated throughout Italy, in large numbers, in
the most sophisticated circles, some of them being destined for
professional cooks. The first culinary expansion, from Frederick II’s
territory to the rest of Italy, occurred initially in those areas that
were politically connected with the Emperor; for example, through
Ghibelline governments. Historians have emphasized the connection
between the birth of Tuscan poetry and the Ghibelline environment.
Among the elite of the thirteenth century there was an aspiration
towards a more sophisticated and sumptuous way of life, and
Frederick II was seen as a model among Italy’s elite. With the end of
the Norman domination in the south and the arrival of the Anjou, the
tradition of dietary treatises and gastronomic literature continued in
other parts of Italy, particularly in Tuscany, the region that had been
closest to Frederick II. The new culinary writing in the vernacular
traced a similar route from Sicily to the north that had earlier been
taken by Sicilian poetry.

Box 3.6 Culture at the court of Frederick II

At the time of Frederick II . . . men in Italy were almost primitive
and lived in the most miserable and shabby way. And this
Frederick renewed and refined and instructed everything, and,
among all emperors, was gifted with beautiful, noble and
adorned habits.
(Thirteenth-century chronicler Jacopo D’Acqui,
in De Stefano, 2007, p. 10)

Like most contemporary novels, Boccaccio’s Decameron made

numerous references to food (for example, VIII, 3; IV, 9; V, 9). The
fourteenth-century aspirations to luxury and a comfortable life
pervaded literature and also found expression in minor poetry. For
example, the poet Folgore of San Giminiano described groups of
people who shared a love of banquets and the pleasures of life
without vulgarity and with good taste, sustained by the virtue of
generosity and free of religious restraint. However, in Esposizioni
sopra la Comedia di Dante, Boccaccio later condemned the excesses
of food consumption and the proliferation of banquets among both
laymen and the clergy. At the same time, new social figures emerged
around the culture of food, with the stable employment of
professional cooks in aristocratic families. In the mid-thirteenth
century it was evident how luxurious Sicilian cuisine had become
fashionable at rich people’s banquets in Florence: ravioli, lasagne,
macaroni, citrus fruits, dates, almonds and spices, as well as
medicinal products such as the Arab-influenced syrups.
As Anna Martellotti has observed, ‘cooks travelled and gourmands
were everywhere’: among the Popes’ chefs at Avignon there was a
Florentine; and the chef Chichibio, protagonist of one of Boccaccio’s
most famous novels, set in Florence, was Venetian. Written treatises
as well as oral tradition brought Sicilian cuisine to the whole of
northern Italy; Venetian cookery books reproduced Sicilian dishes,
and Tuscan cookery books strongly influenced by Sicily appeared in
Bologna. As Sicilian poetry became Tuscan, and Tuscan literature in
turn became Italian, so Sicilian cuisine was transmitted to the whole
of Italy, showing that dietary fashions developed alongside other
cultural and scientific developments.

SELECTED FURTHER READING

J. Larner, Italy in the Age of Dante and Petrarch, 1216–1380 (London: Longman, 1980) is a
recommended introduction, which should be followed by T. Dean (ed.), The Towns of Italy
in the Later Middle Ages (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), an immensely
useful selection of primary sources, which have been introduced and contextualized. First
published in Italy in 1979, G. Tabacco, The Struggle for Power in Medieval Italy: Structures
of Political Rule (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) covers the political and
social history of Italy from the early Middle Ages to the Renaissance. L. Martines, Power and
Imagination: City–States in Renaissance Italy (London: Pimlico, 2002) is a lively and
thought-provoking work on the nature of the Italian city states from the origins of the
communes to the high Renaissance. Two important books on Italian society, family and
gender relations are D. D’Avray, Medieval Marriage: Symbolism and Society (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2005) and P. Skinner, Women in Medieval Italian Society, 500–1200
(Harlow: Longman, 2001).
 4
........
Renaissance Italy:
From the European Model
to the ‘End of Italy’?

CHRONOLOGY
1501 Louis XII of France occupies Naples
1503–4 Spain occupies the kingdom of Naples and expels the French
1512 End of the republic in Florence, return of the Medici
1515 Third French invasion by Francis I, occupation of Milan
1519 Charles V elected Emperor
Sack of Rome by German and Spanish troops. Restoration of the republic in
1527
Florence
1530 Medici restored to power in Florence by Charles V
1540 Pope Paul III approves the Society of Jesus (Jesuits)
1542 Establishment of the Roman Inquisition
1545 Milan under the rule of Philip II, son of Charles V
1545–
Council of Trent (3 sessions: 1545–7; 1551–2; 1562–3)
63
1555–9 Pontificate of Paul IV Carafa
1556–
Milan, Naples, Sicily and Sardinia under Philip II (successor to Spanish Empire)
98
Peace of Cateau–Cambrésis recognizes Spanish hegemony over most of Italy;
1559
Pope Paul IV issues the Index of forbidden books
1563 Savoy capital moves from Chambéry to Turin
1571 Battle of Lepanto: the Western states defeat the Turkish fleet
ITALIAN POLITICS IN THE FIFTEENTH AND SIXTEENTH CENTURIES

For European monarchies in possession of solid armies and finances,

Italy was a kind of promised land. The peninsula’s political
fragmentation encouraged ambitions for conquest. Italian states
attempted to avert foreign occupation with the constitution of an
Italian League in 1454, in the hope of maintaining a balance by
avoiding internal wars and in defence of what they publicly called
‘Italian liberty’. This balance was, however, very fragile, and the
period between the end of the fifteenth century and 1559 is known
as that of the ‘Italian wars’, during which France, Spain and the
Germanic Empire fought each other on Italian territory. Paradoxically,
it was during this terrible period that Italy experienced the period of
the high Renaissance. Historian and politician Francesco Guicciardini
(1483–1540) observed that the multiplicity of capital cities and
princely courts in the regional states guaranteed Italy’s political and
cultural polycentrism, without which the Renaissance would probably
have been impossible. He therefore concluded that the absence of a
unified monarchy had perhaps been an advantage for Italy:
But the misfortunes of Italy . .. tended to stir up men’s minds with all the more
displeasure and dread inasmuch as things in general were at that time most favorable
and felicitous . . . Not only did Italy abound in inhabitants, merchandise and riches, but
she was also highly renowned for the magnificence of many princes, for the splendour of
so many most noble and beautiful cities, as the seat and majesty of religion, and
flourishing with men most skillful in the administration of public affairs and most nobly
talented in all disciplines and distinguished and industrious in all the arts.
(Guicciardini, 1969, Book I, pp. 3–4)

The fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries in Europe were a time of

cultural dynamism, confessional struggles and religious wars. The
Renaissance and the Reformation were the result of a deep crisis in
European civilization – they represented perhaps the greatest
historical shifts since the beginning of the Middle Ages and before the
Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. They brought about the
revolutionary affirmation of rational thought and the crisis of religious
authority. The Renaissance aspired to new intellectual and political
forms, which suggested the need to wrest power from clerics in
religious matters and give it to the people; often, this meant the
subjection of religious to secular power. The Reformation was
powered by a deep religious feeling, and aimed at breaking the
compromises that had made the Church a temporal power.
One aspect common to the whole of Italy in the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries was a unique way of conducting politics,
characterized by a complicated network of alliances, with
relationships based on dependence and the need for protection. This
complex web was constantly changing, as the desire for the
expansion of larger powers and the need for protection of smaller
ones could set off minor, or even major, local political ‘earthquakes’. It
was difficult, and at times impossible, for foreigners to understand
the rules that maintained and periodically altered this complicated
balance; in particular, it was a challenge for foreign diplomats, as the
French ambassador Philippe de Commynes (1447–1511) mentioned
in his Mémoirs.
As we saw in the previous chapter, the world of the central and
northern Italian city-states came to an end in the fifteenth century,
when dominant cities were able to control their surrounding territory
and create a small number of regional states. Some Italian states
remained republics, at least in name: Venice, Florence, Genoa, Siena
and Lucca. The republican institution had been praised by humanists
such as Leonardo Bruni (1369–1444), who defended freedom of
speech and the right of the virtuous to power. Republics did not
hamper the control by aristocratic families of city and regional state
governments, which continued to strengthen themselves throughout
the Renaissance period. In Venice, the elites remained quite distinct
from the middle classes, and aristocratic life continued to prosper, as
elsewhere.
The only city in which political participation was widely extended to
the middle classes was Florence, when the city underwent moments
of political crisis. In the second half of the fourteenth century, Milan
under the Visconti embarked on a campaign of expansion,
conquering most of Lombardy, Verona, Vicenza and Padua, Genoa,
and parts of Piedmont and of Emilia (including Bologna). After the
conquest of Carrara at the end of the 1380s, poets from different
Italian cities (such as Antonio Loschi from Vicenza, Francesco di
Vannozzo from Padua, and Saviano of Siena) celebrated Gian
Galeazzo Visconti (1351–1402) as a new ruler for the whole
peninsula, who could unify Italy and bring peace. Florence remained
the only city to oppose Milan. However, in 1402, a devastating plague
ravaged northern Italy, killing Gian Galeazzo. While the Milanese
expansion would probably have been halted in any case by the
economic exhaustion of the Visconti state (which, after new conflicts
with Venice and Florence, had already lost most of its territory by
1433), as Hans Baron has suggested, this event was interpreted by
the Florentines as though they had resisted Milan – the victory of a
city-republic against a tyranny. The Milanese–Florentine confrontation
demonstrated how Italian politics had become secularized: the
medieval divergence of Guelphs and Ghibellines – of Papacy and
Empire – had been replaced by one between dynastic expansion and
the ideal of free city-state. Conflict between Italian states seemed to
be resolved in 1454 with the Peace of Lodi, when the border between
Milan (then under the Sforza dynasty) and Venice was fixed at the
River Adda, and a non-aggression pact, named Lega Italica,
confirmed the division of Italy into the five major states of Milan,
Venice, Florence, Rome and Naples.
At the end of the fifteenth century, another moment of crisis for
Florence arose as a result of the revolutionary preaching of the
Dominican writer and politician Girolamo Savonarola (1452–98), who
argued that artisans and shopkeepers were the morally healthy
section of society, and attacked the privileges of the Church, for
which his writings were later listed in the Index of prohibited books;
his radical message could not last long, and political pressure both
inside and outside Florence (in the Papacy in particular) led to his
arrest in 1498; he was tortured and then hanged, and his body was
burnt in the Signoria square according to the will of Pope Alexander
VI. In the fifteenth century, Florence saw the rise of the Medici
dynasty, with Cosimo the Old (1389–1464) and Lorenzo the
Magnificent (1449–92, whose life coincided with the golden age of
the Florentine Renaissance), although only with Cosimo I (1519–74)
did it turn into a despotic state; by then, Florence had extended its
territory to most of the Tuscan region (including Pisa, Siena, Pistoia
and Arezzo, but not Lucca), and Cosimo was given the title of Grand
Duke of Tuscany in 1569 by Pope Pius V.
The other major republic of the fifteenth century, Venice, was a
state whose control expanded from the Po Valley to the Dalmatian
coast, and even to parts of Greece. Its mainland possessions
extended to Padua, Vicenza and Verona (incorporated between 1404
and 1406), the Veneto, Friuli and Dalmatia (between 1414 and 1423),
and Brescia and Bergamo (in 1428), up to the border with the
province of Milan. The republic had been established without external
help, and remained independent even when, from the seventeenth
century, most of Italy was conquered or under foreign control. The
republic controlled the Church by subordinating it to the government:
the Patriarch, head of the Venetian Church, was elected by the
senate rather than imposed by Rome; in order to fight the
Reformation and at the same time prevent excessive Papal
interference, Venice established its own Inquisition. By the beginning
of the eighteenth century, the population of the republic numbered
more than 2 million, 1.7 million of whom lived in mainland Italy.
Venice was still governed by an assembly of citizens, the Grand
Council, though its members were drawn mainly from prestigious
families. The Venetian aristocracy was so proud of the city’s
independence and power that it never accepted fiefs and honours
from any king, a common practice in the rest of Italy. Venice was the
first state to use permanent embassies at foreign courts; and the
ambassadors’ reports are one of the most important sources for the
study of contemporary European society. As the capital of a
Renaissance state, in 1600 Venice was still one of the largest cities in
Western Europe, despite the spread of the terrible plague during
1575–7.
The control of Venice’s mainland possessions was based on a
balance between oligarchic rule and local autonomy. Friuli maintained
a regional parliament, which decided on financial and military
matters. Local councils maintained power in Verona, Vicenza, Treviso
and Brescia. A study of the Brescian case has demonstrated how
Venetian attempts to increase control coexisted with the survival of a
plurality of powers. To a certain extent, the Venetians relied on local
aristocratic families to govern; Venetian and local aristocracies were
therefore not antithetical but complementary. Ruling families, with
their network of allies constructed through marriage ties, everywhere
maintained strong economic links with the countryside on which their
power continued to be based, even while they controlled urban
institutions.
In 1512, the Medici family, which had been in exile after a popular
revolt in 1494, returned to Florence, and began its inexorable march
towards hereditary rule, establishing itself definitively as a dukedom
under Cosimo I; principalities also existed in Ferrara under the Este,
Mantua under the Gonzaga, and Urbino under the Montefeltro. These
were prosperous states and very lively centres of humanism and the
arts. The Papal State continued the medieval, nepotistic style of rule
into the sixteenth century. In an Italy divided by rival families, the
Roman Church was always a fundamental ally, the point ‘of departure
and of arrival of each group, the aim and often the instrument of
court loyalty, the synthesis of any other court’s activity’, as Walter
Barberis has remarked. Court intellectuals sometimes chose
ecclesiastical careers in order to best serve their patron family, so
strong was the bond between powerful families and the politics of the
Church. Guicciardini, as a humanist and a republican Florentine,
ultimately hoped for the ruin of the Papal State; nevertheless, he was
entrusted with such important roles by the Medici popes (Leo X and
Clement VII) that his personal cause and that of the Popes eventually
coincided.
Italian signorie and regional states appear to historians as the
most modern of their time because of their economic and cultural
vitality, but also because they were not bound as vassals to the
medieval monarchies to the same extent as in the rest of Europe.
However, as Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) lamented, Italian states
were weak and separated; the strong state of the future was clearly
going to be born abroad. The unified monarchies of Castile and
Aragón was the first example of a modern state able to dominate the
conscience of its subjects. The re-establishment of the Spanish
Inquisition in 1478 served to maintain unity of race and faith by
persecuting the Jews, who were expelled from the country in their
hundreds of thousands in the last decade of the fifteenth century.
Repression then extended to the Muslim communities and political
dissenters. The Inquisition acted to crush all internal opposition to
the monarchy.
While Spain forged national unity under one crown, Italy remained
politically disunited, as well as the focus of both Spanish and French
expansionist policy. After the death of Alphonso of Aragón in 1458,
the French and Spanish monarchies fought several wars for
possession of Naples. In addition, in 1499, the French King Louis XII
occupied Milan on the basis that his grandmother was a Visconti.
After various vicissitudes, wars and shifting alliances, the French
gained control, though never a secure hold, over part of the Po
Valley, while the Spanish took the south – and ruled it from 1504 until
the eighteenth century.
A third great power returned to expand in Italy: the German
Empire. From 1356, the rules for electing emperors had changed in
Germany, to a system in which the seven leading vassal states in
Germany elected the Emperor, who retained the title ‘Emperor of the
Romans’ although the tradition of coronations in Rome had ended
and the Empire had become mainly Germanic, confined to Central
and Eastern Europe. However, when Ferdinand of Aragón died in
1516, he was succeeded by his grandson, Charles V, whose mother
had been married to a Habsburg. Charles had been brought up in the
Habsburg court, and found himself in control of Spain, Naples, Sicily
and Sardinia, as well as of the German Habsburg possessions – the
widest-controlled area in Europe since the Roman Empire. Wars for
the control of northern Italy between the Empire and France
followed; and when, in 1527, the Papacy backed the French King
Francis I, the imperial army besieged and sacked Rome. The ferocity
of the imperial mercenary soldiers (mainly Spanish, as well as many
Lutheran Germans) who killed innocent people, took hostages and
burnt books, provoked horror and outrage among Italian intellectuals,
who lamented the destruction caused by the ‘new barbarians’.
However, the sack of Rome did not leave long-term scars on the city
– which continued to augment its population, reaching about 125,000
inhabitants by the seventeenth century – or interrupt the flourishing
of Renaissance culture. For example, the autobiography of the
Florentine artist Benvenuto Cellini (1500–571), goldsmith and
metalworker, who helped to defend Rome before moving to Florence
and then Mantua, shows the capacity of artists to continue to work
and travel around Italy at a time of plague and war:
Because I have always taken great pleasure in seeing the world and had never been to
Mantua ... I departed with my father’s blessing, mounted my fine horse, and rode on him
to Mantua . . . Since the world was under the clouds of pestilence and war, I travelled to
Mantua with the greatest difficulty; when I arrived I sought to begin working; then I was
put to work by a certain Milanese master named Niccolò, who was the goldsmith of the
Duke of Mantua.
(Cellini, 2002, Book I, 40, p. 71)

On his abdication in 1556, Charles V divided his huge territory into

two kingdoms: the western and southern territories, including the
Italian possessions, were to be ruled by Philip II; and the German
territories (including Austria, Bohemia and Hungary) were to be
controlled by Ferdinand I. The year 1527 marked the beginning of
Spain’s political predominance in Italy. Under Charles V, baronial
power in Sicily and in the mainland south remained undisturbed.
Many Spanish aristocrats moved to Palermo, and Sicilian noble
families spent time in Madrid; these moves facilitated mixed
marriages and a blending of the political elites and their interests.
The viceroy government of Sicily had Castilian as its official language,
though communication with the population had to be in either Sicilian
dialect or Italian. Naples was a centre of major interest for the
Spanish regime, as it was a huge city with an important market in
both luxury and standard goods. Controlling the city was never easy
– mainly, as Chapter 5 will show, because of revolts (provoked by
economic conditions) among the lower strata of the population.
By 1600, Spain controlled 5 million of Italy’s 13 million inhabitants.
Both Charles V and Philip II continued to grant fiefs to Italy’s
powerful families; they also increased control over the Papacy, as
many barons from those families became cardinals. The Papacy
collaborated with Spain in its plans for an anti–Turkish reconquista –
Crusades sanctified by the Church against the Ottoman Empire.
Under the Spanish regime, Italy enjoyed an age of peace; but its
control lacked deep roots: Italian princes often sought to regain the
country’s freedom, with the major dynasties (of Este, Medici and
Gonzaga) being largely autonomous, Piedmont unreliable and Venice
always a potential enemy.
Map 4.1 Political divisions in Renaissance Italy
Source: adapted from Denis Hay and John Law, Italy in the Age of the Renaissance, 1380–
1530 (London: Longman, 1993), p. 352.
 In Piedmont, the Savoy dynasty decided to move its capital from
Chambéry to Turin, under Duke Emmanuel Filiberto, in 1564. During
the Reformation, the House of Savoy had begun to lose territory on
the other side of the Alps, and in 1533 Geneva rebelled against
Savoyard control and became a beacon of Calvinism. This led the
dynasty to concentrate its interests south of the Alps, towards the
sea and the Po Valley, where they controlled the duchy of Aosta,
Piedmont, and the county of Nice (nevertheless, in standard
sixteenth-century works, such as those of the Bolognese historian
Leandro Alberti, the Savoy dynasty was considered to be French and
not Italian). During the French occupation between 1536 and 1562,
Turin’s municipal authorities exercised more control over civil and
religious life than they had under the House of Savoy. The return of
Emmanuel Filiberto to Turin after the peace of Cateau–Cambrésis was
followed in 1564 by the nomination of a new Archbishop, Girolamo
Della Rovere, which re-established in the city a stable and long-
lasting religious-political axis. While the rest of the peninsula was
characterized by a very intense urbanization, Piedmont contained
only a small group of cities. At the end of the sixteenth century, only
Turin and Mondovì had more than 10,000 inhabitants, and very few
towns had more than 5,000, and the weakness of this urban fabric
favoured the dynasty’s policy of centralization. The House of Savoy
began to create a civil religion by promoting court ceremonies that
were not restricted to the cathedral but rather centred on different
churches, as a sign that they could ‘assimilate the entire religious
topography of the city’, as Paolo Cozzo has demonstrated. On the one
hand, some important municipal cults were transformed into state
cults; while on the other, the city incorporated the sacred elements
(sacralità) of the Savoy dynasty.
During the Renaissance, the Papal Court had become one of the
richest and worldliest in Europe; the scandalous and luxurious
lifestyle of many of its Popes and cardinals continued to provoke
protest among European intellectuals. The nepotistic system reached
its climax, and the city became one of the major centres of cultural
patronage. The 1498 alliance between Pope Alexander VI and the
French King Louis XII against the Milanese Sforza helped the Pope to
extend control over the Romagna. The military campaign against that
region, described by Machiavelli in The Prince, has been defined by
Volker Reinhardt as akin to a war of extermination. When the Sforza
family line died out in 1535, the Duchy of Milan passed to the Empire
and thence to Philip II, though the French only relinquished official
control over Lombardy in 1559, with the peace of Cateau–Cambrésis.
In the sixteenth century, it therefore seemed that Italy’s destiny
was to be decided by foreign powers. Contemporary intellectuals
debated whether Italy was finished: did it have to end that way?
Guicciardini replied in the negative: after many extraordinary cultural,
political and economic achievements, the country could not simply go
backwards. Indeed, during the sixteenth century, Italy continued to
be at the frontline of commercial expansion. Italian cities were still
the most advanced economies in Europe; Republican Venice was as
rich as absolutist Paris, with new palaces being built beside the Grand
Canal, and an amazing concentration of luxury shops between the
Rialto Bridge and St Mark’s Square. From Piedmont to Venice, Naples
and Salerno, Italian cities produced high-quality luxury goods that
were sold all over Europe. Their products were of outstanding design,
made with rare materials and highly worked by skilled artisans.
Foreign visitors were impressed by the intense level of horticultural
cultivation near the cities, with the introduction of exotic products
such as tomatoes, and began to consider Italy as a land of plenty.
This was true only of the upper classes, as most Italians ate mainly
bread and pasta. The frugality of their diet was evident when
compared with the larger, meat-eating northern European travellers.
As in the previous centuries, the relationship between city and
countryside continued to be very close. Peasant families could not
ignore the urban world of commerce and exchange, and when they
were not in the fields the peasants often took part in work as, for
example, blacksmiths, shoemakers and woodcutters.
Despite foreign political control, Italy was not subject to foreign
domination: its local institutions continued to exist; its elites
continued to exercise control over their territory and its
administration; its cultural achievements and way of life continued to
develop as singularly Italian, and the Italian ruling class continued to
be involved in commerce, banking and textile production. The
transfer of foreign elites into southern Italy was limited by the need
to maintain a good relationship with the local barons, and the
Aragonese court was already largely Italianized by the mid-fifteenth
century.
The four most influential Renaissance writers: Machiavelli, Jacopo
Sannazzaro (1457–1530), Baldassarre Castiglione (1478–1529) and
Ludovico Ariosto (1474–1533), chose to write their books in Italian
rather than in Latin. Their works had a profound influence abroad,
only surpassed by Petrarch’s love poems and Boccaccio’s Decameron.
The fact that their work was not in Latin – still an internationally
understood language – but in Italian was no obstacle at a time when
foreign students studied at Italian universities and educated travellers
visited Italian cities. Italian was in this period the best-known foreign
language, as French was to be from the seventeenth century
onwards.

RENAISSANCE AND HUMANISM

The dominant social groups in the city-states produced one of the

liveliest intellectual movements of the time: humanism. It appeared
initially in Florence and spread to the rest of the country, mobilizing
an intellectual elite in central and northern Italian cities and in
Naples. Humanists were part of (and addressed) the urban ruling
classes – noblemen, rich bourgeois, princes, prelates, professionals.
They were concerned with the study of classical Roman and (to a
lesser extent) Greek culture, embracing all fields of knowledge, but
with a particular interest in the humanities and in the study of
society. They taught public men the art of rhetoric, intended as the
art of persuasion in both speaking and writing. From the middle of
the fourteenth century, they began to use the word ‘Renaissance’,
creating an imagery of renewal to mark their sense of living in an age
of regeneration, of ‘re-emergence into light after what they were the
first to call “dark ages”’, as Peter Burke has noted. By studying
ancient urban history, they identified ‘civilization’ with urbanism and
classicism. Everything that came between the Roman age and the
Renaissance was described as ‘barbarism’. To the medieval mentality,
the classical age had been too far in the past, but at the same time
still too present, to be considered as a historical phenomenon. On the
one hand, there was the continuity of tradition; for example, the
Germanic Emperor was considered to be a direct successor to Caesar
and Augustus; but on the other hand, there was an unbridgeable
abyss between pagan and Christian civilizations. Those two opposed
tendencies were not yet sufficiently balanced to allow an attitude of
historical detachment, which humanists thought they now possessed.
Believing that their own cities were the renewal of classical cities,
humanists praised their own time too – and their own ruling classes.
Classicism also involved the study of the language. Latin was
considered to be the only lively sign of Roman domination, as it was
still known throughout Europe. The attempt to study Latin texts in
their historical context prompted the application of fine philological
techniques, and the birth of classical scholarship. Early Florentine
humanists, at the beginning of the fifteenth century, despised
vernacular writers and considered even Dante and Petrarch to be
inferior to ancient writers. However, by studying Latin, they began to
explore its development and different stages, just as Dante had done,
coming to recognize, as Martines puts it, ‘the historicity of language’.
In a study of the crisis of the early Renaissance, Hans Baron has
demonstrated how humanists in their first (Latin) phase, tended to
become detached from their own age – particularly in Florence during
the period of political crisis in the fourteenth and the fifteenth
centuries. In the following decades, when the threat of a Milanese
invasion had been overcome, the city humanists began to see
Florence as a new Rome, and recognized that classical ideals ‘could
serve as an ethic of social engagement for citizens in their own
modern states’: civic humanism strengthened local city patriotism.
This development coincided with a new appreciation of Dante’s
theories of the vernacular. Also, humanists began to consider Petrarch
as an example of both an expert in, and an enthusiast about
classicism, as he had assembled the greatest collection of Latin
classics known at the time, even surpassing the Papal library. Both
Dante and Petrarch had seen Rome as the exemplar of Italy’s glories
and virtues.
In the second half of the fifteenth century, the libraries of Lorenzo
the Magnificent and Pope Nicholas V had become the main
custodians of Greek texts, and Greek began to be taught in the most
important Italian universities, though it only became common for
Italian humanists to understand Greek in the sixteenth century. The
belief was that the study of classical texts could be the basis for the
creation of a political science suited to the present times, and this
was often linked to a need to secularize politics. Serious study of
ancient texts resulted in the discovery, by the Roman humanist
Lorenzo Valla (1407–57), that the Constantine donation was a
forgery. He demonstrated that the donation was full of anachronisms,
including the fact that it was written in a Latin so crude that it did not
conform to that of Constantine’s time, and that it cited towns that in
Constantine’s time had not yet been founded. Valla’s work was
reprinted in 1518, a year after Martin Luther’s reformation
programme, and contributed to the spread of hatred against the
Church. The question of the fake donation at the beginning of the
modern age made it clear that the false document, the testimony of
Papal temporal power, was an Italian question, inextricably linked to
the country that hosted what the bishops believed to be St Peter’s
heirs. Places and monuments mentioned in medieval literature in
relation to Constantine and Pope Sylvester happened to be in Rome
and in other Italian cities, from the north-east (Grado and Aquileia) to
the north-west (Tortona in Piedmont) to the centre and centre-south
(Ostia, Tivoli, Capua and Naples), to the extreme south and Sardinia.
Ariosto mentioned the donation, recalling Dante’s scepticism, in his
Orlando Furioso. Machiavelli, who was passionate about Dante and
interested in the religious question, was no longer concerned with the
donation, which had for him, at that point, no meaning, but with the
substantial problem of the presence of the Papacy on Italian territory.
In the fourth book of the Storia d’Italia, Guicciardini provided a
synthesis of the donation question, using it as a pretext for a long
digression on the origins and the history of the papal temporal
power:
 On these foundations and by these means, raised to secular power, little by little
forgetting about the salvation of souls and divine precepts, and turning all their thoughts
to worldly greatness, and no longer using their spiritual authority except as an instrument
and minister of temporal power, they began to appear rather more like secular princes
than popes.
(Guicciardini, 1969, Book IV, p. 149)

The work was not published until 1561, more than twenty years after
Guicciardini’s death, and various parts were censored. The first
unabridged version was only published in the second half of the
eighteenth century. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the
Calabrian philosopher Tommaso Campanella (1569–1639) defended
the Pope against Machiavelli, supporting an anachronistic vision of
the Pope’s superiority over state power. By then, the debate on the
donation had been replaced by a debate on Papal power, and had
assumed the marked characteristic of a primarily Italian question.
Alongside the religious problem, both Machiavelli and Guicciardini
investigated the history of Italy and the reasons for its divisions.
Machiavelli, who revolutionized political thought, came from a noble
Florentine family and received some education in the humanities. In
1494, after Charles VIII of France had invaded Italy and entered
Florence, Piero de’ Medici was expelled, accused of having accepted
the king’s conditions, and the Florentines proclaimed the republic.
Machiavelli proposed his own candidature as secretary of the
republic, but was defeated by a candidate supported by Savonarola.
Machiavelli, who considered religion only in its external forms
(institutions) and not for its moral values, had no understanding of
the mystical character of Savonarola’s preaching, and despised him as
an ecclesiastical man: only a politician, not a prophet, could lead a
republic.
After Savonarola had been accused of heresy and executed,
Machiavelli became secretary of the republic and began his missions
to Italian and European states to gather information for the city
about other governments’ policies. In 1506 he followed Julius II’s
campaign against Perugia and Bologna as an observer, and from
there he developed some of the ideas he later presented in The
Prince; in particular, that ‘good’ and ‘bad’ policies did not exist, but
only policies that could be either useful or damaging to the security
of the state. In 1509, when Julius II acquired the Romagna,
Machiavelli understood the risk that Papal expansionism posed to the
Florentine republic, and described the Pope’s political and military
activity as a ‘disastrous fury’.
In 1513, the Medici returned to power and Machiavelli was
imprisoned, tortured and confined to a villa in the countryside, where
he began to work on his most famous treatise, The Prince. When his
relationship with the Medici improved, in 1520 Pope Clement VII
commissioned from him a history of Florence (Istorie fiorentine), in
which Machiavelli illustrated the advantages of a national army over
mercenary troops. He had already addressed this question in the
Discourses on Livy (1512–19), in which he argued that the modern
state ought to imitate the ancient Roman citizen militia.
The Prince consists of twenty-six chapters, which can be divided
into four parts. In the first (I-XI) Machiavelli described how to gain
and maintain a new state; in the second (XII-XIV) he examined the
art of war; in the third (XV-XXIV) – the most important part of the
treatise – he analysed the qualities necessary in the art of
government, concluding with the idea that the Prince should ignore
traditional moral requirements, as these often do not correspond to
political necessity; and in the final part, chapter XXV discusses the
role of ‘fortune’ – the obstacles that could hinder the realization of
the state – while chapter XXVI concludes with a call to Lorenzo de’
Medici to take up arms against foreign rule and liberate Italy. Having
seen at first hand how other European states functioned, Machiavelli
began to raise the question of Italian unity as a political necessity.
The chapter ends with the final verses of Petrarch’s poem Italia mia.
Machiavelli freed politics from the moralistic aspects of medieval
theology, and his Prince symbolized humanistic individualism.
However, as Chabod suggested, even more than unification,
Machiavelli called for a state that could ‘defend Italy from the
barbarians’. In 1521, Machiavelli met Guicciardini, a Florentine
humanist from a family very close to the Medici, with whom he began
an intense correspondence. Though Guicciardini did not believe in
formulating universal laws for politics, he did regard history as an
entirely earthly variable, which had to be freed from Papal and
medieval religion.

ARTISTS AND ARCHITECTS

Humanists were not only political thinkers or historians, but also

artists, architects and inventors. They observed that the medieval city
was not constructed organically; its Romanesque and Gothic
monuments were spread around cities in no order, mixed with houses
and other buildings. Renaissance artists developed a system of
representation based on linear perspective between the 1420s and
1440s, and began preparing plans to redesign cities to make them
more symmetrical and geometric. The first Italian writers on art and
art theory, such as Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378–1455), Leon Battista
Alberti (1404–72) and Giorgio Vasari (1511–74), believed that
classical art had been destroyed at the beginning of the Christian
age, as a result of the barbarian invasions and the hostility of the
Church, but had been reborn as the mainstay of the Renaissance
style.
Traditional classical themes were utilized in a variety of Christian
images, so that classical mythology was revived, but incorporated
simultaneously into Christian allegories. In the early Renaissance,
Boccaccio had been the first to return to ancient sources and to
demonstrate a critical and scientific approach to classical art; some of
his writings, such as Genealogia deorum, define him as the precursor
of scientific Renaissance treatises. However, the revival of classicism
was most evident in architecture; this was not surprising in Italy,
where numerous classical buildings had survived almost intact. The
Rome that Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446) visited at the beginning
of the fifteenth century was a complex and disordered urban area;
from then on, the Popes began to reorganize it, making it a centre for
the study of ancient archaeology and of the trade in antiquities, up to
that point dominated by Padua and Venice. Generations of architects
visited Rome to study the Pantheon, the Colosseum, the Arch of
Constantine and the Theatre of Marcellus, with the intention of
following the principles upon which they were built.
 Box 4.1 Vasari’s Lives of the Artists
Giorgio Vasari became famous for his treatise Lives of the
Painters, Sculptors and Architects, first published in 1550. The
first edition was dedicated to the Grand Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici,
and was rewritten and enriched with portraits of artists in 1568,
an edition that was published many times in Italy and abroad. He
described the lives and works of Italian artists since Cimabue,
maintaining that Tuscan artists had brought Italy out of the
Middle Ages. However, his Lives also included non–Tuscan artists
and provided an extraordinary history of Italian art between the
Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Indeed, his life is proof of the
anti-parochialism of humanist artists: he lived and worked
between Florence, Arezzo, Modena, Bologna, Rome, Camaldoli (in
Romagna), Parma, Mantua, Venice, Lucca, Naples, Rimini,
Ravenna, Urbino and Cortona (near Arezzo). His work is
considered as the birth of art criticism in Italy. In the foreword to
the first part, he explained how the barbarian invasions had
ruined Italian art: that they could not have been more distant
from ancient Roman values, and they ‘had no longer any good
customs or ways of life. Nay more, there had been lost at one
and the same time all true men and every sort of virtue, and
laws, habits, names, and tongues had been changed; and all
these things together and each by itself had caused every lovely
mind and lofty intellect to become most brutish and most base’.
From the fourteenth century in Tuscany, however, new artists
were born who restored art and custom to the beauty and values
of Roman times: ‘discerning well enough the good from the bad
and abandoning the old manners, turned to imitating the ancient’;
and specified, ‘the ancient were the works made before
Constantine’.(Vasari, 1996, Vol. I, pp. 37, 45).

With Alberti, architecture became concerned with all the questions

posed by humanistic culture. Alberti belonged to a rich Florentine
family, but was born in Genoa, brought up in Venice and studied law
and science in Padua, moving to Florence in his thirties, though
returning only for short visits as he began work at the Papal court. He
was a writer, thinker and technician as well as an architect, who only
began working on monumental art in his forties, and writing his
famous critical and modern interpretation of Vitruvius’s art, entitled
On the Art of Building, in 1450. Alberti raised architecture to the level
of the liberal arts, separating conceptual from manual work, the
artist’s idea from its execution. As a result of his knowledge of Italy,
Alberti was not limited by Florentine culture, and set architectural
rules and models to which Italian artists were bound for a long time.
One of the Florentine sculptors who had a major influence on
Italian painters, decorators, architects and sculptors was Donato de’
Bardi, called Donatello (1386–1466), who worked not only in Florence
but also in other cities, particularly Padua. Another Florentine,
Tommaso Cassai (1401–28), known as Masaccio, proposed a new
form of painting which, like Donatello’s, left Gothic behind and
created a solid, heroic humanity based on the representation of
powerful figures; he pioneered linear perspective, particularly with his
Trinity in S. Maria Novella in Florence. These new forms, elaborated
in Tuscany, spread rapidly, as demonstrated by Paolo Uccello and
Donatello in Padua; new schools challenged Tuscan hegemony in
Milan, Padua, Urbino and Ferrara, and artists moved between
different cities, so that by the second half of the fifteenth century
Florence was no longer at the centre of Italy’s artistic topography.
Piero della Francesca (circa 1416–92), for example, having spent his
youth in Florence, was active mainly in small towns near his
birthplace, San Sepolcro (Arezzo) and the princely courts at Ferrara
and Urbino. His painting was at the same time both peasant-like and
rustic, and aristocratic and heroic: the meeting between these two
aspects gave an epic character to his work. For example, the group of
frescoes entitled Storia della Croce (‘History of the Cross’) at the
Church of S. Francis in Arezzo harked back to the climate of the
Crusades at the time of Pius II, with complex battle scenes,
illuminated landscapes and fortified towers set high on hills; the
Polittico for the Church of S. Augustine at San Sepolcro represents
several saints of giant stature with grave expressions, after Masaccio.
At that time, under Federico of Montefeltro, Urbino became one of
the major centres of modern culture.
In southern Italy under Spanish rule, Naples and Palermo
functioned as cosmopolitan centres, where Italian artists met and
formed their own style, including Antonello of Messina and painters
from the Marche and from Spain. Their style cannot be defined as
typical of a certain area because of the mixture of styles from all over
Italy and beyond, an international culture that informed the work of
artists in Sicily and in the kingdom of Naples.
In northern Italy, Andrea Mantegna (1431–1506) surpassed the
Tuscan painters by creating images using perspective that had never
been seen before; nature was represented by an architectonic system
of blocks and slabs of stone, and he depicted human beings living
among ruins dressed as ancient Romans. In Mantua, he worked for
the Gonzaga family and decorated the famous Camera degli Sposi. As
a friend to many humanists, he placed images of the Gospels and of
saints’ lives in Roman history. Donato di Pascuccio d’Antonio (1444–
1514), known as Bramante, was the most influential artist in
Lombardy; born near Pesaro and educated in Urbino, he worked as a
painter in Bergamo. From 1480 to 1499 he worked for Ludovico
Sforza, called Il Moro, in Milan, where he created his first
masterpiece, at the Church of S. Maria at San Satiro, where he used
perspective for the first time to create the illusion of an apse.
Pupil of the Florentine sculptor, painter and goldsmith, Andrea del
Verrocchio (1434/7–88), Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) was heir to
all the aspirations of fifteenth-century Florence. He lived and worked
between Florence, Milan, Rome and Touraine in France, and grappled
with questions of sculptural form – for example, in the equestrian
statue of Francesco Sforza; of order and symmetry and chiaroscuro in
painting – as seen in The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa; and in
architecture, taking part in discussions about the cupola of the
cathedral at Pavia. In Milan, he decided to give a theoretical basis to
his doctrine by writing a series of treatises on perspective, anatomy
and mechanics. During the last years of the century, humanists such
as Leonardo produced many sketches that studied human anatomy
and analysed natural phenomena such as water and wind.
 While most artists worked collaboratively in workshops under the
strict control of the commissioning patron, figures such as Leonardo
and Michelangelo acquired personal fame. As André Chastel has
observed, these artists became almost ‘directors of social life’, and
they had a role and a prestige unimaginable abroad, linked to a
comprehensive, universal idea of art: before Leonardo, who was at
one and the same time painter, sculptor, architect, engraver, writer,
poet and musician, this was true of Giotto (painter, head of the
monuments and fine arts office, architect and town-planner);
Verrocchio (painter, engraver and sculptor); Michelangelo Buonarroti
(1475–1564), who could handle any artistic technique; Vasari; and
Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680), the last example of these great,
comprehensively artistic, figures.
The typical Italian relationship between city and countryside
fostered links between artistic work and the construction of
landscape; close links between water engineers, botanists, gardeners
and landscape designers were common. During the Renaissance,
Italian technique in these areas had an international dissemination as
important as that of painting and the decorative arts. The numerous
villas outside Italian cities from Piedmont to Sicily are witness to the
relationship between art and nature during and after this period, with
endless variations around country estates and the development of the
typical Italian garden. However, the Renaissance was fundamentally
urban and not rural; even the authors of pastoral literary works lived
in towns, though they often retired to country villas in the summer.
Fourteenth- and fifteenth-century paintings exemplify this relationship
between city and countryside, as many of the landscapes have a
geometrical aspect that recalls city architecture, and reflect the fact
that artists were required to make statements about their city.
The manners of Italian aristocrats were imitated in Europe, and
nobility of talent was regarded as seriously as nobility of blood: artists
such as Raphael Sanzio, Michelangelo and Titian lived like princes, as
they were in demand by monarchs all over Europe. One development
that was exported was the extensive use of mass communication and
propaganda. The princes and elites of the Italian states did not limit
propaganda to the written word, but relied also on the persuasive
power of images, statues and buildings. The court, in particular,
became a theatre, a spectacle of luxury through which princes sought
to extend their influence and prestige both within and outside the
state, and to maintain control over the local ruling classes. The
lifestyle of court society evolved, establishing new norms of beauty
and aesthetic conceptions. Despite being a minority movement,
during the sixteenth century the Renaissance influenced a large
section of the population, in part a result of the invention of the
printing press: teachers, artisans and shopkeepers, and a
considerable number of women, were involved alongside sections of
the elite.

COURTIERS

The nineteenth-century historian, Jacob Burckhardt, argued that the

achievement in fifteenth-century Italy of such high levels of
civilization and elegance served to justify belief in the perfect courtier,
not as an ideal but as a reality. The most famous courtier’s manual,
by Baldassare Castiglione, Il Cortegiano (The Book of the Courtier), is
indeed set in a real court, that of Urbino in 1507, where he lived and
began a successful diplomatic career. Born in Mantua province,
Castiglione studied Latin and Greek in Milan, where he was educated
as a gentleman at the court of Ludovico il Moro; he moved between
the courts of Mantua, Milan, Urbino and Rome (with Pope Leo X).
When his book was published in 1528, it was already famous at
courts throughout the whole of Italy, such was the interest among
the Renaissance aristocracy for the subject. It was subsequently
translated and disseminated throughout educated European society
during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Some thirty years
later, another work on etiquette became a European bestseller:
Galateo by Giovanni Della Casa (1503–56). Born in Tuscany, Della
Casa studied in Florence and continued his humanistic education in
Padua. He then chose an ecclesiastical career, protected by Alexander
Farnese in Rome. Della Casa became Archbishop of Benevento near
Naples, and finally became Papal Nuncio in Venice, where he also
worked for the Inquisition.
 While Castiglione’s interest was focused on the relationship
between courtier and prince, and more generally on court life,
Galateo was aimed more widely at the urban Renaissance gentleman.
As Machiavelli had done for politics, Della Casa intended to create a
set of manners, and, again like Machiavelli, he sought to establish a
form of obedience to a common law: not the law of power, but the
law of custom and practice, of come si fa (‘how to do things’). In this
sense, Galateo can be considered as one of the first hymns to the
‘modern man’, as Carlo Ossola has observed in his Introduction to a
recent edition (2000) of the text. It was also a hymn of praise to
urban life, for ‘anyone who chose to live not in solitude or in a
hermitage, but in cities and among men’.
The attempt to create an etiquette for the perfect gentleman was
softened by an accent on spontaneity and modesty. The sixteenth-
century gentleman was well aware of the time in which he was living
and knew that, despite the importance of classical models, he had to
adapt to the practical needs of the present. This was particularly true
with regard to language, and the need to opt for a solution that was
not strictly Tuscan but tolerated cautiously neologisms of Spanish or
French origin. At the same time, a gentleman was supposed to
assimilate as much Latin as was considered compatible with the
needs of modern prose. The perfect courtier had to be a skilled
knight and warrior, but also to be able to moderate these qualities
with a touch of dilettantismo (amateurism), to appear graceful and
natural with it. The Renaissance court was his natural environment as
the ideal place for the development of the sereno equilibrio (serene
balance) preached by fifteenth-century humanism in imitation of the
ancient Greek and Roman civilizations. As Alberti wrote in Iciarchia, to
do things well meant ‘to behave with modesty, gracefulness and a
refined attitude which should delight those who observe you’. The
sense of measure and discretion was also a feature of the ideal state
– one founded neither on extreme wealth, nor mired in poverty, but
based on a majority of ‘mediocre’ citizens.
Della Casa’s work continued to be an influence well into the
eighteenth century, when the poet Giacomo Leopardi, who was very
interested in the ‘customs of the Italians’, pointed in Crestomazia
italiana to ‘the kindness, the grace and the amiableness of manners’.
Leopardi assigned the Galateo to the category of ‘practical
philosophy’, thus anticipating its interpretation during the
Enlightenment and throughout the nineteenth century, with the
publication of a Nuovo Galateo by Melchiorre Gioia, a philosopher
from Piacenza, which shifted the emphasis from ‘conversation’ to
‘social reason’. The tradition of the etiquette manual therefore
continued, but in the context of new and different ideas and tastes.
The ‘cleaning up’ of ‘customs’ also meant ‘civilization’, a civilization
that depended on the use of reason and on what was practically
‘useful’: for Gioia, ‘civilization thus consists of the victories obtained
by the principles of social reason on the disordered impulses of
nature’. The ‘new’ Galateo was handed down to subsequent
generations of educated Italians, this time in a united Italy to writers
who no longer lived in a court society.
Despite their attempts to free themselves from the Middle Ages,
sixteenth-century humanists were still ‘rather medieval’. Castiglione’s
Courtier drew on medieval traditions of courtly behaviour and love as
well as on Plato and Cicero, and even Machiavelli’s Prince was part of
the medieval genre of books of advice for rulers. The humanists’
attention was not limited to the classical texts, but ranged restlessly
from antiquity to the present, and even Machiavelli and Guicciardini
recognized some value in medieval prophetic literature, which
continued to be very popular through cantastorie (story tellers and
singers) in Italian cities until the Counter Reformation. According to
Guicciardini (in a letter to Goro Gheri of 1518), ‘today just like in the
past… great things have been anticipated by great prodigies’; and
Machiavelli admitted in his Discourses on Livy that ‘no grave accident
in a city or in a province ever comes unless it has been foretold either
by diviners or by revelations’. Ariosto’s most famous book, Orlando
Furioso (first published in 1516) shows the result of the author’s
study of classical epics, and in particular his knowledge of medieval
romance. It is neither an imitation of the classical epics nor of
medieval romances: he had, as Burke has described, ‘a foot in both
camps’. Both Ariosto’s and Castiglione’s works could only have been
written by writers with a thorough knowledge of both ancient and
medieval traditions. Humanists were divorced from the classical age
by the legacy of Christianity and could only achieve a classicism that
was tempered by the beliefs and aspirations of the Christian society
they inhabited. Nevertheless, the humanist movement was secular,
just as Italian culture in the Middle Ages had been fundamentally the
work of laymen.

THE COUNTER-REFORMATION, THE NEW ROME AND ITALY IN THE

SIXTEENTH CENTURY

The development of the Papacy in the second half of the fifteenth

century also meant social, economic and cultural progress for Rome.
The triumphant classicism of that period had its reference point in an
idealized image of ancient Rome, which the Papacy believed itself
destined to recreate. This idea had been sustained by humanists in
the previous centuries; for example, historian and humanist Flavio
Biondo (1392–1463), born and educated in Romagna, moved to
Rome where he worked for the Popes, and analysed the institutions
of ancient Rome in his last work, Roma Triumphans, arguing that the
Church was the true heir of Roman universality.
However, the increasing worldly power of the Church continued to
provoke protests from both laymen and local churches who proposed
reform, protests that converged in the preaching of Savonarola and
his followers. Once the communes had become regional states led by
principalities, the families who aspired to power gained great
advantage through Papal investment and recognition. Cardinals
drawn from powerful Italian families strengthened the ‘Italianness’ of
the Papacy. The fortunes of the Popes therefore ran parallel to those
of the Italian political and social elite.
The ideas of the Reformation reached humanist intellectuals in
Italy who were trying to free the country from popular superstition.
When Luther’s ideas became known they were rejected by the
Papacy, particularly because of their appeal against both Papal
hierarchy and the sacramental system of salvation, essential to which
is the centrality of good works. Luther’s books began to be read in
Italy following the ninety-five theses of 1517, and his doctrines
became intertwined with existing religious tensions in Italian cities:
an anti-clerical culture, ancient millennarian and prophetic anxieties,
humanistic Renaissance thought and widespread desire for a return
to the origins of Christianity. It was difficult for the Papacy to forbid
the reading of books that entered the country from the other side of
the Alps, because there was a clandestine book market fed by
flourishing commerce and by the flood of foreign students who came
to study at the universities of Padua and Bologna; books appeared
anonymously, with fake authors or nicknames. In addition, Venetian
printers, who always welcomed novelties and had contacts with
printers all over Europe, made it possible to buy Luther’s books in
Venice.
After the imperial army’s sack of Rome in 1527, the Papacy
launched a powerful and organized reaction. Protestant groups had
begun to appear in cities that had links with France, such as Lucca,
Ferrara, Modena and Siena, and a prompt Papal response was
necessary. Under Paul III Farnese, Ignatius Loyola created the Jesuit
order, and Cardinal Gian Pietro Carafa reorganized the Inquisition.
Carafa became Archbishop of Naples and head of the Inquisition, and
went on to become Pope with the name Paul IV. He sent so many
people to prison that when he died in 1559, the Roman crowd
attacked and burned the Inquisition palace, and freed its prisoners.
By 1570 there was almost no active Protestantism in Italy.
The Papacy could not act through repression alone; it had to
challenge Protestant doctrine ideologically. This was carried out
officially at the Council of Trent, which lasted from 1545 to 1563. The
need for a Catholic reform was not prompted merely by Luther,
though. There was continuity between the many requests for reform
since the Middle Ages (as seen in previous chapters) and attempts to
renew religious life in the sixteenth century. The episode of
Savonarola had been anticipated by a number of less-well-known
attempts by preachers and mystics (many of whom were women) to
reinvigorate Italian religious life. As John Martin has observed, the
introduction of printing led to the diffusion of books in the vernacular
and of devotional texts among the urban lower middle classes,
further stimulating the need for new spiritual models and a deeper
religiosity. Indeed, new initiatives developed before the Council of
Trent, particularly centred on charity (the Theatines, the Barnabites,
the Capuchins, and, among female groups, the Angeliche and the
Ursulines), concerned with the spiritual and material help of the poor
and the marginalized. Trent was therefore principally, but not solely, a
response to Protestantism.
The city of Trent was located within the Empire but was ethnically
Italian and therefore influenced by both the Emperor and the Pope.
The council was not a democratic meeting where doctrine was
discussed, but was dominated by leading Spanish Jesuits, who
imposed their definition of orthodoxy. It legitimized purgatory and
therefore the possibility of mediation; it confirmed the mediation
through good works and Papal indulgences, and therefore penitence
and pilgrimages; it re-established the need for the administration of
sacraments by priests, and enshrined the doctrine of
transubstantiation denied by Luther. Church control over books
extended to ancient and early Christian classics, which were often
censored, corrected or abridged, helping to create a generalized
mistrust of Italian-text editions among Italians and foreigners alike. A
gap persisted between the decisions taken at Trent and the variety of
religious experiences that demanded reform in Italy, and it was not
easy for the Church to impose uniform religious practices on the
whole country. From Trent onwards, the relationship between the
Papacy, religious groups and popular beliefs continued to be one of
negotiation and resistance, not simply one of repression.
Architecture continued to be one of the means of propagating
Catholicism, as revealed by Papal biographies, which remarked on the
importance of the ‘zeal for God’s house’. According to a biography by
the humanist Giannozzo Manetti, Pope Nicholas V (1447–55)
recommended on his deathbed that St Peter’s basilica and other
religious buildings be renovated. The new Basilica of St Peter was the
major work begun by Julius II (Pope 1503–13), who decided to
transform Rome into the capital of the Renaissance. Bramante,
Michelangelo and Raphael were among the artists who worked for
him. The movement promoted by Julius II intensified under his
successors, particularly Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici, Lorenzo’s son,
who became Pope as Leo X (1513–21). The decision taken at the
Council of Trent sustained these efforts by reiterating the veneration
of images in close connection with the cult of saints and relics – just
as the Council of Nicea had done eight centuries before. Images were
not only artistic expressions, but useful instruments of propaganda,
as they illustrated religious ‘stories’ and Christian history.
Roman culture was characterized by a passion for archaeology,
and Rome became a city of excavations and new constructions, full of
ruins with many empty spaces, where beautiful gardens were created
and many discoveries were made, such as the Apollo of Anzio and the
Laocoon of Aquilino. In April 1506, the first stone of one pillar of the
new St Peter’s cupola was laid. Julius II’s tomb was entrusted to
Michelangelo, and the new basilica was to preserve the tomb of St
Peter and the mausoleum of Julius II. After the deaths of Julius II
and Bramante, the original plan came to a halt, and both lack of
money and much discussion postponed the completion of the basilica
until 1626: 120 years, twenty Popes and ten architects later. This
meant that the final result was an essentially composite design. The
work of Bernini placed the Renaissance construction within a Baroque
landscape, with an oval piazza encircled by columns. By walking
inside through the huge porch, visitors take a journey through the
labour of generations. Only at the cupola, at the centre of all the
differing perspectives, is it possible to have a sense of Bramante’s
and Julius II’s great project.
In 1508, following Bramante’s suggestion, the Pope called a young
artist from Urbino, Raphael Sanzio (1483–1520), to Rome. His father
was a painter and he had been educated within the extraordinary
culture of the Montefeltro family (which had ruled in Urbino since the
thirteenth century), so well described by Castiglione in The Courtier.
Before moving to Rome, Raphael had worked in Perugia and Siena,
revealing his genius in his depictions of portraits and facial
expressions. He incorporated into his balanced and peaceful art
elements of Leonardo, of Michelangelo’s force and of Titian’s use of
colour. In the Vatican, Raphael worked on frescoes for Julius II’s
apartment, showing himself to be a natural interpreter of the
humanistic aspiration for a reconciled and serene humanity; his art
originated in a mature and rich culture, together with a conception of
ancient times as a golden age. His images of the Virgin illustrate the
perfection of his art, which achieved its pinnacle in the Madonna
Sistina of 1513.
While Leonardo placed painting above all arts, Michelangelo
considered sculpture to be the supreme artistic form. He worked for
the Pope in Rome, as did Bramante and Raphael, contributing to the
debate on St Peter’s, and moved between Rome, Venice, Bologna and
Florence, in which city he sculpted a gigantic David in marble, which
appeared in the Signoria square in 1504 and used for the first time
the anatomical concept of contrapposto (the weighting of the body
on the right-hand side). The following year, Michelangelo worked on
Julius II’s tomb and mausoleum in Rome, which was completed in
1512. The latter was a synthesis of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century
themes, brought together and inspired by ancient art, Greek beauty
and triumphant Roman style. He subsequently returned to Florence
and worked in the Medicis’ sanctuary of San Lorenzo. The new Pope
Paul III brought him back to Rome, commissioning him to paint the
Last Judgement in the Sistine Chapel on a wall measuring 17 by 13
metres. Michelangelo’s composition was conceived and executed as a
fearsome rotation of figures, ascending on the left-hand side, and
descending on the right-hand side; brown bodies whirled on a
background of deep blue, above the sinister red of the inferno
beneath, around the central figure of Christ, who appeared as a
Hercules or a Jupiter.
What was achieved in Rome in the first half of the sixteenth
century in the fields of architecture, sculpture and painting marked
out Italy from the rest of the West, giving the peninsula a classic
style that had no equivalent in France, the Netherlands or Germany.
The fifteenth-century experience had anticipated aspects of that art,
but the new Roman classicism overtook what had existed previously:
these artists considered ancient art with equanimity; they relied on it
but were never intimidated by it. There is no Renaissance church that
is simply a copy of a Roman building; there are no art works that
merely imitate Greek or Roman compositions: however, they all
convey the same air of dignity, clarity and idealization. Sixteenth-
century Roman art thus became the expression of a new culture,
which developed from within the wider humanistic culture of the time
and soon expanded to other parts of Italy, beginning with Tuscany
and Lombardy.
Parts of what is now defined as Lombardy were at the time under
the rule of the Venetian republic, and were influenced by Venetian art
as well as by the new Roman style. At the end of the fifteenth
century, Philippe de Commynes defined the Grand Canal as ‘the most
beautiful road in the world, and the most adorned with houses’.
Venice’s religious and civil ceremonies were magnificent, performed
as naval parades. The city’s decline, as a result of the voyages of
discovery and the increasing advance of the Ottoman Empire
following the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, was not yet
apparent between the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries. It
had, however, become evident that Venice was now primarily a
mainland Italian power. In a rich city, with a sophisticated taste for
exoticism and a cultural heritage that looked to Byzantium more than
to Rome, humanism developed differently from the way it did in
Rome and Tuscany. With the new century came a passion for building
villas on the mainland, where gentlemen and ladies found a natural
environment in which to discuss love and culture; an example of
which can be found in literature in the Asolani by Venetian writer and
humanist, Pietro Bembo (1470–1547). Around 1530, Venice rivalled
Rome in stature and defined a new phase of classical art, which was
rapidly followed by the complex so-called Mannerism. The works
around St Mark’s Square continued with the bell tower loggetta, the
first modern addition to the square, in 1537–40. Venice contributed
to the fifteenth-century artistic revolution with the transformation of
painting through a new use of colour, which generated new forms of
light and tone, in the work of Giovanni Bellini, Titian and Giorgione.
Among Giorgione’s (1477–1510) pupils was Titian Vecellio (1485–
1576), whose influence spread during the sixteenth century across
the whole of northern and central Italy. He became an artistic
authority both in Italy and internationally; strongly connected to
Venice, he maintained beneficial relationships with princes at Ferrara
and Mantua, with Pope Paul III, and the Emperors Francis I and
Charles V. Titian’s work for Paul III exemplifies both the relationship
between Popes and artists in the age of artistic patronage (mece-
natismo) and that between Popes and their relatives in the age of
nepotism (the papal practice of making their nephews cardinals). In
particular, the painting Paolo III con i nipoti is an expression of the
vicissitudes that propelled the Farnese family among the Olympians
of Italy’s ruling elite. Painted a few months after the Pope had made
his son, Pier Luigi, Duke of Parma and Piacenza, it was a difficult
picture to construct, taking into consideration, as it had to, the Pope’s
will and the struggle between his nephews; and indeed it remained
unfinished. In the painting, Paul III is seated, flanked by cardinal
Alexander Farnese standing and Duke Ottavio bowing in the act of
reverence. The act of reverence was the Pope’s due when greeted by
all mortals and consisted of them bowing three times, ending with
the kissing of the Pope’s foot. Cardinals were required to show
reverence, but the painting shows only the layman bowing, about to
kiss the foot stretching from the papal gown. The portrait therefore
reflects the Pope’s habit of nominating his nephews as cardinals
(even if they did not have the required qualifications) in order to
enhance the power of the family, and responds to an apparent desire
for immortality in projecting present dynastic power into the future.
In the mid-sixteenth century, a new Italian form of art, called
Mannerism, spread across Europe. The building of aristocratic villas,
already a feature in the Venetian republic, spread to other parts of
Italy; and one of the palaces that most influenced Europeans was the
Palazzo del Tè in Mantua. Artists moved around Italy as before,
bringing with them new styles to other regions and in turn learning
and absorbing new regional experiences. The new Duchy in Tuscany
enlarged public buildings, adding parks and gardens in order to
create grandiose surroundings for court ceremonies. Cellini was a
typical exponent of the new art form, his sophisticated formalism and
his complex and bizarre taste becoming typical of the age. Florentine
Mannerist art was expressed mainly in its monumental fountains –
complex compositions on several levels in which statues were
distributed elegantly around stretches of water that graced
aristocratic gardens. Indeed, Mannerism was at its finest in the
design of gardens and grottoes (which produced the word
‘grotesque’) as in, for example, the Boboli Gardens in Florence.
Venetian Mannerism was mostly evident in the area around
Vicenza, where Andrea Palladio (1508–80) modelled villas with
increasingly animated façades. In painting, Jacopo Robusti (1518–
94), known as Tintoretto, began to accumulate or disperse figures
with dramatic effects of light and shadow, distributing figures in all
directions across the whole area of the picture – as evident, for
example, in his Last Supper of 1564–87. Tintoretto was entrusted
with important commissions at the Doge’s Palace in Venice; in 1588,
he completed the theatrical and disproportionate Paradiso in the
salon of the Grand Council. The art of Paolo Caliari (1528–88), known
as Veronese, who also worked in Venice, was less exaggerated; at
the Sala dei Dieci, in the Doge’s Palace, Veronese’s more harmonious
style demonstrated the persistent influence of Bellini and Mantegna
when Mannerism was in vogue. The phenomenon of counter-
classicism, or counter–Renaissance (a concept developed by Hiram
Haydn in the post-war years), or Mannerism, was already present at
the time of the Renaissance. Mannerism can be seen as a constant in
European literature, and as a complementary phenomenon to
classicism in any age. However, Burke has suggested that rather than
an anti- or counter-Renaissance, Mannerism should be described as a
late phase of the Renaissance, born of the crisis engendered by the
Reformation, the French invasions in Italy and the sack of Rome. At
the end of the century, like Rome and Florence before it, Venice
began to exhibit a sense of weariness. With a few exceptions, the
seventeenth century was a period of stasis, when little new was
created, and patrons of the arts were content with the great works of
the previous period, enhanced by their success throughout Europe.

LITERATURE AND ITALIAN LANGUAGE IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY

The development of a common Italian literary language, which

intensified during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, was not
restricted to intellectual circles, but extended to the chancelleries of
Italian states. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the
Neapolitan writer Jacopo Sannazzaro corrected the southern
elements in the first draft of his Arcadia (in prose and verse)
according to the rules of literary Florentine; in a similar way, the
Ferrarese Ludovico Ariosto (1474–1533) modified the Po Valley
characteristics of his Orlando Furioso, following rules established by
Pietro Bembo, as was evident in the third and definitive edition of the
poem in 1532; Baldassarre Castiglione, also in the third and final
edition of his Courtier of 1524, replaced various expressions
influenced by Latin and local dialects with a veneer of toscanità. A
later edition from 1528 increased the Tuscan emphases after editing
by the Venetian aristocrat, Giovan Francesco Valerio, with Bembo as
consultant.
Leon Battista Alberti helped to boost the vernacular language in
the mid-fifteenth century by according equal weight to vernacular
and Latin in his book The Family in Renaissance Florence, and by
launching a competition of vernacular poetry in 1441 entitled
Certame coronario. Lorenzo the Magnificent in Florence promoted the
vernacular as the official language of culture and the court. As a
result, a courtly language emerged, founded on a vernacular
influenced by Latin and purged of dialect elements. The literary
language was also unified throughout Italy with the development of
Petrarchism in the second half of the century. However, this was a
very refined vernacular, different from that in common usage. The
type of intellectual, often of the court, defined by Petrarch was also
responsible for the linguistic choices made in the sixteenth century.
However, the prevalence of Tuscan and the final victory of vernacular
over Latin still required linguistic unity, a demand that also came with
the development of the press, which needed uniform rules of
vocabulary, orthography, grammar and punctuation. Intellectuals such
as Pietro Bembo collaborated with printers in introducing norms – for
example, the apostrophe and the semi-colon – and in proposing a
new principle of style. The son of a successful diplomat, Bembo
belonged to an ancient Venetian aristocratic family, which educated
him in humanist studies and particularly in the cult of Petrarch. While
his father was ambassador to Florence he met Lorenzo the
Magnificent. When he returned to Venice, the prestigious publisher
Aldus Manutius commissioned from him a new edition of the
Canzoniere, which appeared in 1501. Bembo subsequently became
the major exponent of Italian literature, establishing the norms of the
vernacular and championing a renewed Petrarchist tradition.
Venice was the European capital of printing, and it was there that
the ‘language question’ exploded. As the literary critic, Romano
Luperini, has suggested, the central contested issue was: ‘Which
should be the linguistic norm capable of unifying the written and
spoken vernacular of Italy’s educated people?’ There were three main
positions in the ensuing debate:

1 Bembo, in Prose della volgar lingua (‘Proses in the vernacular’,

1525) proposed a language based on Petrarch for poetry and
Boccaccio for prose, which represented a return to the fourteenth
century.
2 Baldassarre Castiglione and Giangiorgio Trissino were among
supporters of a common language that used the language of
Italian courts as a model to create a mixed idiom on the basis of
Tuscan.
3 Nicolò Machiavelli, in Discorso sulla lingua (‘Essay on the
language’,1515), proposed the use of contemporary vernacular
Florentine.

Bembo’s proposal, for a language that responded to the needs of an

aristocratic culture separated from daily life and founded on the cult
of the past, prevailed. To take inspiration from a language of two
centuries earlier meant choosing the separation of a written from a
spoken language, a classicism reserved for the elite: a limitation of
language creativity, reduced to imitating a fixed norm, anachronistic
and ahistorical. By the mid-sixteenth century, high literature
throughout Italy was unified through classicist language, while the
decisions taken at the Council of Trent regarding the exclusion of the
use of vernacular in the liturgy (1513) was another example of
language distancing the elites from the lives of ordinary people.
In prose, the link with Boccaccio’s language was less rigid, though
the use of a language that was continually being superseded served
to remove literature from accessibility to the general public and
turned it into rhetoric, often unable to express the immediacy of life.
Only in the nineteenth century did the ‘language question’ start to
find appropriate answers. The inadequacy of the language ‘solution’
in the sixteenth century was evident from the emergence of a new
language alongside that of culture: a literary language that exalted
the grotesque, the realistic and comic, the expressionistic. The anti-
classicist revolt took shape around Teofilo Folengo (1491–1544). In
his mock-heroic poem Baldus, an Italian dialect lexicon is grafted on
to a Latin morphological-grammatical and metrical structure. At the
same time, in Venice, the comedies of Angelo Beloco (1496–1542),
nicknamed Ruzante, became very popular. Their protagonist was
generally a poor peasant who lived an upside-down reality compared
to ‘official’ reality. The peasant only understood a vital reality linked
to the material needs of existence, food and sex, and his language
was a dialect from Padua. Through these authors, the most realistic
expressions of Italian literature took revenge on the language and
concerns of the elite.

Box 4.2 The Index of Forbidden Books

In 1559, the Roman Church, confronting the huge production of
books in Lutheran Germany (around 180,000 books during the
sixteenth century) and fearing their diffusion in Italy, published
the first Index of Forbidden Books, under Pope Paul IV. The main
casualty was the Bible: all translations in the vernacular and in
Latin were censored, apart from St Jerome’s Vulgata. The first
Italian translation of the Bible appeared in 1848, at the time of
Mazzini’s Roman Republic. Almost all printed works were
prohibited to the public, among them Dante’s De monarchia,
Boccaccio’s Decameron, the writings of Machiavelli and Erasmus,
as well as almost all Greek and Latin classics. In 1571, the
Congregation of the Index was created to control publishing
activity and to keep the catalogue of forbidden books updated.
 Books that appeared on the Index were burned, and their authors
and publishers subject to trial.

During the Renaissance, tensions originated by the dualism caused

by the physical presence and control of the Roman Church over
society were expressed, in particular in the centre of humanism,
Florence, at the court of the Medici. On the one hand, humanist and
poet Angelo Ambrogini (1454—94), known as Poliziano, was
hedonistically exalting a love for earthly life and encouraging all to
enjoy it. On the other hand, the Dominican priest and popular
preacher Savonarola insisted that life ought to be lived in preparation
for a ‘good end’. For the humanists, time had an earthly duration
which should be exploited in order to improve human life, while for
the faithful, still bound to the medieval mentality, time spent on earth
served as a preparation for the afterlife. The devastating plague of
the mid-fourteenth century, together with recurrent epidemics, had
strengthened the mendicant orders and spread their written
expositions of the art of dying well. Lorenzo the Magnificent, a
shrewd politician, expressed both tendencies: he wrote religious laudi
as well as carnival songs.
The most illustrious victim of the climate of Counter–Reformation
was Torquato Tasso (1544–95), author of an epic narrative of the
final phase of the first Crusade, Gerusalemme Liberata (1575), who,
concerned to find himself outside Catholic orthodoxy, sent his poem
to theologians and denounced himself to the Bologna Inquisition; in
1577, he submitted his poem to the Ferrara Inquisition, which
absolved it. However, oppressed by a sense of guilt, he accepted all
requests for revision and cut out important parts of the poem in a
self-destructive rage. He worked for the Este family (which ruled
Ferrara from the thirteenth century), a difficult environment, given
their historic practice of not challenging the Papacy. Tasso eventually
spent seven years in a mental asylum, while his poem was published
without his approval and enjoyed great success. In 1592, he radically
rewrote the poem and retitled it Gerusalemme Conquistata, a work
that critics consider to be infinitely inferior to the earlier version.
Tasso’s drama is perhaps the best-known example of the climate of
censorship that the Counter–Reformation imposed on intellectuals.

SELECTED FURTHER READING

Recommended introductions are D. Hay and J. Law, Italy in the Age of the Renaissance,
1380–1530 (London: Longman, 1989), C. Black, Early Modern Italy. A Social History
(London: Routledge, 2001) and P. Burke, The Italian Renaissance: Culture and Society in
Italy (London: Polity, 1999). H. Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance: Civic
Humanism and Republican Liberty in an Age of Classicism and Tyranny (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1966) is an essential examination of classicism and civic
humanism in Renaissance thought, and this should be followed by C. Celenza, The Lost
Italian Renaissance: Humanists, Historians, and Latin Legacy (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2004). O. Niccoli, Prophecy and People in Renaissance Italy (Princeton, NJ,
Princeton University Press: 1990) is a thought-provoking and highly readable study of
popular culture during the traumatic age of foreign invasions.
 5
........
Under Popes and Distant Kings:
Italy in the Age of the Baroque

CHRONOLOGY
1618– Thirty Years’ War, fought on Italian territory in Valtellina (1620–6) and Monferrat
48 (1627–31)
1621–
Philip IV succeeds to Spanish crown
65
1647–
Anti–Spanish revolt in Palermo and Naples
8
1701– War of the Spanish succession: all Spanish Habsburg Italian possessions pass to
14 Austrian Habsburgs
1713–
Savoy obtains Sicily and exchanges it with Austria for Sardinia (1720)
14
1733–
War of the Polish succession
8
1733–
Charles Bourbon enters Naples
4
1737 End of the Medici dynasty
Peace of Vienna: Lombardy, Parma and Piacenza under Austria; Francis Stephan
1738
of Lorraine becomes Grand Duke of Tuscany
1740– War of the Austrian succession: French invasion of Piedmont, followed by Austrian
8 —Piedmontese victory
Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle: Maria Theresa confirmed as Habsburg Empress of
1748 Italian territories; Parma and Piacenza to Philip of Bourbon (brother of King of
Naples, Charles of Bourbon)
Charles of Bourbon becomes Charles III of Spain and leaves the Kingdom of the
1759
Two Sicilies to his son, Ferdinand IV
 1763–
Famine hits; particularly Naples, Rome and Florence
4
1773 Jesuit order suppressed by Pope Clement XIV
1796 Napoleon invades Italy

ITALIAN POLITICS IN THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH

CENTURIES

While reflecting on the age that followed the Counter–Reformation,

the early-twentieth-century historian, Benedetto Croce, observed
that, while Italy’s rejection of Protestantism had kept the country in
one sense united, it had done so at the price of a kind of cultural
hibernation, cut off from the movement of ideas that spread across
the rest of Europe, because of the domination of the Papacy and
Spain. Italy, he claimed, ‘was resting, tired; and it is a beautiful and
wishful metaphor, to say that she was not completely finished and
dead’. These views were typical of a historiography that saw the
seventeenth century and the first half of the eighteenth century as a
period of decline between two glorious ages – the Renaissance and
the Risorgimento. This was a reading influenced by nineteenth-
century nationalism, which hoped that the Risorgimento marked a
break with an era considered hostile to the ‘modern age’, in which
Italy was disunited and subject to the will of foreign powers. This
chapter explores the common threads of Italy’s culture and society in
the period between the Counter–Reformation and the Enlightenment,
a long period which left important legacies for modern Italy, in terms
of social discipline (as a result of the Council of Trent), of scientific
discoveries, and of achievements in art, architecture, music and
literature. As John Marino has remarked, while the French and
Spanish invasions conquered Italy politically, Italy continued to export
its culture to France and Spain, as well as to the rest of early modern
Europe.
From 1618, Europe was shaken by the Thirty Years’ War, caused
by the French–Habsburg confrontation over pre-eminence in Europe.
The Italian states were affected indirectly, mainly in the economic
field; the Venetian republic in particular suffered disruption of some
of its northern markets (mainly in textiles, glass and luxury goods).
The worst moment came in 1627, when Duke Vincent II Gonzaga of
Mantua died leaving no heirs. This precipitated a crisis of succession
(the Duchy interested the Habsburgs, the French and Piedmontese
alike), which led to war and the sack of the city by the imperial army
in 1630. Mantua and the Monferrat were fiefs of the Empire, but were
claimed by Vincent II’s nearest male relative, the French Duke of
Nevers. After a period of war between France and Spain, the Duchy
of Milan had become the first signoria to be subject to a foreign
power – and it remained under Spanish control for 170 years, from
1535. When the Mantuan crisis occurred, the Spanish governor of
Milan warned Madrid about the threat a French domination of Mantua
would bring to the Spanish position in Italy. This led to a direct
confrontation on Italian territory, when, in 1629, Louis XIII’s army
crossed the Alps and defeated Charles Emmanuel of Savoy. In 1630,
the French and the Spanish negotiated a truce and confirmed Charles
Nevers as Duke of Mantua. The war was devastating for parts of
northern Italy, and coincided with an epidemic of the plague. As the
Thirty Years’ War continued, the Spanish increased taxation in Naples
to support and sustain Milan, provoking moments of high social
tension in the city. After the end of the war, Italy experienced a
period of relative political peace for the rest of the century, though it
was one also marked by economic stagnation until around 1680.
Culturally, there was still artistic vitality, particularly with the boom in
Italian Baroque architecture in Piedmont, Rome, Campania, Apulia
and Sicily.
Political turmoil returned at the beginning of the new century with
the Spanish succession crisis of 1700, sparked when Charles II died
with no direct heirs. The fate of Naples, Sicily, Lombardy and Sardinia
was therefore at stake, until the peace of Utrecht in 1713 left the
Austrian Habsburgs in control of Naples and Lombardy, and the
House of Savoy in control of Sicily. This arrangement lasted only a
few years, until 1720 when, for geographical convenience, an
exchange assigned Sardinia to the House of Savoy, and Sicily,
reunited with Naples, to Austria. This changed again in 1735, after a
war over the Polish succession, when Austria ceded Naples and Sicily
to a Spanish Bourbon. The regular succession crises of this period
were clearly destabilizing for Italian states. However, while Italy was
still politically divided, a specific Italian culture continued to develop,
particularly through the production of new literary, artistic and
musical forms, which kept alive a sense of identity and geographical
integrity. As Chapter 6 will illustrate, the Enlightenment and the
impact of the French Revolution together provided the foundation for
a movement towards Italian independence, but in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries Italian states were still a long way from
devising solutions for political unification.
During this period, the Serenissima (‘Most Serene’) Republic of
Venice was menaced increasingly by international encirclement, not
only from the Adriatic but also from the mainland, where the
Habsburg Empire expanded to Venice’s western, eastern and
northern borders. Military expenditure and arms production increased
– the latter concentrated mainly at the Venice Arsenal and in Brescia,
the republic’s armaments capital. Moreover, Venice’s relations with its
Italian neighbour, the Church, were strained. Venetian aristocrats
criticized Papal nepotism and opulence, Venice did not accept the
Papal Inquisition, and the University of Padua recruited Protestant
students. When Pope Paul V imposed an interdict on the republic,
hoping to incite the clergy to rebel against its rulers, Venice expelled
the Jesuits and imprisoned clerics who sided with the Pope. The
Venetian monk and theologian Paolo Sarpi (1552–1623) wrote a
pamphlet in favour of limiting Church power to the spiritual sphere
and advocated the birth of national churches along the lines of the
Anglican Church in England under Henry VIII. During the war for the
succession of Mantua in 1627–30, Venice came close to entering the
war on the side of France and Piedmont against Spain and Austria,
but the Venetian senate preferred to remain defensive. The republic’s
only Italian military adventure was its participation, along with Parma,
Tuscany and Modena, in an anti–Papal league in 1642, which resulted
in the Pope’s devastation of the Polesine (the countryside of lower
Venetia on the Po Valley), and demonstrated that there was little to
be gained from war. Despite continued conflict with the Ottoman
Empire between 1645 and 1718 reducing its overseas territory to the
island of Corfu and the Dalmatian coast, in 1700, Venice was still the
most dynamic port in the Mediterranean; only later in the eighteenth
century was it overtaken by Marseilles. At the time Napoleon
Bonaparte invaded Venice in 1796, however, the city chose to offer
no resistance – by this stage war was no longer considered an option.
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Venice continued
to invest in prestigious buildings – palaces, churches, hospitals and
mainland villas – which helped to produce a new source of wealth:
tourism. Like Rome, Venice was visited by European aristocrats who
wished to improve their education and artistic taste. By the mid-
eighteenth century, about 30,000 of the city’s 140,000 inhabitants
were foreigners, many of them English, which made Venice a
cosmopolitan cultural centre.
At the opposite end of the peninsula, the southern regions were
particularly affected by dynastic changes, which saw Sicily initially
under the French Philip V, then the Piedmontese Victor Amedeo II,
followed by the Austrian Charles VI, and the Spanish Charles III; this
constant change caused the Sicilian nobility to suffer problems of
identity, because their traditional links with their Spanish allies were
broken. New strategies and alliances had to be created within the
new courts to enable the barons to maintain political control over the
island. Feudal lords controlled commerce and built castles all over
southern Italy. The Spanish regime simply maintained the existing
baronial power, but, in order to limit corruption, viceroys tended to
employ foreigners. However, regal powers were limited to command
of the army and rule within pre-existing legal systems. In Sicily, unlike
the rest of Italy, the King of Spain was also an apostolic delegate,
because the Spanish Inquisition had replaced the Roman Inquisition
for the investigation of heresy. Sicily had a parliament composed of
representatives of the barons, the clergy and the towns, whose duty
it was to confirm the king’s tax requests. Naples retained the Roman
Inquisition after the Spanish Inquisition was rejected following two
riots, in 1510 and 1547. Spanish viceroys notwithstanding, the
southern mainland was a Papal fief, like Ferrara and Urbino, in which
the Church taxed the clergy. As in Naples, Milan under the rule of
Spain also rejected the Spanish Inquisition, not through popular riots
but because of the governor’s advisers: the governor was the
representative of Spanish power in Milan, and 40 per cent of his
political advisers were from Milan or other Lombard provinces.
The viceroy’s position had been weakened in the past because he
was always considered a foreigner: the local aristocracy and city
representatives, and the parliament in Naples, had the right to
petition the king directly and therefore tended to ignore the viceroys.
The viceroy who gained the most influence, Pedro Toledo, had done
so in part through the 1539 marriage of his daughter Eleonora to
Cosimo de Medici, who was Duke of Florence in the years 1537–74.
Toledo had therefore increased his power by linking his family with
Italian elite families (though this was a mutual affair, with power and
prestige also flowing in the opposite direction, as Cosimo was
propped up by Spanish power); two of his sons also married
members of the Neapolitan aristocracy, which helped to root his
power in the local context. Despite these moves, Toledo’s power
diminished as he ventured further from the capital. The attempts to
introduce the Spanish Inquisition, which would have strengthened
royal power, failed as a result of aristocratic opposition and popular
riots. From the age of Toledo onwards, viceroys learnt well that
Spanish rule was limited: they must appease the local nobility and
accommodate the Church’s interests, as well as watch the lower
classes constantly, to guard against revolt. A joint Spanish–Italian
Council of Italy was created in Madrid in 1558 to supervise Naples,
Sicily and Milan (under Spain from 1535), but in effect Spanish power
continued to decrease during the following century.
Unrest in Naples continued throughout the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, usually provoked by hunger, and illustrative of
the city’s lack of loyalty towards the Spanish government. Two major
events that shook many contemporaries, one at the end of the
sixteenth century and the other in the mid-seventeenth century,
produced similar problems and displayed similar patterns of popular
revenge against centuries of aristocratic repression and violence.
The first occurred in 1585, when a grain shortage provoked hunger
riots in Naples. One of the representatives of the people in the
Neapolitan parliament, Giovan Vincenzo Starace, the son of a silk
merchant, was brought by the mob, sitting backwards on a chair, to
the traditional site of popular government in the city at St Augustin,
where he was killed. This was simultaneously an example of a
leader’s reversed status and a parody of execution rituals in which
the condemned – usually elements of the lower classes – were
paraded through the city. During the march, shops were closed, and
the crowd of onlookers insulted Starace and armed themselves. He
was eventually lynched by a furious crowd and his corpse was
mutilated and dragged through the poorest areas of the city. The
urban masses participated in large numbers, included artisans and
shopkeepers, and the riot horrified contemporary observers all over
Europe. The crowds were only subdued when the viceroy imported
grain and sold it cheaply, but a savage and large-scale repression
followed: about 800 people were tried, 270 tortured, and 12,000
Neapolitans fled the city. In all, 31 rioters were condemned to death,
430 jailed, 71 sent to ships’ galleys and 300 exiled.
A second revolt took place in 1647, when a new tax on flour and
fruit caused the poorer areas of Naples to riot, under the leadership
of a young fish-seller from Amalfi, Tommaso Aniello, known as
Masaniello. Crowds occupied the royal palace, forcing the Viceroy to
retreat to Castel Nuovo, which was placed under siege. As in the
previous century, artisans and shopkeepers joined the revolt and the
houses of rich government officials, nobles, tax farmers and creditors
were attacked by the hungry multitude. The aristocrats hired bandits
to kill Masaniello, but the attempt failed and further infuriated the
masses: bandits and aristocrats alike were killed, and more palaces
were attacked. The Viceroy had no choice but to abolish the new
taxes and grant the people more power within the city council. By
treating with the Viceroy, Masaniello lost popular support, he was
killed and his corpse dragged around the city in a similar gruesome
ritual to the one Starace had suffered. Tommaso Astarita has shown
that other rituals were evident in the riots: goods from sacked
palaces were distributed to the poor, and parts cut from the bodies of
dead aristocrats were put on display. Once the government imposed
its rule again, it increased the price of bread once more, and
Masaniello’s corpse was reassembled and given a saint’s funeral, in
which he was honoured by hundreds of people.
In January 1648, the Spanish government promised an amnesty to
rebels and a tax reduction but, as anti-feudal rebellion spread into
the countryside, it sent a fleet to bombard the city, while the
aristocrats began a ferocious repression in the provinces, hiring
bandits to kill rebels and peasants; as the government gradually took
control of the situation, rebel leaders were executed. While food riots
and rebellions were endemic in early modern Europe, these events
illustrated the relatively weak control the Spanish had over southern
Italy; the viceroys were powerless against angry mobs, though the
monarchy could always send troops to crush revolts. Masaniello
remained a romantic hero in European public memory, and characters
based on him appeared in operas and paintings during the following
two centuries.
In 1647, a similar revolt broke out in Palermo over the rising price
of bread, and then spread to other cities and towns. The popular cry
against taxes and bad government (fora gabelle e malo governo) was
evidence of the centrality of the taxation issue at the time, but like
the Masaniello rebellion in Naples it was also a political revolt against
the municipal aristocratic form of government. Once again, the
Sicilian aristocracy’s loyalty to the Spanish government facilitated the
violent restoration of power. It was not just a shortage of food that
created revolt. Indeed, the principal attitude towards famine in the
seventeenth century was one of expiation and deference to God’s
will: famine was seen as a divine punishment for people’s sins, and a
food crisis normally produced orderly religious processions rather
than protests. For example, the Palermo revolt began early in May
1647, with the people walking backwards while praying in the streets
of the city asking God for rain to save the harvest. Sensibility towards
moral lapses increased during a time of famine, when sinners were
invited to confess as an act of redemption. Instead of disturbing the
traditional order, famine at first reinforced it. It was only when the
viceroys and the public administration increased the price of bread
even after the coming of the rain that devotion turned to anger, and
bread replaced the images of saints on the spears carried in
processions. Revolts occurred whenever political divisions and
antagonisms combined with popular hardships that had been
provoked by food shortages and economic pressures. In the case of
the Sicilian revolt of 1647, the result was the condemnation of
government policies coupled with a loss of popular identification with
the fortunes of the Catholic monarchy.
The two centuries of the viceroys were characterized by high
taxation, foreign domination, popular revolts, and famines. They also
witnessed regular natural catastrophes – earthquakes, eruptions of
Vesuvius, and epidemics. There were also, however, important
cultural achievements in philosophy, such as the work of Giambattista
Vico (born in 1668) and Pietro Giannone (born 1676 in Puglia), and in
literature, with the work of the Neapolitan Giambattista Marino
(1569–1625), whose poetry also influenced Baroque music. Naples in
particular was one of Italy’s cultural capitals in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries; it was the only large port in the southern
kingdom, it boasted the only university and was the site of most of
the banking facilities to meet the financial needs of the kingdom’s
elite. Many Italian communities lived there: Genoese, Florentine,
Venetian and Milanese. By the seventeenth century, Naples had
become an exporter of maccheroni. One Neapolitan obsession was
gambling, which provided the government with revenue, so the
viceroys’ few attempts to suppress it were resisted successfully.
When, in the eighteenth century, illegal gambling houses began to
prosper, gambling became linked with urban organized crime –
subsequently named the camorra – though, in general, life in Naples
was no more dangerous than in any other large European city of the
time.
The high quality of the work of the many painters who lived in
Naples made the city the only one in Italy truly comparable to Rome
in terms of the number and quality of its artists. New churches,
private palaces, convents and cloisters appeared in the city
throughout the two centuries of viceroyal rule. The urban planning of
Naples changed with the building of the most important city artery by
Viceroy Toledo, which still bears his name. However, the real
masterpiece of viceroyal architecture was the royal palace created by
architect Domenico Fontana, which in 1600 replaced the old palace.
The Austrian viceroys in the first half of the eighteenth century
sought to import reform and to reorganize the Sicilian economy,
improving transport safety and fighting banditry in the countryside.
However, Austrian weakness during Habsburg involvement in the
Polish war of succession increased the Empire’s financial
requirements from the island, making the Habsburgs dependent on
the local elite. The latter was thus able to regain control, in exchange
for its financial support, and to block reform that was deemed
harmful to the rulers’ secular privileges.
In the Papal States, strong city identities developed in the Marche
and Umbria, though no individual city prevailed over the others,
which made it difficult for the Popes to control the area whenever
anti–Papal revolts occurred. From 1598, following the end of the Este
dynasty, the area around Ferrara came under Papal control; there, as
in Bologna and Romagna, the Pope was represented by a legate, a
cardinal who ran the provinces on behalf of the Pope, and the areas
were known as the Legacies. The legate controlled the clergy, the
administration of justice, and the investigation of heresy through
arrest, capture and execution.
The major political problem in the Papal States was the
maintenance of Papal control over the nobles in the neighbouring
provinces, who used banditry to retain and expand their territorial
control. Papal justice often used exile as a punishment to deal with
this phenomenon, but banditry continued to flourish. The local clergy
often coexisted with banditry, and sometimes even favoured it.

THE POST-TRIDENTINE SOCIAL WORLD

Population growth in Italy continued in the eighteenth century

(reaching 18 million in 1800), but at a much lower pace than in other
European countries, indicating a relative decline. However, Italy
continued to be Europe’s most urbanized country, with the greatest
number of cities and the highest density of population. By 1770, Turin
had 82,000 inhabitants; Milan recovered from the devastating plague
of 1630, which had halved its population, claimed 126,000
inhabitants by the end of the seventeenth century, and became a
cosmopolitan and intellectual centre in Europe, under Austrian control
from 1715.
The urbanization of the nobility continued to distinguish Italy from
northern Europe. City aristocracies were constituted from bankers,
military nobles and bureaucrats, all of whom possessed land. Land
brought prestige, economic stability and the dependency of the
peasants who lived in the surrounding countryside and worked for
them. As Christopher Black has shown, there was extensive mobility
between city and countryside in the early modern period, which often
involved travelling long distances throughout the peninsula.
Ambassadors moved from city to city; and shepherds travelled to
different parts of the country across mountain ranges. Wealthy
women moved for matrimonial reasons; and the poor relocated from
the countryside to the cities for work as servants or prostitutes.
Seasonal workers journeyed according to the harvest; state officials
went to collect taxes or rent money within state boundaries, or to
administer justice; merchants, patrons and artists or musicians
travelled the whole country; and members of any state could be
sentenced to temporary exile in another state. Baroque and pastoral
literature and music frequently idealized the urban image of the rural
world, and the concept of the villa in the country continued to expand
its appeal. Commerce was constantly connecting cities with
countryside, and mills in particular were a common point of contact
between peasants and townspeople, with the miller often serving as
a communicator of urban culture and new ideas – as in the case of
the Friulian miller Menocchio (studied by Carlo Ginzburg), who
questioned religious orthodoxy in the Venetian republic.
In urban society, many were employed as servants – an occupation
for both males and females; people generally worked as servants
while they were young (as teenagers or in their early twenties).
Prostitution was an important and recognized aspect of Italian city
life. While at times (particularly in the case of epidemics), lay and
religious authorities viewed it more strictly, as long as it did not
create a public scandal it was usually tolerated; in some cities,
prostitutes were confined to specific districts; for example in Venice
near the Rialto Bridge, or in Florence around the Mercato Vecchio.
Elite prostitutes enjoyed good lifestyles, were educated, dressed
elegantly and posed nude for important painters. At the lower levels,
prostitutes also provided other, non-sexual, services: they practised
magic and were consulted for spells to bind loved ones or defeat love
rivals. Their magic, like that of witches, included the treatment of
illnesses or the recovery of lost fortunes.
From the second half of the sixteenth century in both northern and
southern Italy, women’s lives were influenced, particularly at the level
of the aristocracy, by the fact that aristocratic families adopted an
increasingly marked patrilinear structure, characterized by male
primogeniture, excluding daughters and younger sons from
inheritance. Marriage was therefore only encouraged for the eldest
son, while the others had to remain celibate and choose a military or
ecclesiastical career. This reduced the collateral lines of elite families
and resulted, in the long term, in a demographic decline of the
aristocracy. Control over the family as a constituent cell of society led
religious authorities to try to discipline behaviour and any
transgression that violated the model imposed by the Council of
Trent. Indeed, as a part of the wider attempt to reassert the Church’s
power over European society, the Council also took decisions that
were to affect aspects of domestic life. As the sacred aspect of
marriage had been declared, polygamy became a crime punishable
by the Inquisition. Those who ignored the sacred aspect of marriage
were treated as heretics: men could be condemned to between five
and ten years in the galea (ships’ galleys), and women sent to prison.
As Irene Fosi has demonstrated, family morality could be policed with
the help of neighbours and relatives:
Domestic walls were not impenetrable. The eyes and ears of neighbours were ready to
detect gestures, noises, shouting: the home and its rooms formed an indivisible unity
with the street, nullifying any distinction between public and private.

However, there were exceptions in the indissolubility of marriage,

as separations were allowed in the case, for example, of adultery or
extreme cruelty. The Tridentine Council established that marital
disputes had to be brought before the ecclesiastical court. As Joanne
Ferraro has demonstrated in research on the Venetian case, much
reluctance remained with regard to the observation of the new rules,
which frequently clashed with individual desire. Women who had
been forced into marriage when very young, for example, later used
Tridentine definitions of marriage to prove that their unions were not
valid.
Painting reflected the changes in society. Following Petrarch’s love
poems, painters before Titian had portrayed images of gentlemen’s
lovers which combined love, passion and sexuality outside marriage.
The cortese adoration of the ideal woman had been replaced by an
attempt to bring together love and sexual passion, bridging a
separation that had existed throughout the Middle Ages. This process
was obstructed by the mid-sixteenth-century Church, which
strengthened its control over people’s habits, and made it difficult to
continue the tradition of love portraits. Only German romanticism at
the end of the eighteenth century returned to combining both kinds
of love; however, it did so within the revaluation of marriage,
something that had largely been ignored by the more innovative idea
of free, extra-conjugal, love of the Italian Renaissance. Family and
public morality became inextricably linked; family reputation and
honour were important resources that required confirmation by an
extra-familiar context of social relations. The concept of honour was
related to the family mainly with regard to vigilance over female
sexuality; in all patrilinear societies it was necessary for children to be
legitimate, so that property did not pass to those of different blood
from the husband’s. Surveillance of women’s sexual honour was
therefore crucial to safeguard the continuity and strength of the
lineage. However, there were many ways of establishing, losing and
reconstituting the honour of women, men and families. As Giovanna
Fiume’s research has shown, forms of compensation existed that
meant honour was not always irreparably lost and could be
renegotiated. Religious and lay institutions for orphans and
abandoned women served to protect them from falling prey to
‘dangers of honour’. Such women could create a new reputation and
even prepare a dowry that could put them back in the marriage
market. The image of the Sicilian woman imprisoned within the walls
of the family was also a stereotype that emerged only later. Indeed,
as demonstrated by Jane Schneider, only women from rich families
could afford not to go to work in the countryside; instead, they
stayed at home for long years preparing complicated sets of white
embroideries that came to symbolize female sexual purity and
economic wealth. For the majority of the female population in both
cities and countryside, reality consisted of a combination of
housework and agricultural work, child care and various urban jobs
such as laundress or maid.
As Guido Ruggiero’s research shows, the moralists of the time,
even those educated in a humanistic environment, seemed more
influenced by Christian values than by contemporary practice. The
ruling classes worried about maintaining a public standard of morality
to a greater degree than did the common people. Indeed, for the
lower classes, honour and shame were elastic and malleable
concepts. As elsewhere in the early modern period, the number of
illegitimate children in Italy was very high; weddings celebrated after
years of cohabitation were commonplace, as was prostitution, which
was a common profession, as noted earlier, particularly in cities, for
which women had only to register and pay for a licence. Only in the
nineteenth century, when the state became stronger, did private
behaviour become a matter of public regulation.

A VIOLENT COUNTRY?

By Western European standards, Italy has always had a reputation

for being a violent society, a reputation that extended from the time
of the Renaissance to the 1970s. In biographies such as Cellini’s,
violence was constantly present, and later historians, including
Burckhardt, confirmed his view of the sixteenth century. There were
factors that favoured lawlessness in Italian society, starting with its
geography: the presence of many remote mountain areas facilitated
escape for bandits and criminals, and central authority was always
threatened by the surrounding hilltop baronial fortresses. The high
population density of cities made social control very difficult. Male
servants with a bad reputation were called bravi, and they provided
an armed service to landowners and the aristocracy. Generally
criminals who escorted the elite and intimidated their enemies, they
were particularly brutal in rural areas, where they threatened
peasants on behalf of the landowners. Bravi also settled personal
vendettas and at times enjoyed the exciting life of the city, taking
part in gambling activities and frequenting brothels.

Box 5.1 Description of the bravi in Manzoni’s The

Betrothed
Here is Alessandro Manzoni’s description, from the early 1800s, of
two bravi hired, during the Spanish domination of Milan, by an
arrogant nobleman, Don Rodrigo, in order to threaten the priest
Don Abbondio and discourage him from celebrating the marriage
of two young lovers, Renzo and Lucia, who are workers in the silk
industry in a village near Lecco on Lake Como:

As he turned the corner the priest glanced towards the

shrine in his usual way, and saw something that was both
unexpected and unwelcome. Opposite each other where the
paths flowed, as it were, together, were two men: one of
them was astride the low wall, with one leg dangling
outwards and the other on the path; his companion was
standing leaning against the wall, with his arms crossed on
his chest. Their dress and manner, and what the priest from
where he was could see of their faces, left no room for
doubt as to their profession. On his head each wore a green
net hanging over the left shoulder and ending in a large
tassel; from this net a heavy lock of hair fell over their
foreheads. They had long mustachios curled up at the ends;
shining leather belts on which hung a brace of pistols; a
small powder-horn dangled like a locket on their chest; the
handle of a knife showed from a pocket of their loose, wide
breeches; they had rapiers with big, gleaming, furbished
hilts of pierced brass, worked in monograms. It was obvious
 at first glance that they were men of the class known as
bravi. This class, now quite extinct, was then flourishing in
Lombardy, and was already of considerable antiquity.
(Manzoni, 1997)

Banditry was seen as politically strategic in landowner-peasant

relations; bandits were much feared but also mythologized. Some
bandits were forced to live in hiding most of the time, though they
could be pardoned if they helped to capture other dangerous bandits.
Some bandits carried out vendettas on behalf of rival families, and
were employed indiscriminately as criminals or soldiers – serving in
the army or forming part of a criminal band were interchangeable
ways of finding employment. This situation existed all over Italy, but
was stronger in the south because the viceroys’ power was not strong
enough to control the local barons who employed bandits.
In a pamphlet on the brigands in Italy, the French writer Stendhal
(Marie Henri Beyle) (1783–1842) – who arrived in Milan with
Napoleon’s army in 1800 and then travelled extensively around the
country – noticed that, while in France and every other European
country, people who lived by stealing and killing were universally
condemned, in Italy they were respected by the public. Italians were,
of course, terrified by brigands, but they also felt sympathy for them
when they were punished. Short poems narrating the lives of famous
brigands were extremely popular, and the public regarded them as
heroes, feeling an admiration for them ‘very close to the feeling that,
in ancient times, the Greeks felt for some of their semi-gods’. Like
Manzoni, Stendhal also commented on the bravi in Lombardy:
In 1580, in the heart of Lombardy emerged a very feared corporation of assassins: that
of the bravi. Many rich lords hired them and used them to satisfy all their fancies,
whether caused by hatred, vendetta, or love. The bravi performed with an incomparable
ability and audacity the most difficult missions: even the authorities feared them. From
1583 the Spanish governor in Milan made vain efforts to destroy such a dangerous
corporation: he issued endless edicts, which did not prevent the bravi from continuing to
be employed. In 1628 their category was particularly flourishing and they had the most
daunting reputation for murder and kidnapping.
(Stendhal, 2004)
Brigandage had existed in Italy, as Stendhal affirmed, from time
immemorial, but its wide diffusion began in the mid-sixteenth
century. Government weakness meant that brigands were often
granted impunity, and such an adventurous life fascinated many
young people, who longed to escape the tyranny of a feudal lord or
the Church authorities. While the whole of Italy was infested by
brigands, they were strongest in the Papal States and the Kingdom of
Naples. After describing the way the brigands dressed, Stendhal
noticed that their equipment was a mixture of the religious and the
military: together with weapons they carried images of saints, Jesus,
and especially the Virgin Mary, which were considered necessary to
save their souls: ‘nothing more dreadful than this mixture of cruelty
and superstition!’. They believed that dying at the stake, following
absolution by a priest, would ensure a place in heaven. Even when
killed by the police, these brigands remained heroes in the eyes of
the public, who attributed more genius and courage to them than to
regular military leaders.

AN AGE OF HUNGER

As Massimo Montanari’s research has shown, early modern Europe

was an age of hunger, one in which the gap between the patterns of
consumption of rich and poor widened. The global enrichment of
urban societies, the increasing products offered by an expanding
market, and the role of money, all contributed to the concentration of
wealth and power, and to extreme levels of misery and deprivation.
The Renaissance had introduced into gastronomy a similar
aesthetic attention to that informing etiquette and the arts, from the
adornments that accompanied dishes to the convivial scenery, the
presentation of food, the gestures that attended service and, as
treatises such as the one by Della Casa discussed above, the
relationship between eating and manners, from the correct use of
cutlery to rules about chewing. This aesthetic attention distinguished
elite food consumption. The early-seventeenth-century literary work
that most defined the class divide in terms of food was Bertoldo, by
Giulio Cesare Croce (1550–1609), first published in 1606. Croce was
a self-taught blacksmith from Romagna who found great success as a
popular writer and a cantastorie, accompanying his stories on the
violin in village squares and at city festivals – though he had no
patrons and eventually died in poverty. The Bertoldo of Croce’s work
was a peasant who fell ill and was treated by court doctors, who gave
him the most sophisticated foods of the time, which were totally
unsuited to his coarse stomach. He continued to ask for a pot of
beans and onion, the only food he was used to, but to no avail.
Having to eat the food of the rich, he died in terrible pain. The book
reflects many medical treatises of the time; Giacomo Albini, doctor of
the House of Savoy, for example, warned that pain and illness would
come to those who did not eat according to their social status. For
the peasants, this meant they must continue eating flour products or
cereals. Flour became a crucial part of their lives – in the form of
bread, focacce and polenta. In 1630, Cesare Righettini wrote a ‘heroic
poem’ entitled La Polenta, a parody of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, in
which the heroic champion Orlando, after four days of abstinence
from food because of his search for Angelica, ate a giant dish of
polenta and died.
Consumption was entirely dependent on the results of the harvest,
which caused not only nutritional but also psychological imbalances,
as anxieties about food became totally ingrained into daily life. Similar
literature, with different outcomes from Bertoldo, can be found in
Spain, where the best literary example was Don Quixote’s Sancho
Panza, constantly preoccupied with the need to eat, in contrast to the
dreamy mental world of Don Quixote, and always eager to take part
in banquets whenever his master’s adventures gave him the chance.
Literary works provide us with knowledge of what the urban middle
classes and aristocracy ate in Italy between the sixteenth and
eighteenth centuries. Much correspondence throughout this period
confirms the use of and praise for vegetables and various types of
herbs, an attitude that was typically Mediterranean and bore little
comparison with the other side of the Alps.
One of the last examples of the creative era of Renaissance and
Baroque gastronomy (subsequently displaced by French supremacy)
was a treatise on L’arte di ben cucinare (‘The art of cooking well’)
published in 1662 by Bartolomeo Stefani, the main chef at the
Gonzaga court. In his writing he described a banquet he organized
for the visiting Queen Christine of Sweden, who abdicated and moved
to Italy in 1655 after converting to Catholicism. The most prominent
part of Stefani’s description, besides the dishes, was the amazing
architectural scenery of the lunch: a theatrical representation
intended to impress the eyes even more than the stomach.
Food was also very important during the feasts in honour of patron
saints, especially in a peasant society that suffered from hunger for
most of the year. The feast was the moment when dreams of
abundance came true, albeit briefly; it was the moment of communal
sharing of food in a mood of solidarity. The preparation and
distribution of food were central aspects of this collective activity, and
many typical products and recipes of Italian cuisine originated in the
festive cycle linked with recurrent patronal celebrations. The
succession of saints’ days therefore became what Marino Niola has
called the sacralization of the economic cycle.

PHILOSOPHY, SCIENCE AND RELIGION

In 1600, after a trial that lasted seven years, the Inquisition had the
philosopher Giordano Bruno burned at the stake in Rome. The other
important philosopher of that time, Tommaso Campanella (1568–
1639), was tried and imprisoned many times (the longest term being
between 1599 and 1626) accused of being a heretic, but managed to
escape the death penalty by pretending to be mad and enduring
torture. After publishing the Apologia pro Galileo and the political
utopian work Sun City, he was arrested again, but persuaded the
judges of his faith and subsequently fled to France. Another example
was that of Galileo Galilei from Pisa (1564–1642), forced to renounce
his scientific discoveries because they conflicted with Aristotelian
physics and with the Papal beliefs supported by the Jesuits.

Box 5.2 A sixteenth-century Italian gastronomic itinerary

The doctor and writer, Ortensio Lando, wrote a Commentario
delle più notabili e mostrouse cose d’Italia e d’altri luoghi
(‘Commentary on the most remarkable and monstrous things of
Italy and of other places’ – first published in 1548), in which he
pretended to recommend to an improbable Aramaic tourist in
Italy what and where to eat in each region. He therefore
described the typical food and wine of various parts of Italy,
making a sort of oeno-gastronomic guide of the country:

Within one month, if the wind is favourable, you will arrive in

the wealthy island of Sicily and you will eat such
maccheroni... If it is convenient to spend Lent in Taranto,
you will become larger than longer, such is the tastiness of
fish cooked with oil and vinegar, and with certain fragrant
herbs and some flavour of whole nuts, garlic and almonds ...
In Naples you will eat... fish, mushrooms ... almond cakes ...
In Siena you will eat excellent marzipan, exquisite apricots,
and tasty ravagiuoli [portions of fresh cheese] ... Not far
from Pisa, in a place called Val Caci, you will eat the best
and most beautiful ricotta that was ever seen from East to
West... I do not want to forget to warn you that in Bologna
they make the best sausages that were ever eaten ... If you
have a sudden desire to eat a perfect quince jam you must
go to Reggio, Mirandola and Correggio, but lucky you if you
get to that cheese from Piacenza ... In Piacenza they also
make a dish called gnocchi with garlic, which would
resuscitate the appetite of a dead man ... In Padua you will
find excellent bread, berzamino wine, small pike ... Should I
not tell you about the fish from Chioggia? About the
Venetian plaice, gilthead, oyster, scallop and grey mullet? ...
You will find good wine in Friuli and even better in Vicenza,
where you will also eat the most perfect baby goat. Shall I
not tell you about the large carp of Lake Garda?... As you
arrive in Brescia I want you to go on my behalf to mister
Giovan Battista Luzago ... and ask him to give you to drink
that vernaccia wine ... the Brescians have, apart from the
 vernaccia of Cellatica, superior muscatel... As I am sure that
you will not return to your beloved fatherland without
visiting Genoa, I warn you that they make cakes called
gattafure ... Oh the muscatel pears! You will drink such a
good muscatel from Tagia that if I drowned in a barrel of
that wine I would feel like dying the happiest death.

The habit of living with a dual truth and a dual morality, the
tendency towards pretence and the need to mask one’s deepest ideas
and feelings were theorized by Torquato Accetto in the treatise Della
dissimulazione onesta (‘On honest dissimulation’, 1641): ‘I carry the
mask, but only because I have no choice, because no one can live in
Italy without it.’ He praised the cautious life, which, according to him,
‘went well with the soul’s purity’; indeed, he argued, ‘the rose
appears so beautiful because at first sight it conceals that it will be so
short-lived’. The difference between philosophers’ attitude in Italy and
in other countries is evident in John Locke’s Letter Concerning
Toleration (1689), written while he was exiled in Holland after the
defeat of the Whig party in England:
although the magistrate’s opinion in religion be sound, and the way that he appoints be
truly evangelical, yet if I be not thoroughly persuaded thereof in my own mind, there will
be no safety for me in following it. No way whatsoever that I shall walk in against the
dictates of my conscience, will ever bring me to the mansions of the blessed.
(Locke, 2003, p. 232)

Like the Roman Church, the Spanish ruling class sought in southern
Italy to control the cultural centres that had been created during the
Renaissance, closing down academies, and persecuting the southern
Italian philosopher-scientists Giordano Bruno, Giambattista Della
Porta and Bernardino Telesio; however, rebel intellectuals did emerge,
even from monasteries, as the cases of Giordano Bruno and
Tommaso Campanella demonstrated. Educated within Catholic culture
and religion, these authors had to face not only the drama of
persecution, but also internal dilemmas of choosing to operate
outside an established tradition.
 Bruno was an industrious writer and teacher from Nola in
Campania. As a Dominican novice at the Naples seminary, he read
forbidden books by Erasmus and Lucretius and, after being
summoned to Rome, he escaped to Geneva, where he converted to
Calvinism. He moved between France, Germany and England where,
in London, he published a book which argued that the universe
comprised a number of different worlds all rotating around their own
sun, therefore dismissing the Christian theory of the Creation.
Homesick for Italy, he returned to Venice in 1591, where the republic
charged him with heresy and handed him over to Rome, where he
was burned by the Inquisition.
Campanella was born in Stilo, in Calabria, in 1568, of a peasant
family. He became a Dominican as his only option to be able to study,
and came into contact with Telesio’s work. From 1589 he began
travelling: he left Calabria and moved to Naples, where he met Della
Porta and became interested in the scientific study of magic. In 1591,
he published the Philosophia sensibus demonstrata (‘Philosophy of
the senses demonstrated’), clearly influenced by Telesio, and the
following year was summoned by the Dominican Order, which
ordered that he abandon his ideas and return immediately to
Calabria. He disobeyed and moved to Florence, then to Bologna,
where the Inquisition confiscated all his manuscripts, and on to
Padua, where he wrote various works. In 1593–4, in a treatise
entitled Della monarchia dei cristiani (‘On the monarchy of the
Christians’), he expressed his fundamental political conception: the
unification of all peoples of the world under one common law, which
was both civil and religious.
In 1594 he was arrested and tortured for the first time and
extradited to Rome, where he shared a prison with Bruno. In 1595,
he was forced publicly to renounce his ideas and to live in a
monastery on the Aventine Hill, where he wrote an operetta on
Lutherans, Calvinists and other heretics. Subsequently sent back to
Calabria, Campanella organized an anti-clerical, anti–Spanish
conspiracy, with the aim of establishing a republic. The conspiracy
was discovered and he was arrested and condemned to life
imprisonment. In prison in Naples until 1626, Campanella wrote some
of his major works, including Sun City (1602). He was then
transferred to the Roman prisons of the Inquisition and liberated on
the personal decision of Pope Urban VIII, who hoped to use him in
the supervision of the Inquisition. But Campanella intervened in 1633
in Galileo’s Inquisition trial in favour of the scientist and was therefore
forced to flee to France, where he died in 1639.
Sun City is the idealized programme of the failed Calabrian
insurrection. It appears that the literary stimulus for the work came
from Diodoro Siculo, who, in the second book of his Histories, told a
merchant about the habits of the inhabitants of an island in the
Indian Ocean. The chief of the City of the Sun was both a religious
and a civil leader, helped by three princes, Pon, Sin and Mor,
symbolizing Potenza (power), Sapienza (knowledge) and Amore
(love). The first of these princes oversaw military affairs, the second
had charge of the liberal and mechanical arts (governing with as
many officials as there were sciences), and the third was responsible
for human development, education, medicine, feeding and clothing.
The basis of life in the City of the Sun was the communal nature of
property, including women. Education began at three years of age
and there were no class distinctions. Children were brought up by the
whole community and the lack of personal interest that resulted from
dedication to every art meant that there was no crime. Sun City is in
the form of a dialogue, in which an Hospitaller (a knight of the order
of the Hospitallers at St John in Jerusalem) asks questions of a
Genoese boatswain in the service of Christopher Columbus. One of
the questions was: ‘Are the inhabitants of the City of the Sun
Christians?’, to which the boatswain answers that they only followed
the law of nature, which brought them close to Christianity. Christian
religion could be defined as the law of nature plus the sacraments: by
bringing it back to its natural state, it would become ‘mistress of the
world’. As Eugenio Garin has explained, political reform and religious
renovation were very closely linked, and this is why Campanella was
strongly opposed to Machiavelli and his ‘reason of state’. While
Machiavelli wanted to distinguish state and religious power from each
other, for Campanella the two remained strictly intertwined. Both the
religious aspect and Campanella’s social demands must be
understood within the historical context in which he lived: his City of
the Sun reflected the widespread misery among the population of
southern Italy; the desire for an egalitarian and communal society
being derived from the unbearable conditions imposed by the feudal
society in which the Catholic Church was an instrument of power.
Counter–Reformation Italy was in part an anti-clerical country, full
of atheists who were lively intellectuals and prolific writers.
Academies, which were to expand rapidly in the eighteenth century,
were, according to Hanlon, the ‘breeding ground for atheism’, but
atheism was also a feature among the common people: village
disbelievers such as Menocchio, the miller described by Carlo
Ginzburg, whose research has demonstrated how the orthodox views
imposed by the Inquisition were challenged not only by forbidden
literature but also by a rich traditional popular culture that had
existed for centuries. The fact that most Italians in the early modern
period were illiterate does not mean that they had no culture. As
shown by Ginzburg’s example of Menocchio, literary and traditional
oral cultures were mixed. Also, peasant oral culture was transmitted
by popular writers and sung in villages by the cantastorie, while the
majority of the working urban population had a basic knowledge of
reading and writing for practical purposes. Taken together, this
culture facilitated the spread of unorthodox ideas.
By the late sixteenth century, the problem of controlling knowledge
had become particularly pressing, and the Inquisition more active in
prosecuting heresies concerning the interpretation of the natural
world, including mathematics. Initially regarded as inferior to
philosophy, it was taught increasingly at Italian universities,
principally in Padua, where the first European observatory was built,
housing a huge telescope. The same university became the leading
European academy for medicine, through the study of the work of
Galen of Pergamum: specialist chairs were created in surgery,
anatomy, paediatrics and geriatrics. These advances led to Catholic
orthodox beliefs being questioned increasingly. One of the teachers at
Padua University was, from 1592, the Florentine mathematician
Galileo Galilei, who developed the world’s most powerful telescope in
the first decade of the new century, and which he donated to the
Republic of Venice. After this, Galileo moved to Florence, where he
was offered a highly paid job as mathematician and philosopher at
the court of Grand Duke Cosimo II. In 1614, he declared that
religious and scientific truths should be separated, a theory contrary
to Catholic belief, which brought him into conflict with the Inquisition.
The latter put him on trial and placed Nicolaus Copernicus’s work on
the Index. Absolved at the trial, Galileo persevered and published a
pro–Copernican pamphlet, the Dialogues on Two World Systems, in
1632. Pope Urban VIII summoned him to Rome and, despite Galileo’s
work being in translation and having a wide influence abroad, he was
held by the Inquisition in a palace in Tuscany. He retained many
disciples in Italy, especially among scientists who continued to
experiment with the telescope, tasks made easier by the fact that
Italian workshops crafted the world’s finest glass lenses.
Nevertheless, the condemnation of Galileo warned Italian scientists to
be careful and not to reveal their true beliefs; most scientists in Italy
until the eighteenth century were Jesuits (the Company of Jesus had
been founded in 1534 by the Spaniard Ignatius of Loyola), and
Galileo’s work remained on the Index until the 1740s. The
heliocentric view of the universe was not accepted by the Catholic
Church until 1822. However, Galileo’s legacy was not erased by the
Inquisition, and persisted in the work of advocates of Copernicanism,
who continued to use the telescope – some of them were Jesuits,
such as the German astronomer, Christopher Clavius. Indeed, many
Catholic scholars had begun to question the Ptolemaic system and did
not expect such a strong intervention from the Church. As Paula
Findlen has remarked, observational astronomy continued to advance
in Italy. Though many scholars continued to write in Latin, scientific
works appeared increasingly in Italian (most of Galileo’s works had
been accessible to anyone literate, as they were in Tuscan),
broadening the interest of society in scientific discoveries.

CLERGY, SAINTS AND MAGIC

As Gregory Hanlon has remarked, Italian cities were ‘arsenals filled

with relics accumulated over centuries’. Italy was also crammed with
dioceses, each of which had a bishop: in 1600 they numbered 315,
compared with 130 in France – a much larger and more populous
country. Bishops were selected by the Pope, with the exception of
Sicily, where that privilege lay with the Spanish king. Bishops
confirmed children, consecrated new churches, ordained the clergy
and reported suspicions of heresy to the Papacy. They could also
grant licences and dispensations – for example, to married people
who wanted to separate, or to relatives who wanted to get married –
and they also had a central role in deciding on new devotions and
pilgrimages.
The secular clergy lived among the people, administered the
sacraments and, if ordained, were supported by an income that was
not subject to state taxation. For this reason, many aristocratic
families tended to have one son who was a priest, and placed some
of their property in his name: as Hanlon has described, ‘obtaining a
good benefice was often the point of departure for the social rise of a
whole family’. Many of these priests did not respect canonical
regulations. However, this did not usually create problems within their
local parishes; people tolerated priests’ sexual activity as long as this
did not create scandal by involving virgins or married women of the
community, and as long as they looked after their children,
administered the sacraments and did not ask for high donations.
When communities denounced members of the clergy to the bishop it
was because the priests had offended community morals; for
example, by gambling, practising usury, carrying weapons or being
involved in magic and carnival activities.
The secular clergy grew in part as a result of the assistance of the
Jesuits, who organized schools throughout Italy, the number of which
increased from eighteen in 1556 to eighty in 1630 and to 111 in
1700. Numbers of churchmen continued to expand more generally in
the late sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries. Around 1625, for
example, clergymen made up 12 per cent of the population of Lecce
in Apulia. The abundance of clerics contributed to the building of new
churches, which made Lecce a centre of Baroque architecture in Italy,
developing a very distinctive urban landscape. A northern city, Ferrara
in Emilia, with 20,000 inhabitants, contained ninety-six churches and
fifty monasteries, convents or other types of religious institution.
Religious events, particularly when they involved the transportation of
relics, were spectacles to which ordinary citizens contributed by
hanging flags and banners at their windows and producing street
paintings. People were obsessed with giving pious donations, and
with the idea of purgatory.
In contrast to the secular clergy, the regular clergy took vows of
chastity, poverty and obedience. They were segregated from the
population at the margins of towns and lived according to the regula
(rule). As mentioned in Chapter 4, during the early modern age
female orders experienced the same growth as male orders. By mid-
century, noble families suffering economic difficulties placed
daughters in convents to avoid the dowry problem. In 1589, the use
of grilles in churches was introduced, hiding nuns from all visitors,
however close the relationship; nuns were forbidden from keeping
servants or pets, and their correspondence was checked by the
abbesses. These laws, even if only partially observed in many cases,
were resented by nuns of noble birth, who were not used to such
strict rules of life and had previously thought of convents as akin to
congregations of ladies.
People expected priests to help placate divine anger, believing that
they had the capacity to summon supernatural powers. Many rituals
were forms of exorcism, protection against evil forces, while others
were used to invoke God’s help – when, for example, there was a bad
harvest, a drought, or there were plagues and natural disasters.
People took part in processions, following the priests and carrying
images of saints, often barefoot and whipping themselves to show
God they were begging for mercy for their sins. Saints interceded
between the people and God, and belief in miracles was much
stronger at that time than belief in medicine. The most important
intercessor continued to be the Virgin Mary, whose shrine in Loreto,
near Ancona, became the most famous in Catholic Europe. Loreto is
located a few kilometres from the Adriatic coast near Recanati in the
Marche, and contains the most important Marian relic: the walls of
the house where the holy family lived in Nazareth and where Mary
brought up God’s son. The house is contained within a marble edifice
constructed by the architect and sculptor Andrea Sansovino (1467–
1529) from a design by Bramante. According to legend, the walls flew
from Palestine to Loreto, transported by angels, in order to escape
Islamic occupation. Having decided to approve this fantastic story,
the Roman Church supported Bramante’s project for reconstructing
the sanctuary, first under Julius II, then under Leo X, who entrusted
Sansovino with its completion. Since then, while its fame declined
from the eighteenth century, Loreto has remained an essential stop
on the pilgrimage to Rome.
The Jesuits looked after the wellbeing of pilgrims between the
sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. The Compagnia di Gesù (Society
of Jesus), officially approved by Pope Paul III’s bull Regimini militantis
ecclesiae of 1540, was one of the most effective instruments of the
Church’s renovation. In addition to the three traditional vows of
poverty, chastity and obedience, the Jesuits established a fourth one
of obedience to the Pope’s orders, which had to be the willing and
total obedience of a lifeless body (‘perinde ac cadaver’). It was the
Jesuits who defended Loreto from the attacks of the Reformation.
Not only heretics, but also intellectuals who wanted Church reform
believed a more ‘moral’ and inner religiosity was needed, which would
not propagate superstitions based on such irrational miraculous
stories. The Jesuits were able to save the pilgrimage to Loreto and
indeed to reinforce devotion to the shrine, assisted by the fact that
such devotion was shared by thousands of pilgrims and was deeply
rooted among the masses. Loreto therefore became a symbol of the
Counter–Reformation.
Loreto is not the only Marian shrine in Italy: the country is filled
with them – from the twelfth century to the present day, more than
one shrine a year has been dedicated to the Madonna. In 1982, there
were 1,539 Marian sanctuaries out of a total of 1,763. They can be
found all over the peninsula, but are concentrated mainly in the
north, the highest number being in Liguria. After the later unification
of Italy, Loreto became a key site of national memory and identity,
chosen by Catholics as a centre of religious pilgrimage to counter the
civil-political pilgrimages of the time (as, for example, that of 1884 at
the King’s tomb in the Pantheon or, in 1895, the 25th anniversary of
the seizure of Rome by the Italian army). Later still, in 1891, Leo XIII
conceded full indulgence to those who made the pilgrimage to
Loreto. With Mary’s help, Italy’s Catholics had to fight a new crusade:
against atheism and liberalism. Felice Cavallotti, the radical and anti-
clerical member of parliament, in a speech to the chamber in the
1870s, called Loreto the ‘sacred business of fraud’. The coexistence of
civil and religious influences, which underpinned the cult of protector
saints, surfaced particularly during the feasts dedicated to them. In
1642, with the note Pro observatione festorum, Urban VIII made the
celebration of the patron saint an obligatory feast, therefore a day on
which work was forbidden. Civil influence over the patronal choices
brought about a kind of cohabitation between saints, that, as Niola
(2007) has observed, ‘made the patronal pantheon in Italian cities
particularly crowded, especially during the Baroque age’.
After the Council of Trent, discipline tightened on the practices and
representations of sanctity, and the gap widened between Roman
centralization and local patronal practices. The autonomous role of
local churches and city governments in the creation of new saints had
gradually been reduced from the twelfth century onwards, but it was
the process of canonization that principally became centralized during
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In an attempt to de-localize
saints, the 1630 Papal decree Pro patronis in posterum eligendis
placed the patronage system under the direct control of the Roman
Church; it also established that only previously canonized saints could
be chosen as protectors.
One of the most enduring cults from the seventeenth century is
that of St Gennaro in Naples; already a feature in the sixteenth
century (particularly after Gennaro’s help had been sought during a
plague epidemic in 1527), the cult soared to new heights in 1631,
when Gennaro’s relics were considered to have rescued the city from
a devastating eruption of Vesuvius, by halting the flow of lava. The
eruption had already killed over 3,000 Neapolitans when the bishop
decided to take Gennaro’s head outside the Cathedral, at which point
the saint’s dried blood became liquid. The miracle has continued to
occur almost every year since then, and has become the major
saintly event in the city; on the few occasions when the blood failed
to flow, it was commonly believed that great evil would be visited on
the city. The bleeding of saints’ bodies has been a recurrent
phenomenon since the Middle Ages and has continued until recent
times (with the success of the cult of Padre Pio, an early twentieth-
century capuchin from Puglia who allegedly developed stigmata on
his body and whose devotion has spread, and still persists, all over
Italy). Saints could develop stigmata during their lifetime, or could
spill fresh blood when dead. A study by Giulio Sodano on the case of
Naples in the seventeenth century has explained how the aristocracy
sustained the belief in miracles that involved the spilling of blood. In
the early modern period, the glory of prestigious families was
considered to depend on the nobility of their blood, which had been
transmitted down the centuries. Both nobles and saints possessed a
virtuous and exceptional blood, the first thanks to their predecessors,
and the second as a result of divine intervention.
The belief in saints had much in common with the belief in
witches. Many lay people, mostly women, simply imitated priests and
learnt how to practise exorcism. With the bull Coeli et terrae of 1586,
Sixtus V unleashed the harshest attack ever against magic and
astrology, both of which became heresies and were no longer
tolerated. The main victims were the thousands of women accused of
being witches, who were brought to Inquisition tribunals. However,
the job of a witch was not dissimilar to that of a priest: they cured
illnesses, and used amulets and images, including those of saints and
crosses. This could be one reason why Italy, where magic proliferated
more than in other European country, did not witness the same level
of furious and bloody repression of witches experienced on the other
side of the Alps. The Italian Inquisition was not as worried by female
magic as by the new male interest in science; indeed, magic
persisted well into the modern age. Research carried out by the
Neapolitan anthropologist Ernesto De Martino (1908–65) illustrates
the continuation of such beliefs into the twentieth century.
While the Spanish Inquisition helped Spain to create a nation of
Spaniards by repressing Muslims and Jews, the same was not
possible in Italy, which had no centralized state. Nevertheless, Popes
decreed that Jews had to live in ghettos created in Italian cities. The
Roman Inquisition, while responsible for executing about 300 people,
did not reach the murderous levels achieved by the Spanish
Inquisition; instead, it focused increasingly on the repression of
thought, using the Index and creating a climate of fear that any
unorthodox behaviour could be reported to Rome.

ART, ARCHITECTURE, LITERATURE AND MUSIC IN THE BAROQUE

AGE

The use of painting by noble families to display their status continued

from the Renaissance into the Baroque period. However, a
fundamental novelty was introduced by a young Lombard artist,
Michelangelo Merisi (1573–1609), known as Caravaggio after the
name of his town near Bergamo, who began painting the common
people: card-sharps, soldiers, fortune-tellers and lute-players. This
underworld appeared even in his paintings of sacred subjects, which
often shocked his contemporaries. Caravaggio moved between
Lombardy, Rome, Naples and Messina. Between 1597 and 1602 he
worked in Rome in the Church of S. Luigi dei Francesi, producing
some of his most beautiful works: St Matthew and the Angel, the
Vocation of St Matthew, and the Martyrdom of St Matthew. He knew
the life of the lower classes and had a tormented life himself,
constantly tangling with the law because of violent quarrels and
unorthodox habits. After being wounded in a fight on his way to
Rome, he caught malaria and died near Porto Ercole in Tuscany in
1610, at only 37 years of age. He hated Mannerist art, its allegories
and conventional forms. His realism was based on the Brescian
Renaissance painters Girolamo Savoldo (1480–1548), Girolamo
Romanino (1484–1562), Alessandro Bonvicino, known as Moretto
(1498–1554), and on Leonardo and the early-sixteenth-century
Venetian painters. His choice of disreputable and ambiguous models
to represent the apostles brought religious art down to a more
human level.
His revolutionary innovation, one of the most important in Italian
painting, was the invention of chiaroscuro: the use of shadow by
casting light only on the most dramatic part of the painting.
Caravaggio’s studies of light took advantage of the scientific
discoveries of his time, a time when the work of the scientist and the
artist were closer than in previous periods. He created a sort of
camera obscura in his studio, as described by a 1620 biographer:
A unified light which came from above without reflection, as might happen in a room with
the walls painted black; in this way lights and shadows would be very bright and very
dark, and they would have a non-natural impact on painting, something which was never
realised or thought of by any painter in any previous century.
(Parronchi, 2002)

The contribution of the Neapolitan scientist Della Porta was especially

important for Caravaggio. Della Porta wrote a treatise on optics
entitled De refractione (1593) after the invention of binoculars, which
publicized the camera obscura beyond its use in optical laboratories.
During the eighteenth century, painting was also given new vigour
with the work of artists from Venice: Francesco Guardi, Antonio
Canale (known as Canaletto), and Giambattista Tiepolo whose
mythological and historical paintings decorated palaces in northern
Italy and Spain.
As was the case during the Renaissance, in the Baroque era Italian
cities were the location for processions and festivities, and the
importance of building façades continued to increase. The key word
was ‘rhetoric’: the art of persuasion through images that were
subordinate to the aims of orthodoxy and absolutism. The
corresponding Baroque musical style was that of sensual and
spectacular melodrama, which contrasted with the more classical
experiences of the theatre (comedy and tragedy) in other parts of
Europe. Baroque art dominated from the early seventeenth to the
mid-eighteenth centuries and represented a resurgence of previously
less productive regions of Italy, particularly Piedmont and Sicily.
New architecture was also prompted by population growth. Early in
the seventeenth century, Rome had 100,000 inhabitants. The
problem of overpopulation (and the consequent spread of epidemics)
was confronted by undertaking public works in the areas just outside
the city centre. Already by the end of the sixteenth century, Pope
Sixtus V and his chief architect Domenico Fontana had begun to
enlarge the city by creating around 10 kilometres of new roads
furnished with aqueducts and fountains. Citizens were encouraged to
build houses with the offer of tax relief, and rich villas with gardens
began to appear at the edges of these areas.
Rome was also expanding because of increases in the number of
pious tourists during the Counter–Reformation period. At every
jubilee (every twenty-five years) hundreds of thousands of visitors
flocked to the city (reaching a total of 700,000 in 1650). In the
interest of maintaining such an inflow, the Papacy spent money on
the creation of new monuments, thus diverting attention from the
needs of Rome’s citizens to the beautification of the capital. Italian
architecture’s main concern, as before, was to create a bella figura,
and religious orders, aristocrats and cardinals all contributed. To a
greater extent than previously, Italian Catholicism in this period
rejected the evangelical and reform model of unadorned churches.
Over-decorated buildings were to reflect God’s splendour and to fix
Counter–Reformation precepts in peoples’ minds. Papal tombs
became monuments rich with ornament and portraying stories of
saints and martyrs – symbols of a militant optimism that
accompanied the spectacular style of the Baroque period. Ceiling
painting became very fashionable in aristocratic palaces, depicting
triumphal allegories drawn from classical and mythological examples
that celebrated the glory of famous families. This fashion extended
from palaces to churches.
Roman Baroque architecture was spearheaded by three artists: the
Neapolitan painter Pietro da Cortona (1596–1669), the Lombard
architect Francesco Borromini (1599–1667), and the Tuscan architect
and sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680). The ‘artistic director’
of Baroque Rome was Bernini, the designer of the colonnade of St
Peter’s Square, which made it possible for the Pope to receive
100,000 pilgrims at a time. Bernini sculpted theatrical scenes on to
fountains such as the Triton and the ‘fountain of the rivers’ in Piazza
Navona. On the latter, a large obelisk has at its base a rock inhabited
by river gods, all huge statues in complex poses. Other major
architectural achievements were the Villa Borghese, an opulent
building created by a cardinal – the nephew of Innocent X, the
Barberini Theatre, and the Palazzo Farnese by Antonio Sangallo. Pope
Alexander VII (1655–67) rebuilt Rome with the needs of tourists in
view, creating wide roads for both practical and aesthetic reasons,
which eased traffic problems and facilitated the age of the Grand
Tour, during which, particularly in the eighteenth century, the
European educated elite travelled to Italy to learn good manners and
the art of conversation, and to improve their knowledge of art and
architecture. Public building was also a response to the problems
posed by unemployment and begging. Seventeenth-century Rome
was full of beggars: in 1660, there were around 10,000, a tenth of
the population, assisted by hospices, charities and various church
activities.
Pilgrims could also approach St Peter’s by crossing the S. Angelo
bridge, which Bernini decorated with ten statues of angels holding
the instruments of Christ’s Crucifixion. The Pantheon, an ancient
pagan temple, was restored and consecrated as a church, adjacent
palaces were removed and a square created around it. The city’s
expansion came to a halt in the eighteenth century when, as a result
of huge debts accumulated over the previous century and the general
economic crisis, there were no longer sufficient funds for new works.
In the eighteenth century, Rome’s population climbed to 130,000,
making it the third largest city in Italy after Naples and Venice, but
the figure remained unaltered during the following two centuries as
Rome rested in its existing splendour with an economy based almost
exclusively on tourism.
In 1684 and 1693, Sicily was hit by devastating earthquakes and
some of its cities had to be entirely reconstructed. One of the
masterpieces of European eighteenth-century urban theatricality is
the town of Noto, in the Iblei hills near Syracuse in the south-west of
the island, rebuilt in just a few years based on a herringbone pattern,
and conceived by local architects as a vast theatre that provides
amazing perspectives over the higher part of the city. Another capital
of Baroque art was Turin under the House of Savoy, a result of the
work of Guarino Guarini (1624–83), a member of the Theatine order,
who had lived in Rome (where he was a student of Francesco
Borromini), Sicily, Paris, and finally arriving in Turin in 1666. There he
built the Palazzo Carignano with its elliptical entrance in an
undulating façade and, among his religious buildings, the Chapel of
the Sacred Shroud in Turin Cathedral, and San Lorenzo dei Teatini. In
1715, Victor Amedeo II employed Filippo Juvara (1678–1736), born in
Messina and educated in Rome, to build the Basilica of Superga, the
mausoleum of the Savoy family, on a hill overlooking the city. Among
the artists influenced by Juvara was Luigi Vanvitelli (1700–73), the
son of a Dutch painter who worked in Ancona and Rome, and was
called to Naples in 1751 by Charles III, who entrusted him with the
construction of the Royal Palace of Caserta, considered to be the
Italian Versailles, a building whose classical influence is subverted by
its enormous proportions and its immense garden that represented a
masterpiece of Italian landscaping. A huge central staircase, flanked
by two smaller ones, opens on to a dramatic perspective of arches
and marble columns.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Italy provided two
original contributions in the field of theatre: the drama, which evolved
into melodrama, and the improvised form of Commedia dell’ Arte. A
theatrical vision of life was portrayed through complex and
spectacular scenarios which created a sense of power designed to
overawe the audience; the opposite of Shakespeare’s declaration in
England at the time that the whole world was a stage, and men and
women merely actors. Pastoral drama had already become successful
in the late sixteenth century with Tasso’s Aminta (1573) and Battista
Guarini’s Pastor Fido (1590), which portrayed an idealization of court
life and were shown across Europe. They describe the love-lives of
shepherds, with hints of tragedy and comedy in a fairytale
atmosphere. Pastoral drama has four musical intervals between the
acts and the chorus enters the scene at the end of each act,
sometimes interrupting the action. In the seventeenth century, the
poetry of Giambattista Marino (1569–1625), particularly Poems
(1602) and Adonis (1623), brought together theatre and music in
literature: the literary text had to be both seen and heard, with the
aim of creating a surprise effect. Other arts followed the example
(painting, sculpture and music) in the attempt to seduce the public
with surprising metaphors – the new style was called Marinismo.
 The Commedia dell’ Arte first appeared in Venice as the comedy of
the ‘zanni’. Zanni (the name Giovanni in Venetian dialect) was a
harlequin-like figure portraying a servant in conflict with his master, a
merchant. Actors were professionals who earned their living by giving
recitals. For the first time, actresses appeared on the scene, although
the Church opposed this and made things difficult for theatrical
companies in cities where it had influence. When comedians arrived
in cities, they had to obtain permission to play from both the civil and
religious authorities. As plots were often improvised, the Church
could not easily exercise effective preventive censorship. In
Commedia dell’Arte, standard characters could be identified by their
masks, a form of theatrical symbolism that later spread from Italy to
the rest of Europe. The form became successful beyond the court
and moved from city to city; it was improvised and open to anyone
who could buy a ticket, therefore playing mainly to a bourgeois
public.
Italians called Commedia dell’Arte ‘sudden’ or ‘improvised’ comedy,
while contemporary foreigners called it ‘Italian-style comedy’. Theatre
moved beyond the courts, and actors with little money and no
patrons travelled around the Italian states. They invented masks that
corresponded to non-heroic characters of daily Italian village and city
life and spoke in different dialects, creating protagonists with whom
most of their public could identify: no heroes, but poor and cunning
people, cuckolded husbands, deceived old men, and shrewd,
unscrupulous servants, each of whom represented the precise
characteristics of a particular city: Bergamasco, Neapolitan, Milanese
and Venetian. Once it was clear that sex and the mockery of powerful
people were successful themes, female characters were staged
alongside the stock character of the bullied aristocrat. The image of
Italians presented by comedians was of a cunning and unreliable
people, full of ideas and genius but at the same time ignorant and
incoherent, never prepared to make a stand and constantly avoiding
commitment to principles. This image can find its way back to the
characters in Boccaccio, where craftiness, luck and love take centre
stage as motivating factors and themes. Another interpretation
explained these characters as anti-government, anti-nationalist
sceptics of power and authority from above, where only taking
matters in one’s own hands gets them done. By taking regional
masks on stage across Italy, comedians helped to create an Italian
identity long before it was thought of by national revolutionaries.

Box 5.3 Carlo Goldoni and Venetian theatre

Carlo Goldoni was born in Venice in 1707, when the city was in a
state of what Marvin Carlson has called ‘its long and luxurious
decline’ as the ‘pleasure capital of Europe’ (Carlson, 1981).
Government attempts to restrict expenditure on parties,
extravagant dresses and jewellery had little chance of success,
and masked figures in street theatre as well as opera were well
received by the public, which included many tourists as well as
residents. In Goldoni’s time, opera was performed in Venice in at
least eight theatres, compared with two in both London and Paris.
With Goldoni, masks stopped being called Pantalone, Arlecchino,
Bighella and Colombina and took on the names of the Venetian
bourgeoisie and lower classes. They began to be characterized by
the peculiar conditions of their social class and lifestyle:
gentlewomen, sharp-tongued females, travelling merchants,
soldiers and lovers.

At the end of the sixteenth century the Camerata dei Bardi, an

academy of Florentine scholars and musicians, decided to reintroduce
song into theatre, as in the ancient Greek tragedies. At the Florentine
court, Jacopo Corsi, the poet Ottavio Rinuccini and the composer
Giacinto Peri produced the first operas, Dafne and Euridice, in 1598
and 1600, respectively. Both had pastoral subjects, following the
poetic fashion of the time. They were presented at the Pitti Palace for
the wedding of Maria de’ Medici and the future king of France, Henry
IV, and are considered to be the first melodramas. Euridice is a
pastoral fairytale with a mythological theme, characterized by a style
of singing akin to talking known as recitar cantando (performance
singing), a dialogue sung by single voices in which the text was lifted
by the music. Recitar cantando was interrupted by arias – verses
which alternated with instrumental refrains in which the character
expressed his or her feelings. Inspired by these examples, the
Cremonese Claudio Monteverdi (1547–1643), who became the most
important musician of the time, wrote Orfeo, first performed in
Mantua in 1607. Opera, as it came to be called, continued to develop
in Mantua, Rome, Venice and Naples, initially intended as a court
spectacle for the celebration of extraordinary events. In Mantua, a
theatre with 6,000 seats was built for the wedding of Francesco
Gonzaga, in which Monteverdi’s Arianna was performed. The
melodrama elegantly brought together different artistic forms:
literature, music, the figurative arts and architecture. It met with
extraordinary success in the European courts and its popularity has
continued to the present day.
The term Baroque is used in music to indicate the period between
the early seventeenth and mid-eighteenth centuries, when music
adopted a fundamental role among the arts, through its theatrical
contribution. Instrumental music increasingly acquired a more
independent role, no longer restricted to accompaniment for songs
and dances. New musical forms included sonatas, which brought
together the harpsichord with two string instruments; the solo violin
concerto; and the concerto grosso, in which a small group of
musicians (called a concertino) play with a larger group (called a
ripieno). Through these new forms, musicians exhibited a virtuosity
that took Baroque poetic exuberance to new heights. Until the mid-
seventeenth century, Italy was the unqualified leader in European
musical innovation, and Italian was the lingua franca of musical
Europe. Italian musicians were sought for courts all over Europe, and
Italian was considered to be the ideal language for singing; Italian
courts were centres of musical life, in terms of both theatrical
performance and the construction of instruments.
Churches increased their use of music during liturgical
celebrations, and music began to accompany theatre through
madrigals, which brought music and poetry together. Indeed, poets
began to write madrigal verses, as in, for example, the Rime by
Giambattista Marino. Intermezzi, musical interludes between the acts,
punctuated theatrical performances. By the end of the century, with
the work of great composers such as Arcangelo Corelli (1653–1713),
Alessandro Scarlatti (1660–1725), Antonio Vivaldi (1678–1741) and
Tomaso Albinoni (1671–1751), opera and Baroque music had become
popular throughout Italy (essential, for example, to Venice’s carnival)
as well as abroad.
While singing and recitals were already present in the Italian
literary tradition, as we have seen, and had been encouraged by the
Renaissance interest in beautiful manners (for example, Castiglione
wrote in Cortegiano about the beauty of singing literary texts), the
common opinion of Monteverdi’s contemporaries was that Orfeo’s
singularity lay in its actors singing rather than speaking. The
apparently unnecessary intermedio, which often introduced
decorative fantasy elements but also surprising coups de théâtre
marking the formal organization of the story, was also typical of the
opera. Orfeo was also a success because it conformed perfectly to
the conventions of pastoral themes: the mythological final scene,
where Orpheus is destroyed by the bacchantes, was only suggested,
while the hero was lifted skywards by a singing Apollo emerging from
a cloud. The rescue and apotheosis of the hero, in a clear
personification of the prince figure, conformed well to the demands
of court eulogy. For its return to classical and mythological themes, as
well as for its echoes of Dante and Petrarch, Orfeo is seen as a great
Renaissance work, though the recited solos and dialogue were
characteristic of the Baroque period.

THE CONTINUING LANGUAGE DEBATE

A network of academies developed in Italy from the mid-sixteenth

century and into the seventeenth, with the aim of expanding literary
culture beyond the courts. The most influential was the Arcadia,
created in Rome in 1690, which sought to weaken the impact of
Marinismo, proposing the return to classical themes. However, by the
early eighteenth century, Italian poetry had begun to lose its pre-
eminence in Europe, surpassed by the development of English and
French national literature. In this as in other fields, Italy began to
import foreign models. The influence of the European Enlightenment
on Italian literature is evident in Giuseppe Parini (1729–99), a neo-
classical Milanese writer and a member of the Arcadia, whose work
The Day was a satirical poem on the social codes of the aristocracy.
As Chapter 6 will demonstrate, late-eighteenth-century writers
regarded literature as the art that could bring Italy closer to the
movement of ideas that already characterized other European
countries – the ‘age of Enlightenment’ – a stance that led eventually
to support for the struggle for independence and unification.
Manzoni’s poetry in the nineteenth century was a fundamental
contribution in the debate on the birth of a national language. Before
that, the most progressive intellectuals of the Italian Enlightenment
sought to close the gap between written and spoken language, and
debated the problem of the links between the linguistic and cultural
unity of what they began to call ‘the nation’. The scholar Alessandro
Verri (1741–1816) introduced the Milanese newspaper Il Caffè (1764–
6) by proclaiming that it was the founders’ intention to avoid ‘vain
display of rare and delicate terms’, and to write so as to be
‘understood throughout the whole world’. The prose of this period
was characterized by the introduction of French words and by the
simplification of syntax. The Latin model, full of subordinate clauses
with the verbs at the end of sentences, was replaced by simpler and
more straightforward structures. The Milanese Enlightenment thinkers
of Il Caffè upheld their right to invent new words and to Italianize
foreign terms.
The jurist and scholar Cesare Beccaria (1738–94), in his Ricerche
intorno alla natura dello stile (‘Researches around the nature of style’,
1770), asserted that literary works should make stylistic choices
based on holding the reader’s attention and communicating
sensations. Melchiorre Cesarotti, in Saggio sulla filosofia delle lingue
(‘Essay on the philosophy of languages’, 1785), stated that language
was a living organism which evolved alongside changing historical
and social situations; he therefore proposed a balance between
innovations in vocabulary and syntax, and examples from earlier
authors. The Accademia della Crusca, one of Italy’s most prestigious
and conservative intellectual academies, which was opposed to these
new proposals, continued to defend the fourteenth-century Florentine
model. In 1612, the first edition of the dictionary of the Crusca
Academy had been published in Venice, based entirely on fourteenth-
century authors. Only in its third edition, in 1691, did it include some
sixteenth-century writers, such as Tasso. This Florentine model was
finally defeated in 1783, when Grand Duke Leopold of Tuscany
suppressed the academy. Around the same time, a new dictionary
appeared – the Dizionario universale critico enciclope-dico della
lingua italiana (‘Critical universal encyclopaedic dictionary of the
Italian language’, 1797–1805) by the abbot Francesco D’Alberti of
Villanuova, which welcomed technical neologisms, foreign words and
the living language spoken by the Florentine people. The debate,
however, continued: the poet and scholar Vincenzo Monti (1754–
1828) led a current of classicists in criticizing Enlightenment writers
for their uninhibited use of foreign words, and argued the need for
the retention of a noble language from the later medieval period
separate from the language of the common people, although even
these classicists were open to some innovation and did reject
exaggerated archaisms. The purist current, led by the Veronese
Antonio Cesari and the Neapolitan Basilio Puoti, was the most
conservative, preferring a return to the pure language of the
fourteenth century. Puoti later wrote the chief grammatical work of
purism, Regole elementari della lingua italiana (‘Elementary rules of
the Italian language’, 1833), and founded a school at which
Francesco De Sanctis (1817–1883), one of the most important Italian
literary critics, studied. De Sanctis recalled of his school days that
pupils studied fourteenth- and sixteenth-century authors and were
then required to practise their writing ‘according to a certain choice of
solemn and noble words, not worn-out from usage and not too
obsolete, and by constructing sentences that were not too
complicated or in the manner of Boccaccio, but elevated, solemn and
abundant’.
The purist tradition would finally be defeated with the arrival of
Romanticism in the nineteenth century. One of Romanticism’s
precursors was the Piedmontese Vittorio Alfieri, born in Asti in 1749.
Alfieri supported not only the diffusion of a language close to the
needs of the people, but also the freedom of intellectuals from
political elites. In a book entitled The Prince and Letters, he made
reference to Machiavelli as one of the last examples of a free author
who did not defer to any prince. His heroic interpretation of
Machiavelli was based on the idea that, by outlining the ruthless
qualities princes should possess, the Florentine writer was
expounding the qualities of the free writer; that is, the complete
independence from political power, allowing freedom of judgement
and the search for truth that was the supreme duty of an intellectual.
Alfieri’s work therefore became a heroic denunciation of the
absolutism and oppression of eighteenth-century political power, and
his praise of Machiavelli was later approved by the poet Ugo Foscolo
(1778–1827) in The Sepulchres. It was in the prince’s interest to be a
patron of writers in order to make them write formally elegant and
pleasing books that did not challenge his power and were empty of
content. Among modern writers, Alfieri recalled Tasso and Ariosto
who, during the Counter–Reformation had become flatterers in order
to be protected by their princes and had therefore produced an art
inferior to the one they would have produced in an atmosphere of
intellectual freedom. As for many eighteenth-century writers, Alfieri’s
all-time hero was Homer, the poet of the Greek people who worked
without political protection, in exile and poor, yet was a superior poet
to Virgil, who had been protected by Augustus, who was rich and
praised by his contemporaries. Alfieri exalted literature as the only art
that could challenge absolutism, providing the first of many
reflections on the relationship between the intellectual and power,
which continued into the twentieth century in the work of Antonio
Gramsci and Alberto Asor Rosa. The final attack on seventeenth-
century literature came from Francesco De Sanctis in the nineteenth
century. De Sanctis, in his history of Italian literature, demonstrated
how taste had changed: he hated allegories and witty remarks, the
ceremonies of rhetoric – the seventeenth century was for him a
corrupted age, the underworld of Italian literature. Only in the
context of the nineteenth century could Italian literature be returned
to its former splendour: ‘literature could only be reborn through the
resurrection of the national conscience’.
Map 5.1 Italy in the eighteenth century
Source: adapted from John Marino, Early Modern Italy, 1550–1796 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press), p. 287.
 As the next chapter will illustrate, it was the Enlightenment at the
end of the eighteenth century that provoked the re-emergence of the
idea of Italy’s unification. Early-eighteenth-century authors such as
Vico, whose Scienza nuova, published in 1744, was later seen as the
basis of natural law; Antonio Genovesi, a professor at the university
of Naples, who confronted the issue of the landless peasantry in
southern Italy, proposing that all Church land should be converted
into peasant leaseholds; Ludovico Antonio Muratori, who sought to
reform the curricula of Catholic schools and universities; and
Giannone, who argued that legal punishment against heresy should
be meted out by the state and not the Church, were important
influences. However, these intellectuals did not insist on the idea of
Italian unification, in part because it seemed politically unrealistic,
and in part because they believed that the loss of Italy’s cultural
prestige was all too evident when Italian cities were compared with
the lively centres of Paris, London and Amsterdam during what
historians define as the European ‘Age of Reason’.

SELECTED FURTHER READING

J. Marino (ed.), Early Modern Italy, 1550–1796 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) and
D. Sella, Italy in the Seventeenth Century (London: Longman, 1997) are excellent overviews
of the period. T. Astarita, Between Salt Water and Holy Water. A History of Southern Italy
(London: W. W. Norton, 2005) provides an interesting and readable insight on the southern
regions. The Spanish social, religious and political influence on Italy is covered by the
authoritative study by T. Dandelet and J. Marino (eds), Spain in Italy: Politics, Society and
Religion, 1500–1700 (Leiden: Brill, 2007). J. O’Malley (ed.), The Jesuits: Culture, Sciences,
and the Arts, 1540–1773 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999) provides a nuanced
examination of the impact of the Jesuits on Italian culture. The ideas of the precursors of the
Italian Enlightenment in the early modern period are examined by V. Ferrone, The
Intellectual Roots of the Italian Enlightenment (New York: Humanity Books, 1995).
 6
........
A National Melodrama:
The Epic of the Risorgimento

CHRONOLOGY
1796–
Italian Republics established; Venice under Austria (1797, Treaty of Campoformio)
9
1805 Napoleon becomes King of Italy (Milan)
1806 Joseph Bonaparte becomes King of Naples
Rome occupied by French troops; Joachim Murat succeeds to the Kingdom of
1808
Naples
1814– Congress of Vienna (November 1814-June 1815). Lombardy and Venetia annexed
15 to the Habsburg Empire; restoration of previous rulers
Revolution in Naples; Palermo declares independence from Naples; Neapolitan
1820
troops intervene in Sicily
1821 Austrian troops enter Naples
Rebellion in Modena; Austrian troops intervene in Modena, Parma and the Papal
1831
States
Insurrections in Palermo; constitutions granted in Naples, Tuscany, Sardinia,
Rome; insurrection in Milan; declaration of the Venetian Republic; Charles Albert
1848
(Piedmont) declares war on Austria and is defeated (first war of independence);
Austrian re-occupation of Lombardy, Modena and Reggio Emilia
Proclamation of the Roman Republic; Piedmont restarts war against Austria and is
1849 defeated; Charles Albert abdicates in favour of Victor Emmanuel II; French troops
enter Rome; the Venetian Republic surrenders to Austrian troops
Second war of independence: Franco–Piedmontese troops defeat Austria;
1859
Lombardy, Tuscany, the Legations and the duchies annexed to Piedmont
1860 Nice and Savoy annexed to France; revolution in Palermo; Garibaldi’s Thousand’s
expedition to Sicily; Garibaldi enters Naples; plebiscite and annexation of the
 Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, Umbria and the Marche
First election of the Italian parliament; Victor Emmanuel II becomes the King of
1861
Italy; Turin capital of Italy
1865 Florence capital of Italy
Third war of independence: Italian forces defeated; Prussian forces defeat Austria;
1866
Venetia to Italy
Napoleon III defeated by Prussia; Italian troops enter Rome; Rome becomes the
1870
capital of Italy.

THE ITALIAN ENLIGHTENMENT

Towards the end of the eighteenth century, most of Italy was living
under famine conditions, which encouraged rulers to implement
‘Enlightened’ policies of reform. To confront both economic crisis and
relative cultural decline, Italian intellectuals began to promote a
sense of revival, or risorgimento. The movement was initiated in
Naples and Milan, influenced by a wider European Enlightenment
culture. For late-eighteenth-century thinkers who took part in the
Enlightenment, famine and disease were no longer signs of God’s will,
but the result of poor government policies. Debates on the best form
of government had continued from the post–Renaissance period.
Political thought in this earlier period had been inspired by the
publication of Machiavelli’s Discourses and The Prince in 1531–32,
and Guicciardini’s History of Italy in 1561–4 (previously circulated in
manuscript); these works formed the basis for the subsequent
analysis by the Piedmontese priest and political thinker Giovanni
Botero (1544–1617), author of The Reason of State, and of Paolo
Sarpi. As seen in the previous chapter, the political movements of the
Renaissance and post–Renaissance were revived by the work of early
Enlightenment thinkers such as Ludovico Antonio Muratori,
Giambattista Vico and Pietro Giannone, and, in the second half of the
eighteenth century, by reformers such as the Milanese Pietro Verri
(1728–97) and Cesare Beccaria.
Famine and epidemics also provoked new interest in ways of
tackling poverty and living conditions, both in cities and on large rural
estates. While ‘enlightened’ European rulers were as paternalistic as
the absolutist rulers before them, they now had secular interests to
protect, and began an assault on the privileges of the Church. The
Jesuits, in particular, were targeted for their wealth and their
interference in education, and were expelled from most states, until
the Papacy finally dissolved the order in 1773. In Piedmont, Charles
Emmanuel III eliminated tax exemptions for the clergy, expanded the
army and brought education and poor relief under the control of the
state; he also abolished serfdom and promoted agrarian reform in
Sardinia. In Lombardy under the Habsburg Empress Maria Theresa,
local intellectuals such as Verri and Beccaria took part in discussions
about reform. In Tuscany, the government undertook land and
ecclesiastical reform, reducing the number of feast days and
suppressing monasteries. However, reforms aimed against religion
met with popular opposition everywhere. When common land was
divided and sold, it was bought by rich landowners, so the situation
for the peasant masses remained unchanged, thus exacerbating
social tension. This kind of land reform, like the religious reforms,
was not welcomed by the lower classes. By 1789, the year of the
French Revolution, many reformers were also unhappy with the
limited results obtained so far by the reform programme, and were
drawn to the events in France. The cry ‘liberté, egalité, fraternité’
resounded all across Italy, as it did in the rest of continental Europe.
The new ideas also spread to the Papal States; as in the rest of Italy,
the Enlightenment attracted young aristocrats and bourgeois
intellectuals, who gathered in the salons of private palaces or in
public cafés and began discussing ideas that were in marked contrast
to orthodox Catholicism and its associated morality.
The idea of nation (which implied the concept of an Italian
struggle for independence and unification) did not become a realistic
goal supported by writers until the nineteenth century; however,
during the eighteenth century, a number of histories of Italy and
Italian literature indicated a will to overcome the era’s sense of
decline, and to reconsider the concept of Italy, by harking back to the
centuries between Dante and Machiavelli. For example, in 1723,
Giacinto Gimma from Bari had published an innovative history of
Italian literature entitled Idea della storia dell’Italia letterata (‘Idea of
the history of literary Italy’), which focused on prose as well as
poetry, and incorporated the history of Italian literature into the wider
history of Italian culture. Gimma was animated by patriotic fervour;
when mentioning the word ‘nation’, he indicated not a political
outcome but a cultural condition common to all the peoples between
the Alps and Sicily, which had extended from the time of Dante to the
seventeenth century. The absence of a political strategy marked the
gap between his work and De Sanctis’s famous history of Italian
literature a century later; however, Gimma’s perspective anticipated
the arguments of the Italian Enlightenment patriots. Other works
followed along these lines: Della poesia italiana (‘On Italian poetry’)
by Francesco Saverio Quadrio, first published in Venice in 1734;
Storia della letteratura italiana (‘History of Italian literature’) by
Girolamo Tiraboschi, first published in Modena between 1772 and
1782; and Del Risorgimento d’Italia negli studi, nelle arti e nei
consumi dopo il Mille (‘On the renaissance of Italy in the studies, the
arts and consumption after the year 1000’) by Saverio Bettinelli,
published in Bassano in 1773, which interpreted Italy’s history of
literary production as having alternated between moments of glory
and of decline.
The Enlightenment intellectual Pietro Verri, influenced by both
Machiavelli and Montesquieu, founded the Academia dei Pugni in
Milan, a group which included his brother Alessandro and Cesare
Beccaria, among others. They published the most renowned
newspaper of the Italian Enlightenment, Il Caffè (1764–6), first
issued the same year as Beccaria’s On Crimes and Punishments, an
influential work throughout Europe, which argued that the aim of
punishment had to be re-education rather than vengeance, and
proposed the abolition of the death penalty. Both Beccaria and Il
Caffè debated the problems of penal justice in eighteenth-century
Lombardy; the writers wanted not merely to reform the judicial
system, but to replace it with a new system based on the equality of
law and the separation of powers – in which they were influenced
principally by Montesquieu and Voltaire. This debate was instrumental
at the time in bringing about the abolition of torture in most of
Europe; between 1770 and 1777, Pietro Verri contributed by writing a
pamphlet on torture, Osservazioni sulla tortura (‘Observations on
torture’), which was published posthumously in 1804, when torture
was abolished in Lombardy by Joseph II. However, this was simply
the final act of the struggle against torture in the Italian states; the
first condemnations of the practice had come from the humanists at
the end of the fifteenth century, moved by the inhumane treatment
meted out to witches throughout Europe. Verri had previously written
a pamphlet against torture in 1763, the Orazione panegirica sulla
giurisprudenza milanese (‘Panegyric speech on the Milanese
judiciary’), in the sarcastic tone often used by these intellectuals
against their adversaries. In this work, a conservative supporter of
torture, infuriated by the enlightened reforms in Prussia and France,
demonstrated the irrefutable necessity of torture:
If innocent citizens must not be subject to torture, then we must conclude that innocent
citizens must never become victims of headaches or fever ….. but innocent citizens do
suffer from these illnesses; it is therefore false that innocent citizens must not be
exposed to torture.

Similarly ironic was the praise for the Milanese assembly of judges,
the Senate:
In Milan there is a body of judges who are the lords of law, and this is the Senate, which
is entrusted with judging the material possessions, the life and the reputation of citizens,
either according to the law, or against the law, or outside the law.

The three possibilities were listed as if there were no differences

between them. Verri’s Osservazioni became a key text, followed in
1842 by Storia della colonna infame (‘History of the infamous
column’) by the Milanese poet and novelist Alessandro Manzoni
(1785–1873), which represented an attack on the vast power of
judges and supported the distinction between legislative and judicial
powers. According to Giulio Carnazzi, Enlightenment thinkers can be
seen as the precursors of the defence of civil rights in Italy.
News circulation was widespread and rapid throughout Europe in
the second half of the eighteenth century. Italian gazettes revealed
the existence of a public opinion that was well-informed about, for
example, the violent reactions in the Netherlands to Joseph II’s
despotism, the heroic idealism of republicans such as Pasquale Paoli
in Corsica, or the outbreak of the American Revolution. Terms such as
‘virtue’, ‘patriotism’, ‘republic’, ‘democracy’ and, increasingly,
‘revolution’ became well-known across the peninsula, while a new
generation of intellectuals developed under the influence of Diderot
and d’Alembert’s Encyclopaedia. With Milan, Naples was an important
and dynamic centre during the Enlightenment period, where
intellectuals from all over Europe gathered. Many of these
intellectuals tried, with difficulty, to pose an alternative to the
Counter–Reformation culture that had strengthened the popular
belief in saints and supernatural powers. In order to fight against
superstition, popular publications such as the widely-read almanacs
were employed to attack the world of magic. In Piedmont in the
1780s, over 200,000 copies of Enlightenment almanacs were
published each year. These were designed to be read in public, and
both propagated the latest scientific progress and attacked religious
superstitions, including, for example, the belief in saintly power and
the fanaticism surrounding events such as the liquefaction of St
Gennaro’s blood.
Milanese Enlightenment thinkers depicted their city as a centre of
progress, in contrast to Papal Rome which was described, for
example, in the correspondence from Pietro to Alessandro Verri, as
the epitome of intellectual degradation, a city interesting only for its
art and architecture. Together with Naples and Milan, Venice
witnessed the flourishing of scholarly initiatives with a number of
Enlightenment publications such as the Giornale dei letterati d’Italia
(‘Newspaper of the Italian literati’); the Venetian Arcadia academy
played an important role in emancipating Italy from the marginal
forms of Baroque literature and facilitating the discussion of themes
receptive to European rationalism.

Box 6.1 Cafés and revolution

The discussion of new ideas and the diffusion of Enlightenment
gazettes was encouraged by the new fashion for coffee houses,
which appeared in Europe following the arrival of coffee from the
Middle East. According to Etienne François, the first European city
 to open a coffee house was Venice around 1647. The fashion
exploded in the eighteenth century, when it became linked with
the intellectual life of Enlightenment thinkers and, later, the
revolutionaries of the Risorgimento. Cafés were places of liberty,
where the intellectual middle classes could converse about art,
politics, economics and literature without the restrictions of the
formal society of aristocratic salons. However, as a play by
Goldoni in Venice of 1750 showed, café culture had also started
to permeate the lower classes:
Trappola: It is really something that makes you die of
laughter, to see even porters coming to drink their
coffee.
Ridolfo: Everyone seeks to do what everybody does. Once
grappa was fashionable, now it is coffee.
(Goldoni, 2004, Act I, p. 85)
According to Maria Malatesta, during the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries even prestigious coffee bars such as Florian
in Venice were frequented, at different times of the day, by
different social classes.
(Malatesta, 1997, p. 59)

THE LEGACY OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION AND NAPOLEON

In 1796, French troops led by the young Corsican general Napoleon

Bonaparte founded short-lived, French-dominated republics in Italy.
Italian supporters of the French Revolution welcomed Napoleon and
fought in his Italian Army. After crossing the River Po at Piacenza and
defeating the Austrians at Lodi, Napoleon entered Milan. The patriot
Francesco Melzi d’Eril (1753–1816) was an eyewitness to the event,
which coincided with the Pentecostal celebrations:
There is a warning that Bonaparte is arriving today. The whole city is going to welcome
him outside Porta Romana . .. He passed through it at a gallop . .. The people followed in
happy celebration; but in the sense of a feast day, rather than of a new order of things
which we were not imagining yet.
The Milanese people then received a bilingual proclamation:
The French Republic, which has sworn hatred to tyrants, has also sworn fraternity to all
peoples. The tyrant who oppressed Lombardy for so long has caused much evil to
France; but the French know that the king’s cause is not the cause of the people. Respect
for property, for individuals; respect for the religion of the peoples: these are the feelings
of the French Republic and of the victorious Italian army.

Bonaparte subsequently established a provisional administration for

the city which included some local patriots and aristocrats, among
them Pietro Verri.
In 1798, the French army entered the Papal States and declared
the end of Papal rule in Rome; in 1799, they arrived in Naples and
Tuscany and in 1797 invaded the entire territory of the Serenissima,
including Venice. The book on the statue of the lion of St Mark in the
city’s main square, which had carried the inscription: Pax tibi Marce,
Evangelista meus, was replaced by the declaration of human rights.
Venetian patriots interpreted this as a sign of new times – democracy
replacing religion – but their hopes were soon crushed: the French
signed the treaty of Campoformio with the Habsburgs and, in
exchange for Austrian renunciation of Lombardy, Belgium and
Modena, the Habsburgs were given Venetia. No one expressed the
bitter disappointment with Napoleon better than Foscolo in Last
Letters of Jacopo Ortis. With the exception of Venetia, all of mainland
Italy was under the control of ‘revolutionary’ French authorities
imposing French laws and administrative systems, and French
attitudes to property and religion.
Map 6.1 Italy after the Napoleonic invasion (1797)
Source: from John A. Davis, Italy in the Nineteenth Century, 1796–1900 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press), p. 289, by permission of Oxford University Press.
Napoleon’s conquest of Italy brought major changes in the political
condition of the country, with the formation of ‘sister republics’. The
Repubblica Cisalpina included Lombardy and the former Po Valley
duchies; the Repubblica Ligure revived the old aristocratic Genoese
Republic; the Roman Republic replaced the Papal States; the
Repubblica Partenopea in the continental south replaced the Bourbon
monarchy; and the Repubblica Cispadana was established in the
Emilia Romagna region. These republican experiences of the ‘Jacobin
triennial’ of 1796–9 did not last long, dependent as they were on
Napoleon’s military fortunes, but were nevertheless crucial in
providing the practice of democracy for a new political class that
would later set in motion the national risorgimento. The constitutions
created in these years demonstrated the interest of revolutionaries in
the relationship between state and citizens: they explained in detail
the duties and rights of citizens, and the functions of members of
parliament – who had to express the general will and not just the
needs of electors. The concepts of nation, equality and freedom
began to be interpreted as rights among large sections of Italian
public opinion.
The French claimed to bring liberation, and some Italians believed
them. These young, educated, urban, middle-class men and women
called themselves patriots and expressed a genuine enthusiasm for
liberty, equality and progress; they hated the Church and the
privileges of the aristocracy; they had republican ideals and were
great propagandists. Many of them from across Italy flocked to Milan,
considered to be the centre of the French presence, thereby
enlarging the ranks of the Milanese bourgeoisie. As a result,
Napoleon began to rely increasingly on the moderate elements to
govern the city. Some patriots wanted the unification and
independence of Italy, but had little hope of that at the time; instead,
they had to depend on the French and be content with the French
constitution which, in theory, granted freedom of the press, of
association and worship, equality before the law and legislative
assemblies.
With the arrival of the French, Rome, more than any other Italian
city, was overwhelmed with revolutionary words and imagery. The
break with Papal domination and an exaltation of the republican past
increased the already lively interest in ancient history and uncovered
the existence of another secular and republican Rome obscured for
centuries by clerical dominion. Memories of ancient Rome and the
Rome of Arnaldo, Cola di Rienzo and Giordano Bruno had not
disappeared. One of the revolutionaries, Nicola Corona, addressed
people among the ruins of the Forum, vowing that Rome ‘begins to
resume its ancient decorum, its honour and glory; and the fathers of
the patria, who have been groaning under the yoke of ignorance and
fanaticism, are now reborn to imitate the ancestors who triumphed
and proclaimed laws’. As research by Francesco Bartolini has shown,
a new political language came into circulation, founded on the explicit
use of ancient history as a means of constructing a new urban
identity. While they were more progressive than the states of the old
regime, the French republics did not really respect the Jacobin ideals
they claimed to support. Indeed, despite the efforts of the Italian
revolutionaries, within a short time the power vacuum created by the
departure of the old monarchs was filled by the leaders of the French
army. The main aim of the French governors was to keep order and
to tax the population in order to maintain the army. They ruled
through the army and used minor nobles as local administrators,
excluding the patriots. Moreover, high taxation and requisitions led to
anti-French rebellions. The peasants hated the French and so did the
Church, since the invaders had confiscated Church properties and
banned religious pilgrimages and the cult of local saints. Anti-French
revolts continued to spread, often causing local civil wars. For
example, in 1799, Cardinal Ruffo marched with the peasantry from
Calabria to Naples to ‘fight the Godless French’; in Naples, 7,000
members of the enlightened middle classes were massacred as
Jacobins; this slaughter of intellectuals highlighted the problem of the
relationship between intellectuals and the peasantry that would be a
major question during the Risorgimento. In Tuscany, peasants
rebelled under the slogan ‘viva Maria’. Other forms of protest included
disregard for French laws and the continued observation of religious
practices, as republican institutions had demonstrated no sensibility
towards the problems of the peasant masses. The Neapolitan writer
Vincenzo Cuoco (1770–1823) analysed the reasons for the republican
defeat and the return of the Bourbons in Naples in 1799 in a famous
book, Saggio storico sulla rivoluzione napoletana del 1799 (‘Historical
essay on the 1799 Neapolitan revolution’) written a few years later
when Cuoco was exiled in Paris, and first published anonymously in
Milan in 1801. Revolutions, he explained, could be active or passive:
active revolutions were sparked by the precise needs of the majority
of the population, while passive revolutions marched with a foreign
army under whose domination the national elite was unable to
involve the popular masses. Clearly, the partenopea revolution
belonged to the second category. The Bourbons returned to power
and unleashed a ferocious repression against the republicans that
lasted until 1806, when the French army returned to establish a new
French regime, this time no longer republican in nature.

Box 6.2 The birth of the Italian flag

In Milan in 1796, the French established a militia called the
Lombard legion, whose flag was white and red – inherited from
the Milanese coat of arms, and green. The cities of Modena,
Ferrara, Bologna and Reggio Emilia, which together constituted
the Repubblica Cispadana, decided to use the same flag of green,
white and red. Subsequently, the flag became a symbol of
freedom. During the Restoration, the flag appeared only
clandestinely, and was waved by patriots during attempted
revolutions before 1848. The wide use of the tricolour during the
five days of Milan in 1848 persuaded the Piedmontese King
Charles Albert to adopt it as a ‘national’ flag, with the coat of
arms of the House of Savoy at its centre.
 The French regimes persisted in Italy until Napoleon’s defeat in
1814, though with some changes that reflected the shift in France
from republic to empire, and the consequent transfer of political
power into the hands of moderates all over Italy. In 1805, the
Cisalpine Republic, which included part of Venetia (to the west of the
River Adige), became the ‘Kingdom of Italy’, with its capital in Milan
and Napoleon as its king. Piedmont was annexed to France, and the
Kingdom of Naples was governed by Napoleon’s brother, Joseph
Bonaparte (1806–8) and later by Napoleon’s brother-in-law, Joachim
Murat (1808–15). By 1809, the Papal States had also been annexed,
by which time French rule had become more imperial than
republican, and many patriots had become disillusioned. The press
was censored and representative assemblies represented only the
elite. Popular revolts continued, with bloody risings and land
occupations, mainly against taxation and conscription. In this period,
Italy’s principal secret society, the Carbonari, was created in the
south. Secret societies had elaborate oaths and rituals, organized
conspiracies and plots and, with the departure of the French, believed
their time had come in the fight for Italian unification.
The French left Italy an important legacy – their legal and
administrative systems. Under French rule, decisions were taken by
state officials who, as urban and educated lawyers, acted according
to fixed rules and modern legal codes: they were appointed by the
French and stayed in their positions when the French left. But
perhaps more important was the legacy of ideas and mentalities.
Italy had taken part in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, its
intellectuals favouring rational decision-making, legal rights, economic
progress and general education, and despising Catholic superstition.
After Napoleonic rule their beliefs had become more rooted, as the
French had unleashed serious attacks on the Church, made state
schools compulsory, and espoused values that were patriotic rather
than religious. All this brought about a clash between incompatible
ideals. Some Italians embraced this legacy and even those who did
not were still exposed to the ideas.
Despite the disillusionment Italian patriots felt with Napoleon, he
also left a legacy. The most famous of the many odes to Napoleon
after his death in 1821 was Manzoni’s Fifth of May (translated by
Goethe into German), which conveyed dramatic intensity and
emotion, illustrating that Napoleon was still regarded differently from
the absolutist rulers of the Restoration. The poem exalted his
geographical conquests, lauded him as the arbiter between the spirits
of absolutism and liberalism, and emphasized the contrast between
his glory and his downfall – he remained a romantic hero who
inspired intense love and equally intense hatred.
Following Napoleon’s defeat and the Congress of Vienna in 1815,
Austria governed most of Italy. Italy remained ‘used’ by foreigners as
it had been since the sixteenth century; Piedmont alone remained
independent, out of the necessity of keeping the French away from
the peninsula.
Austrian-dominated northern Italy was governed without a
constitution and did not rely on the Italian middle classes. The
aspiration for a constitution was thus another fundamental legacy of
the French period. Austria recovered possession of Lombardy–
Venetia, dominated Tuscany (through family ties) and central Italy,
and had a great influence on the Papal States, as the Pope welcomed
the Restoration and saw Austria as a Catholic ally. However, in the
Papal States, the middle classes had no intention of simply accepting
the Restoration, as revolution in Romagna in 1830 demonstrated. In
the south, Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies was also allied to Austria;
Sicily was discontented about the return to governance from Naples,
and revolts broke out continually on the island. Indeed, between
1805 and 1815, Sicily was occupied by the British fleet, which had
been there to fight the French and remained under the pretext of
protecting the Bourbon family, which had been forced to flee Naples.
Under the 1812 constitution the British abolished feudalism in Sicily
and encouraged commerce in land and property so it would no longer
be a privilege of the nobility and the Church. When Sicily returned to
being ruled by Naples, its parliament was dissolved and no attempt
was made to involve the middle classes in the government of the
island. The poverty of the rural masses, and the disappearance of
common land that had followed the privatization of fiefs, was a
persistent problem that continued to provoke revolts throughout the
Risorgimento period, to the extent that peasant violence represented
the most feared aspect of the revolutions of 1820, 1848–9 and 1860.
Piedmont and Liguria were the only potential anti–Austrian regions in
Italy. The Piedmontese House of Savoy sought to reverse the French
experience and restore the past by refusing to grant a constitution,
and reinstating the privileges of the aristocracy and the Church.
Map 6.2 Italy after the Congress of Vienna (1815)
Source: from John A. Davis, Italy in the Nineteenth Century, 1796–1900 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press), p. 291, by permission of Oxford University Press.
In Venice, despite the fact that many had welcomed the Austrians
as liberators against the tyrannical French in 1797, the young nobles
and professional middle classes had absorbed French revolutionary
ideas and wanted a constitutional regime. Intellectuals began
organizing throughout Lombardy–Venetia, where top jobs in the civil
service and administration went to Austrians or to those who spoke
German, where universities and schools had to follow the Viennese
curriculum, and where the Austrian legal code was introduced.
Italians saw this as a Germanic invasion – competent but foreign.
Many northern landowners had properties in both Lombardy and
Piedmont, and chose loyalty to Piedmont, often moving there and
becoming officers in the Piedmontese army that would later wage
war on Austria.
Secret societies continued to organize and ferment local
revolutions in the 1820s and 1830s. One famous society, the ‘Perfect
Sublime Masters’, was created by the Tuscan revolutionary Filippo
Buonarroti (1761–1837) in northern Italy and, like the Carbonari in
the south, it attracted thousands of former Napoleonic officers. A
carbonaro from Genoa, Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–72), who dedicated
his entire life to what the historian Mario Isnenghi has described as
his ‘rigorous and extremely demanding idea of nation’ based on the
three principles of independence, unity and republic, addressed
Italian youth in particular: in exile in Marseilles in 1831, he founded
the clandestine organization, ‘Young Italy’.

LANGUAGE AND NATION

After the Enlightenment, Romanticism came to dominate literature

and philosophy, initially in Germany and England, and then in the rest
of Europe. It may seem contradictory, but the most original
discussions on romanticism in Italy came from classicists such as
Giacomo Leopardi, from Recanati in the Marche (1798–1837) and the
Greek–Venetian Ugo Foscolo (1778–1827). The Piedmontese patriotic
writer Silvio Pellico (1788–1854) argued that, while the apparent aim
of these poets was romantic drama, the real aim was the
development of Enlightenment ideas, which were at the heart of the
Risorgimento. Italian poets of the time did not accept the appellation
of ‘romantic’, regarding romanticism as having a ‘barbarian’ and
Protestant origin.

Box 6.3 Buonarroti on secret societies and Mazzini’s

Young Italy
Buonarroti on secret societies:
The secret society ... is a democratic institution in its principles
and in its end; but its forms and its organisation cannot be those
of a democracy. With respect to doctrines, which one assumes
are held in a pure form by the leaders, they would be better
preserved and transmitted by them ... With respect to action ... it
is absolutely necessary that the impulse come from above and
that all the rest obey. This society is nothing else but a secret
army, destined to fight a powerful enemy.
(Eisenstein, 1959)
From the manifesto of Mazzini’s Young Italy (1931):
Love of the country, abhorrence of Austria, and a burning desire
to throw off her yoke, are passions now universally diffused, and
the compromises inculcated by fear, or a mistaken notion of
tactics and diplomacy, will be abandoned ... Italy does know that
there is no true war without the masses ... that the secret of
power is faith; that true virtue is sacrifice ... We swear it by the
thousands of victims that have fallen during the last ten years to
prove that persecutions do not crush, but fortify conviction; we
swear it by the human soul that aspires to progress.
(Mazzini, 1955)
 Alfieri’s message of national re-awakening from the end of the
eighteenth century was taken up by Foscolo, who wrote a poem
entitled The Sepulchres (later a classic reading for generations of
Italians), introduced by a verse that sounds like a call to action: ‘To
great things the urns of the strong inflame strong souls.’ The subject
was the relationship between the tombs of Italy’s dead greats and
the best among the living, the latter needing inspiration to emulate
past glories. Foscolo showed how, for centuries, Italy had lived with
the problem of the comparison with its glorious past; the travellers of
the Grand Tour always remarked on the contrast between past
splendours, visible in Italy’s ruins and architecture, and the present
inferiority of a country of peasants, priests and bandits, divided into
many small states. As the French clergyman and ambassador Dufour
De Pradt wrote in a book on the Congress of Vienna, Italy had been
transformed into a picture gallery that everyone wanted to visit.
Foscolo’s cry, ‘Italians, I exhort you to histories’, was a call to the
inhabitants of Italy to feel part of one nation, by looking back at their
history.
However, a nation needed a national literature and a national
language, and the first political attempts to unify Italy developed
alongside discussions on language and identity. In the first decades
of the nineteenth century, Italy had still not achieved linguistic unity;
and the written language was not that of spoken expression. In 1817,
Stendhal remarked:
The written language is only spoken in Florence and Rome. Everywhere else people
continue to use the ancient local dialect, and speaking Florentine in ordinary conversation
is considered ridiculous. A man who writes a letter opens the dictionary, and words are
never emphatic or pompous enough. As a result spontaneity, simplicity, and a nuanced
prose are unknown things in Italian. If one needs to express those feelings, one has to
write in Venetian or in Milanese.
(Stendhal, 1817)

In 1806, Manzoni wrote to the French scholar Claude Fauriel: ‘The

state of Italy divided in fragments, and the almost general laziness
and ignorance have posed so much distance between the spoken and
the written language, that the latter can be almost be defined as a
dead language.’ In Zibaldone, in 1821, Giacomo Leopardi wrote: ‘in
order to put the Italian language really on its feet, it is, in short,
necessary to put Italy and the Italians on their feet’. Apart from
Leopardi, one of the greatest Italian poets of all times, the most
genuine language was expressed by two poets who wrote in dialect:
Carlo Porta (1775–1821) in Milan, and Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli
(1791–1863) in Rome. Both provided lively descriptions of popular life
in their cities.
Leopardi lived in the Papal States and recalled Italy’s past glory,
denouncing both Austrian and French rule. His patriotic poems were
not his best ones, but they created a bridge between Italian poetry
and the Risorgimento. In an essay entitled Discorso sopra lo stato
presente dei costumi degli italiani (‘Reflection on the current state of
Italians’ habits’), written in 1824 but published for the first time in
1906, Leopardi investigated the causes of weak Italian identity,
putting together an identikit picture that is in large part still valid
today. In other European countries (apart from Spain, the only
country Leopardi considered to be more backward than Italy) a social
bond was maintained by the role of elites in the practice of good
manners and habits, which were then disseminated among the lower
classes; in Italy, however, there was no recognizable elite with which
the whole of the society could identify. This led to problems of
indifference, selfishness, apathy, cynicism, misanthropy, obtuseness
and a short-sighted outlook among the Italians. Not only did Italy
lack a political centre, it also lacked a sense of society:
I leave out that the nation, not having a centre, does not have a truly Italian public; I
leave out the lack of national theatre, and of a truly national and modern literature . . .
But even leaving all this out, and focusing only on the lack of society, the natural result is
that Italy does not have a manner, a specific Italian habit. Either there is no habit at all,
or it is such a vague and indefinite concept that leaves the discretion of deciding how to
act on any occasion almost entirely to each individual. Not only each city, but even each
Italian has their own habit and manner.
(Leopardi, 2001)

In Zibaldone, Leopardi emphasized the need to reinsert Italian

intellectual life into the great circuit of European ideas. First, it was
necessary to update the language in order to bring to life a civil
society. The principal author of this reform was Manzoni, through his
novel The Betrothed. In a letter to Fauriel in 1821, Manzoni wrote
that the difficulty in dealing with historical subjects came principally
from the poverty of the language:
An Italian writes, if he is not Tuscan, in a language that he has almost never spoken, and
(even if he was born in the privileged region) writes in another language which is spoken
only by a small number of Italy’s inhabitants ... This poor writer completely lacks the
feeling, so to speak, of communion with the reader, the certainty of managing an
instrument equally known by both.

Against classicists and purists, Manzoni argued for the primacy of

usage over literary tradition: ‘usage is the arbiter, the master of
languages’, he wrote in Sentir messa (‘To hear mass’, 1835–6), a
thesis he developed in the later works Sulla lingua italiana (‘On the
Italian language’, 1847), Saggio sul vocabolario italiano secondo l’uso
di Firenze (‘Essay on the Italian vocabulary according to Florentine
usage’, 1856), and in the report Dell’unità della lingua e dei mezzi di
diffonderla (‘On the unity of the language and on the means to
propagate it’, 1868) produced when he was in his eighties and
presiding over a commission for the study of the diffusion of ‘good
language and pronunciation’ under the new state. The only written
language that was both in use and understood all over Italy was
Tuscan. The Tuscan language, spoken by educated people, therefore
ought to become, according to Manzoni, the Italian language;
between the national but unpopular solution of a literary language,
and the popular but non-national solution of the dialects, Manzoni
highlighted a third way: the living and spoken Florentine language.
Political unity was also to have consequences for language.
According to the 1861 census, Italians who could read and write
made up less than a quarter of the population, and that included
even those who could only sign their names. In southern Italy in
particular, 90 per cent of the population was illiterate. The percentage
of these who could express themselves in Tuscan Italian varied from
2.5 per cent (according to Tullio De Mauro) to 9.5 per cent (according
to Arrigo Castellani). Primary education was particularly in crisis: as
Enrico Malato has observed, in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, the
law authorized illiterate women to teach, and in Piedmont, one of the
most advanced regions, teachers always spoke dialect, ‘under the
pretext that children would not otherwise understand’. Catholic
opposition to mass education, based on the idea that education,
without the support of religion, was an instrument that led to atheism
and social disorder, contributed to the maintenance of ignorance.

ROMANTICISM AND RISORGIMENTO

Romantic literature arrived in Italy in the shape of an article by the

French Romantic writer Madame de Staël, called ‘Sulla maniera e la
utilità delle traduzioni’ (‘On the manner and utility of translations’),
published by the periodical Biblioteca italiana. Italian Romanticism
rejected the symbolism typical of the English and German variants
and engaged with the rationalism of the Lombard Enlightenment,
opening up the latter to the concept of ‘the people’. In Lettera
semiseria di Grisostomo al suo figliuolo (‘Semi-serious letter from
Grisostomo to his son’, 1816), the Milanese poet and patriot Giovanni
Berchet (1783–1851) wrote that the poet had to be understood by
the people, the only class of individuals that was prone to emotion:
‘The only true poetry should be popular poetry’. For this reason,
writers needed to use a common language that was suited to the
literate bourgeois public.
The years between the Restoration and Unification were those of
the Risorgimento. In Italy, Romanticism became identified with the
struggle for national independence. Romantic–Risorgimento literature
was therefore politically engaged and was characterized by a strong
educational strain, particularly regarding the bourgeois class, the
‘people’ that had to become a ‘nation’. At the root of the flourishing
patriotism was the Mazzinian Romantic idea of popularization.
Mazzini’s slogan was ‘thought and action’ and, at the time, ‘action’
meant illegal activity and could lead to prison, shooting, hanging or,
in the Papal States, despite the Pope’s hostility to the French
Revolution, even the guillotine. Many followed Mazzini’s example and
went into exile (a path already trodden by Foscolo, the first Romantic
exile). Condemned to death in Piedmont, a 27-year-old Mazzinian
called Giuseppe Garibaldi fled Italy and began an adventure that
made him the ‘hero of the two worlds’; he took up arms in Latin
America (where there are still streets and squares named after him
today) until it was possible, in 1848, to return to fight in Italy.
Another young Mazzinian, Jacopo Ruffini, sentenced to imprisonment
at the same time as Garibaldi was sentenced to death, failed to
escape and instead committed suicide for fear of not resisting
interrogation. His two brothers followed Mazzini to England, where
one of them, Giovanni Ruffini, wrote an autobiographical novel
entitled Lorenzo Benoni, or Passages in the Life of an Italian (first
published in Edinburgh in 1853). It narrates the vicissitudes of a
young patriot who took part in the first Mazzinian conspiracies while
at the same time living a romantic love story. All the elements of
Risorgimento romanticism are present: autobiography, condemnation
by the authorities, exile in England, and love. Ruffini also wrote a
story, Doctor Antonio, which concerned an Italian exile who returned
to Italy to fight and, forced to choose between love for a woman – an
English lady who had challenged the social conventions of her society
to follow him – and love for the patria, chose the latter. In an ending
typical of Risorgimento romantic novels, he was imprisoned and the
woman he loved died gazing at his prison from a castle in southern
Italy. For many young men, death was associated with ‘making
history’ – a violent self-sacrifice in the name of a higher ideal. In
1860, before leaving Genoa for Sicily, Garibaldi wrote to a relative: ‘I
have no other desire: to die for Italy.’ In Federico De Roberto’s
masterpiece The Viceroys (1894), set in Sicily just after Garibaldi’s
landing, one of the characters, Lorenzo, decides to become a
garibaldino and sends a letter to his fiancée, Lucrezia, in which he
announces his aim of joining Garibaldi to accomplish his duty to the
Fatherland, and begs her not to cry should the great destiny of dying
for Italy befall him.
Many attempts to continue the fight ignited by Mazzini were
defeated. Failure created martyrs, and the sacrifice of the martyrs
consciously fed Mazzini’s civil ‘religion’ (the religion of the patria). The
most famous of these sacrifices were made by the Bandiera brothers
and by Carlo Pisacane, the former executed in 1844 and the latter
lynched in 1857 after trying to organize revolutions in southern Italy
and finding no support among the peasantry – both cases illustrating
the lack of interest in the national cause.
A typical Italian genre of the time was the patriotic poetry that
celebrated the myth of the fallen hero. One of the first such poets
was Alessandro Poerio (1802–48), a Neapolitan patriot who lived
mostly in exile and died during the revolution in Venice. Poerio wrote
the song Risorgimento (1836) and books of poetry full of comments
on the martyrs for the Italian cause, on Italy’s past glories and on the
resting place of great Italians. Luigi Mercantini, author of a Hymn to
Garibaldi, wrote refined poetry, particularly in La Spigolatrice di Sapri
(‘The gleaner of Sapri’), on the unfortunate expedition of Pisacane to
Southern Italy (1857). In this poem, a peasant woman simply but
movingly remembered:
I was on my way to glean one morning/When I saw a ship in the middle of the sea/it was
a steam ship,/and it carried a tricolour flag.

The story is alternated by the refrain: ‘They were three hundred,/they

were young and strong,/and they are dead’. Another famous refrain
was that composed by Arnaldo Fusinato in the poem A Venezia (‘To
Venice’, 1849), dedicated to the city’s surrender to the Austrians after
the long resistance that followed the 1848 revolution:
The epidemic rages,/bread is lacking,/on the bridge /the white flag waves!

It was intended that the reader should be absorbed by the strong

images of a myth that became legend. Many of these poems were
written to be set to music and so were more widely diffused. The
most famous was the march by Goffredo Mameli, with music by
Michele Novaro, which later became Italy’s national anthem, taking
the title from its first line, Fratelli d’Italia (‘Brothers of Italy’, 1847).
Born in Genoa in 1827 and educated in university Mazzinian circles
within a strongly Romantic culture (including writers such as Victor
Hugo, Lord Byron, Foscolo and Manzoni), Mameli died aged 22 in the
defence of Rome alongside Garibaldi. In his songs, he embodied the
Mazzinian ideal of poet-prophet, who translated thought into action
through his literature.
 Box 6.4 Italy’s national anthem (1847)
The anthem brings together glorious events from the Italian past
(the battle of Legnano of 1176; the Sicilian Vespers; Ferruccio –
Francesco Ferrucci, who defended Florence against Charles V in
the sixteenth century; the child named Balilla who threw a stone
at the Habsburg army, starting a popular revolt in Genoa in
1746); it also makes references to ancient Rome and to a
Mazzinian religiosity:

Italian brothers,/Italy has awakened,/And is wearing the

helmet/Of Scipio on her head./Where is Victory?/Let her bow
her head,/ Because God made her/Rome’s slave.//Let us join
in legions,/We are ready to die!/Italy summoned us!//For
centuries we have/Been trampled on and derided,/Because
we are not a people,/Because we are divided./Let it be that
one flag,/One hope bind us together;/The hour has
come/For us to join forces.//Let us join in legions . . //Let us
unite and love one another;/For unity and love/Show to
peoples/The ways of the Lord/Let us swear to liberate/Our
native soil;/If united under God,/Who can conquer us?//Let
us join in legions . . .//From the Alps to Sicily,/Legnano is
everywhere;/Every man has the heart/and hand of
Ferruccio./The children of Italy/Are called Balilla;/The sound
of every trumpet/Sounded the Vespers.//Let us join in
legions . . .//The sold swords/are reeds that bend;/The
Austrian eagle/Has already lost its feathers/Together with
the Cossack/It drank Italian blood/And Polish blood/But its
heart burned.//Let us join in legions,/We are ready to
die/Italy summoned us!

A common thread running through this kind of literature was the

repetitive character of the narrated events, in which the experience of
the suffering of the national community was constantly renewed, with
its natural continuity unchanged. The recurrent elements were: the
oppression of Italy by foreign populations or tyrants; the internal
division among the Italians, which favoured that oppression; the
threat to the national honour caused by such oppression; and the
unlucky but heroic attempts at redemption/liberation. The
Risorgimento was therefore represented as the awakening of a
people as it acquired consciousness of its past and of forgotten
values, but it was also a proper resurrection – a cancellation of an
original sin, a redemption from a political and ethical fall.
There was no European model for patriotic poetry. In Italy, it
influenced people through songs played by bands or sung in cafés,
and by resuming popular rhythmical structures. The opera (born, as
was seen in Chapter 5, in the early seventeenth century) was
extremely popular in the nineteenth century, and became a patriotic
weapon, disguising its message to elude censorship. Gioachino
Rossini in William Tell (1829) told the Swiss story of heroic resistance
to oppression with allusions to the Italian case; Vincenzo Bellini, in I
puritani (1835) described the hardship of exile (common to many
Italian patriots in the 1820s and 1830s) and concluded the opera with
the idea that it was beautiful to die shouting ‘liberty’. In 1889, the
poet Giosuè Carducci wrote that the composer Giuseppe Verdi (1813–
1901) ‘presaged the revival of the Fatherland’; his songs were
‘unforgettable and sacred to anyone born before 1848’. Carducci was
mainly referring to Nabucco, which became the most significant
opera in its expression of the Risorgimento mood. Nabucco is set in
Jerusalem and Babylon in 586 BC, but reminded the public of the
Italian situation:
Go, my thought, on golden wings/Go, alight upon the slopes, the hills,/where, soft and
warm, the sweet breezes/of our native land are fragrant !/Greet the banks of the
Jordan/And Zion’s razed towers.. ./Oh, my country so lovely and lost!/Oh, remembrance
so dear and ill-fated !/Golden harp of the prophetic bards,/why do you hang mute on the
willow?/Re-kindle the memories in our breasts,/speak to us of the times of yore !/Just as
for the cruel fate of Jerusalem,/intone a strain of bitter lamentation,/otherwise let the
Lord inspire you with/a melody to give us strength to suffer!

The political effect of Verdi’s opera can be attributed to the

widespread popularity in Italy of the melodrama, which became the
echo chamber of aspirations for national unity. Verdi’s origins, a
peasant family from the plain of Busseto near Parma, together with
the fiery music of his early operas (Rigoletto, Traviata and Trovatore)
were interpreted as a genuine expression of the soul of the Italian
people. The public sometimes changed words to parts of his operas,
to make the meaning more explicit: for example, in Ernani the ‘lion of
Castille’ became the ‘lion of St Mark’. According to Mazzini, Verdi’s
music inspired dramatic events and social faith, and became a
universal language both for individuals and for the community.
Mazzini also recognized a novelty in Rossini’s choruses in a text of
1836 entitled Philosophy of Music. The historian Piero Brunello has
interpreted the proclamation of the Venetian Republic by Daniele
Manin in March 1848 as if it was modelled on Verdi’s chorus of Ernani
– as in an opera, in the squares of 1848 Italy patriots swore oaths,
raising swords: ideas of brotherhood, oaths, proclamations of a fight
against tyranny, the relationship between tenor and male chorus, all
were elements typical of opera. In this sense, Verdi’s operas can be
seen as the ‘soundtrack of 1848’.
Prison, exile, political battles and revolutions are the background to
the extraordinary energy of the period, and to its literature. Exile was
a key feature in the growth of the national and Romantic discourse.
Italian intellectuals got together, especially in Paris and London, and
produced a number of translations of French, English and German
Romantic writers (including Honoré de Balzac, Hugo, Alphonse de
Lamartine; William Shakespeare, Walter Scott, Byron; Johann von
Goethe, Friedrich Schiller and Friedrich Klopstok). The Romantic spirit
and national sentiment in Risorgimento literature combined in the
historical novel, a popular genre at least until Unification; however,
the most intense expressions are to be found in memoir writing,
where literature expressed itself through history and politics. One of
the most famous examples is My Prisons by Silvio Pellico; he was
among the founders of Il Conciliatore in 1818, a Milanese newspaper
that in many ways continued the experience of Il Caffè, but survived
only briefly because of Austrian censorship. Pellico was arrested and
sent to a harsh prison, an experience he described in his book, which
is not directly political, but rather a narration of his intimate
experience. My Prisons was edited many times and translated into
other languages, making it the most-read Italian book of the
nineteenth century – the Austrian Chancellor Prince von Metternich
said that the book did more damage to Austria than a lost battle. The
intellectual origins of My Prisons lay in the experience of Milanese
journalism, and it can be seen as a product of eighteenth-century
rationalism, in its problems with public dissemination, its distance
from strictly literary interests, its pedagogic intentions and its civil
passion.
Perhaps the most famous novel of Italian literature, Manzoni’s The
Betrothed, is a historical novel which tells the story of Renzo and
Lucia, two lovers living in Spanish-dominated seventeenth-century
Milan. The Spaniards were clearly associated with the Austrians in the
nineteenth century, so the novel contains a patriotic message. A
moderate Catholic, Manzoni also conveyed a religious message,
intertwining large-scale and individual history; it is the story of an age
seen through the eyes of the victims of high politics, and considers
how individuals with faith in God can survive. Italy’s history of the
oppressed was one of dignified people who could withstand the
pressured events. Manzoni wrote in beautiful literary Italian, which
could be understood by the people without being provincial, and
which contributed to its popularity.
Art, which over the previous two centuries had been more
innovative than literature, was much less influential during the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Neo-classicism and the
revival of archaeology were not as important as literature in the
Risorgimento era. However, in sculpture, some world-class
masterpieces were produced – in particular, the work of Antonio
Canova (1757–1822), who produced, alongside busts of Napoleon
(and the famous monument to the Emperor’s sister, Pauline
Bonaparte), the Tomb of Vittorio Alfieri in 1810; created before
Napoleon’s fall, this bore a crowned image representing Italy and was
much discussed among his contemporaries, many of whom saw a
patriotic message in it, despite Canova’s commitment to the French
Emperor.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF A NATIONAL DISCOURSE

Risorgimento thinkers and poets made reference to previous Italian
thinkers and writers, establishing as they did so a cult of the ‘fathers’
of the nation – Dante, Petrarch, the Renaissance artists, Machiavelli
and Galileo. Taken together, the reception of their ideas was the basis
for the Risorgimento. The movement that led to the unification of
Italy had many different souls – democratic, moderate, Catholic-
liberal, anti-clerical, republican, monarchic. Early-twentieth-century
anti–Fascist historians such as Gaetano Salvemini, Antonio Gramsci
and Carlo Rosselli discussed the problems of the Risorgimento,
convinced that its worst side (the most undemocratic forces) had
triumphed. During the Resistance in the Second World War, there was
an attempt to return to the democratic roots of the movement, the
ones that had been repressed by Liberal Italy. Contradictions in the
unification movement were evident as early as in 1848, however,
particularly between a national-nationalist priority and the hope of a
progressive and democratic solution. However, those divisions were
not always apparent to all those men and women who,
enthusiastically, in different ways and at different times, took part in
revolutionary events. Indeed, the Risorgimento was not simply a
movement of a narrow elite that rested on the actions of individual
diplomats such as Count di Cavour or military leaders such as
Garibaldi. As recently emphasized by Paul Ginsborg and Alberto Banti,
despite the context of a largely illiterate society, tens of thousands of
people took an active part as militants in political movements, while
hundreds of thousands of others, often close to these militants,
regarded the events of Unification with a mixture of trepidation and
sympathy. The high numbers of those who became members of
clandestine sects such as Young Italy, took part in revolts all over
Italy in 1820–1, 1830–1 and 1848, participated in mass
demonstrations, enrolled as volunteers in the wars for independence
of 1849, 1859 and 1866, attempted insurrections in the 1850s, and
fought alongside Garibaldi in 1860, constitute a highly significant
aspect of Risorgimento history. The peasant participation in Sicily in
1860, the urban lower classes who fought behind the barricades with
the bourgeois classes in 1848 in Milan and Venice, as well as the
diffusion among all social classes of patriotic melodrama, are all
elements that confirm the ‘mass’ dimension of the unification process.
Moreover, the involvement of the ‘people’ was a conscious political
aim for intellectuals who, despite the dangerous and illegal nature of
their activity, sought to move large sections of the population to a
militant commitment – to move ‘people’ to become a ‘nation’.
Why did so many young men and women become patriots? Why
did some decide to belong to secret societies, read forbidden books
and think about subversive geopolitical transformation between 1796
and 1860? New Italian research, particularly by Alberto Banti, has
begun to investigate what the national question meant for the men
and women who saw it as an important part of their lives. The origins
of the national discourse are to be found, once more, in the
Enlightenment. In 1765, an article in Il Caffè entitled ‘On the
Fatherland of the Italians’ imagined a conversation in a Milanese café.
A newcomer arrives and mixes with a group of regular customers.
One of the regulars enquires if he is a foreigner; the newcomer
replies that he is not. He is asked if he is from Milan. Again, the
answer is ‘no’. The puzzled regular asks him where he is from, to
which the stranger replies: ‘I am Italian, and an Italian in Italy is
never a foreigner, just as a Frenchman in France, or an Englishman in
England.’ They begin to converse and the newcomer outlines his
views with reference to Italy’s history: the origin of the Italian nation
during the expansion of ancient Rome, when Rome extended its
privileges to the whole country (‘we were all similar at the
beginning’); then the barbarians came, and for centuries Italians
were disunited, but this had never altered those common origins –
that uninterrupted continuity meant that all Italians should feel part
of the same nation. The regular customer replies that differences
between cities remained important; the newcomer agrees, adding
that patriotism did not negate the legitimacy of Italy’s ancient states
and of their present institutional peculiarities. On a cultural level, they
were all Italians and should contribute to Italy’s artistic and scientific
progress (which was what made a country into a nation), while
politically it was natural to be loyal to one’s own ‘small Fatherland’.
Banti has demonstrated that this type of discourse was subject to
a fundamental change from the 1790s. The impulse for that change
came with Napoleon’s Italian Army, through the pages of newspapers
and leaflets, manifestos, books and prints, all of which were
distributed around Italy in great quantity with astonishing speed.
Unlike in previous decades, the patria no longer meant any kind of
institutional system characterized by fair laws, but one single
institutional unit: a republic with parliamentary representation.
Patriotism, as writings of the time specified, was no longer just ‘love
for the patria’ but ‘love for the republican and democratic patria’. The
authors of these writings were generally young intellectuals,
journalists, writers, lawyers, doctors and former priests who had
followed the events of the French Revolution with enthusiasm.
A decisive contribution to the discussion of a possible unitary
Italian state came from Buonarroti. When the French were preparing
the attack on Piedmont and Austrian Lombardy, he intensified contact
with Italians living in Liguria and Nice in order to organize
insurrectionary acts in support of the French. His speeches to the
Italians in Nice (all Italians were brothers and sisters, all part of the
same country and the same patria) influenced a proliferation of
writing on the existence of a ‘genius of the Italian nation’, the
principal characteristics of which derived from ancient Rome, a
common blood and religion, common habits and language, and a
precise and coherent geographical location. There was an imitation of
France evident in many of these writings, in an attempt to eliminate
the specific Italian history of cities and regions, and the complex
variations this implied. This was difficult to sustain because, while it
was true that Italians had a common past, literary language and
culture, the experiences of people who lived in different parts of the
country varied along with environmental conditions, agricultural
practices, and laws and institutions that had become stratified over
the course of centuries.
After France compromised with Austria at Campoformio, the focus
shifted from emulation of the French to a wholly Italian tradition.
Foscolo, in the Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis, told of Jacopo’s travels
throughout Italy, including a visit to the Florentine church of St Croce,
where he worshipped at the graves of Galileo, Machiavelli and
Michelangelo. While contemplating these great Italians, Jacopo was
‘overwhelmed by a sacred shiver’. By recognizing a common ‘Italian
genius’, the story founded a new concept of militant nationalism
independent of the French example. It was with this shift that the
national discourse filtered into popular cultural expression such as
poetry and opera – which reached the masses much more readily
than did books or newspaper articles.
These emotional tempests were lived through by the younger
generation – it was young people who discovered the nation and
decided to fight for it. The Risorgimento was also a subversive
phenomenon, which of course made it ‘naturally’ suited to the young.
Ippolito Nievo’s novel, Le Confessioni di un italiano (translated into
English as The Castle of Fratta) contributed, perhaps even more than
Manzoni’s, to the construction of the national discourse. Nievo was
born in Padua, and the characters of his novels moved mainly
between Lombardy, Venetia and Friuli. He studied in the Lombardy–
Venetian kingdom under the Habsburgs during the 1840s and 1850s,
but was also involved in the political struggle against Austrian rule. In
1848, he was a Mazzinian and took part in the failed revolution in
Mantua. He rejected the opportunity of following a judicial career,
which would have entailed working for the Austrian administration,
and instead became a writer and a radical journalist. In 1860, Nievo
took part in Garibaldi’s ‘Thousand’ expedition. During a journey from
Palermo to Piedmont in 1861, charged with carrying some
administrative documents for the expedition, he died when his ship
went down. Nievo wrote his novel when he was still in his thirties,
from the viewpoint of an 80-year-old man narrating his life spanning
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The novel included the
typical ingredients of the nineteenth-century Romantic historical
novel: castles, war, revolution (the protagonist takes part in the
battles of the Risorgimento from the Napoleonic wars onwards), and
a beautiful love story between the central character Carlino and his
cousin Pisana, one of the most forceful female characters of Italian
literature.
Women and families were also central to the national discourse.
The family was expected to be the primary cell of the nation,
educating and supporting the new generation of patriots. Foscolo, in
exile in 1828, wrote an article, published by the London Magazine
and entitled ‘The Women of Italy’, in which he condemned the
practice of Church and aristocracy of keeping women locked away in
convents; he thought that Italy could not have aspired to nationhood
without the redefinition of women’s role within the family. Mazzini
also addressed Italian women as heads of the patriotic family – the
heart of the patria. While Foscolo focused on the family of the elite,
Mazzini sought to popularize a strong and classless image of the
Italian family, which would produce citizens ready to sacrifice their
lives. Many Risorgimento heroes were supported enthusiastically by
their parents, particularly by their mothers, who at times appeared
ready to sustain them even in the most self-destructive adventures.
De Roberto described the patriotic character of Lorenzo (The
Viceroys) thus: ‘He was really a good young man, studious, a bit hot-
headed, inflamed by the liberal ideas of his uncle, burning with love
for Italy: when he wrote to his girlfriend he told her that he had three
passions: herself, his mother, and the fatherland that needed to be
redeemed.’ Italian Risorgimento families therefore embodied a
tension between familial love and the call of Romantic nationalism.
As Simonetta Soldani has demonstrated, many women became
attracted to the national movement thorough the ideas of moderate
Catholicism. Once involved, they made an important contribution to
the success of patriotic-religious liturgies and the numerous
ceremonies of mourning, thanksgiving and hope organized all over
Italy in 1848. Once there were men killed, wounded and imprisoned
for the cause, women in different parts of Italy began to exchange
expressions of solidarity with one another. In 1848, Tuscan and
Lombard newspapers published an ‘address of gratitude from Tuscan
women to Lombard women’, for the help received by Tuscan patriots
from Lombard women who sheltered, nursed and fed them during
the first war of independence. Collective greetings, as signs of
reciprocal recognition, continued to be exchanged after 1848
between women from Sicily, Tuscany, Lombardy, Venice, Genoa and
Bologna.

THE REVOLUTION BEGINS: 1848

There were different ideas of nation, many Italie in cammino (‘Italies
in the making’): anti-clerical and neo–Guelph, democratic and
moderate, republican and monarchist, unitarian and federalist.
However, when the supporters of these views described the Italian
nation in itself rather than specifically in relation to political
outcomes, these differences disappeared – Banti calls this
correspondence the ‘elementary morphology of the national
discourse’.
Mazzini took it for granted that Italy existed as a nation just like
other European countries, because of its common literary culture,
which justified the right to self-government and independence. His
major enemy was the Papacy, since he favoured secular education
and believed that only Rome could be the capital of Italy. As many
before him, Mazzini wanted an end to Papal temporal power, but also
the end of its power over the spiritual education of Italians. For many
Risorgimento leaders, Catholic and anti–Catholic alike, the legacy of
Rome was a central issue. For this reason, the unification of Italy was
bound to produce a clash with the Papacy. However, Mazzini believed
in God, and believed that Italian unification was God’s will, and this
provided a crucial aspect of his attempt to construct a civil religion.
Mazzini’s belief in insurrection by the people – though by ‘people’
he meant urban intellectuals and the educated class, rather than the
masses of peasants – was considered damaging by other, more
moderate, supporters of the national cause. Among these was
Vincenzo Gioberti (1801–52), a Catholic priest whose vision for the
unification of Italy was as a confederation of states under the Pope’s
leadership – an idea that consciously recalled the Guelph factions of
the Middle Ages, hence his programme was named ‘neo–Guelph’.
Gioberti reunited the history of Italy with the history of Rome,
underlining the continuity between Latin and Catholic civilization, and
asserting religion as the moral foundation of the Italian nation. He
outlined his programme in an 1843 book entitled On the Moral and
Civil Primacy of the Italians, in which he argued that only Rome
expressed ‘in embryo the unity of Italy and of the world’. These ideas
influenced Pope Pius IX, newly elected in 1846, who became famous
both in Italy and abroad as a ‘liberal Pope’. However, there were
many problems inherent in Gioberti’s programme, not least the
continued Austrian presence in northern Italy. Gioberti managed not
to mention this anywhere in his book, because Austria was a key ally
of the Pope. Moreover, he left open the question of why Italian states
would want to be controlled by the Papacy.
Despite these contradictions (the title of ‘liberal Pope’ was itself an
oxymoron), expectations rose that Pius IX would become the author
of the future Italy proposed in Gioberti’s Primacy. The image of Rome
was turned upside-down, from the site of the past to the site of the
future – no longer in Jacobin republican form, but now with an
ecclesiastical focus. The idea of the Pope as a symbol of renewal
assumed different meanings: a politico-national meaning for the
liberals, and a religious-cultural meaning for those Catholics tired of
the Church’s traditionalism; for the Roman lower classes, the Pope
represented a millennarian aspiration for a better life. These
expectations were raised, often independently of the Pope’s will, all
over Italy, challenging the Restoration settlement. Between the
Pope’s declaration of an amnesty for political prisoners in 1846 and
withdrawal from the war against Austria in 1848, Rome became the
theatre for an impressive number of feasts and popular banquets,
where the Pope was cheered and the rebirth of the city proclaimed,
expressed, as Bartolini has described, with an ‘impatient, almost
revolutionary fervour’.
This fervour was met with bitter disappointment when the Pope
made clear that he would not take part in an anti–Austrian war (and
later withdrew all his ‘liberal’ concessions); in place of Papal
leadership a moderate but secular programme gained ground,
following the defeat of the revolutions. Led by Cavour and the House
of Savoy in the 1850s, this proposal had first been presented by the
Piedmontese Cesare Balbo (1789–1853) who, in The Hopes of Italy,
argued for a federal union led by Piedmont. Balbo believed that King
Charles Albert must take the initiative by waging war on Austria to
unite Lombardy–Venetia with Piedmont. The problem with Balbo’s
programme was that he devoted little attention to the rest of Italy
and focused on the north. These many and competing views all had a
part to play in the revolutions that rocked the peninsula in 1848, and
the first war of independence that followed.
The Italian revolution of 1848 began in Palermo, and forced the
Bourbon monarchy to declare a provisional constitutional
government. The fact that events occurred in Palermo before Milan
has often been cited to counter the opinion that the Risorgimento
was an imposition of the north against the south. The revolt started
in the city of Palermo and immediately received help from the
countryside (where armed gangs were organized), and extended to
the surrounding areas and the continental south. The social unrest
already present in the south, together with endemic unemployment
in Naples and Palermo, brought about a temporary alliance between
the urban lower classes, artisans, intellectuals and political activists.
Anger was turned against the landowners of the big estates.
Ferdinand II Bourbon was forced to concede a constitution, which
inspired a temporary and enthusiastic political unity as well as liberal
optimism; liberal and democratic newspapers flourished in the capital
and provinces. A new government in Palermo was led by
autonomists, who wanted a democratic constitution and separation
from Naples. However, the Sicilian separatist movement was divided,
as not all liberals agreed on the virtues of separation, and these
tensions within the liberal movement weakened the revolution.
Moderates wanted a stable compromise between the monarchy and
parliament, afraid of mass political participation, while the democrats
wanted to forge links with the masses through universal suffrage.
The revolution had a European dimension, and when a revolt
broke out in Vienna, Italians answered with anti–Austrian risings in
Milan and Venice. The patriot Daniele Manin (1804–57) led the
Venetian revolution, which liberated prisoners and organized a Civil
Guard. The Republic of St Mark was reborn. A day later, on 18 March
1848, the Milanese people began one of the most memorable events
of the Risorgimento, the ‘five days’ of insurrection – a mass
participation, including women, children and priests, that defeated
the Austrian army. In the second day of the fighting, the Austrian
general, Joseph Radetzky, admitted that there were more than 1,000
barricades in the city – which became symbols of collective defence
against the weapons of power, an expression of the century’s
Romanticism. During these five days, Milan’s image as victim of
foreign occupation was replaced by that of a revolutionary city. On
the first day, a manifesto appeared on the city walls that expressed
the conviction that the future of Italy was at stake in Milan:
People of Milan! The eyes of Europe are upon us considering whether our prolonged
silence had been dictated by intelligent prudence or by fear. The provinces are waiting for
a command from us. The destiny of Italy is in our hands. One day alone can decide the
destiny of a whole century. Discipline! Unity! Courage!

Liberals and democrats returned to Milan from all over Italy. The
celebration of the liberation from the Austrians revived memories of
the history of the medieval commune; for example, by marking the
anniversary of the battle of Legnano: ‘Let the Germans come down
again,’ shouted the democrat, Pietro Perego, ‘and we shall answer: to
Legnano’; ‘the sovereign people still remember those days ... and
they are ready to renew them’.
Unity did not last long, as programmes for the Risorgimento
continued to present a variety of proposals. Carlo Cattaneo, who
played a primary role in the Milanese insurrection, supported the idea
of a democratic republic (established successfully during the Venetian
revolution), but he did not believe that it made sense for Italy to
become a unified state with its capital in Rome, as the Mazzinians
wanted; out of respect for Italy’s regional traditions, Cattaneo
advocated a democratic but federal solution. For him, Italy was not
enslaved so much by foreigners as by its own leaders: freedom came
before nationality. The solution he most despised was that of an Italy
under the Piedmontese monarchy; his antipathy was such that when
the moderates called Charles Albert to Milan, Cattaneo proclaimed
that it had been useless to fight and defeat the Austrians only in
order to be invaded by another (albeit Italian) monarchy.
Charles Albert decided to declare war on Austria, not to help the
revolutionaries but, on the contrary, to take control of the situation to
avoid the proclamation of a republic in Turin. He had been
considering war against Austria with the aim of creating a kingdom of
northern Italy and liberating the country from foreign occupation, but
the war he imagined was a dynastic conflict supported by moderates,
not a people’s war provoked by insurrection in the wider context of a
republican revolution. The Pope retreated, also worried by the
political events, writing a document, called ‘allocution’, in which he
restated his role as Pope of all Catholics, including Austrians.
Volunteers from across the peninsula joined the Piedmontese army,
transforming a war of the House of Savoy into the first war of Italian
independence. After defeat at Custoza, the Piedmontese signed an
armistice with Austria, but fought again a few months later, in March
1849, only to be defeated again, this time in Novara. Charles Albert
was forced to abdicate and left the throne to his son, Victor
Emmanuel II, under whose reign Italian unification was accomplished
more than a decade later. Victor Emmanuel decided to maintain the
constitution in Piedmont (the Statuto), in contrast to the other states,
where rulers who returned to power after the defeat of the
revolutions re-established their old regimes: for this reason, the
1850s are called the years of the ‘second restoration’.
While in regular warfare the Italians had reinforced their reputation
as a people incapable of fighting, the popular wars of the
Risorgimento demonstrated the capacity of the popular masses to
sacrifice and fight courageously in both defeat and victory. Shortly
after the five days of Milan, the people of Brescia resisted the
Austrian attack for ten days – days that ended in slaughter, and fixed
two opposed images in the national memory: of the city as the
‘lioness of Italy’; and of the Austrian general Julius von Haynau as
‘the hyena of Brescia’. The defences of Rome and Venice would
become mythologized to a greater extent, lasting, as they did, for
months rather than days. The Roman Republic survived from
February to June 1849, organized by Mazzini, Mameli and Garibaldi –
the latter leading the military resistance against French troops
summoned by the Pope to defend his temporal power. The Roman
Republic was the most democratic (as demonstrated by its
progressive constitution), reflecting the ideas of the radical current of
the Risorgimento. More than 400 garibaldini died in one day during
its defence. As Garibaldi moved north to fight in defence of the
Venetian Republic, his wife Anita died, aged 31, an event that
contributed to his cult as romantic hero of the Risorgimento. Patriots
came to Venice from across the country, demonstrating the national
significance of the struggle. In August the city surrendered in the
face of Austrian bombs, hunger and cholera. The Venetian
experience, like the Roman and the Milanese, took symbols of the
city’s past (St Mark, the republic) and united them with symbols of
Italy’s unification, such as the tricolour flag – even if it sometimes
appeared with horizontal rather than vertical stripes.

THE IMPOSSIBLE RESTORATION

The second restoration was much more repressive than the first; Italy
was still ruled by foreigners, now more overtly than before. French
troops were stationed in Rome, Austria kept garrisons in Tuscany and
central Italy, and placed Lombardy under military rule. However, the
revolutions of 1848 had changed the situation fundamentally, and no
real restoration was possible. The Bourbons never recovered their
popularity; political stability could not be re-established in Sicily, as
the island’s economic problems and social discontent had not been
addressed. The repressive aspects of the monarchy increased: the
police state was strengthened, intellectuals were removed from
administration, censorship was reintroduced, as was Church control
over education; spies infiltrated the population, leading to arrests and
trials, and bandits were recruited by the government to inform on
political activists. Unsatisfied expectations were, however, still
present. Middle-class discontent continued, as the government
invested heavily in the army to the detriment of education and public
works, and there were considerably more democrats and dissenters
than before 1848. Many democratic and moderate exiles had moved
to Piedmont, Switzerland, Britain and France. Austrian rule in
Lombardy lost its reputation for efficient administration and acquired
one for cruelty and tyranny. It was hated by the middle classes and
even by the most influential aristocratic families. In Rome, the
aristocracy welcomed the Pope’s return, preferring stability over
revolution and the republic, but the Pope had betrayed the
expectations of the middle classes, which were now against him.
Rome faced a financially disastrous situation and was not capable of
military self-defence, being entirely dependent on the French.
Piedmont represented the only exception to the triumph of
absolutism and reaction in Italy after 1848; it was the only state not
dependent on Austrian influence or military power, and the only one
to retain a constitution, with an elected parliament sharing
governmental responsibilities with the monarchy. Victor Emmanuel
believed the Statuto was important to keep democrats under control
and to maintain the support of the moderates, which he needed
because of his anti–Austrian stance. The Statuto (which became
Italy’s constitution on unification and remained so until the
Republican constitution of 1948) was very moderate but its mere
existence ensured a special role for Piedmont in Italy. It established
the principle of judicial independence, the equality of citizens before
the law, and rights of association. However, the aristocracy remained
in control, property was declared inviolable, and the king remained
the sole executive power and commander of the armed forces; and
the alliance between throne and altar was confirmed, with
Catholicism being declared the official state religion. Around 100,000
exiles moved from all over Italy to Piedmont, where they could meet,
discuss publicly and promote the development and circulation of
newspapers: they created an Italian culture in a single region. Some
of them became deputies in the parliament and even ministers, since
all Italians, though not foreigners, had the right to vote and stand for
office. The constitution forced new behaviour on the aristocrats, as
they now had to contest elections and persuade voters. The
monarchy maintained control, but before long, intelligent politicians
were able to influence parliament and public opinion. In addition, the
constitution gave Piedmont the approval of foreign liberal states; it
therefore acquired a new status, as a liberal national focal point.
Many exiles came from southern Italy. Some supported a return to
Muratism (that is, they wanted to replace Ferdinand with Luciano
Murat, the son of Joachim Murat, who had governed in Naples under
Napoleon) in the hope of attracting French support, which they failed
to achieve. Most of the liberal moderates championed Piedmontese
leadership of a united Italy under Victor Emmanuel and looked to
Cavour for assistance against Bourbon reaction. Many democratic
exiles looked beyond a united Italy; a minority such as Carlo
Pisacane, Rosolino Pilo and Pasquale Calvi opposed any compromise
with the monarchy and sought to mobilize the rural poor of the
South, placing social revolution before unification; others, such as
Francesco Crispi (1819–1901), wanted the unity of Italy above all
else, and were ready to compromise with the House of Savoy.
After the defeat of various Mazzinian and democratic attempts in
the 1850s, unification under the House of Savoy seemed the only
practical solution. Between 1849 and 1852, the Turin government
was led by Massimo D’Azeglio (1798–1866); a Piedmontese patriot,
an aristocrat and a liberal moderate politician, he was Balbo’s cousin
and married Manzoni’s daughter. He was also a painter (of Italian
Romantic-patriotic landscapes) and a novelist. The Piedmontese
parliament was not made up of organized parties, but of groups
named ‘Right’ and ‘Left’. Neither group was disciplined, and deputies
voted however they liked (as, for example, on anti-clerical reforms).
Each government therefore sought to offer concessions and win MPs
favour for each vote, a practice that has been interpreted as the
beginnings of ‘transformism’ and corruption in the Italian political
system. In 1852, Cavour replaced D’Azeglio as Prime Minister. Cavour
was opposed both to the Mazzinians and to absolute monarchy, had
edited Il Risorgimento with Balbo and had pressed for the
constitution in 1848, when he entered parliament for the first time.
After studying in France and Britain, he became a supporter of
economic liberal systems and was responsible for the reforms of the
army, administration and financial system that modernized Piedmont
in the 1850s.
Cavour’s diplomatic ability persuaded European powers, and Italian
conservatives, that the choice was between revolution and Piedmont.
A partial reconciliation took place between moderates and the
defeated democrats, in the shape of the National Society (founded in
1856), led by Garibaldi with Manin as president, alongside a Sicilian,
Giuseppe La Farina, who sought to promote an alliance between the
House of Savoy and the national movement. The Society fomented
national public opinion all over Italy and became an ideal instrument
in Cavour’s hands, particularly effective in the Romagna and the Papal
States. The slogan was clarified: ‘Italy and Victor Emmanuel’. In the
name of this slogan, the Thousand (almost all of whom were
republican democrats) defeated the Bourbons in Sicily and Naples in
1860. However, before the success of this popular conflict, a second
war of independence in 1859 had already seen Cavour’s efforts
crowned with triumph, thanks in part to a French alliance and British
benevolence.
The battles against the Austrians (Magenta, S. Martino and
Solferino) were won mainly by the French army and ended with an
armistice at Villafranca that only ceded Lombardy to Piedmont. The
main Italian contribution to the war came from the mass desertion of
Italian soldiers from the Austrian army. The popular element once
more imposed itself, with protests in Tuscany, Emilia and Romagna,
which led to the annexation of these regions to Piedmont, which the
French Emperor Napoleon III accepted thanks to Cavour’s persuasion
and at the price of granting Nice and Savoy in exchange. The
annexations were decided by plebiscites, the results of which can still
be seen on the walls of municipal government buildings around Italy.
These plebiscites, which confirmed the annexation of parts of Italy
to the House of Savoy – Lombardy in 1848 (although temporarily
nullified by the Austrian re-conquest of the region in 1849), southern
Italy in 1860, Venetia in 1866 and Rome in 1870 – have often been
described as merely a manipulation of public opinion, well
orchestrated by the National Society and controlled by the new rulers.
They were not consultations similar to elections, as they took place
once events had already occurred and served to celebrate the new
situation; indeed, they were public and collective gatherings,
generally with rulers at the head of processions and peasants
following. However, new studies have begun to take them more
seriously and explore what actually happened on occasions that
represented, at least until Fascist mobilization in the following
century, the highest point of popular participation in political
consultation. The percentage of the votes in favour of Italian
unification ranged from 92.6 per cent in the Marche to 99.9 percent
in Mantua and Venetia. A number of paintings and drawings, many of
which were produced by foreigners, illustrate the feeling of joy
surrounding the voting procedure. The practicalities took place during
feasts of a highly theatrical character involving not just voters but the
whole of society, including women and children; the imperative of
national unity eliminated divisions of class, party, generation and
gender. During these patriotic moments, between 1848 and 1870,
squares, streets, buildings and monuments were wrapped in tricolour
flags, and men and women wore tricolour cockades on their hats and
clothes.

WARS AND REVOLUTIONS FROM GENOA TO ROME – VIA PALERMO,

NAPLES AND VENICE

Despite being blamed after unification for being an obstacle to Italian

unity, southern Italy played a vital role in the process; it brought
about the administrative collapse of the Bourbons, and the peasant
revolt in Sicily enabled Garibaldi’s successful campaign for Naples.
When Ferdinand died in 1859, his successor, Francis II, continued the
policy of neutrality towards Austria; when the people of Naples
celebrated Piedmont’s victory against Austria, he employed troops to
crush popular demonstrations. In April 1860, a Mazzinian insurrection
in Palermo was crushed by the police, but the execution of the
conspirators had unfortunate consequences for the Bourbons;
repression brought international condemnation and popular
upheavals in the countryside. Peasants rebelled against taxes and
carried the tricolour flag into the towns. Conspiracies continued
despite the efforts to impose an apparent order by force. The exiles
Pilo and Crispi returned to Sicily, the former to mobilize the
countryside, and the latter to organize an expedition from the north
to be led by Garibaldi. From Quarto near Genoa, one thousand
garibaldini, students, intellectuals and manual workers, mainly from
northern and central Italy, left in two ships, the Lombardo and the
Piemonte. After stopping at Talamone on the Tuscan coast to stock
up with arms, they reached Marsala in Sicily. In his memoirs, one of
the garibaldini, Cesare Abba, wrote a description of the Sicilian exiles
seeing the Sicilian coast as the ship approached it:
 How easy it is to recognize the Sicilian exiles among us! There they are, all crowding at
the bows. They seem to concentrate their whole being in their eyes. There are about
twenty of them, of all ages. It will be a miracle if Colonel Carini gets ashore alive, seeing
that his heart is bursting with joy.

Once on the island, supported by the local peasant masses who were
promised land if they fought with Garibaldi, the thousand now joined
by other volunteers defeated the Bourbon army. By August they were
in Calabria, and by September had reached Naples, unopposed and
triumphant.
These events and their impact on Sicilian society have been
recounted by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1896–1957) in his
novel The Leopard (published posthumously in 1959), which
described how the old elite managed to survive the events. Two
episodes in the story are particularly revealing. Following Garibaldi’s
landing at Marsala, the brother-in-law of the aristocratic protagonist
of the novel, the Prince of Salina, writes in a letter to the Prince: ‘I
am writing to you in a state of utter collapse … The Piedmontese
have landed. We are all lost.’ However, the prince does not panic: ‘the
name of Garibaldi disturbed him a little. That adventurer all hair and
beard was a pure Mazzinian’; nevertheless, he reflected, ‘if that
Galantuomo King of his has let him come down here it means they
are sure of him. They’ll curb him’. Indeed, the prince’s nephew,
Tancredi, who volunteers for Garibaldi’s army, explains to him: ‘unless
we ourselves take a hand now, they’ll foist a republic on us. If we
want things to stay as they are, things will have to change’. The new
liberal middle class, which many aristocrats feared would take power,
soon begins to mix with the aristocracy, initially shocking the prince.
When the liberal leader Don Calogero visits him wearing a tailcoat,
the prince considers the fact that a non-aristocrat can climb the stairs
of the palace dressed like that was a worse affront than the bulletin
about Garibaldi’s landing at Marsala. In the same way, the hatred for
Cavour expressed by the reactionary priest Don Blasco in The
Viceroys (‘Don Blasco expressed himself violently against that
Piedmontese polenta-eater’) was soothed when a family member, the
Duke of Oragua, is finally elected to the new Italian parliament; the
duke’s brother explaining to his young son: ‘Can you see how much
honour the uncle is bringing into our family? When we had the
viceroys, our relatives were viceroys; now that we have a parliament,
uncle is a member of parliament!’
Garibaldi’s success forced Cavour to rethink Piedmont’s role in
Italy, not least because Garibaldi claimed the south in the name of
Italy and the king, was a leader of the National Society and was more
moderate than radical. The only way to control the south was for
Cavour to choose annexation. In September, he sent troops to Rome
to prevent Garibaldi’s march on the city, which risked conflict with
France and, in October, a plebiscite in the south favoured annexation.
Expanding Piedmontese rule over the whole of Italy signified the final
defeat of the democrats. Cavour succeeded because he exploited the
divisions within the southern liberal movement, and because the
opposition did not have a stronger alternative to Piedmont.
In 1861, when Turin became the capital of Italy, Venice was still
under the Austrians and Papal Rome was protected by French
control. The republicans accused the Piedmontese king of continual
surrender, first at Villafranca, then in preventing Garibaldi from going
to Rome. However, Papal control of Rome was clearly precarious.
Garibaldi’s followers continued to prepare for attack, and Cavour
finally declared that Rome must be Italy’s capital city. By the time of
his death in 1861, Cavour was one of the foremost architects of the
unification of Italy, which could not have been brought about without
the diplomatic successes he achieved during the second war of
independence. Though it has often been argued that Cavour was
interested only in the expansion of Piedmont, and he spoke and
wrote mainly in French, he was a liberal moderate who took part in
the culture of the Risorgimento, and eventually supported Garibaldi
and the National Society. Cavour’s legacy also continued in the area
of anti-clericalism, as his laws limiting the power of the Church and
his slogan of ‘a free Church in a free state’ became the basis for
state–Church relations during Liberal Italy.
Establishing Rome as the capital of Italy took more years of
struggle and diplomacy. In 1862, Garibaldi moved up from Sicily
towards Rome with his volunteers. Diplomatic reaction to this
alarmed the government, and the king moved to stop Garibaldi (the
man who had liberated southern Italy in his name!), subsequently
defeating him at the battle of Aspromonte. In 1864, a centre-right
government led by the Bolognese Marco Minghetti (1818–86) treated
with the French, who agreed to leave Rome within two years, while
Italy promised not to attack the city; the capital was moved to
Florence in 1865. The following year, the French duly left Rome, but
when Garibaldi gathered another force, his 3,000 volunteers were
defeated by a combination of Papal forces and the French, who had
returned to protect Rome. At this point the situation was resolved by
war rather than diplomacy or guerrilla action. The Prussian prime
minister and later German Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, who during
the wars for German unification needed to open a front in Italy,
proposed an alliance between Prussia and the Italian government
against Austria; in the event of victory, Italy would be given Venice.
The Italian army continued to demonstrate military incompetence
with defeats at Custoza and Lissa, on the Adriatic, but Prussia won
the war north of the Alps at Sadowa, and Venetia became part of
Italy. The result of the plebiscites was 642,000 in favour and 69
against unification, though this last war of independence was a farce
in comparison with the popular battles fought in the earlier struggle
for independence. When Prussia fought another war against France in
1870, the French garrison was forced to leave Rome to move extra
military forces to the Rhine. In September 1870, the Italian army
finally entered Rome through a breach at Porta Pia, one of the gates
in the walls surrounding the city that Michelangelo had created in the
sixteenth century. The plebiscite resulted in 133,681 for and 1,507
against unification. Rome was finally proclaimed Italy’s capital and
Pius IX declared himself a ‘prisoner in the Vatican’, denouncing the
new kingdom and the loss of his territories.
Various meanings were attributed to Porta Pia, as became clear
from the annual celebrations that followed the liberation of Rome.
From the start, the celebrations were spontaneous, involving different
elements of the Roman population. Two distinct initiatives soon
became evident, expressing the different moods of the Risorgimento:
one came from the municipal authorities and was supported by the
government, commemorating national unification under the banner of
the monarchy with military parades, the distribution of medals and
the illumination of public buildings. The other initiative came from
political and civil associations such as workers’ and anti-clerical
societies, which organized demonstrations that were often republican
and anti-government in nature. These unofficial celebrations were
accompanied by feasting in the areas in Rome where the bulk of the
ordinary people lived; these were the first secular mass festivals held
in united Italy as they included potentially revolutionary ridicule
directed both at clerics and at the government.
However, these divisions became apparent only after the first
anniversary of unification. At the time, the celebrations united all
factions in a solemn and joyful spectacle. Edmondo De Amicis, one of
the most famous writers of Liberal Italy, described, in his Impressions
of Rome, the overwhelming happiness of the patriots during the
events of 20 September 1870 – the long-awaited moment:
These big squares, these huge fountains, these giant monuments, these memories, this
soil, this name of Rome, the soldiers, the tricolour flags, the prisoners, the people, the
screams, the music, that secular majesty, this new joy, this reconciliation that memory
brings between times, events and triumphs both ancient and modern; all this together is
something that fascinates us, that strikes here, in the middle of our forehead, and seems
to make reason dither; one would say that it is a dream; we almost cannot believe our
eyes; it is a happiness that overwhelms the strengths of the heart. Rome! We cry out.
(De Amicis, 1870)
Map 6.3 Unified Italy (1870)
Source: from John A. Davis, Italy in the Nineteenth Century, 1796–1900 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press), p. 293, by permission of Oxford University Press.

SELECTED FURTHER READING

D. Carpanetto and G. Ricuperati, Italy in the Age of Reason, 1685–1789 (London: Longman,
1987) and J. Davis (ed.), Italy in the Nineteenth Century, 1796–1900 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2000) are indispensable introductions to the period that led to Italian
unification. An analysis of the challenges to the national project can be found in C. Duggan,
The Force of Destiny: A History of Italy since 1796 (London: Penguin, 2007). C. Lovett, The
Democratic Movement in Italy, 1830–1876 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1982) focuses on democratic nationalism in the Risorgimento process. A. R. Ascoli and K.
von Hermeberg (eds), Making and Remaking Italy: The Cultivation of National Identity
around the Risorgimento (Oxford: Berg, 2001) is a collection of valuable essays on the
perception, implementation and contestation of Italian national identity, while L. Riall,
Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007) is a thorough
examination of the myth-making that surrounded Garibaldi.
 7
........
Liberal Italy

CHRONOLOGY
1878 Death of King Victor Emmanuel II; succession of Umberto I
1882 Triple Alliance between Italy, Austria–Hungary and Germany
1887 Francesco Crispi becomes prime minister
1892 Foundation of the Italian Socialist Party
1896 Italy defeated in colonial war at Adowa (Ethiopia); Crispi resigns
1898 Riots in Milan
1900 King Umberto I assassinated; succession of Victor Emmanuel III
1903 Giovanni Giolitti becomes prime minister
1910 Foundation of the Italian Nationalist Association
1912 Universal male suffrage
‘Red week’ in June; Giolitti resigns; Antonio Salandra becomes prime minister;
1914 outbreak of First World War in August — Italy remains neutral; Pope Benedict XV
succeeds Pius X
1915 Treaty of London with Britain, France and Russia; Italy declares war on Austria

CELEBRATING THE NEW NATION

In 1876, Pasquale Villari addressed the Italian parliament, reminding

members that ‘outside our narrow circle there is a numerous class to
which Italy has never given a thought, and which it must finally take
into consideration’. As early as 1843, in On the Civil and Moral
Primacy of the Italians, Vincenzo Gioberti (1801–52) had argued that
Italy existed on two levels: living and active for intellectuals and for
some among the ruling classes, passive and ‘vegetative’ for the
masses. Once unification had been achieved politically, the major
question was, therefore, how to create an active loyalty to the new
state among those who had hitherto been passive.
It was not solely in the new states such as Italy and Germany that
nineteenth-century European post-revolutionary rulers confronted
the problem of transforming people into citizens – as Eugen Weber
has put it, regarding the French case, ‘peasants into Frenchmen’. In
a political democracy amid the constant threat of social revolution
following the Paris Commune of 1871, it was necessary to find new
methods of government and ways of creating loyalty; to invent a
‘civil religion’. The symbol of Marianne in France was a unifying one,
even though it was represented in different ways by radical Jacobins
and moderates, as the monuments studied by Maurice Agulhon in
radical and moderate local councils illustrated. In The Invention of
Tradition, Eric Hobsbawm explained the two different levels – official
and unofficial – involved in the construction of new traditions. The
former is a ‘political’ level – institutional, organized by the state;
while the latter is ‘social’, organized by associations and civil society.
These two levels were evident in the case of the celebrations for
Porta Pia, discussed in Chapter 6. However, historians should be
cautious when using the term ‘invention’ in the case of the Italian
Risorgimento; for example, an anti-clerical tradition was not invented
in 1870 but had existed, albeit repressed, for centuries. Major steps
towards the construction of a civil religion in Europe included the
creation of a secular equivalent to the Church through state
schooling, which promoted Republican values in France or monarchic
values in Germany and Italy; the organization of public ceremonies;
and the erection of public monuments representing both national
and local heroes – for example, the statues of Victor Emmanuel,
Garibaldi and Cavour to be found all over Italy, to which every city
added its own local heroes, such as the statue erected to Manin in
Venice.
The socialist movement, which began to grow towards the end of
the century, was also aware that a nation-building process required
the identification of all social classes, and the working class in
particular, with the new state. With the foundation of an Italian
Socialist Party in 1892, it became evident that socialism also acted
within the boundaries of the nation – as a national section of the
International. The most difficult goal for any political party was
winning over the peasantry, which had only been involved actively in
the Risorgimento on a few occasions. For the most part, the
peasantry had local concerns, and was not yet educated in the cult
of the nation; nevertheless, the new ruling class believed it to be
possible to control the peasants because they were used to obeying
traditional authorities such as the Church and the king. However,
creating loyalty to the House of Savoy was another question: for
centuries, the Savoy dynasty had meant little to those outside
Piedmont, and, moreover, the Church (to which most of the peasant
masses were loyal) opposed the new state. The decision to
enfranchise only 2 per cent of Italians reflected these difficulties.
Having Rome as the new capital served the national myth. At its
foundation as a state, Italy did not try to emulate ancient Rome but,
on the contrary, seemed keen to free itself from that history. All that
remained from the classical age was Rome’s mission to civilize – for
Gioberti, Catholic Rome; for Mazzini, Rome as the centre of the
popular march towards fraternity and progress. The question of the
new Rome was very important to the young nation, as is evident
from the celebrations and buildings of the immediate post-1870
years. One crucial event was the welcoming ceremony for the king
on his arrival in the capital. Until 1870 these ceremonies had been
reserved for Popes, so it became necessary to create a new route
around the city for civil processions, marked with new secular
symbols. The Left deputy Benedetto Cairoli (1825–89) wrote about
the need physically to create a new Rome, the symbol of Italian
unification, alongside ancient Rome and the Rome of the Popes.
Town planning became a vital part of this ambition. Piazza Venezia
was chosen as the site for a huge monument to the unity and liberty
of the nation, the ‘Vittoriano’. Other monumental buildings included
the new Court of Justice, the statue of Garibaldi on the Janiculum
Hill overlooking the city centre, the statue of Cavour and Piazza
Cavour, and (much later, in 1922, when republican ideas were no
longer a threat) the statue of Mazzini on the Aventino, one of the
ancient Roman hills. An ideal route was constructed that was
nourished by a patriotic and national, rather than a religious,
discourse. Alongside the remains of ancient Rome and confronting
the monuments of Papal Rome, a new city therefore began to
emerge as a symbol of a modern civilization and Italian unity. Driven
by that impulse, the polycentric character of the Papal city, which
had lasted for centuries, began to be replaced by monocentric town
planning, in which streets radiated from a new centre at the foot of
the ancient Capitoline Hill, or Campidoglio, in Piazza Venezia.
There, the Vittoriano monument to Victor Emmanuel II was to
represent Italy’s triumphal march into recent history as an ‘opera’, a
complete and dramatic synthesis of all the different events and the
emotional energy of the Risorgimento. The architect Camillo Boito
explained that the monument had to express, ‘like the symphony of
a musical opera’, ‘the principal themes, concentrating the passions,
the concepts, the colours of the wide dramatic picture in a short and
powerful synthesis’; as historian Bruno Tobia has described it, the
monument was a ‘historical synthesis, a philosophy of history,
incarnated in real and symbolic representations’. It had to provide
both a metaphorical representation of the ideological content of the
national revolution and a realistic depiction of the king. The huge
statue of King Victor Emmanuel II is the departure point for a
system of monumental staircases and symbols: at the base of the
statue the fountains represent the Tyrrenic and Adriatic seas, and
the bronze sculpted groups symbolize Thought and Action; below
them are the high reliefs of the triumphal March of Work and Love
for the Patria, which converge on a central representation of Rome.
Above that stands the statue in golden bronze of Victor Emmanuel
on horseback on a pedestal adorned by images of Italian cities. In
the upper storey of the arcade there are statues depicting Italian
regions and, on top of the arcade, to the right and left respectively
sit the two bronze quadrigae symbolizing Unity and Liberty. Along
with monuments of the Risorgimento, another architectural fashion
of the time was the construction of covered galleries. The Victor
Emmanuel gallery in Milan (1863) has a triumphal façade inspired by
both antiquity and the Lombard Renaissance that faces the Duomo
square; in Naples, the Umberto I gallery (1887–90) expressed both
contemporary eclecticism and a return to the Renaissance.
One major event, which mobilized city councils, associations,
citizens and representatives of Italian communities abroad, was the
‘civil pilgrimage’ to Victor Emmanuel’s grave in the Pantheon in 1884
on the 25th anniversary of the Risorgimento with the intention of
expressing national gratitude to the House of Savoy. The choice of
date determined that the Risorgimento had officially begun in 1859,
thereby expunging the humiliating first war of independence, as well
as the democratic revolutions and republics of 1848. Another way of
‘making Italians’ was by heightening awareness of their country’s
natural and artistic beauty. During the previous two centuries, the
European upper classes had travelled to Italy as the principal
destination of the Grand Tour; with this migration, secular travellers
had taken the place of the pre–Renaissance religious pilgrims, and
the newcomers discovered Italy’s classical and humanist culture.
Goethe, who spent two years in Italy from 1786, described in his
Travels in Italy the archaeology and architecture, the natural
landscapes and the urban life of Italy. He was also one of the first to
move as far south as Sicily, provoking a new interest in the Italian
south among European travellers. The Grand Tour tradition was
interrupted by the Napoleonic invasion and by the tortuous events of
the Risorgimento, but after unification the new state decided to
promote an ‘internal’ Grand Tour to enable Italians to discover more
about their own country. In 1863, the leader of the Right Quintino
Sella (1827–84) founded the Italian Alpine Club, reflecting an
increased interest in the Italian mountains, inspired by the idea of
the Alps as a frontier, one from which foreigners had often come and
which now must be defended as a national border: national values
were thus at the heart of the club. Mountains both represented an
arduous challenge in which individuals exercised physical virtue, and
a mental pathway for strengthening attachment to the patria. While
proletarian Italy was forced to emigrate to avoid starvation, the
bourgeoisie responded enthusiastically to the idea of travelling. In
1894, the Italian Cyclist Touring Club added to foreign visitors those
who were born and lived in the peninsula. Members of the Touring
Club were very different from traditional travellers, a distinction
evident even from their dress. In an etiquette manual published at
the beginning of the twentieth century, the writer Matilde Serao
stated that the ‘good bourgeois’ going on holiday had to pack
separate costumes for horse riding, running, playing tennis, playing
polo, hunting, rowing, alpine sports, swimming and fencing. New
rules for leisure time on holiday were strict on dress codes, to the
extent that early century beach life looked like a summer annexe of
the bourgeois salon. To this Italy of full summer dress and parasols
(to avoid tanning, which at the time was considered plebeian), the
Touring Club counterposed physical effort and the more casual
cycling costume. Italians visited one another’s cities: this was an
Italy rooted in its urban culture, which intended to unite the
hundreds of cities and thousands of villages not only through travel
itineraries and new maps, but also with common ideals and feelings
that were to be at the basis of every Italian’s education.
The idea of combining travelling and sport in order to ‘forge
Italians’ gained popularity at the same time as the introduction of
German methods of physical exercise into schools to eradicate
physical defects and combat rickets. A new model of Italian youth is
found in Miss Pedani, the female protagonist of the short novel
Amore e ginnastica (‘Love and gymnastics’) by De Amicis (1892), an
athletic gymnastics teacher whose bookshelves contained atlases,
pamphlets on hygiene, swimming and cycling, and the publications
of the Italian Alpine Club. In response to a neighbour, she replies to
the common view that gymnastics is unimportant:
How can we joke about gymnastics while we have, out of 300,000 conscripts, 80,000
rejects for physical debilitation! Schools are full of pale youngsters, whose chests and
arms are like those of a small child, and out of ten girls of the best society you cannot
find even two without any constitutional defects ... Oh! It is a sad joke.
(De Amicis, 2001, p. 30)
De Amicis and the Touring Club were imagining the same Italy, one
in which Italians from every part of the country became curious
about all its regions, where Italians of different social classes learned
geography, gymnastics and good citizenship together at school. The
most famous of De Amicis’ works was Cuore (Cuore: The Heart of a
Boy), which became, together with Collodi’s Pinocchio, essential
reading for generations of young Italians.
Carlo Collodi (the pseudonym of Carlo Lorenzini, 1826–90) was a
former republican converted to the monarchy, who believed in public
education as a means of overcoming class differences. His work was
intended to reach the masses but also, as Silvio Lanaro has
underlined, to transmit the national message from adults to children.
In Viaggio per l’Italia di Giannettino (‘Giannettino’s journey across
Italy’, 1880), Collodi added new elements in the country’s landscape
to the monuments traditionally listed in atlases of Italy: the factories,
new symbols of the Italian worker, served to bring both moral and
material improvement to the lower classes, and to create a new
industrial and modern architecture. His most famous book, Le
avventure di Pinocchio: Storia di un burattino (The adventures of
Pinocchio), follows the vicissitudes of a puppet in an Italy of
vagrancy and hunger, disreputable inns and policemen. The
educational intent was inserted into a fantasy story in which the
wooden puppet Pinocchio, invented by his master Geppetto,
becomes a youthful adventurer in a life beyond rules. Dangers are
overcome with the help of magical beings such as the fairy with blue
hair, a substitute for the mother Pinocchio could not have; a sense of
guilt always accompanied his adventures, because Pinocchio acted
against Geppetto’s will and the rules of society, in particular those of
its central institution, the school. Collodi’s story imparted to children
the value of hard work, honesty, school attendance and obedience to
parents. When Pinocchio decides to run away from home in order to
avoid going to school, the talking cricket (representing the voice of
his conscience) tells him: ‘Woe to those children who rebel against
their parents, and who run away from their homes. They will never
be happy in this world, and sooner or later they will repent it bitterly.’
Despite these messages, Pinocchio has been interpreted as the anti–
Cuore: it makes no reference to king or nation, and leaves much
space for fantastic adventures.
Cuore by De Amicis is a post–Risorgimento diary of a Piedmontese
child, apparently addressed to children but in fact targeting a
generation of parents that came through the battles of the
Risorgimento. The primary school was seen as the laboratory of the
nation; unification took place in classrooms, as the book illustrates
when a pupil from Calabria arrives at the Piedmontese school, shy
and terrified, and the teacher, holding his hand, tells the class:
You should be pleased. Today a young Italian is entering the school who was born in
Reggio di Calabria, more than five hundred miles from here. Cherish your brother who
has come from so far away. He was born in a glorious land which gave Italy illustrious
men, and which gives her strong workers and brave soldiers, in one of the most
beautiful parts of our country, where there are great forests and great mountains,
inhabited by people of ability and courage .. . Make him see that an Italian boy, no
matter which Italian school he sets foot in, finds brothers there.
(De Amicis, 1986, p. 17)

In the book, respect for the army was another value to be taught at
school: at a military parade, the school director explains to the
children that they must love the soldiers, who were both poor and
signori from all parts of the country dedicated to defending it from
foreign invasions; children were taught to salute the flag, because
‘he who respects the flag when he is small will know how to defend
it when he is grown up’. Children were also taught to love the king
because he unified Italy and liberated it from foreign tyrants, and to
honour Risorgimento heroes. Drawing on Risorgimento ideals, love
for the patria and the family – particularly the mother – were firmly
intertwined, depicted in the book in the teacher’s reading of a text
on Mazzini and his love for his mother, his desperate pain at her
death, and her survival in his memory as a moral guide. The literary
critic, Elio Gioanola, has defined De Amicis as the most extraordinary
tear-jerker that literature had ever known: la mamma and la patria,
this universal mother, became the preferred themes of the creative
pedagogy of the Ligurian writer. Another writer full of Risorgimento
rhetoric was the classicist poet Giosuè Carducci (1835–1907). He
was, like De Amicis, a republican who converted to monarchical,
anti-socialist and anti-clerical ideas, including a hatred of foreign
influences in literature. Carducci had a great impact on the
generation that would later support Italy’s entry to the First World
War.
As well as the army, schools, the Touring Club and literature, a
contribution towards making Italians also came from cookery books:
the conditions of extreme poverty in most of Italy did not prevent
the continuation of Italian cuisine in the nineteenth century, and in
1891, Pellegrino Artusi from Romagna published a book that became
a bible in Italian family homes, La scienza in cucina e l’arte di
mangiar bene (‘Science in the kitchen and the art of eating well’). As
Carol Helstolsky has noticed, its impact in providing Italians with a
common language regarding the preparation of food and attitudes
towards eating was still evident years later, but at the time it was
written ‘his formula of middle-class sobriety, simplicity of
presentation, and attention to regional difference proved to be the
right formula for a national cuisine’. One of the elements that unified
Italy was indeed diet – mainly bread. The variety, between classes
and regions, came principally from the type of flour, which was the
common ingredient involved in producing different types of bread,
polenta or pasta. The poverty of the Italian diet was emphasized by
social scientists and reformers, as in earlier centuries. They explored
the living standards of the rural population to argue that poor
nutrition brought with it other problems such as illness, short stature
and intellectual inferiority. Observers of the southern question
affirmed that southerners ate fewer proteins than northerners and
were therefore less productive. The real difference, however, was
not geographical but social: class disparity was emphasized by the
difference in food consumption. Maize spread to dominate the
agrarian landscape of the northern regions; eating only maize-based
polenta (which lacked vitamins) caused pellagra, an illness that had
social, as well as physical consequences. The disease progressed
through three phases (the three Ds): dermatitis, diarrhoea and
dementia – the origin of expressions like ‘to be mad with hunger’ or
‘the madness of monophagy’. Italian psychiatrists at the time did not
know how to cure what they believed to be a mental disease for
which there seemed to be no obvious cause.
In the nineteenth century, flour was the basis of another dish
invented in Naples that would become as important as pasta in the
identity of Italians: pizza. An oven for pizzas already existed in the
district of Capodimonte at the time of the Bourbon King Ferdinand
II. Under the new state, a pizza that became very popular was made
with tomatoes (red), mozzarella (white) and basil (green) to
represent the colours of the Italian flag. As Franco La Cecla has
explained, there are two different stories about this pizza – it could
have been made for the occasion of the visit of Queen Margherita of
Savoy (1851–1926, married to Umberto I), and therefore named in
her honour, or the pizza already existed and, in honour of the
queen’s visit, it ‘suddenly found a name, a sense, and a historical
function’. Italian national identity crystallized around national food –
pasta and pizza – which became the gastronomic symbols in which
regional differences were dissolved. Italian emigration, together with
the dissemination of Artusi’s book, extended the same process
around the world, as the millions of Italians who crossed the Alps
and the Atlantic reproduced the dishes they were familiar with in
Italy, which in turn stimulated exports from Italian food companies
trading in pasta, tinned tomatoes and olive oil. Even emigrants who
had the opportunity to try new types of food continued to eat as
they had done in Italy.

CONTESTING THE NATION: THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

In the centre of the Campo de’ Fiori in Rome, among the market
stalls and wandering Romans and tourists, stands a monument to
Giordano Bruno. The philosopher is wrapped in a Dominican habit,
carries an open book in his hands; his face, with his head covered by
a hood, appears thoughtful, severe and absorbed. The inscription
simply says: ‘For Bruno, from the century by him foreseen, here
where the stake burned’. The statue was unveiled in June 1889 on
Pentecost Sunday. It was a spectacular ceremony attended by
thousands of people. The square was crowded with stalls and
banners carrying quotations from Bruno, like the one he addressed
to the judges who condemned him: ‘You shake more by pronouncing
this condemnation than I do by hearing it.’ The procession, starting
from Piazza Esedra consisted of former garibaldini, rectors and
professors of Rome University, representatives of city councils and
associations from Nola (the town where Bruno was born),
representatives of foreign universities and Italian regions,
freemasons, representatives of mutual aid societies, and members of
parliament. People gathered at windows and on balconies along the
route. The erection of a monument to Bruno in the square (very
close to the Vatican) where he had been burned at the stake three
centuries before, had an unequivocal political meaning. The Pope,
who had threatened to leave Rome if the monument was unveiled,
spent the day abstaining from food, prostrate at the feet of St
Peter’s statue while, as the newspaper Civiltà Cattolica put it, ‘the
revolutionary Hydra occupied the streets of his Rome’. From the
1880s onwards, a thick network of cultural associations named
‘Giordano Bruno’ spread all over Italy.
Relations between Church and state had been deteriorating since
the 1850s, when the Piedmontese parliament approved laws to limit
Catholic influence, causing the Church to adopt a yet more
intransigent approach to political change in Italy. Fissures continued
to exist within the Church. For example, some of Garibaldi’s
supporters in Sicily were local priests, and in the north many priests
who had taken part in the 1848 revolutions wanted an end to Papal
temporal power. The divergence between the Church and the elites
constituted major changes in a society in which, until the eighteenth
century, there was virtual symbiosis between the dominant classes
and the Catholic hierarchy, with ecclesiastical control over charities
and education, and Church ownership of a large proportion of the
land. Civil registries that certified baptisms, marriages and funerals
were kept in Church archives, exemplifying very well the condition of
a society in which there was no distinction between citizen and
Christian. During the Enlightenment, when Clement XIV (Pope
between 1769 and 1774) suppressed the Jesuits, a movement of
Catholics emerged who were open to reform and to dialogue with
Enlightenment thinkers. However, the subsequent Pope, Pius VI
(1775–99) condemned the Enlightenment, describing it in
apocalyptic tones as the work of the Devil, against which the legacy
of the Counter–Reformation had to be regrouped for a deadly
confrontation between Christianity and the forces of the modern
world. The Papacy calculated that eventually political power would
side with the Church to defend the existing order. For the Papacy,
the French Revolution and the arrival of the French army in Italy
were the final consequences of the dissolution of authority initiated
by Martin Luther (and instigated by Satan). The Church’s totally
negative judgement on the modern age emerged, which implied the
necessity of a return to medieval Christianity and, indeed, during the
Restoration, with the exception of a few Catholic liberals (such as
Manzoni, Gioberti, Rosmini and Tommaseo), the medieval model
became the ideal alternative to the modern world.
With the first unification of 1861, the Papal States were restricted
to the region surrounding Rome. In 1864, the Pope promulgated one
of the most famous encyclicals against modernity: Quanta cura,
which included a ‘Syllabus of Errors’, a list condemning uncongenial
propositions from earlier centuries, which served as an instrument to
attack anti-clericalism and liberalism. The Syllabus was divided into
ten sections, which condemned as false various statements
concerning, for example, pantheism, naturalism and absolute
rationalism; moderate rationalism; socialism, communism, secret
societies and liberal clerical societies; and modern liberalism. Some
of the condemned ideas (followed by a declaration that the opposite
was true) were the following: ‘philosophy is to be treated without
taking any account of supernatural revelation’; ‘human reason ... is
the sole arbiter of truth and falsehood, and of good and evil’;
‘Protestantism is nothing more than another form of the same true
Christian religion, in which form it is given to please God as equally
as in the Catholic Church’; ‘the Church ought to be separated from
the state, and the state from the Church’; ‘the Roman Pontiff can,
and ought to, reconcile himself to, and come to terms with,
progress, liberalism and modern civilization’. The Syllabus provoked
negative reaction from the Protestant world and, more surprisingly,
met with similar response among Catholics, apart from
conservatives. Among the Church’s enemies, the Syllabus increased
anti-clerical activity, having made it clear that the Church and
modernity were incompatible.
In 1870, before the events at Porta Pia, a Vatican council was held
in Rome with the object of restoring Papal authority; 774 bishops
from around the world, along with deposed secular rulers (for
example, the Tuscan grand-duke and the former King of Naples,
Francis II) voted in favour of papal infallibility – the dogma stating
that the Pope spoke from divine revelation on doctrinal matters and
therefore could never be wrong when speaking ex cathedra on faith
and morals. Unfortunately for the council, two months later, Italian
troops entered Rome, putting an end to what remained of the
Papacy’s temporal power. After Porta Pia, the new state’s rulers and
the king found themselves in a difficult position; the defeat of the
Church had been necessary for the establishment of the new state,
but continual confrontation could jeopardize their consolidation of
power. Most of the population was illiterate and rural, and connected
with the Church through parish networks that had been reinforced
from the time of the Counter–Reformation onwards. Moreover, most
of these rulers were not radical anti-clericals, but conservatives from
privileged backgrounds who were accustomed to having connections
with the Church. Opposition to the government was not good for the
Church either, as its hierarchy had flourished for centuries thanks to
its links with the civil authorities.
The Pope’s behaviour was not unjustified at the time, since it was
not yet clear that he had lost power permanently; Popes had gone
into exile or faced serious crisis in the past, and survived, so it
seemed natural that he would seek to return to power by refusing to
grant legitimacy to the new state, by instructing Catholics not to
vote, and by appealing to Catholic states in Europe to assist the
Church – through military means if necessary – to help restore its
temporal power. While government policy followed Cavour’s ideal of
a free Church in a free state, the Pope’s Non Expedit of 1868
proclaimed the policy of ‘neither elected nor electors’. The new
state’s ambiguous position was also evident in the constitution,
especially in Article 1 of the Statuto, which established Catholicism
as the religion of state. Schooling was another contested issue: De
Amicis’ school, the ‘gym’ for the education of Italians, made no
reference to religion. The Vatican risked losing the clerical monopoly
over the education of the young because of national schools: under
the Casati law (named after the minister of education, Gabrio Casati)
enacted in Piedmont and Lombardy in 1859 and the rest of Italy in
1861, every community had to have a public primary school with
teachers hired by the civil authorities, although religious education
was included in the curriculum. The Coppino law of 1877, named
after minister Michele Coppino, listed all material to be taught in
school without mentioning religion, though it did include the secular
liberal ‘duties of man and citizen’. While religion continued to be
taught, this law caused further controversy.
Following Porta Pia, the government, needing to address
international concern, declared the Law of Guarantees, which
recognized the Pope’s status as an independent sovereign,
established his freedom to communicate with Catholics
internationally and to conduct diplomatic relations with other
countries, and assigned the Vatican a large annual income. While the
Pope’s attitude did not change for some time, this law did eventually
help to smooth the relationship between Papacy and state.
Moreover, towards the end of the century, the rise of a social
Catholic movement brought signs of change. In the 1870s, local
Catholic associations emerged, particularly in the north. A national
conference of these groups, the Opera dei Congressi, founded in
1874, organized further conferences and pilgrimages, sent petitions
to parliament calling for the protection of the Church’s interests and
called public meetings in protest at the government’s anti–Catholic
policies. Pius IX died in 1878 and was replaced by Leo XIII, who was
Pope until 1903. Leo was as intransigent as Pius, but understood the
importance of adapting Church policies to modern times; the
encyclical Rerum Novarum in 1891 outlined the position of the
Church on social policy for the first time, rejecting socialism but
maintaining that it was their Catholic duty to engage in public works
to ameliorate modern social ills. At a local level this led to the
formation of youth groups and credit organizations for peasants and
workers. Catholic peasant and worker associations appeared during
the last twenty years of the century as a response to the socialist
threat.

CONTESTING THE NATION: SOCIALIST ITALY

Cavour’s financial policies generated a deficit that deepened each

year as a result of preparations for war with Austria. Showing little
gratitude for Piedmont’s sacrifices for the nation, Italians from other
regions complained that, after 1861, all Italy had to pay Piedmont’s
debts. Loans for Piedmont’s debts were taken out repeatedly on the
international capital market, on disadvantageous terms. In 1865,
Quintino Sella was the first finance minister to explain the reality of
the situation; his solution – effective but unpopular – was to increase
taxation, especially on flour, the tax most hated by the poor.
In March 1876, the ‘historical left’ replaced the ‘historical right’ in
government. The term ‘left’ is misleading, as it was a current within
the liberal, monarchic system. The new prime minister, Agostino
Depretis (1813–87), was a former Mazzinian now loyal to the
monarchy. He was one of the ‘new’ men in the Italian state: neither
from Piedmont nor a noble and, like the other Lombard Benedetto
Cairoli and the Sicilian Francesco Crispi, had played an active part in
the Risorgimento. The five Cairoli brothers from Pavia all fought as
volunteers and two of them were killed, becoming by their sacrifice
an example for the ‘religion of the patria’ along with their mother
(one of the maternal ‘symbols’ of the Risorgimento discussed in
Chapter 6). These new men all came from the middle classes and
from the left, but had all converted to the monarchy during the
unification process. While there was no great difference between the
right and the left, the latter was nominally committed to greater
democracy and a wider franchise, and tended to support progressive
taxation and secular education. There was, however, agreement on
both sides that Italians must become politically educated in loyalty to
the state first – they were not yet ready for liberty and democracy.
This belief was reflected in the suffrage, which remained very
limited: in 1881, a new electoral law extended voting rights (to 6.9
per cent of the population) according to taxation, so that a greater
proportion of the middle classes qualified to vote, but the franchise
was still linked to education and literacy and therefore continued to
exclude the peasant masses, and particularly southerners. The new
leaders of the state feared that reactionary landowners and priests
would manipulate these unenfranchised masses. At the same time,
the left sought to educate: the Coppino law made primary education
free, compulsory and secular up to the age of nine. Another law
abolished the tax on flour.
In the 1882 elections, the far left, known as the Estrema (radicals,
republicans and later also socialists) doubled their number of seats.
Economic crisis and anarchist attempts to assassinate political
leaders throughout Europe added to the concerns of the ruling class
in Italy; hoping to prevent a radicalization of politics, Depretis began
an alliance between the left and the right, called trasformismo.
Differences between the two sides faded further, because, with
trasformismo, politics were no longer governed by principles, but by
expediency. Ministers began to appear in corruption cases, as they
could be ‘bought’ by either side whenever policies were debated.
A radical move towards more authoritarian government came with
the arrival of Francesco Crispi as prime minister in 1887. The Sicilian,
and former garibaldino, held a patriotic view of the soldier as the
good citizen, and linked the concept of war with that of nationhood;
these ideas were revolutionary during the battles of the
Risorgimento, but became reactionary in the new context. Crispi
reinforced the monarchy’s role as a national symbol (‘the monarchy
unites us, the republic would divide us’), and was prime minister at
the time of the pilgrimage to the Pantheon and one of the creators
of the ‘religion of the patria’. Consistent with his (previously
Mazzinian) view of Italy’s world mission, he became an advocate of a
strong foreign policy, signing the Triple Alliance with Austria and
Germany in 1882 and provoking Italy’s first foray into colonial
imperialism with an invasion of Ethiopia. The massacre of Italian
soldiers at Massawa in 1885 and their defeat in 1896 at Adowa
confirmed the poor reputation of the Italian army and undermined
confidence in the new state. Crispi’s domestic policies, notably the
ferocious repression directed at the socialist movement, were as
disastrous as his foreign policy, and created another enemy for the
new state in socialism.
Socialism, first organized by ex-garibaldian and ex-republican
elements, emerged in the countryside of the Po Valley, in Sicily, and
in the early factories in the north. A new and growing class of
factory workers toiled for long hours in unhealthy conditions; wages
for women and children were respectively 27 per cent and 17 per
cent of those for the male work force; and there was no system of
social security, so periods of illness and unemployment took families
close to starvation. The first associations for the defence of workers
were republican (motivated by a Jacobin and carbonara legacy) and
anticipated socialist associations, particularly in the Romagna, taking
inspiration from Mazzini’s opposition to the new state. Mazzini,
disappointed with the outcome of unification, had remained in exile.
He was distressed by the fact that the idea of the nation did not
overcome social conflict, and that nationality was instead an illiberal
force that had failed to emancipate the people. Anti-clericalism also
became a major element of the new workers’ associations –
Republican associations created mutual aid societies that competed
with the traditional bourgeois philanthropy, which in rural areas were
influenced by Catholicism. Even under Depretis, the constitutional
freedom of association was accepted only formally, as the Italian
government was constantly anxious about the possible existence of
a ‘state within the state’.
 Mutual organizations and co-operatives were established to help
workers, often receiving money from employers, who hoped by
these means to contain conflict. However, the severe economic crisis
during the last two decades of the nineteenth century turned the
associations into militant leagues that declared war on employers
and demanded better pay and working conditions. Socialist leagues
quickly came into conflict with Catholic leagues in rural areas. The
major difference between them was that Catholic culture promoted
class collaboration and mediated between peasants and landowners,
while socialist struggles tended to be highly confrontational. Protests
became more effective with the foundation of the Chambers of
Labour in 1890, the socialist representatives of which began to take
part in local politics. Socialist and Catholic leagues developed
divergent local political cultures by providing recreational activities,
meeting places and even separate marriage and funeral services. A
strong Christian culture was common to both: socialists, despite their
anti-clericalism, propagated the idea of Jesus as the ‘first socialist’,
and developed a Christian message (a kind of ‘evangelical socialism’)
that was compatible with the class and egalitarian ideology of
Marxism. The first socialist leaders, such as Camillo Prampolini
(1859–1930) and Leonida Bissolati (1857–1920) would appear
outside village churches, describing socialism to the peasants as a
promised land, a ‘world upside-down’, where the teaching of the
Gospels could be put into practice not by obeying the Church
authorities but, on the contrary, by fighting against the privileges the
Church had shared with the landowners since time immemorial.
The extent of state repression was a consequence of the liberal
ruling class’s sense of vulnerability. Emergency regulations enshrined
in the 1865 Public Security Law were applied on a regular basis. The
police had wide-ranging powers to restrict individual freedom. In the
1890s in particular, a state of military rule was frequently declared to
deal with mass anti-government protests. Towards the end of the
century, the two most important moments of unrest were the Sicilian
fasci risings and the bread riots in Milan, both bloodily repressed.
 A socialist movement developed in Sicily around the shipyards and
in the cities of the east coast, from Messina to Catania and Syracuse.
The groups that emerged, called fasci, were the first in southern
Italy to exercise the rights permitted in the Statuto, particularly the
rights of association and to hold meetings in private and public
places; the fasci organized huge popular demonstrations for better
working conditions and higher salaries, and they held meetings in
theatres, squares, cities and villages, selecting significant sites of
collective memory and identification. Their most momentous
achievement was winning the right to strike, which was confirmed in
1890 in the penal code written by Giuseppe Zanardelli (1826–1903,
jurist and prime minister between 1901 and 1903). In 1893, protests
spread throughout the countryside, where 300,000 peasants
occupied huge landed estates that, despite the number of landless
peasants, were left abandoned by absentee owners. New secular
ceremonies, full of ‘civil’ rhetoric, replaced or coexisted alongside
traditional local religious rituals such as processions and feasts for
patron saints. As in the Po Valley, religion and socialism were tightly
intertwined, indicated by the presence of crosses, Madonnas and
patron saints at the fasci’s demonstrations. The liberal elite, which by
this point controlled municipal power and public employment, stood
alongside the conservative landowners in demanding that the
government repress the fasci. The intervention of troops in the
repression of the movement unleashed a violent backlash in many
villages – arson, assassination, and the invasion and sacking of town
council buildings – a violence made considerably worse by further
state reaction, which restored social peace in Sicily by killing,
arresting and outlawing the fasci. Crispi was a former garibaldino,
yet he also held a sacralized idea of the authority of the state,
property and public order, which he was ready to defend by any
means.
In May 1898 (fifty years after the ‘five days’ of 1848), widespread
social unrest in Milan again culminated in military repression, in
which over 100 protesters were killed. State violence was followed
by the suppression of newspapers, the closure of socialist and
Catholic organizations, and the arrest of opposition party leaders.
While socialists and anarchists had taken part in the organization of
the riots, the actions were fundamentally the expression of intense
economic hardship caused by taxation on flour and a corresponding
rise in the price of bread. King Umberto I, the son of Victor
Emmanuel and King of Italy from 1878, praised the general
responsible for the massacre, Bava Beccaris, and awarded him a
medal. This was a dramatic end to the nineteenth century, which
clearly demonstrated the repressive and undemocratic nature of the
new liberal state. ‘Proletarian revenge’ opened the new century in an
equally dramatic fashion: Gaetano Bresci, an anarchist manual
worker from Prato in Tuscany, who had emigrated to America,
returned to Italy to avenge the Milanese protesters massacred by
Bava Beccaris, and shot the king dead in Monza. After the
assassination, it became clear that repression alone would not
prevent social revolution, particularly since the grievances of the
masses were widely recognized as legitimate. A new, more
democratic, phase began under a post–Risorgimento liberal,
Giovanni Giolitti (1842–1928).

Box 7.1 Social protest and music in liberal Italy

Music continued to be an important cultural expression of
political conflict. Proletarian protest after Italian unification
expressed itself in the composition of republican, socialist and
anarchist songs. Many of these referred to the examples of the
French Revolution and the Risorgimento, so that new hymns
used the music of the Marseillaise, the Hymn to Garibaldi, or
Verdi’s operas. Pietro Gori, the most prolific of anarchist
songwriters, invented the hymn of the First of May (international
workers’ day, a date that originated with the hanging of four
innocent anarchists in Chicago in 1886) to the tune of Nabucco:

Go, May, the peoples are waiting for you/the free hearts
salute you/sweet Easter of the workers/go and shine at the
glory of the sun!
 While Verdi’s arias had inspired the ideal of freedom from foreign
oppression during the Risorgimento, they now expressed, with
the new words of the workers’ hymns, hopes for a new freedom
from political and social oppression. Songs of the workers’
movement had common themes – fields, factories, barricades,
the memory of the ‘martyrs’, social revolution, human progress,
the struggle against tyranny and oppression. The Ferocious
Monarchist Bava, written immediately after the slaughter in Milan
in 1898, follows the effects of that repression in a semi-didactic
style (along the classic model of Italian songs by cantastorie):

At the agonizing and painful screams/of a crowd asking for

bread/the ferocious monarchist Bava/fed the hungry with
lead.//One hundred were the innocent dead/under the fire
of the armed Cains/and at the fury of the assassin
soldiers/‘death to the cowards’! shouted the plebs.//Alas, do
not laugh, Savoy thug/if the gun has tamed the rebels/if
the brothers have killed the brothers/on your head that
blood will fall.//... Come on, do cry sorrowful mothers/when
the dark evening descends/for the sons thrown in prison/for
those killed by fatal lead.
Political songs of the twentieth century continued along the lines
of their nineteenth-century origins. As Stefano Pivato has
observed, another aspect of continuity was the religious
character at the root of the workers’ movement ideals, as
demonstrated by hymns such as the Italian version of The
International (‘a faith was born in our hearts’), the Hymn to the
First of May (‘sweet Easter of the workers’), or the Song of the
Young Italian Socialists (‘we swear to die/rather than to betray
our faith’). Politics were a new ‘religion’; protest songs were
‘prayers’.

CONTESTING THE NATION: BANDITRY AND THE ‘SOUTHERN

QUESTION’
The ministers of the new state were mainly northerners, and those
who did come from the south had spent years in exile and had
distanced themselves from the problems of their provinces. Sicily
had twice initiated a national revolution (in 1848 and 1860), but it
was much less nationally conscious than either Lombardy or
Piedmont. In Sicily, landowners who had opposed the revolution at
first turned patriot when Cavour’s soldiers provided a chance to put
down social disorder. Even the garibaldini made it clear in 1860 that
national unification took precedence over social issues.

Box 7.2 The Bronte episode

The Sicilian writer Giovanni Verga published in 1883 a short story
based on an actual incident in the revolution of 1860. In the
town of Bronte, west of Mount Etna in the province of Catania,
the peasants attacked the town hall and aristocrats’ homes,
killing members of the local gentry. The revolt was violently
suppressed by the garibaldino general, Nino Bixio:

They unfurled a red-white-and-green handkerchief from the

church-tower, they rang the bells in a frenzy, and they
began to shout in the village square, ‘Hurray for liberty!’
Like the sea in storm, the crowd foamed and swayed in
front of the club of the gentry, and outside the Town Hall,
and on the steps of the church – a sea of white stocking-
caps, axes and sickles glittering. Then they burst into the
little street. ‘Your turn first, baron! You who have had folks
cudgelled by your estate-keepers!’ .. . Sickles, hands, rags,
stones, everything red with blood! The gentry! The hat-
folks! Kill them all! Kill them all! Down with the hat-folks! ..
. Liberty meant that everybody should have his share . . .
The next day they heard that the General was coming to
deal out justice; which news made folks tremble . . . From
afar off, in the remotest alleys of the village as you sat
behind your closed door, you could hear those gun-shots
 firing one after the other, like cannon-crackers at holiday
time.
(Verga, 1984)

Northern rulers were ignorant about southern Italy, and many of

them simply believed it to be a potentially rich area that could
become prosperous with good administration; they neglected such
realities as 90 per cent illiteracy, the persistence of feudalism in the
countryside, or the different forms of criminality that were evolving
out of traditions of banditry – like the Neapolitan camorra and the
Sicilian Mafia. Prefects and police inspectors who were sent to
administer Sicily after 1860 believed they were confronting a sort of
‘primitive Africa’, inclined to violence and far removed from the
concept of legal equality. Its peasants seemed ignorant and
barbarous, ferocious in rebellion, religious, anti-modern, and
therefore unpatriotic. What made the southern situation distinct was
the persistence of banditry, which had weakened in most of the rest
of the country by the time of Italian unification. In most of the
south, banditry, organized by the Bourbons, seemed capable of
threatening the very existence of the new state in the two years
after 1861: many cities and villages in the mainland south were
occupied by armed bandits, and subjected to bloody repression and
civil war. Some 90,000 Italian troops were employed to fight
banditry, a higher number of soldiers than had been employed
during the anti–Austrian war of 1859; and civil war in the south
caused more casualties than the wars for independence. Much of the
brutality was a result of the reaction of desperate soldiers trying to
survive in a hostile country against a fierce enemy.
The situation was different in Sicily, where the Bourbons had
never been loved, and the memories of Risorgimento battles were
too fresh to permit a reaction favourable to the older dynasties. Part
of Sicilian banditry’s success was its rejection of conscription; many
peasants left their villages and went into hiding, rather than serve in
the army. In addition, banditry was linked with the idea of the faida
– the use of vendetta to redress a wrong (generally murder)
between families, a symbol of a society that did not recognize the
rule of state law. While banditry was defeated by the state in the
southern mainland by 1865, in Sicily it remained endemic, supported
by the landowners, who accused the civil authorities of being unable
to control the criminals and who therefore ‘had to’ deal with them in
order to avoid trouble. In fact, the landowners did not employ
bandits simply to defend themselves, but also to give weight to their
own personal vendettas, to damage economic rivals and to control
the peasantry.
In his Enquiry on Sicily of 1876, Leopoldo Franchetti (1847–1917)
explained that ‘mafioso’ behaviour represented a distinctive
characteristic of Sicilian society at all levels. The first serious scholars
of the southern question were Franchetti, Pasquale Villari (1826–
1917) and Sidney Sonnino (1847–1922), who studied the condition
of the peasantry in areas where city dwellers had never penetrated.
These scholars inaugurated a tradition of inquiry later named
meridionalismo (‘southern-ism’). They believed that peasants were
the real Italians, since the peasantry made up over half of the
national population, even though almost all were illiterate. Villari, a
Neapolitan liberal exiled by the Bourbons in the 1850s, who lived in
Florence, wrote a pamphlet in 1866 entitled: ‘Who is to blame?’
which, at the time of the third war for independence, suggested that
the real enemy of the new state was not Austria, but was instead (as
cited in Nelson Moe) ‘our colossal ignorance’, ‘the illiterate
multitudes, the unthinking bureaucrats, the ignorant teachers, the
childish politicians, the impossible diplomats, the incompetent
generals, the unskilled worker, the patriarchal farmer, and the
rhetoric that eats away at our souls’. The ‘quadrilateral’ to be fought
was not on the battlefield between the fortresses at Mantua, Verona,
Peschiera and Legnago, but was the ‘quadrilateral of seventeen
million illiterates and five million rhetoricians’.
The new state exported the Piedmontese education system to the
south, but could not suddenly provide teachers and buildings, and
the dissolution of monasteries caused a crisis in the charity system
that led to even greater levels of poverty. Banditry contained an
element of Catholic reaction against the government’s treatment of
the clergy. Some bandits were just peasants protesting against high
prices, and they were easily manipulated by the Church and the
landowners, who had increased their power with unification as
electors who controlled local government and local employment, and
had acquired both ecclesiastic and communal possessions.
Garibaldi’s army had been disbanded in 1861 and prisoners were
widely released in the 1860s, liberating a mass of the displaced poor
and escaped convicts, all of whom were difficult for the new
administration to control. Initially, the garibaldini were considered a
greater threat than the pro–Bourbons. The new state therefore
purged more garibaldini than Bourbons from the administration, the
military and the judiciary, leaving in place those who were in reality
the most corrupt and the most hostile to the existing state.
In 1863, the Pica Laws (called after the right-wing deputy,
Giuseppe Pica) gave extensive military powers to the civilian
authorities, who could use arrest, detention and summary executions
in the provinces affected by banditry, and these powers were used
widely. The war against banditry was not only hugely expensive (in
terms of both money and men), but it also created public disillusion
with the new Italy, and a distorted view of the south as a backward
and crime-ridden area, impervious to change, and a source of
political subversion: the war contributed to the construction of a
‘southern question’ and a sense of southern ‘difference’, which was
to dominate the understanding of the south. The main reason why a
more serious political crisis did not occur was the weakness of the
various opponents; despite disrupting and undermining government
authority, Bourbon reaction never justified the alarm it caused, and
the Church had effectively withdrawn from politics. Republicans and
revolutionaries did not constitute a real threat, and the
parliamentary left was ineffective in the 1860s.
Apart from a few serious scholars, the southern question was in
the main analysed by writers, particularly within the current of
verismo, a current influenced by Zola’s and Flaubert’s naturalism in
France. Verismo was contemporary to the emergence of positivist
culture, which arrived in Italy largely thanks to Villari – who applied
experimental scientific methods to history and literature in his
research on banditry; to the philosopher Roberto Ardigò (1828–
1920); and to the anthropologist Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909).
The major representatives of Italian realism were three Sicilian
writers: De Roberto (author of The Viceroys, a masterpiece on the
Sicilian aristocracy at the time of unification), Giovanni Verga (1840–
1922) and Luigi Capuana (1839–1915). Verga, born in Catania to a
family of landowners and brought up in an atmosphere of liberalism
and patriotism, retains a place in Italian literature as the guide to the
world of humble people. His short stories and novels showed a
historical piety, which was not sentimental and did not imply
identification, but simply expressed the commitment of a writer who
recognized the moral validity of the Sicilian lower classes. In this lay
the main difference between his masterpiece, I Malavoglia, and
Manzoni’s: while Manzoni had also described historical reality, he was
a romantic idealist who believed that events were ultimately
governed by Providence, while Verga’s realism examined social
reality in its material and casual simplicity (one just needs to think
about the ironic name ‘Providence’ given, in Verga’s novel, to a boat
that sinks and causes ruin to the Malavoglia family). In his use of
language, he sought to adhere fully to the way his characters spoke
(though dialect was present in the syntax rather than the
vocabulary); he collected proverbs and sayings in the villages.
Capuana did the same, though he was more important as a theorist
of verismo and as a literary critic than as a writer. In I Malavoglia,
Verga used proverbs as symbols of an ideological fixity that gave an
aura of sacred authority to decisions apparently taken for practical
and immediate needs, but nevertheless consistent with a
metaphysical wisdom. To both Verga and Capuana, proverbs were
also the expression of a traditional way of life, closer to nature, in
contrast with the turbulent passions of the big city, a contrast they
experienced as they both moved to Milan (a characteristic of Italy’s
best realists was that they were Sicilians who wrote about their
region from Milan, as detachment was fundamental in their
understanding of the island). But they also represented a society
that was bound to disappear, as shown by I Malavoglia, where
proverbs were associated with the generation of the grandfather,
Padron ’Ntoni, and not with that of his grandson ’Ntoni, who rejected
them. Verga’s realism was evident in his desire to avoid depicting
Sicilian villages as picturesque and idyllic, and the novel eventually
demonstrated how the law of economic self-interest prevailed over
the traditional family values of the Malavoglia clan.
Another great writer of the end of the century was Italo Svevo
(pseudonym of Ettore Schmitz), born in Trieste (still under the
Habsburgs) in 1861; like Verga, he rejected the Risorgimento
rhetoric, but, influenced by the arrival of psychoanalysis in Italy,
turned his attention to the self, producing beautiful novels such as
Confessions of Zeno, A Life and As a Man Grows Older, which were
both anti-romantic (describing inept and defeated ordinary people in
ordinary life) and anti-naturalistic (focusing on autobiographical
subjects).

ITALIANS ABROAD

Prior to unification, the mass migration of poor workers and

peasants occurred alongside the process of Risorgimento. In some of
their aspects, the Risorgimento and emigration were rebellions
against poverty in the countryside, clerical and aristocratic privilege
in the cities, and foreign interference and occupation. This raised the
question of whether nationalists could succeed in turning the
peasantry into Italians abroad more easily than at home. Could it be
easier to make Italians once they had left Italy? One problem with
such a project was that political and economic emigration did not
always follow the same routes: urban nationalists and exiles chose
mainly European destinations, while most of the poor and rural
migrants moved to north and south America and Australia.
A wave of emigration followed the unification of Italy, mainly from
Sicily, Venetia, Tuscany and Calabria; emigrants saw themselves as
workers of the world rather than supporters of their own new state,
something that held true for southerners in particular, who felt
despised by their own rulers, who treated them as racially inferior
and rebellious criminals. In fifty years, 16.6 million Italians left the
country – although many later returned. The principal reasons for
the mass exodus were deep seated agricultural crisis: the fall in the
price of wheat, the erosion of customary and paternalist bonds of
rural society caused by industrialization (which created precarious
new conditions of life for the peasantry), the conditions of poverty
because of the lack of adequate land reform, and, in some cases,
the awareness of the peasants’ miserable conditions resulting from
socialist proselytizing in the countryside. The large demand for
labour in the plantations, mines and factories of northern Europe
and America presented a solution. Most emigrants from southern
Italy moved to north America, leaving from the port of Naples, and
most of those from northern Italy moved to south America, leaving
from the port of Genoa. Two-thirds of emigrants were men, half of
them peasants; 90 per cent were manual labourers. Initially, it was
mainly men who left, a development that was made possible by the
women who remained on the land taking on all the productive and
family work.
How did emigrants know where to go? Usually, they already had
contact with experienced emigrants through family, friends or
neighbours; within a network of men sharing the same trade, some
became labour recruiters for employers abroad; such recruiters were
active in an entirely male world of cafés, osterie (pubs), trade fairs
and markets. Most of the temporary or seasonal emigration was
between Italy and northern Europe, while emigration to America
tended to be more definitive. An impressive number of emigrants
returned to Italy as soon as they had accumulated enough money:
between 1905 and 1920, 80 to 90 per cent of emigrants from
Venetia and Friuli returned from across the Alps, while 40 per cent
returned from the Americas. No other country’s emigration has
comparable figures. The creation of ‘Italian villages’ abroad and the
high numbers of those who returned to Italy provide good counter-
arguments to the notion of an absence of national identity after
unification that is often repeated in textbooks. In addition, the
emigrants’ perception of the wider world remained confused, so that
it was difficult to substitute loyalty to the new host country for
loyalty to an Italian identity; for example, any non–European country
was indistinctly defined as ‘la Merica’. The result of emigration was
the emergence of another Italy replicated around the world with a
huge variety of official and non-official associations, cultures of origin
that persisted but were at the same time modified by their new
environments; mass emigration too created ‘a history of Italy’. The
Italian press in foreign countries is an example of how many
histories of Italy existed, and of how varied the concept of
Italianness could be; Italy was perceived in different ways by
Risorgimento exiles, liberal patriotic societies, and Catholic, and later
Fascist and anti–Fascist, newspapers. As research by Emilio Franzina
has shown, the experience of emigration expressed itself largely
through music, as emigrants carried mandolins and other
instruments in their baggage and wrote songs about their
experience. One of the most famous songs, Mamma mia dammi
cento lire (‘Mother, give me 100 lire’), was adapted from a well-
known ballad, La maledizione della madre (‘The mother’s curse’), in
which a daughter wanted to marry the king of France and disobeyed
her mother, who was against the marriage; running away from her
mother, the girl drowned in a river. In the new version, the daughter
asks her mother for 100 lire to emigrate to America, rebels against
her mother’s objection though she is supported by her brothers, and
dies in the middle of the ocean when the ship is wrecked. The song
was just one of many on the theme of tragedies at sea, which were
all too common, and a constant fear for emigrants.
The state promulgated the first emigration law in 1888, which
dealt with the organization of sea transportation for emigrants, with
the stipulation of contracts with shipping companies and regulation
of conditions during the journeys. The latter were shameful by any
standard – there was a minimum requirement of only one square
metre per person on the boats – and there was no interest in
emigrants once they arrived at their destination. One rule decreed
that married women could not emigrate without their husbands’
consent, while men’s choices were restricted by conscription as they
could be called up for service even while abroad, while their sons
could also be conscripted if they kept their Italian nationality.

TOWARDS INDUSTRIALIZATION: WOMEN’S WORK BETWEEN

FIELDS AND FACTORIES

Between 1880 and 1910, Italy experienced a huge increase in the

urban population, particularly in the north, where industries (mainly
textiles) began to appear. In Milan, which during that period began
its transformation into the economic capital of Italy, the population
almost doubled, from 322,000 to 579,000. The diffusion of industry
increased exchanges between city and countryside, particularly in
northern regions, where the urban propertied class invested capital
in rural improvements such as hydraulic works and land reclamation.
The first industries were also largely dependent on rural production
and on the rural population. One example of this is the spread of
silkworm cultivation from the seventeenth century: spinning was a
family industry that was entirely reliant on rural activity; it
augmented meagre rural earnings and depended on the cultivation
of mulberry trees and silkworm farming as well as on the spinning
mill. During the nineteenth century, many landowners who lived in
cities established small factories with spinning mills where women
workers produced cloth. From the mid-century, this development
gave rise to a mushrooming textile industry in the valleys of the
Olona, Lambro and Adda rivers in Lombardy, and in the Piedmontese
and Venetian valleys (around Biella and Schio, respectively). Women
did most of their work from home, were dispersed in different areas
of the countryside, were low paid and politically unorganized, and
performed the work in addition to their other tasks in the fields.
Skilled jobs in factories were given to men, with the justification that
women must marry and bear children, and the continuity of their
work could not therefore be guaranteed. The diversification of
industrial occupations meant that women’s industrial work was
limited to one phase in their lives, before they married; this in turn
led many women to postpone marriage and childbirth, as well as to
the tragic abandonment of illegitimate children to foundling hospitals
– at the time of Italian unification, the Milan foundling hospital had
over 5,000 admissions a year. Women continued to work in factories
and fields until the moment they gave birth, a reality starkly at odds
with the advice of medical literature of the period, which was full of
suggestions regarding the attention pregnant women must pay to
their condition. Women who worked until they gave birth in the
industries of the Milanese valleys suffered from a deformation of
their pelvis which caused puerperal osteomalacia, a bone disease
related to childbirth.
Middle-class urban women began organizing to improve the
conditions of these poorer women by devoting themselves to
philanthropic work, giving rise to the first women’s associations,
which combined charity work (the tutelage of young female workers,
assistance to prevent the abandoning of children and so on), with
educational and political activities. Women were also supported by
the Church, which sought to rescue them from socialist propaganda.
Priests were very influential in many women’s lives; for example,
during the confession women could complain about their husbands –
not to much avail, as priests generally taught women the virtue of
patience. For this reason, many democrats and socialists of the time
opposed the extension of the suffrage to women, in the belief that
women’s social condition inevitably led them to religious dependence
and political conservatism. The idea was that, influenced by priests
and landlords, women were likely to use their votes in the wrong
way. An exception was the Mazzinian and radical feminist Anna Maria
Mozzoni (1837–1920), who wrote an appeal in favour of the vote for
women and against marital tutelage as early as 1877, following the
hopes raised by the political victory of the left.
Women also wrote about themselves. In the second half of the
nineteenth century, with the expansion of the publishing industries,
the novel became a consumer product, spawning numerous writers
expert in rambling love stories, tear-jerkers and spirited romances,
often published as appendices to newspapers and magazines. This
development favoured the appearance of a female literature by
women and for women, which often promoted the bourgeois values
of the family and motherhood, but sometimes considered the
question of female emancipation. In both cases, these works were
highly rhetorical with little literary value. Perhaps the first female
writer of significance was Sibilla Aleramo (pseudonym of Rina Faccio,
1876–1960), author of the feminist autobiography Una donna (‘A
woman’, 1906), followed in the twentieth century by many more.
Anna Radius Zuccari (1846–1913), known as Neera, was one early
author of numerous novels centred on family life, with female
protagonists who struggled with their condition but eventually
accepted it; however, the most famous female writer of that period
was Matilde Serao (1846–1927), a journalist and wife of a famous
journalist of the time, Edoardo Scarfoglio. Serao was influenced by
verismo but fell into patronizing and sentimental formulas when
writing about the social problems of her native city of Naples.

‘LA BELLE EPOQUE’: THE GIOLITTI AGE

The nineteenth century ended with colonial disaster, bloody state

repression, and banking and corruption scandals in which the
government was directly implicated. Yet, the period between the
beginning of the new century and the outbreak of the First World
War was an age of optimism: in 1900, a more progressive and
democratic government came to power; with the exception of a
(European-wide) economic crisis in 1907, the economy expanded
rapidly – the national income rose by 38 per cent up to 1907, and a
further 20 per cent subsequently; some of the most famous names
in the Italian economy appeared during this period: Fiat, Pirelli,
Olivetti, Lancia and Alfa Romeo represented Italy’s industrial take-off.
But after the first fifteen years of the century, Italy lived through two
world wars and Fascism, and did not experience a further economic
boom until the 1950s and 1960s. What was true for the economy
was also true for culture. The early years of the twentieth century
were also a culturally prestigious time: between 1901 and 1914,
Italy received four Nobel prizes (awarded to Carducci for poetry,
Golgi for pathology, Moneta for peace, and Marconi for physics).
Also, between the 1860s and 1900, the daily press developed
considerably, with the birth of newspapers that still exist today.
However, it is necessary to remember that this rapid industrial and
cultural development was patchy, and considerable difficulties
remained: poverty was still a major problem, particularly in the south
and among the landless peasants in the north (braccianti). Politically,
the period was defined as the era of Giovanni Giolitti, a liberal
Piedmontese statesman who was prime minister through most of the
pre-war period, governing with various coalition governments. Giolitti
understood that Italy could continue to progress only if it managed
to control and absorb internal protest. His major innovations lay in
incorporating those forces representing the greatest danger to the
Italian state. Giolitti therefore responded to moderate socialist
demands, seeking in particular to involve the reformist current of the
Socialist Party as, for example, in 1913, with the granting of
universal male suffrage. He also opened a dialogue with organized
Catholicism in order to gain crucial votes against the growth of
socialism, which led to the Gentiloni agreement in 1913 (after Count
Vincenzo Gentiloni). However, his policies angered an increasingly
hostile extreme right, which turned nationalism into an aggressive
and imperialistic idea distinct from its democratic origins in the
Risorgimento. This nationalist right became more explicitly anti-
parliamentary and anti-democratic (particularly as Giolitti provided
openings to the moderate left), and in 1910 the Italian Nationalist
Association was founded as its organized expression.
In a 1909 novel entitled I vecchi e i giovani (‘The old and the
young’), the writer Luigi Pirandello (1867–1936, and winner of the
Nobel prize for literature in 1934) illustrated the distance that had
grown between two generations: those who had experienced the
Risorgimento – and had in many cases later betrayed its original
ideals – and a new generation born between 1880 and 1890 that felt
detached from the Risorgimento vision and was tired of living on
memories, focusing instead on the future. Among this latter
generation were the futurist avant-garde and the writers for
newspapers such as Il Regno, Leonardo, La Voce and Lacerba, all of
which were published in Florence and attacked the condition of the
country they called ‘Italietta’ (small Italy); one of the motivators of
this circle was the founder of the Nationalist Association, Enrico
Corradini (1865–1931). These newspapers were read by a
discontented bourgeois public of predominantly young men. In 1911,
in an attempt to appease the right, Giolitti embarked on renewed
colonial war, this time in Libya – the first war in which Italy used
aircraft in combat. The modernity of the new flying machines was
exalted by the intellectuals of futurism, a movement founded by
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944). The nationalists desperately
wanted Italy to be involved in a glorious war, and the praise of war
appeared in all their writings. As Arno Mayer has argued, futurism,
for all its admiration of modernity, remained linked to a nineteenth-
century bourgeois myth of progress and technology, explicit in its
collusion with capitalist industry and accompanied by a reactionary,
anti-socialist and anti-feminist ideology. The periodicals influenced by
futurism carried a nationalist, imperialist line, full of expressions such
as ‘Italy’s absolute leader’, ‘colonial expansionism’, ‘cult of progress
and speed, of sport and physical strength’ (as Gioanola has
commented, ‘Mussolini had nothing to invent himself’). Centred in
Milan and Florence, futurism also flourished in Sicily; Marinetti
exalted metropolises, industry and the modernity of the northern
spirit, but also, as Claudia Salaris has argued, the instinctive
improvisation and the ‘enthusiasm for the primordial force of
landscape belonging to the dream of a southern dimension’.
Marinetti himself felt ‘a bit Sicilian’: born in Alexandria in Egypt, the
first Italian land he touched was Sicily; futurism in Sicily was one of
the movement’s first and most enduring incarnations.

Box 7.3 The Futurist manifesto (1909)

1. We want to sing of the love of danger, the habit of energy and
rashness.
 2. The essential elements of our poetry will be courage, audacity
and revolt.
...
4. We declare that the splendour of the world has been enriched
by a new beauty: the beauty of speed ... A roaring motor car
which seems to run on machine-gun fire is more beautiful
than the Victory of Samothrace.
7. We want to glorify war – the only cure for the world –
militarism, patriotism
...
8. We want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality,
feminism and all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice.
...
It is in Italy that we are issuing this manifesto of ruinous and
incendiary violence, by which we today are founding Futurism,
because we want to deliver Italy from its gangrene of professors,
archaeologists, tourist guides and antiquaries. Italy has been too
long the great second-hand market. We want to get rid of the
innumerable museums which cover it with innumerable
cemeteries.

The fervour for war also stimulated more moderate voices; the
elderly poet, Giovanni Pascoli (1855–1912), a Romagnol pupil of
Carducci who had been an internationalist in his youth, represented
perhaps better than anyone else the transition from the
Risorgimento to twentieth-century nationalism, when he gave a
famous speech in favour of war, claiming that Italian peasants
needed land – in the shape of colonies – and that Italy, ‘the great
proletarian’, had finally ‘moved’. His ‘national socialism’ met with
approval from landowners and industrialists, since it did not threaten
the class system: the nation was ‘proletarian’ compared with other
European nations. Corradini’s writings were very similar, especially
his political novels; he addressed these to Italian emigrants, whom
he considered lost to the Fatherland unless they could be brought
back to fight in a national war. On the eve of the Libyan war, which
was opposed by the socialists, a climate of nationalist enthusiasm
engulfed the bourgeois cafés in Italy and a new popular song was
played by civic groups in the streets and in theatres, stirring novel
emotions:
Where does the most prosperous soil hide?/Where does the sun smile most
magnificently?/On the sea that links us to golden Africa,/the Italian star shows us a
treasure.//Tripoli, beautiful soil of love,/May this song come fast to you./May the
tricolour flag fly/on your towers with the sound of the cannon !//Do navigate, o
battleship:/The wind is favourable and the season is pleasurable./Tripoli, delightful
land,/will be Italian with the sound of the cannon.

The Libyan war ended in victory in 1912, though it was only a

relative one: Italian rule was limited to the coast, and it took the
Fascist regime years of violent repression in the 1920s to extend
Italian control over the entire country, and the population continued
to rebel against their colonial rulers. The nationalists wanted the war
from the start, but were unhappy with the way it was prosecuted:
they argued for a more intensive campaign and hoped for a more
definite outcome. Despite the war being in part conducted for them,
these criticisms aggravated the nationalists’ relationship with Giolitti’s
government. The nationalist right, together with the Futurists,
constituted the largest element of the interventionist movement of
1914–15 which culminated, as we shall see, in the ‘radiant days’ of
May 1915.
The radical position of the nationalists was pushed further right by
the ‘red week’ of June 1914, characterized by strikes and violent
clashes with the police all over Italy at a time when many cities and
towns were run by socialist councils. The spark for this widespread
workers’ protest was a police massacre at Ancona; three workers
were killed during an anti-militarist demonstration calling for the
release of the anarchist Augusto Masetti, who had shot and
wounded a colonel and shouted ‘up with anarchy, down with the
army!’ while departing for Libya in October 1911. The link between
social protest and pacifism was evident during the red week, and
would continue in various ways throughout the duration of the Great
War. During the red week, the trade unions proclaimed a general
strike, supported by the socialist newspaper Avanti! (edited from
1912 by Benito Mussolini, from Romagna). The symbolism of the
French Revolution and of 1848 were resurrected in Italy by the
protests; pews taken from churches were piled up in the streets,
serving as both barricades and an anti-clerical demonstration;
protesters talked of revolution and a republic. The fear of revolution
among industrialists and the middle classes turned into anger at
Giolitti’s government, which was accused of not repressing the
protest – though the predicted revolution failed to take place
because the reformist leaders of the socialist trade unions called off
the strikes.
When the First World War broke out in August 1914, Italy was still
part of the Triple Alliance negotiated by Crispi in 1882, but decided
at first to remain neutral. However, by May 1915, Italy had changed
its position to support France and Britain. Neither the Entente
powers (France, Britain and Russia) nor the central powers
(Germany and Austria) wanted Italy to join with their enemies, not
because they thought the Italian army was an ally worth having, but
because Italian involvement would divert resources to a new front in
the Alps. For this reason, Britain and France promised Italy
convenient territorial gains, in case of war. The secret Treaty of
London of 1915 committed Italy to join the Entente and declare war
on Germany and Austria–Hungary; in return, Italy would receive the
Trentino, South Tirol, Trieste and Gorizia, Istria (but not Fiume) and
northern Dalmatia if the Entente won. To many ‘democratic’
interventionists (including republicans, reformist socialists and
Italians living in the Trentino and Trieste areas that were still part of
the Habsburg Empire) this treaty raised the prospect of liberating
lands that were still ‘unredeemed’ and waging a final war for Italian
independence against Austria: thereby finishing the task of the
national Risorgimento. For the nationalists and Futurists the war was
an opportunity to turn Italy into a great power, no longer the
‘proletarian’ among European nations, no longer Giolitti’s ‘Italietta’. A
final vote in favour of war was taken in parliament on 20 May 1915
under a conservative prime minister, Antonio Salandra (1853–1931),
with the Socialist Party as the only opposition.
As Chapter 8 will show, intervention was supported by Italian
intellectuals influenced by nationalism and Futurism, whose writing
demonstrated a fundamental shift from nineteenth-century
democratic nationalism to an aggressive imperialism. As the Socialist
Party continued to oppose the war (with the exception of the
reformists, who had been expelled from the party in 1912 after their
support for Giolitti’s Libyan war, and had founded the small Italian
Socialist Reformist Party), Mussolini, until 1914 an anti-militarist
revolutionary and editor of the party newspaper, turned
interventionist. This move, which has often been explained simply by
reference to his opportunism, was not peculiar to Mussolini, and was
partly a result of a conviction that socialism need not necessarily be
separate from the idea of the nation. Mussolini’s meetings with
socialists from the ‘unredeemed lands’ of the Trentino (particularly
Cesare Battisti) in 1909 persuaded him eventually that socialism
must be reconciled to the idea of the patria – this mixture of
socialism and nationalism became evident in November 1914, when
Mussolini wrote his first interventionist article in Avanti!, and was
consequently expelled from the party:
The national question is a reality for the socialists too.
The example of the Trentino is one that forces even the most radical of the neutralists to
think. If these ‘Italian’ people revolted against Austria, how could we, as socialists . . .
oppose an Italian intervention? Now, the Trentino has morally rebelled. As a minority
party with long-term aims we cannot take any military responsibility, but if the Italian
bourgeoisie, which has a duty to confront national issues, moved against Austria–
Hungary, we – by opposing a war – would only sacrifice the Trentino and favour Austria–
Hungary, which is – socialists must remember – the very pillar of European reaction.
(‘Nations and Internationalism’, Avanti!, 18 October 1914)

With financial assistance from Italian and French industrialists,

Mussolini founded an interventionist newspaper, Il Popolo d’Italia.
His declaration of interventionism, a few short weeks after his article
in Avanti!, added elements to the discussion of socialism and nation
similar to the ideas of the Futurists and many anti-socialist
interventionists. As Chapter 8 shows, the distinctions within the
interventionist movement were to fade as the war progressed:
I am embarking on an audacious project and I do not hide its difficulties from myself.
The cry is one word which I would have never pronounced in normal times, but which I
instead raise, aloud and with no compromises, with certain faith, today: a fearful and
fascinating word: war!
(‘Audacity!’, Il Popolo d’Italia, 15 November 1914)

What allowed Mussolini and many democratic interventionists to

overcome the questions posed by their socialist and pacifist origins
was the decision to accept that class struggle must be suspended for
the greater good of the nation in times of war:
The socialists cannot ignore the existence of national issues. One cannot ignore existing
facts, and national problems do exist, they are complex and profound. At times, they
overwhelm class issues and they interrupt the evolution of class struggle.
(‘The terms of the problem’, Il Popolo d’Italia, 19 November 1914)

While democratic interventionists such as Bissolati drew on the

memory of the Risorgimento to maintain the war’s democratic aims
of liberating the Trentino and Trieste from the Austrians (as well as
defending Serbia and Belgium from Germany), Mussolini also
recalled the lost battles of Italian unification, battles that – in his
view – demanded revenge, since only through victory in war could
the unification process be completed. War, not education or
literature, was now necessary to ‘make Italians’:
War must reveal Italians to themselves. First of all, it must dissolve the ignoble legend
according to which Italians do not fight, it has to delete the shame of Lissa and Custoza,
it has to demonstrate to the world that Italy is able to fight a war, a great war. We must
repeat it: a great war. Only a great war can give the Italians the notion and the pride of
their Italianness, only war can ‘make the Italians’, as D’Azeglio said.
(‘The first of Italy’s wars’, Il Popolo d’Italia, 14 February 1915)

SUGGESTED FURTHER READING

A. Lyttelton, Liberal and Fascist Italy, 1900–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002)
provides an excellent introduction to the period. M. Carlson, The Italian Stage: From
Goldoni to D’Annunzio (London: McFarland, 1981) and S. Stewart–Steinberg, The Pinocchio
Effect: On Making Italians (1860–1920) (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2007) are
useful starting points for a study of Italian literature during the nation-making process. The
development of Italy as a nation can also be explored through a study of mass emigration,
as in D. Gabaccia, Italy’s Many Diasporas (Seattle, Wash.: University of Washington Press,
2000), and of Italian food, as in C. Helstolsky, Garlic and Oil: Food and Politics in Italy
(Oxford: Berg, 2004). A very interesting and readable account of the position of southern
Italy in this period is N. Moe, The View from Vesuvius: Italian Culture and the Southern
Question (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2002).
 8
........
From Hunger to Hedonism:
Italy in the Twentieth Century

CHRONOLOGY
1916 Government of national unity
1917 Strikes against the war in Turin in August; Italian defeat at Caporetto in October
1918 Italian victory at Vittorio Veneto in October; Italy occupies Trent and Trieste
1919 Foundation of Italian Popular Party; D’Annunzio’s occupation of Fiume
1920 Giolitti becomes prime minister; factory occupations; end of occupation of Fiume
1921 Foundation of the Communist Party and the Fascist Party
Pope Pius XI succeeds Benedict XV; Fascist March on Rome in October; Mussolini
1922
becomes prime minister; foundation of the Fascist Grand Council
1923 Italian fleet bombards Corfu
Murder of Socialist deputy, Giacomo Matteotti; opposition withdraws to the
1924
Aventino
1926 Fascist laws outlaw opposition parties
1929 Lateran Pacts between the Church and the state
1935 Stresa conference; Italy invades Ethiopia
Conquest of Addis Ababa; Italian intervention in the Spanish Civil War; Rome–
1936
Berlin Axis
1938 Promulgation of racial laws
Pope Pius XII succeeds Pius XI; Italy occupies Albania; pact of Steel between Italy
1939
and Germany; outbreak of the Second World War; Italy ‘non-belligerent’
1940 Italy declares war on France and Britain in June; Italy invades Greece in October
1941 Fall of Addis Ababa; Italian troops to the Russian campaign
 Surrender in Tunisia in May; the Allies land in Sicily in July; fall of Mussolini;
Marshal Badoglio becomes prime minister; armistice with the Allies in September;
1943
foundation of the Italian Social Republic; foundation of the Committee of National
Liberation
1944 Liberation of Rome in June
1945 Partisan insurrection and liberation of northern Italy in April; Mussolini shot
1946 Referendum votes for republic to replace monarchy
1948 New Constitution; Christian Democracy wins elections
1978 Former prime minister Aldo Moro kidnapped and murdered by the Red Brigades
1991 Communists rename themselves Democratic Party of the Left
Revelations of high-level corruption spark arrests and investigations; collapse of
1992
Christian Democracy and the birth of the ‘Second Republic’

THE ITALIAN PEOPLE BETWEEN PEACE AND WAR

‘Sacred selfishness’: with these words, prime minister Antonio

Salandra justified the shift in alliance that took Italy into the First
World War on the side of the Entente in 1915. This cynical image
confirmed the ideas that many contemporary Europeans held about
Italy, especially among its former allies. Austro–Hungarian
propaganda depicted Italian soldiers as sinister dwarfs with a
regimental feather in their hats and a knife behind their backs, and
represented Italy as a country of cunning people dating back to
Machiavelli’s time (a country of machiavellici); after unification, Italy
had inherited from Piedmont the art of ‘managing’: of changing
alliances when it suited them. The Austrian chancellor referred
ironically to Italian ‘waltz turns’ as both Germany and Austria tried to
persuade Italy not to turn its back on them.
However, this view of diplomatic opportunism does not do justice
to the reasoning and feelings of what has been called the
‘interventionist piazza’. Confrontation between interventionists and
neutralists in Italian cities saw the former prevail between autumn
1914 and spring 1915, not because they were the majority of the
population but because they were the most visible and noisy. This
was due in part to the support they received from much of the press
and from industrialists, but it was also because the futurists and
nationalists were consistently able to mobilize bourgeois and student
urban groups in their support. It is indeed impossible to ignore the
links between the Italian intellectual world of the belle époque (the
Giolitti age) and the entry of Italy into the First World War. In 1904,
the futurist newspaper Il Regno had welcomed the outbreak of the
Russian–Japanese war: ‘War, finally, has broken out’. This fervent
welcome for war continued in the Italian futurist and nationalist
press in 1911–12, and again in 1914–15, with hymns to violence,
greetings to the ‘new world’, to ‘war as the only hygiene for the
world and its sole moral educator’. Such writing continued for a full
decade, and characterized a period in which war was awaited,
described, and prepared for psychologically. These intellectuals also
regarded war as a way out of Giolitti’s weak democratic Italietta, and
attacks on the parliamentary system began to appear in the writings
of, for example, Giovanni Papini and Giuseppe Prezzolini, and
continued to grow in strength as the government dithered over
intervention in 1914 and 1915. A number of their declarations and
appeals were expressed as a populist ‘revenge of the piazza’ against
the alleged ‘betrayal’ of diplomats and politicians.
Forces of the moderate left also sided with the war – republicans,
radicals, socialist reformists such as Leonida Bissolati and Cesare
Battisti (who lived in Trent under the Austrians), as well as some
revolutionary socialists, including Mussolini. In a speech to
parliament in December 1914, Bissolati declared:
It is not in line with socialist spirit to tell the proletariat: Serbia, this Piedmont of young
Slavia, is about to succumb to Austrian lead; Belgium, the Belgium of Wanderwelde and
Anseele is gasping for breath under German bullying .. . France . . . struggles to defend
her life, renewing the heroic resistance of the Commune .. . but all this, Italian
proletariat, does not concern you.

In the province of Cremona, one of Bissolati’s followers wrote in the

local interventionist newspaper: ‘In order to secure more fighting for
civilization and for the proletariat, in order to affirm the principle of
democracy, in order to maintain a sense of the word “international”,
we say: War!’. The writer of these words was Roberto Farinacci, later
organizer of some of the most violent episodes of Fascist squadrismo
in Italy.
Educated in the ideals of the Risorgimento, one of Bissolati’s
spiritual guides was the poet Carducci, Bissolati’s professor at the
University of Bologna. In Carducci’s poetry, Bissolati saw the Italy of
the Risorgimento, born out of the ruins of a divided, clerical and
medieval Italy. Believing in the ideal of the war as the conclusion of
the Risorgimento, the reformist socialists began to abandon Marx in
favour of Mazzini, to place nation before class. Thanks to this
Risorgimento mystique, the war became invested with a romantic
aura; Bissolati himself, a war volunteer, was portrayed by the
interventionist press as a romantic hero, as if the war had taken him,
at over fifty years of age, directly from parliament to the battlefield.
Far from praising the war (as the futurists and nationalists did) as a
revolutionary or imperialist act, the reformists lent their support in
the name of principles such as reform and the safeguarding of
democracy in Europe: an interpretation that proved very difficult to
sustain, not only because the ‘progressive’ Entente included Tsarist
Russia, but also because the development of the war soon united
the different wings of interventionism against pacifists and socialists.
At the end of the conflict, democratic interventionists became
implicated in the social consequences of war by taking part in
‘patriotic blocs’ with the nationalist right in the 1919 elections,
against the socialists, not grasping that the real danger to Italian
democracy did not come from those who had been neutralists, but
from the patriots with whom they had been allied throughout the
duration of the conflict.
Another public soldier-interventionist figure was Mussolini, whose
role as editor of Il Popolo d’Italia was concerned with cementing the
link between soldiers and the Fatherland. However, while Mussolini’s
war diary, published in instalments in Il Popolo d’Italia, was the self-
depiction of a leader in the making, and portrayed in his war
adventures his leadership of ordinary soldiers the first ‘star’ of
interventionism and post-war nationalism was the poet Gabriele
D’Annunzio (1863–1938). Born in Pescara, D’Annunzio was educated
in Prato and later moved to Rome, where the success of his poetry
won him access to the most prestigious bourgeois salons and
cultural circles; his poetry focused obsessively on the self,
embodying a decadent aestheticism in an exaggerated style. His
poems became very fashionable and allowed him to live an
extravagant life characterized by numerous scandals that served
both to publicize his literary work and to create his image as a
celebrity who secured much space in the media of the time. The
First World War provided D’Annunzio with an opportunity for national
acclaim in piazzas all over Italy; he was hailed as an extraordinary
orator and interventionist propagandist, a ‘first-hour’ volunteer and
‘political educator of the nation’. As Mario Isnenghi has remarked, his
speeches were characterized by the will to renovate all the cultural
and political traditions of the country’s past in an attempt to ‘remake’
Italians: the myth of Rome and the maritime republics, the Savoy
monarchy and Garibaldi; an entire repertory of classicism used to
propagate the idea of a just and sacred war in which the role of the
individual Italian citizen was to be devoted and submissive.
Interventionism was mainly an urban, bourgeois phenomenon.
However, the common image of an immobile peasant mass waiting
passively to be directed by others does not reflect the reality of the
war years; in fact, sections of both the peasantry and the industrial
working class demonstrated actively against the war. During the ‘red
week’, social and anti-war protest continued to be linked. The slogan
launched by the socialist Angelo Tasca (1892–1960) in August 1914
– ‘between France and Germany, we choose the International’ – was
welcomed by socialists and anarchists, including Errico Malatesta
(1853–1932) who, in December 1914, explained in a letter to Avanti!
that the hope for a German defeat did not justify participation in the
conflict: instead of ‘a massacre between brothers’, the masses had to
‘invoke peace among mankind and war against oppressors’.
Studies of the ‘radiant May’ of 1915 (when interventionists
demonstrated in piazzas around Italy) have often tended to leave
out the neutralist activity that took place at the same time. In Turin,
opposition to the war was stronger than anywhere else; almost
every worker participated in the May Day demonstration and strikes
continued throughout the month, only ending with the capitulation
of the Socialist Party which, at that point, had to face the inevitability
of war. Acts such as desertion assumed symbolic value among the
masses. Police reports showed the collective and organized character
of desertion throughout the war years, particularly in the centre-
north. After October 1917, censored letters from families to soldiers
suggested that they ‘acted as at Caporetto’. Desertion and open
forms of rebellion were not, however, limited to the north; between
1917 and the end of the conflict in southern Italy and in Sicily,
demonstrations against the war arose from the necessity of having
men to work in the fields – during these protests, women and
children carried white flags and demanded peace, bread and
revolution.
As Isnenghi has demonstrated, while intellectuals and officers
continued to advocate the reassuring ideology of peasants as the
patient instruments of the nation’s will, during 1917 a contradictory
process began to unfold around two major events that transformed
the face of the war, and imposed reality over ideological
mystification: the August revolt in Turin, and the Caporetto defeat in
October. When crowds began demonstrating for peace and bread in
a large industrial workers’ city such as Turin, echoing the slogans of
the Russian Revolution (the first phase of which had taken place in
February 1917), the liberal state realized the great risk it faced. The
high number of arrests that followed the riots relaunched the anti-
militarist campaign. Armaments workers were urged to bring their
guns to the piazza: ‘Let us put an end,’ one anarchist leaflet
appealed, ‘to this systematic destruction of the human race.’ A few
months later, the Austrians defeated the Italian army at Caporetto
(in present-day Slovenia) taking 300,000 prisoners, while another
300,000 soldiers disbanded and fled. The ‘liberated’ lands of Friuli
and half of Venetia were abandoned in a general retreat along the
line of the River Piave. To the liberal ruling class, this was not only a
military defeat. Caporetto heightened a long-held fear that Italian
soldiers (mainly peasants and southerners with no interest in
‘liberating’ Trent and Trieste) would not continue to fight. In 1915,
the interventionists had overcome the neutralists, but the majority of
the population had not supported the war; the ruling class
understood well enough that some of the liberals were also unhappy
about the war, and that the socialists and many Catholics opposed it.
Universal male suffrage had been granted under Giolitti in 1913, just
prior to the conflict, after half a century of unification during which
the dominant classes continued to believe that the Italian people
were not mature enough to be given voting rights. Would those who
gave their vote in 1913 also be ready to give their blood? Would the
Italian peasant simply continue to obey in silence?
These questions and fears were behind the interpretation of
Caporetto as a military strike, as thousands of soldiers threw away
their guns and fled, refusing to fight. Did this mutiny herald the start
of a revolutionary process, as in Russia? Was the retreat influenced
by defeatist propaganda carried out by socialists and Catholics?
Though Catholics were divided regarding the war, many of the
leaders of Catholic peasant organizations were more intransigent
than the socialists in their pacifism. Shortly before Caporetto, two
powerful slogans circulated in the army: the demand from the leader
of the Socialist Party, Claudio Treves, for ‘not another winter in the
trenches’, and the definition of the war as a ‘useless slaughter’ by
Pope Benedict XV (Pope between 1914 and 1922). The Fascist
historian Gioacchino Volpe later explained the phenomenon of
Catholic pacifism by the fact that many Catholic leaders worked
among the peasantry, and that no party who wanted the peasants
on its side could support the war: ‘because, if the Libyan war, with a
vague perspective of land to be conquered and some religious
colouring had found them not too ill-disposed, the present war left
them indifferent’.
Subsequent historical research, particularly by Giorgio Rochat, has
proved that the major responsibility for the defeat lay with the army
generals (so that the behaviour of the rank-and-file soldiers was an
effect rather than a cause of Caporetto); however, contemporary
accusations turned from blaming soldiers to pointing at the alleged
‘political instigators’ . After Caporetto, while the new head of the
army Armando Diaz (who replaced Luigi Cadorna) inaugurated a
new phase of ‘persuasion’ and material improvements for soldiers,
anti-pacifist repression on the home front became fierce, including
local trials of pacifists and interventionist-led persecution of anyone
suspected of defeatism. Episodes of verbal and physical assault
carried out by interventionists – who were protected by the judiciary
and the police under the justification that they were defending the
Fatherland – represented an early premonition of Fascist squad
violence after the war.
The final victory at Vittorio Veneto and on the River Piave was
won a year after Caporetto. A ‘greater’ Italy came into being,
expanding to include Trent and Trieste within its borders, but at the
cost of 600,000 dead. The gap between nationalist rhetoric and the
reality of war persisted in the aftermath of the conflict, in the
erection of memorials to ‘unknown soldiers’ and sites of patriotic
pilgrimage at a time when returning peasants found themselves in
conditions of poverty that were worse than before the war. This gulf
between the experience of ordinary soldiers and the triumphal
rhetoric of the nation is evident in the texts of war songs,
particularly the wartime song Gorizia and the post-war The Legend
of the Piave. Gorizia, written in 1916 after a battle that cost the life
of 50,000 Italian and 40,000 Austrian soldiers, expresses the tragedy
of the massacre and the soldiers’ hatred for nationalism (‘O Gorizia,
may you be cursed/for every heart which feels conscience/it was
painful to depart/and for many there was no return’) and for the
upper classes who wanted the war, to whom it promises vengeance
(‘You call a field of honour/this land on the other side of the
border/Here we die crying assassins/one day you will be cursed’).
The Legend of the Piave, a 1918 anthem to the victory, is a poetic
narration of the war which has the River Piave as its protagonist
(‘The Piave whispered calm and tranquil at the passage/of the first
infantrymen on the 24th of May [1915]’); the main shift is between
Caporetto (‘The Piave whispered: the foreigner returns!’) and a
proud and patriotic reaction that brought to the final victory (‘No,
said the Piave, no, said the soldiers,/never again may the enemy
step forward!/We saw the Piave inflate its banks/and the
infantrymen fighting the waves./Red with the blood of the arrogant
enemy,/the Piave ordered: go back, o foreigner!’).

THE DEFEAT OF ITALIAN DEMOCRACY

The number of soldiers killed in the conflict meant that in almost

every Italian family there was a veteran, a prisoner, someone
maimed in the war, a widow or orphans. Thus the war continued
well into the post-war years as the wartime experience and its
consequences influenced both behaviour and choices. The
parliamentary elections of November 1919 were a referendum on
the war, counterposing interventionist and neutralist parties. A few
months earlier, in March, groups of interventionists, nationalists and
futurists had gathered in Milan at San Sepolcro to found a new
political movement, the fasci di combattimento. The group was led
by Benito Mussolini who produced a programme full of ideological
confusion – it was republican, in favour of votes for women, anti–
Vatican and nationalist at the same time, encompassing the varied
origins of the Fascist movement – but it was also clearly in favour of
Italian imperialism and expressed a will to conquer power:
We can declare with total certainty that the Fatherland today is greater . . . Because we
feel greater, because we have experienced this war, in as much as we have wanted it, it
was not imposed on us, and we could have avoided it.

By claiming responsibility for the conflict and for the victory, the
Fascists implied that it was now them, and not those who had
opposed the war, who had the right to decide the destiny of the
nation:
The meeting of 23 March .. . accepts the supreme postulate of the League of Nations
which presupposes the integration of each nation, an integration which in the case of
Italy must be carried out in the Alps and in the Adriatic with the reclaiming and
annexation of Fiume and Dalmatia. We have 40 million inhabitants on an area of
287,000 square kilometres ... in ten or twenty years our population will be 60 million.
But if we look around we see England which, with 47 million inhabitants, has a colonial
empire of 55 million square kilometres . . . We want our place in the world.
Despite Fascism’s vaguely asserted opposition to imperialism, the
fasci’s programme in fact clarified the imperialist aims of the
movement, with its demand for Dalmatian annexation and its
indication that a confrontation with Italy’s former allies over the
question of colonies was now an open possibility. Italy, therefore,
was ‘greater’, but not as great as it deserved to be. In September
1919, proclaiming Italian rights to Slav territory, D’Annunzio led a
military occupation of Fiume (in present-day Croatia), which
continued until the end of the following year.
Meanwhile, workers in industrial areas began to occupy factories:
red flags flew from chimneys, and revolutionary slogans appeared on
factory walls; workers organized ‘factory councils’ to demonstrate
their ability to organize both the workforce and factory production
collectively without employers. A similar pattern was followed in the
countryside, where peasants in the Po Valley and Apulia occupied
land and organized ‘farm councils’. Giolitti believed that agreement
with the trade unions could be brought about through granting
reforms. As revolution seemed imminent, Italian socialism showed
itself to be more reformist than revolutionary and called off the
strikes; in 1921 at Livorno, Antonio Gramsci, one of the organizers of
the council movement in Turin, founded the Italian Communist Party.
By then, revolution had been defeated, and the ‘black biennial’
replaced the ‘red biennial’; powerfully portrayed in Bernardo
Bertolucci’s later film 1900 (1976), Mussolini’s fasci moved decisively
to the right by setting up armed squads and helping landowners in
the repression of peasant protest.
The squadristi were mainly veterans and accomplished with ease
punitive expeditions carried out with hand grenades, staves, knives
and guns against socialist co-operatives, trade union headquarters,
left-wing newspaper offices and city councils controlled by the left.
Several hundred workers, peasants and union leaders died in this
‘one-way’ civil war, which saw the forces of the left unprepared and
less well-armed. The Arditi del Popolo, founded in June 1921 by
socialists, communists and anarchists, represented the most militant
anti–Fascist group; not supported by any left-wing party and
outlawed by the government as an armed association (a status not
attributed to the Fascist squads), the Arditi could only be successful
locally. In August 1922, supported by a large part of the population,
they defended Parma against a major Fascist offensive led by
Farinacci and Italo Balbo. However, they were finally defeated by a
Fascist violence that benefited from the complicity of the state.
Indeed, the police and the liberal authorities did not stop the
violence, believing that Fascism could avert the revolutionary threat.
The Liberal government looked quite favourably on the growth of
Fascism. Implementing his usual tactic of trasformismo, Giolitti
included Fascists in his coalition for the 1921 elections, a fact that
inevitably encouraged the police to ignore Fascist violence during
that period. Patriotic Italians had been angry with the government
after the Versailles Treaty – which did not give Italy the colonies it
craved – and believed that Giolitti’s conciliatory attitude towards
strikes was of a piece with his government’s weakness in the area of
foreign policy. The Fascists, who demanded territory and opposed
strikes, grew significantly during 1920 and 1921. But how was it
possible to move from squadrismo to power?
The use of squads by landowners was called ‘agrarian Fascism’,
and grew quickly and unexpectedly. Even Mussolini was surprised by
their success – he had always claimed that Fascism was essentially
an urban phenomenon (just as interventionism had been). Agrarian
Fascism created the figure of the ras – a local duce, often not under
Mussolini’s direct control, such as Farinacci in Cremona, Dino Grandi
in Bologna and Balbo in Ferrara. The apparently reactionary nature
of agrarian Fascism contradicted Mussolini’s revolutionary Fascist
rhetoric. The solution to the difficulties this contradiction entailed
came with the decision to organize a Fascist ‘march on Rome’ in
October 1922.
During the course of the month, the Fascists began to take over
authority in local provinces and regions. These smaller ‘marches on
the provinces’ continued as Fascist columns converged on the capital
from different parts of Italy. There were many references and
symbols reminiscent of D’Annunzio’s earlier march on Fiume, but the
Fascists also employed Garibaldi’s slogan: ‘Rome or death’. About
50,000 people marched towards the capital, while thousands were
simultaneously taking power in local centres all over Italy: they took
over the offices of city councils and prefects, seized weapons and
destroyed the headquarters of the anti–Fascist press. The march was
organized by four men known as the quadrumviri: Cesare Maria De
Vecchi, a landowner, and Emilio De Bono, a general, were
monarchists; Michele Bianchi was a former revolutionary syndicalist;
and Balbo was a former republican. These four men symbolized the
divergent origins of Fascism, which interventionism had first brought
together. While the quadrumviri were co-ordinating the columns
marching towards the capital, Mussolini waited in Milan, uncertain
perhaps as to whether the Fascist march would be successful. Emilio
Lussu, the veteran democratic interventionist and anti–Fascist writer
observed, in his novel The March on Rome and Thereabouts, that
Mussolini stayed close enough to Switzerland in order to flee there if
things went badly wrong further south.
Around fifty people (Fascists, army officers, policemen and anti–
Fascists) were killed in the days leading up to the march on the
capital; there was illegal activity, violence, destruction and
intimidation. It is difficult now to imagine a political movement in a
modern democracy taking over the public sites of power across a
country in just a few days. The police resisted occasionally, but often
they did not; and there was no longer any division within the
movement, because by this point Mussolini was its undisputed
leader. Fascist propaganda later insisted that the Italian problem was
the division between nation and state: Italy was a nation, but it
needed a strong state and it was this that the Fascists claimed they
had achieved on 28 October, when the king appointed Mussolini to
the office of prime minister. Yet the memory of that day remained
controversial under the regime, even in Fascist imagery. On the one
hand it became a source of legitimacy, by providing a revolutionary
myth of the regime’s origins: on 28 October every year citizens were
summoned together to remember the significance of the date. On
the other hand, it was an embarrassing and difficult memory for all
those conservatives who supported Fascism and yet retained power
within the regime. How was a phase of illegality and bloodshed to be
represented once Fascists constituted the government? A popular
film under the regime was A Noi! (‘To us’), partly filmed during that
part of the march that had started out from Naples; but it was
heavily edited, so that the final version showed no violence at all,
portraying a disciplined army of blackshirts, with people welcoming
them everywhere, a force which understood that its destiny was to
accomplish a revolution and to win a form of mass plebiscite. At the
decennial Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution, which opened on 28
October 1932, an effort was made to present a historic continuity
from the interventionist marches of 1914 to the Fascist marches of
1922 – both were interpreted as insurrections against an internal
enemy (the alien, the defeatist, the neutralist, the Bolshevik) in
which a disciplined people triumphed. The reality was very different:
the columns that marched towards Rome were far from disciplined.
They assaulted trains, walked or arrived on old bicycles, were
unorganized, hungry, tired and wet (it rained continuously).
Mussolini arrived in Rome only when asked to form a government,
and only at that point did the Fascists receive the order to march
into the capital. By then, the revolution was effectively over – though
in fact it had never started.
Anti–Fascism was not definitely defeated at this point, and it took
a number of years for Mussolini to initiate his dictatorship. When the
1924 elections were conducted using means of violence and
intimidation around the country, the socialist MP Giacomo Matteotti
(1885–1924) decided to denounce this situation in the chamber:
No Italian elector has been free to decide according to his own will .. . [interruptions
and protests from the right] .. . No elector has been free to say whether he approved or
not the politics, or better the regime, of the Fascist government. No one was free,
because every citizen knew in advance that if he dared to oppose the regime, a political
group in the hands of the government would have nullified his vote and his response ...
[interruptions and protests from the right] ... To reinforce the government’s intentions,
there is an armed militia ... [clapping from the right, and shouts of ‘Viva la milizia!’] .. . I
am talking about elections. There is an armed militia which has the following
fundamental and declared purpose: to support a prime minister who is the leader of
Fascism, and not to support, as the Italian army does, the head of the state .. . and
 particularly in rural Italy these militias were present at the polling stations in great
numbers.

Other democratic politicians had been physically attacked (for

example, Francesco Saverio Nitti and Giovanni Amendola), and
Matteotti expected to be next. In June 1924 he was kidnapped, as
recent research has demonstrated, by members of the Fascist secret
police; Liberal opponents asked the king to dismiss Mussolini, but he
refused. The opposition abandoned parliament in protest and moved
to the Aventine Hill. In July, Mussolini told the Fascist Grand Council:
‘It is not possible to step back now! Fascism did not achieve power
through the normal ways. It did so with the March on Rome, an
insurrectional act. If no one resisted, it was because it was clear that
it was pointless to resist destiny.’ The significance of this speech was
to confirm the legend of insurrection, but it also stated the truth
about a ruling class that had not stopped Fascism in 1922 and would
not do so now. In August, Matteotti’s corpse was discovered outside
Rome.
Unable to legislate, the Aventine secession had been a mistake;
however, it was important from a moral point of view – those who
took the decision to leave parliament erected a moral barrier
between the opposition and Fascism, rejecting any compromise.
Despite its defeat, this represented a strong moral message, which
could be passed on to the next anti–Fascist generation. Matteotti
endured in popular memory as a defender of civil freedom and
democracy, his last speech representing the ultimate challenge to
the illegality of Fascism and bringing him martyrdom. In the
thousands of messages received by his family he was called a
‘martyr’, an ‘apostle’, the ‘new Christ’, ‘hero’ and ‘teacher’; these
were expressions typical of both a Risorgimento civil religious
rhetoric, and a Christian religion understood by the rural masses of
Italy. As most anti–Fascists who had not been assassinated or
imprisoned had fled into exile by 1926, Matteotti became a symbol
for anti–Fascism abroad, and many committees were named after
him. The legacy of the Arditi del Popolo continued too, as many
militants joined the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil
War in 1936–9 and the Resistance during the Second World War.

Box 8.1 Bourgeois anti–Fascism: Non Mollare (‘Do not

give up’)
One evening in January 1925, a history professor, Gaetano
Salvemini, met with a group of friends and former students in
Florence and decided to launch a clandestine newspaper, as the
freedom of the press no longer existed. Moving rapidly between
offices to avoid Fascist surveillance, the group published 2,000–
3,000 copies of each edition. The newspaper could not publish
more than two issues at any one printshop, as the premises were
discovered and burned out by the Fascists. Reference to
democratic legality, civil liberties and the honour of a people
reminded the paper’s readership of the ideals of the
Risorgimento, of the struggle for Italian unification against the
Austrians, and of the victory in the Great War. Italy would not
have peace, they argued in February 1925, until ‘the shame of
this regime is erased, a regime which uses, as instruments of
government ... destruction, intimidation, assault, homicide and
arson’. The Fascists were not solely responsible for such criminal
acts; the Italian people deserved some of the blame for enduring
Fascism passively, showing ‘little moral vigour’ in a ‘serious
symptom of the low level of our public morality’: ‘We do not
believe that the murder of a Member of Parliament [Matteotti],
ordered by the prime minister, can be regarded, in Italy, as a
secondary event’ (June 1925). The last issue of the paper (which
could no longer be published because of the destruction of
printing offices, protracted physical violence and the arrests of
contributors) drew pessimistic conclusions regarding the
fundamentally unequal conditions of the struggle:

Fascism has been compared to an occupation army: it is

precisely true ... Many people in Europe are blaming the
Italians because they do not revolt against such oppression.
 But a revolt is, for the moment, technically impossible. Was
it possible to blame the Belgian people for not revolting
against the German invaders? It is exactly the same thing.
Fascism has at its disposal 200,000 blackshirts, all the
military forces of the state, 100,000 policemen, and the
possibility of providing immunity to all the criminals who are
now willing to act against the anti–Fascists.
(October 1925)

MUSSOLINI’S ITALY

The destruction of democratic institutions occurred in a short period

between 1925 and 1927: laws against the freedom of the press and
for the censorship of critical newspapers, the dissolution of political
associations and any political party other than the PNF (National
Fascist Party), a new Penal Code that transformed Italy legally into a
totalitarian state, the reinstatement of the death penalty, the
abolition of mayors and local city councils and their replacement by
podestà (nominated by the government), the neutralization of
parliamentary powers so that only the Grand Council of Fascism (the
supreme body of the Fascist party created in December 1922)
remained, the institution of the Special Tribunal for State Security to
deal with political opponents, and the establishment of the confino
to keep opponents for years, without trial, in remote villages in the
south or on islands, were all put in place during these two years.
These measures indicated a desire to return to a pre–Enlightenment
age, with values and priorities that challenged the Enlightenment
heritage: authority came to be preferred to liberty, and the rights of
men and citizens were deemed to be outweighed by those of the
patria, which was in turn identified with the Fascist state. As a result,
many non–Fascists had to pretend to be Fascists, or risk being
ostracized by the patria and losing their rights. In the late 1920s,
and particularly in the 1930s, it became impossible to work in the
public sector without a party membership card (which for this reason
began to be called the ‘bread card’). Fascism did not organize
elections, but instead imparted directives from above; increasingly,
as the dictatorship progressed, Mussolini became the central figure
as the founder of the party, the head of the government, and Duce
(Leader) of the Italian people – a Latin term (Dux) that did not mean
anything in juridical terms but was supposed to indicate the
existence of a mystical relationship of trust and communion between
leader and led.
Indeed, as Emilio Gentile’s research has demonstrated, Fascism
organized a political-religious mobilization based on faith and, when
referring to Mussolini, employed a vocabulary more suited to religion
than to politics. The attribution of qualities such as omnipotence,
youth and immortality were encouraged by Vatican support for the
new cult: Pope Pius XI (Pope between 1922 and 1939) claimed that
Mussolini had escaped death (after several attempts on his life),
which proved that God had saved him for the well-being of the
nation. Mussolini was also omnipresent, taking advantage of the
invention of the radio – thousands of loudspeakers appeared in
Italian piazzas – and by travelling around the peninsula as no prime
minister had done before, giving speeches everywhere. Italians saw
him in the flesh, and participated in what became a collective
political ‘theatre’, answering rhetorical questions posed by the Duce
with pre-arranged slogans. The foremost stage was Piazza Venezia in
Rome, where Mussolini established his office and gave speeches
from a balcony overlooking the Vittoriano monument of Italian
unification now renamed the ‘Altar of the Patria’ in honour of victory
in the Great War, with the addition of the symbolism of the
‘Unknown Soldier’ to that of the Risorgimento. In this way, Fascism
anointed itself heir to the Risorgimento, the process of national
‘becoming’ that the war and post-war period had completed.
Gatherings in Piazza Venezia appeared in endless LUCE films shown
in Italian cinemas, together with images updating viewers on the
achievements of the regime, its public works and architecture, and
on the activities of Il Duce. Mussolini did not ‘do politics’ in the old
way: he got up very early in the morning, rode horses, fenced, flew
as his own pilot from city to city, spoke other languages, wrote,
swam, threshed wheat, signed international treaties, received the
world’s powerful, and made proclamations to the masses. Carri di
tespi, small mobile theatres, took plays and opera around Italy, and
LUCE films could be seen even in small villages, in mobile cinemas. A
key slogan of the time was ‘going towards the people’.
Tradition and modernity, conservatism and revolutionary slogans
coexisted in the culture and politics of Fascism, which promoted both
a new ‘futuristic’ Italy of modern cities with white concrete buildings,
a militaristic country of battleships and aeroplanes but
simultaneously a country in which the peasantry was the pillar of the
nation. The moral and physical health of the peasantry was held up
as an example for eugenic purposes, while ruralization was linked to
the desire for an increase in population, which in turn furthered the
aim of imperialist expansion. LUCE films pictured Italians travelling
on holiday by train and by car, and joyful songs such as Mille lire al
mese (‘1,000 lire a month’) created the imagery of the petit-
bourgeois dream, though in reality, both the first mass-produced Fiat
cars (called Balilla) and tickets for rail travel were very expensive,
and most people travelled to work on foot or by bicycle; economic
depression and protectionism led to a general decrease in
consumption that was at odds with Fascist propaganda.
Women were the principal object of a demographic campaign
linked by the regime to its need for greater military power. Welfare
and maternity incentives encouraged Italians to marry and have a
large number of offspring; new laws opposing ‘crimes against the
health and purity of the race’ made contraception illegal and turned
abortion into a crime against the state, carrying a penalty of 2–5
years imprisonment. From 1933, the institution of Mother and Child
Day (24 December) brought women with large numbers of children
from all over Italy to Rome to be awarded prizes. The laws and
ideology surrounding women’s fertility were supported by the
Catholic Church, which came to an agreement with the Fascist state
in 1929 (known as the Lateran Pacts) that ended more than fifty
years of Papal hostility towards the Italian state. Fascism was again
propelling Italy backwards by establishing conservative policies at
the same time as broadcasting a message of novelty and revolution.
This position is exemplified in the case of the regime’s attitude to
women: Fascism did not encourage women simply to stay at home
and breed, as the Catholic Church had always preferred, but also to
play a revolutionary role in the regime by producing and educating
new generations of Fascist warriors. The female reaction to these
policies was just one example of the way the population refused to
comply with those aspects of the system that called for personal
sacrifice: women continued to use birth control as much as they
were able, despite its illegality. If the population did grow under
Fascism it was as part of a generalized European trend of falling
infant mortality and rising life expectancy.
Linked with the demographic campaign was the reclamation of
marshes, though it remained limited to central Italy and was not
attempted in the poorer areas of the south, which remained prey to
malaria. After the Great War, the Sicilian Mafia had expanded its
control over land on the island, as many landowners called for
protection against the threat of land redistribution and the demands
of the peasantry. Like Fascist squads in other parts of Italy, the
Mafiosi were ready to shoot socialists and trade unionists. Fascism
became rooted in the south, particularly after the March on Rome,
when many liberals and landowners joined the winning side.
Between 1925 and 1931, the state conducted a fierce campaign
against the Sicilian Mafia, reminiscent of the post-unification
campaign against banditry unleashed by the liberal state. The
campaign brought about the destruction of many criminal
associations and families, but by the 1930s the Mafia had begun to
reorganize, by which point state propaganda had ceased to mention
Sicilian criminality.
In terms of art and architecture, the Fascist regime had
incorporated and developed aspects of the Futurist movement. In
1914, a few years after Marinetti had published the Futurist
Manifesto, the architect Antonio Sant’Elia published the Manifesto of
Futurist Architecture. Italian architecture, ran the Manifesto, like its
literature, painting and music, should destroy Italy’s past and
traditions, should embrace modernity to the extent that every age
ought to rebuild its cities, and should be both functional and rational.
This movement was supported partly by the Fascist regime and was
realized in many 1930s public buildings in Italian cities, including the
railway stations in Florence, Milan and Rome, and new cities such as
Sabaudia on the reclaimed Pontine marshes. The architect Marcello
Piacentini rationalized this style further, proposing a ‘Fascist style’
that hinted at the Roman past but added what he called a ‘virile
nakedness’ in buildings with sharp-cornered pillars and giant
columns to provide a sense of monumentalism.
Fascism was both a return to the past in terms of law and politics
and an entirely new form of ‘mass’ dictatorship. It took advantage of
the existing rhetoric of a ‘religion of the patria’, a powerful
ideological component that had first been raised during the
Risorgimento, then strengthened by victory in the Great War, and
which could now be conveniently disseminated by the new
technology of radio and cinema, which developed at just the right
time for the regime. The myth of ancient Rome was revived once
more, with Mussolini cast as a new Augustus, his regime seen as a
new imperial age, symbolized by the introduction of a new calendar,
the foundation of new towns such as Littoria, youth associations
named ‘Youth of the Lictors’ and ‘Sons of the She–Wolf’ and the
adoption of the Roman salute. Perhaps the best single example of all
the elements of the Fascist discourse is the Fascist anthem
Giovinezza (‘Youth’), which was played at most public events, and
sung by children in schools:
Salute, o heroic people/Salute, o immortal Fatherland !/Your children have been
reborn/With faith in the Ideal//The value of your warriors/The virtue of your
pioneers,/The vision of Alighieri/Shines today in every heart//Youth, youth/Spring of
beauty/Your song rings and goes/Through the sorrows of life//Within Italy’s borders/The
Italians have been remade/Mussolini has remade them/For tomorrow’s war//For the joy
of work/For peace and for the laurel/For the shame of those/ Who have disowned the
Fatherland//Youth, youth . . . /The poets and the craftsmen,/The lords and the
peasants/with the pride of the Italians swear faith to Mussolini//There is no poor
town/which does not join the ranks,/which does not unfurl the flags/of Fascism the
redeemer//Youth, youth . . .
Consistent with the rhetoric of an empire that would be rebuilt
through the acquisition of colonies, and with the foundation of five
new towns on the reclaimed Pontine marshes in central Italy in the
1930s, Mussolini also set restrictions on emigration. Fascist
propaganda insisted that Italians no longer needed to leave their
country, and that one day, once Italy had its empire, emigrants could
return to work in the Fatherland and its colonies, no longer exploited
by others, but as employers themselves. In the meantime, Italians
abroad were supposed to maintain their Italianness, while at the
same time they were to ‘be remade’ just as, in the words of
Giovinezza, they were being remade in the Fatherland. Institutions
like the Fasci abroad intended to transform Little Italies around the
world into little Fascist Italies, microcosms of the Mussolini
experiment in Italy. Much of the Fasci propaganda was mere rhetoric
– Isnenghi has defined Fascism as a ‘regime of words’: however,
these were words that many wanted to believe were facts, as the
exiled Professor Salvemini had to acknowledge on arrival among the
Italian community of New York:
[These emigrants were] hard workers, linked to their families by heroic bonds of
sacrifice. Arrived in America, illiterate, shoeless and with bags on their shoulders, they
had to face unheard-of difficulties and suffering, despised by everybody because they
were Italians. And now they heard, even from Americans, that Mussolini had made Italy
a great country, where no one was unemployed, where everyone had a bath at home,
where trains were on time, and that Italy was respected and feared in the world.
Whoever challenged this view, not only destroyed their ideal Fatherland, but also hurt
their personal dignity. Italy and the Italian government and Mussolini were in their
imagination an indivisible whole; to criticise Mussolini meant to fight Italy and to offend
them as individuals.
(Salvemini, 1973, p. 625)

Any discussion of the question of the extent of popular consensus

achieved by the regime has to take all these aspects into
consideration: the Italian population took part in political
demonstrations as mass rituals, and millions of Italians privately, at
school, or at summer camps, wrote letters to Mussolini
demonstrating belief in his cult – around which the organizational
energies of the regime were permanently mobilized. However, the
image of all Italians as convinced Fascists who were ideologically
and politically involved is as misleading as that of all Italians as non–
Fascists forced to take part in the regime’s initiatives. It would be
simplistic to think that most Italians accepted Fascism out of
convenience or because they were forced to. The expression ‘honest
dissimulation’ (first used in Counter–Reformation Italy, as was shown
in Chapter 5), has been used to describe the attitude of those who
took part in rallies and meetings, who represented the regime in
their jobs, who saluted Il Duce and wore a black shirt – including
artists and intellectuals such as the poet Giuseppe Ungaretti, Luigi
Pirandello and all the professors and scientists who swore oaths of
loyalty to the regime. As Isnenghi has suggested, it would be more
honest to acknowledge that many believed in what they were doing,
and that they identified with one of the many variants of Fascism –
whether with the San Sepolcro programme, the resurrection of a
new Roman empire or, later, the emergence of a new Nazi–Fascist
European order. As Isnenghi has argued, Fascism was a ‘fruit of
Italian history’; it can, therefore, be considered a ‘poisonous fruit’,
but not an extraneous one ‘fallen, who knows how, from another
tree’.

WORDS THAT DID NOT BECOME REALITY: FASCIST WARS AND

DEFEATS

Domestic policies regarding, for example, the education of youth,

women or the rural campaign, were strictly linked with the grandiose
aims of the regime’s foreign policy. The 1920s have been defined as
a period of ‘pacific’ foreign policy because, despite the regime
continuing to make clear its discontent with the Versailles Treaty,
there was no practical possibility of overturning it. In 1923, when
four Italian soldiers were killed in the Greek part of Corfu while on a
League of Nations mission, Italian forces bombarded and occupied
the island, killing at least fifteen civilians. The League forced Italy to
leave Corfu, and for the rest of the 1920s Mussolini focused on the
‘re-conquest’ of Libyan territory, where Italian occupation had, after
the 1911 war, remained geographically limited and precarious. The
Libyan campaign was a rather traditional colonial war, efficient and
ruthless, accompanied by little clamour or propaganda, and later
removed from national memory and historiography, until recent
studies by Italian historians Angelo Del Boca and Giorgio Rochat.
The most difficult area to control was Cyrenaica, where the
population resisted occupation. In 1930, the Italian army deported
more than 80,000 semi-nomads to concentration camps, where they
lived in overcrowded conditions with a lack of food and hygiene,
resulting in the deaths of half their number in three years. In a
solemn proclamation in 1932, Marshal Pietro Badoglio announced
the ‘pacification’ of Libya. The Libyan deportation and genocide was
up to that point the gravest crime that could be laid at the door of
Italian colonialism.
The victory of Nazism in Germany boosted Italy’s chance of
pursuing a revisionist foreign policy. Mussolini’s speeches and articles
in the Italian press increasingly included attacks on the League of
Nations and on disarmament. In 1932, Mussolini wrote an entry for
the XIVth volume of the Italian Encyclopedia entitled ‘the doctrine of
Fascism’ in which he stated: ‘Peace is foreign to Fascism, as all
international institutions for peace are ... Only war can bring all
human energies to the highest pitch and can ennoble peoples who
fight.’ But how was Italy’s power to be felt in the world? How and
where was the new empire to be built and through a war against
whom?
Mussolini’s starting point in the quest for total power was
inevitably the Great War, which according to the Fascists had entitled
Italy to the Slav-inhabited Adriatic coast, but which Italy had failed
to acquire. As research by Rochat and MacGregor Knox has
demonstrated, the Allies and the neighbouring Slavs came to be
regarded as a major obstacle to Italian ambitions. The other area of
Fascist interest was the Mediterranean, which Mussolini claimed
must again become a Roman sea. Ethiopia was not Mussolini’s first
choice as an area for new territory, though he had expressed
interest in colonies there since 1925. It was only in 1932, when it
became clear to Italian leaders that France would not tolerate Fascist
forays into the Balkans, that Mussolini began planning the invasion
of Ethiopia, which was an independent state and a member of the
League of Nations. However, when Italy invaded Ethiopia in October
1935, conquering it by May 1936, the only intervention from the
League was economic sanctions – a measure that rallied Italians
behind the dictatorship and marked the highest point of consensus
with the regime. The League gave Mussolini an enormous
opportunity to dramatize Italy’s struggle as a virtuous one against
the greedy and plutocratic Western powers, whose ruthless
immorality made them a much more dangerous enemy than
Ethiopia. The regime began to describe Italy as a besieged nation; in
the diplomatic correspondence of Mussolini’s ambassador to London,
Dino Grandi, the British capital was described as the enemy’s most
dangerous trench and headquarters – this was a war fought, he
believed, not on the Ethiopian Tigrai, but on the British Thames.
Militarily, the two enemies were not well matched; Haile Selassie,
Emperor of Ethiopia, had a much smaller army, little artillery and a
very limited air force, while Italy employed modern weaponry
against the civilian population. More than 2,000 bombs containing
poison gas, which was forbidden by international conventions, were
dropped, to destroy Ethiopian resistance.
Subsequently, Mussolini’s policy was characterized by open
hostility to the Western powers in the Mediterranean, intervention in
Spain, the introduction of racial laws, the annexation of Albania, and
entry into the Second World War. These steps became feasible
because of the growth of a domestic consensus around the African
victory and the license for aggression that German dominance
conferred. After the Ethiopian war, more ‘glorious’ enterprises
became necessary in order to maintain support at home. Foreign
policy became the main feature of the regime in the late 1930s,
which also served to keep Italians ‘mobilized’ at home. The most
important domestic policy change during those years were the racial
laws of 1938, which decreed that Jews who had been born abroad,
many of whom came from Nazi Germany, must be deported, that
marriages between Aryans and Jews were forbidden, that Jews could
no longer hold public office, could not join the National Fascist Party,
and could not own more than fifty hectares of land or run any
business with over 100 employees. As a result, 6,000 Italian Jews
left the country in the following three years, Jewish-run firms closed
down, Jewish children were expelled from state schools, one in
twelve university teachers lost their jobs, and others left in protest.
The laws outraged not only the business and academic elite but also
the Church, which regarded them as a breach of the 1929 Concordat
because they prohibited mixed marriages between Catholics and
baptized Jews. For many Jews the laws posed a serious problem of
financial survival: with the exception of very wealthy families, many
found themselves suddenly without employment and had to live in
precarious conditions. In the autobiographical novel, The Garden of
the Finzi–Continis, Giorgio Bassani recalled the experience of his own
family, an average wealthy Jewish household from Venetia:
My father had volunteered in the war and joined the fascist party in 1919; I myself had
belonged to the GUF [Fascist University Groups] until just now. In fact, we’d always
been the most normal people you could think of, so normal we were downright banal, in
fact, and for this reason it seemed to me really ridiculous that now he should suddenly
expect us to behave in an exceptional way, just like that, out of the blue.
(Bassani, 1974, p. 135)

The decision to attack the Jews was an extension of Mussolini’s long-

held anti–Africanism; laws were issued in Ethiopia from August 1936
outlining a system of racial separation. However, while many Jews
anticipated a racist campaign from the time of the Ethiopian war,
others expressed incredulity. As Primo Levi recalled, in The Drowned
and the Saved, instead of confessing to being a political opponent
when he was caught by the Fascist police in 1943, he declared
himself a Jew, for which he was sent to Auschwitz. There were two
separate phases of the persecution which, despite being different in
nature and purpose, are utterly interconnected: between 1938 and
1943 there was an attack on the rights of Jewish people, followed by
physical persecution between 1943 and 1945. During the first phase,
Jews lost significant civil rights; and during the second, deportations
to German extermination camps resulted in the deaths of almost
10,000 people.
 Anti–Fascist exiles benefited from the backlash against the racial
laws and from the changed climate of opinion. Also having a major
impact on anti–Fascism, Italian and German intervention in the
Spanish Civil War in 1936 witnessed Garibaldi battalions of the
International Brigades fighting Italian troops as well as Franco and
anticipating, within Spain, the Italian civil war of 1943–5. In March
1937, at Guadalajara, anti–Fascist brigades proved themselves
capable of defeating the Italian militia sent to help the Spanish
Nationalist rebels. Anti–Fascist exile Carlo Rosselli launched the
slogan ‘Today in Spain, tomorrow in Italy’, suggesting that Spain was
the first stage of the Italian resistance. However, neither he nor his
brother Nello would experience it: they were assassinated by the
Fascists in Paris in 1937.
In May 1939, Italy and Germany signed the ‘Pact of Steel’ in
which, unlike previous international alliances, the allies had to
support one another in offensive wars or actions, not only in those of
defence. Also, the Pact was based on the concept of a common
civilization and ideology. When Italy invaded Albania in April 1939,
the Fascist press portrayed it as a peaceful endowment of civilization
upon a population that had always wanted to be united with the
destiny of Rome. In reality, Mussolini decided to develop a ‘parallel’
war, so that when Germany provoked wider war (which seemed very
likely at that point) Italy would not be too dependent on its ally:
indeed, when Italy entered the Second World War, it continued its
Balkan orientation with an attack on Greece in October 1940. Italy’s
period of ‘non-belligerence’ after the German invasion of Poland in
September 1939 was not one of ‘neutrality’, since Mussolini never
intended to be neutral, but of holding back in order to be better
prepared militarily. In June 1940, Italy entered the war at the last
moment, shortly before the French were defeated, in the hope of
gaining some of the spoils of victory.

Box 8.2 The Jews and Italian society before the racial
laws
 During Napoleonic rule, Jews acquired equal rights with
Catholics, and while some rights were withdrawn during the
Restoration it was not possible to reverse the tide completely –
Jews were sent back to the ghettoes only in the Papal States.
The ghetto was definitively abolished following the liberation of
Rome on 20 September 1870. Classicist historian and anti–
Fascist exile Arnaldo Momigliano emphasized that Catholic
indifference allowed the Fascists and the Nazis to employ anti–
Semitism:

Whatever we write on the period that ends up with Fascist

and Nazi collaborationists sending millions of Jews to
concentration camps (and my mother and my father were
among the victims there), one statement needs to be
repeated. This huge slaughter would have never occurred
without the indifference, which had continued for centuries,
towards Jewish fellow-countrymen. Indifference was the
final product of the Church’s hostility, for which the only
solution to the Jewish question was ‘conversion’.
With the Lateran pacts of 1929, Catholicism became the state
religion. This changed the juridical condition of other religions
that had been considered equal to the Catholic Church under the
Liberal Zanardelli’s Penal Code of 1889. After 1929, other
religions were considered hierarchically inferior to the Catholic
Church. Anti–Semites and pro–Nazis such as Giovanni Preziosi
and Telesio Interlandi reinforced their campaign, particularly
after 1934, when a cell of the clandestine anti–Fascist group
Giustizia e Libertà was caught in Turin and it emerged that many
anti–Fascists were Jews. The identification of Jews with anti–
Fascism became a constant propaganda argument from the
regime, and Jews began to be attacked on a scale previously
unheard of.

It quickly became clear that war propaganda was composed of

hollow words that bore little relation to reality, as the Italian army
was defeated in Greece (rescued only by German intervention) and
northern Africa. Indeed, many young Fascists who had earnestly
believed in the regime’s war were disillusioned by defeat and
became anti–Fascists, and, in some cases, later partisans. One of
them, the writer Nuto Revelli, an extraordinary narrator of the ‘war
from below’, confronted reality during the battle in the Western Alps
against France:
Let us also reflect on the frozen soldiers. 2125: too many in a military campaign that
lasted a few days and was fought on our own land. They wore pieces of cloth on their
feet: cloth instead of socks, which wrapped the foot in a shoe of poor quality leather. It
was like walking with bare feet in the snow . .. the uniforms were made of fake wool,
the same that we brought, together with those cardboard shoes, to the Greek–Albanian
front and to Russia . .. Not to speak of the weapons . . . the artillery was outdated, a
military residue of the First World War.

In 1941, the general of Revelli’s military academy informed the

soldiers that they were going to Russia, and added:
‘The war is going badly .. . Remember that the responsibility of the army’s incompetence
falls back on Fascism, not on the army.’
Those words hit me like a punch in my stomach.

One of the most moving memories of the Russian campaign, first

published in 1953, was written in a German camp in 1944 by the
Alpino (member of the Alpine troops) Mario Rigoni Stern, and is a
testimony of how the Alpini first and foremost fought a battle to
preserve their life in the face of inhuman conditions. The collapse of
the army was accompanied by the collapse of the home front under
the weight of the news of military defeats, hunger and Allied
bombing.
The Allied landings in Sicily in June 1943 precipitated Mussolini’s
fall. With the war almost lost, on 25 July 1943, the king – for the
first time since the March on Rome – decided to act against
Mussolini after the Fascist Grand Council had voted in favour of
Mussolini’s dismissal. Il Duce was arrested, and Marshal Badoglio
became the new prime minister. Mussolini’s was a silent fall, imposed
from above, but it was immediately welcomed from below: as the
radio announced the news, the summer evening saw massive
crowds in the streets and piazzas, cheering and shouting that the
war and Fascism were over. The writer Cesare Pavese, in one of the
most famous novels of wartime Italy, described the arrival of the
news on a Piedmontese hill, where he lived with his landlady and her
mother:

Box 8.3 Italy under the bombs

The bombing of Italian cities began immediately in June 1940,
when Turin and Genoa were hit for the first time, followed by
attacks on Milan, Naples and Taranto. Successive attacks in 1942
and 1943 were much heavier than those of 1940–1, and by the
first half of 1943 all Italian regions had been bombed. In June
1943, Rome was hit for the first time. After the Allied landing,
the bombing of southern Italy began, by both the Allies and the
Germans. In 1943, after the heavy raids on Turin, Milan and
Genoa – by then in ruins – workers went on strike, demanding
peace. Women, who were disproportionately victimized by the
bombing, played a major role in organizing shelters and helping
refugees as well as organizing demonstrations against the
regime over the lack of civilian defence. The writer Natalia
Ginzburg, née Levi, who was from a Jewish anti–Fascist family in
Turin, described in her famous autobiographical book how the
bombing, more than anything else, revealed the reality of war to
Italians:

We supposed that the war would overwhelm us and turn

our lives upside-down. On the contrary many people
remained unaffected in their houses, living as they had
always done. When, however, everyone was thinking that
they had got away with it at little cost, and that there would
be no upheavals of any sort, no destruction of homes, nor
flights nor persecutions, all of a sudden bombs and mines
exploded everywhere; houses collapsed, and the streets
were full of ruins, soldiers and fugitives. There was not a
single person left who could pretend that it was nothing,
 shut his eyes, or stop his ears, or hide his head under the
pillows, there was not one. The war was like that in Italy.
(Ginzburg, 1967, p. 151)

Next day the news arrived . . . The people went down into the town, talking at the top
of their voices. Elvira knocked at my room and called to me through the door that the
war was over. Then she came in, and without looking at me because I was getting
dressed, told me, red in the face, that Mussolini had been thrown out. I came down and
found Egle and her mother. We listened to radio – London this time – I could no longer
doubt that the news was true. Her mother said: ‘But is the war over?’ ‘No; it’s just
beginning now’, I said cynically.
(Pavese, 1965, p. 40)

Although the radio made clear that the war would continue, the
population could not see any reason to go on fighting once the
regime had fallen. Moreover, as a famous Piedmontese partisan song
(entitled Badoglieide) later reminded them, Fascism was still there
with Badoglio ‘made fat by Fascism’, responsible for the war in
Ethiopia, for the shameful aggression against France, for the
massacre of the alpini in Russia and, finally, for having left the
Fascists in power and put anti–Fascists in prison: ‘the shirt was no
longer black/but Fascism remained in power’. There was a mass
reaction against the symbols of the dictatorship: images and statues
of Mussolini were taken down, images of Roman lictors on public
buildings destroyed, and streets renamed; the enraged population
needed to reject an entire age, to leave the past and part of
themselves behind – most people having been, or behaved as,
Fascists under the regime. In the meantime, secret bargaining
between the Allies and Badoglio led to an armistice on 8 September
and the Germans suddenly became the enemy. Again, the popular
reaction was a delighted belief that the war was really over. The
army collapsed and everyone escaped who could, starting with the
king and Badoglio, who abandoned Rome to German vengeance and
sought refuge in Allied-liberated southern Italy. Soldiers left the field
without orders in a large-scale repeat of Caporetto, pursuing what
seemed the only sensible idea: to go home – the title of a famous
film made later in 1961, Tutti a casa by Luigi Comencini. The
partisan Beppe Fenoglio (author of the well-known novel Johnny the
Partisan), told in Primavera di bellezza (‘Spring of beauty’) of the
shock with which a group of soldiers greeted the news:
The uniform wrapped them like a symbol of shame and death, the guns they were
holding no longer felt like honourable national weapons, but like individual tools good
for hunting or banditry.
...
As the soldier said, this is the complete forty-eight [1848]. Never
again will there ever be an army in Italy.

It was difficult to cross Italy and escape from the Germans; some
600,000 Italian soldiers were deported to German internment
camps. Women took on a major role of defending, feeding and
helping Italian and Allied soldiers, thus demonstrating that, despite
the lack of a state to give orders, civil society continued to function,
and a country named Italy still existed. Which Italy, however? Fascist
Italy had died, and the army and the state had collapsed. Some
historians claimed, therefore, that 8 September represented the
‘death of the Fatherland’. This was certainly the way that Fascists
felt: one of them, the young Carlo Mazzantini, expressed these
feelings in his wartime memoir A cercar la bella morte (‘Looking for
the beautiful death’): ‘There was no more Italy; there was no more
government, no more army ... Italy had become nothing more than
a territory with a population occupied by a foreign army.’
The masses sought ways to survive hunger and the bombing, and
waited for the end of the war, welcoming the Allies as liberators as
they progressed from southern to northern Italy. Such attitudes
expressed weariness and opportunism, but also the attraction of the
myth of America – the rich country to which many Italians had
emigrated – which was symbolized during those months by soldiers
bringing food, cigarettes and chocolate as the first products, for
many Italians, of a world of consumption they had admired in the
Hollywood movies they had still been permitted to watch under the
regime. The death of the old patria corresponded to the birth of a
new one – no longer that of Mussolini who, rescued by the Germans,
had established a Fascist republic controlled by the Nazis between
the west of Lake Garda and Venice (the Salò Republic), and no
longer that of Badoglio or the House of Savoy, irredeemably
compromised by contact with the past regime. The new Italy was
born in the mountains where partisan groups began to organize to
fight Fascism and Nazism. It was for this reason that the republic
founded in 1946 declared itself ‘born of the Resistance’. The names
that partisans chose for their armed groups were those of the heroes
of the Risorgimento (Garibaldi, Mazzini, Mameli), and of the heroes
of anti–Fascist martyrdom such as Matteotti, Gramsci and Rosselli.
The indication was that the time had come for a genuine second
Risorgimento, more democratic than the first, with reference not to
Cavour and the monarchy but to the republican and radical
components of the unification struggle.

ITALIAN ART OF THE RECONSTRUCTION

The years of reconstruction were also years of economic boom;

while Italian cities were still in ruins, the economy and society began
to change and to prepare for what was later called the ‘economic
miracle’ (between the mid-1950s and the mid-1960s). New forms of
artistic expression, particularly in cinema, architecture and design,
began to indicate society’s strong desire to break with the war and
with the Fascist past. After the war, the finest achievements of
Italian art were in cinema. Neo-realist cinema, compared by art
historians to the realism of Italian painting at the time of Caravaggio,
was characterized by a civil passion, which rejected both traditional
and Fascist rhetoric, and was aimed at discovering the real Italy in
its backwardness and misery (the Christian Democrat leader, Giulio
Andreotti, Italy’s prime minister for many years under the republic,
said that neo-realism ‘badly served the Fatherland’), but also in its
faith in the ability to renew itself. Neo-realism was characterized by a
philosophy and an aesthetic that distinguished Italian cinema from
that of other nations: it combined ‘humanitarian sympathy’ with
‘gentle cynicism’ which, as an American film review of Bicycle
Thieves by Vittorio De Sica (1948) put it in 1949, ‘Italians alone carry
as their trademark’. Neo-realism was a new Italian Renaissance that
shared with fifteenth-century humanism an emphasis on the role of
the individual. Poor Italians lived as miserably as the poor in other
countries, but their protests tended to take more individual forms,
unaided as they were by any institution (the protagonist of Bicycle
Thieves, for example, could not get any help from either the police
or the Communist Party). Neo-realist cinema portrayed pity for
humanity without offering any solution to its problems and, like the
Commedia dell’Arte in the seventeenth century, could be seen, as
described by Herbert Jacobson, an ‘old Italian recipe for living’.
The term neo-realism was borrowed from the nineteenth-century
literary genre verismo, which already enjoyed public popularity. As a
reaction to Futurism and decadence, this current re-emerged after
the war through writers such as Alberto Moravia who, in Time of
Indifference, portrayed a bourgeoisie without ideals, captured in the
banality of its conversations; or Corrado Alvaro, who revealed in
detail the Calabrian rural world. The writer Italo Calvino, who
described the non-heroic side of the Resistance movement in his
book The Path to the Spiders’ Nest, explained that neo-realism was
the cultural climate for his generation, which they could share, for
example, even during a journey on a train: ‘crammed with people
and bags of flour and oil drums, [where] every passenger would
recount to complete strangers the adventures which had befallen
him’. The same image can be found in the journey by boat to Sicily
described by Elio Vittorini in Conversation in Sicily.
Neo-realism also influenced Italian architecture. At the end of the
Second World War, over three million houses had been destroyed or
badly damaged. During the reconstruction, the Italian architectural
and design avant-garde focused for the first time on the needs of
the working classes. These were years of democratic idealism and
enthusiasm, and architects wanted to reconcile new developments in
housing with the new democracy. For an architect such as Ernesto
Rogers, the vision of prefabricated buildings in the middle of
nowhere represented the physical manifestation of hopes for the
future, though neo-realist cinema did not see the boom in such a
positive light: in 1960, Federico Fellini’s film, La Dolce Vita,
juxtaposed the ‘miracle’ with the decadence and shallow voyeurism
of the protagonists, interpreting the new buildings in the periphery
of Rome like signs of despair and desolation of a dream gone wrong.
Plans designed to increase employment and build workers’ homes
denoted a reaction against the anonymity of 1930s’ ‘rationalist’
architecture. A return to the Baroque age was proposed in the use of
different façades and balconies with roofs and external stairs. Newly-
created districts were supposed to look as if they were the product
of historical sedimentation, hinting at the human and social ups and
downs expressed by the architecture of earlier ages.
At the same time, new furnishings and new interior design
developed to become a symbol of regeneration from the late 1940s
onwards. The ‘ideal home’ of the boom years that followed was not
designed around the needs of everyday life, but emerged instead
from the dream kitchens of America as seen in Hollywood films and,
later, in television soap operas. Italian companies such as Zanussi
began production for the middle classes and for export. As Ginsborg
has observed, the economic crisis of the 1970s did not interrupt the
growth in prosperity – by 1975, 92 per cent of families had a
television, 94 per cent a refrigerator, and 76 per cent owned a
washing machine – and the housing situation improved significantly
by the end of the 1970s. A process of aestheticization began,
focusing on the sculptural form of objects; Ernesto Rogers coined
the slogan ‘from the spoon to the city’ to indicate that everything
now had to be ‘designed’.

ITALIAN SOCIETY DURING THE REPUBLIC

In 1945, in the first issue of Il Politecnico, the writer Elio Vittorini

reflected on the consequences of Fascist crimes:
For some time it will be difficult to say if anyone has lost or won in this war. But it is
certain that a lot has been lost. The dead, if we count them, are more children than
soldiers: the ruins are of cities that had enjoyed 25 centuries of life.
At the same time, he was reflecting on the responsibility of an entire
culture in allowing those crimes to happen and, correspondingly, on
the responsibility of that culture to now shape a democratic society.
In the post-war years, anti–Fascist authors who had been forced into
silence for years under Fascism produced a wealth of literary works;
many of these books had been written during the dictatorship but
had gone unpublished. In 1945, Carlo Levi published Christ Stopped
at Eboli, an account based on his experience of the confino that
brought to public attention the problems of southern Italy. While in
exile, Ignazio Silone described a desperate peasant universe in
Abruzzo under Fascism in the novel Fontamara, first published in
Italy in 1945. From 1948, Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks began to be
issued, including his revealing reflections on Italian society since the
Risorgimento. It was as if novelists and poets had suddenly returned
to life after a long hibernation, as Carlo Levi wrote in 1950, as if
everyone could be a politician:
Everyone still seemed to be living in the exciting atmosphere of the Resistance, and no
one thought that there was any difference between politicians and ordinary people;
everyone acted naturally, in an independent world where there were no barriers in the
factories, at work or in the local government of the Liberation Committee. Just like any
miracle, that active and creative freedom lasted very briefly, but at the time it was real,
you could touch it with your hand and you could see it written on people’s faces. (Levi,
2007, p. 45)

Following a popular referendum in 1946, Italy became a republic.

For the first time, the country had real universal suffrage with the
introduction of female voting. The Italian Constitution of 1948
combined the aspirations and values of the anti–Fascist parties. Their
unity, however, was soon disrupted by the Cold War; because Italy
was in the Western sphere of influence, Western leaders wanted to
prevent a revived Italian Communism from coming to power. The
United States and the Vatican strongly backed the Christian
Democrat Party, who consequently won the first national elections,
held in 1948.

Box 8.4 The Republican Constitution

Based on anti–Fascism and created by the leaders of the parties
that had taken part in the Resistance, it was the most democratic
constitution in the Western world. It reflected the awkward
compromise between the left and the Catholics visible in the
many emphases on ‘work’, ‘progress’, ‘people’ and ‘equality’, as
well as the persistence of the agreement between the formerly
Fascist state and the Church. Decentralization, the rejection of
militarism and the protection of minorities all marked a will to
reverse Fascist trends and policies:
Article 1:
Italy is a democratic republic based on labour.
Article 3:
(1) All citizens have equal social status and are equal before
the law, without regard to their sex, race, language,
religion, political opinions, and personal or social condition.
(2) It is the duty of the republic to remove all economic and
social obstacles that, by limiting the freedom and equality
of citizens, prevent full individual development and the
participation of all workers in the political, economic, and
social organization of the country.
Article 5:
The republic, one and indivisible, recognizes and promotes
local autonomy; it fully applies the administrative
decentralization of state services and adopts principles and
methods of legislation meeting the requirements of autonomy
and decentralization.
Article 6:
The republic protects linguistic minorities by special laws.
Article 7:
(1) State and Catholic Church are, each within their own
reign, independent and sovereign.
 (2) Their relationship is regulated by the Lateran Pacts.
Amendments to these pacts which are accepted by both
parties do not require the procedure of constitutional
amendments.
Article 11:
Italy repudiates war as an instrument offensive to the liberty
of the peoples and as a means for settling international
disputes; it agrees to limitations of sovereignty where they are
necessary to allow for a legal system of peace and justice
between nations, provided the principle of reciprocity is
guaranteed; it promotes and encourages international
organizations furthering such ends.

Norman Lewis, an English officer stationed in Italy, observed as

early as 1944 that Christian Democracy was the most likely party to
run Italy after the war: not tainted by compromise with Fascism (or
by too much compromise with anti–Fascism, as its contribution to
the armed resistance had been minimal), backed by the Church,
industrialists and landowners, and enjoying an existing network of
religious organizations around the country (particularly in rural
areas), run by an army of nuns and priests. The time when the
Catholic Church had been an enemy of the state had now passed.
The elections of 1948 represented a fight not just between
political parties, but between two ideas of civilization. Christian
Democrat election posters showed monsters destroying families with
the Kremlin in the background, or the image of a citizen in the
polling station with the words: ‘God can see you, Stalin can’t.’ In a
famous film from 1952 (Don Camillo, from a successful novel by
Giovanni Guareschi, The Little World of Don Camillo) a priest from a
Po Valley village tries to refuse to baptize the baby of the Communist
mayor, Peppone, by telling his wife that he could not be sure of the
child’s legitimacy, since Communists believed in free love. The
message was that Communists opposed the family (the most
important value in Italian life) but also that even Communists,
though in theory irreligious, wanted to baptize their children.
While the Church had been deeply rooted for centuries in the
countryside, peasant revolts in the late 1940s and early 1950s
demonstrated a Communist militancy that stemmed from
experiences under Liberal Italy (like those of the Sicilian fasci and
the land struggles in the Po Valley during and after the Great War),
destroyed by agrarian Fascism but reborn after the Liberation. The
peasants of the Po Valley and Apulia, Sicily, Calabria and central Italy
became the protagonists in a bitter struggle against landowners to
implement promised land reform. As had been the case in the
socialist struggles of Liberal Italy, Communism was fused with
utopian, religious and mystical elements of peasant culture. In 1950,
of the two million hectares the government had promised to co-
operatives, only 250,000 had been assigned; between 1945 and
1952, the police killed 84 peasants during demonstrations (mainly in
the south, with numerous deaths in Calabria, Apulia and Basilicata);
in Sicily, it was often the Mafia that opened fire, as in the 1947
massacre at Portella della Ginestra carried out by the bandit
Salvatore Giuliano. The state struggle against Communism also
extended to the northern factories, where workers could easily be
dismissed for political reasons, and the police shot at workers during
trade union demonstrations, particularly between 1947 and 1953,
under Christian Democrat interior minister Mario Scelba. At the same
time, in the Cold War context and in a country with the largest
Communist Party in the Western world, the Italian and American
secret services organized an illegal, anti–Communist, clandestine
network called ‘Stay Behind’ codenamed Gladio, which was intended
to prevent a Communist take-over in Italy, and only came to light in
the 1990s. This situation, together with coalitions (of the Christian
Democracy, the Liberal Party and, from 1963, the Socialist Party)
which helped to maintain a permanent DC (Democrazia Cristiana)
majority, has been called a ‘blocked system’ or ‘imperfect bi-
polarism’ because it made it practically impossible for the PCI to
enter government. In 1960, an attempt by Christian Democracy to
govern in alliance with the reborn Fascist party (the Italian Social
Movement – MSI, founded in 1946), as well as the decision to grant
permission to the MSI to hold its national congress in Genoa (where
the resistance had been particularly strong), revealed that the
memory of the civil war was still very much alive. A mass
demonstration was organized in Genoa against the MSI and the then
Christian Democrat prime minister, Fernando Tambroni, which
attracted 100,000 protesters. Despite facing police violence, the
movement spread to other cities, from Piedmont to Sicily, forcing the
MSI to abandon its meeting and Tambroni to resign. What struck
contemporary observers was the presence of many young people
protesting alongside partisans, a protest not only against the
prospect of a return of Fascism but also against the power and
corruption of politicians, the violence of the police and industrialists,
and the fact that, in order to find work, recommendations of priests
were more relevant than a worker’s skill. As Carlo Levi wrote in
1960, it was protest for a freedom to be gained and not just for a
freedom to be defended.
The protests of the 1960s reached their climax in 1968–9. In
1967, a democratic priest, Don Lorenzo Milani, wrote A Letter to a
Teacher, which challenged the class character of Italian schools and
became a standard text for a generation of students in schools and
universities; Italian students protested against authority, against the
dominant culture, and against the individualistic values of the
economic boom. In 1969, the revolt moved to the factories, with
mass strikes at Fiat and all over Italy during the so-called ‘hot
autumn’. These protests were also a consequence of the growth in
the working class, a proletariat that was mainly rural and southern in
origin, semi-skilled and concentrated in large factories. Workers’
wages were among the lowest in Europe, and outside the factory
their basic needs – adequate transport, medical care, schooling for
children and housing – were not being met. The protest thus
expanded to embrace the rest of society, generating new forms of
collective action that brought families together in a network of
solidarity. In the families of political militants, women began to break
with their roles as housewives, roles that had intensified in the post-
war years of economic boom, with a diminished need for women to
work outside the home, children staying at school for longer, and
with constant Christian Democrat propaganda and TV advertising
which insisted that a woman’s duty was to stay at home. Women
organized protests outside factories and took part in the occupation
of housing. By taking this path, the movement of protest moved first
from universities and schools to factories, and then into wider
society and the individual family. Democratic currents within the
Catholic Church, following a thread that had been present for
centuries, proposed again that the Church should be on the side of
the poor and not on the side of the powerful. To the left of the
Communist Party, which had never been committed to revolution,
radical anti-capitalist groups emerged with names such as Lotta
Continua (‘The Struggle Continues’), Potere operaio (‘Workers’
power’) and, in the 1970s, Autonomia Operaia (‘Workers’
autonomy’). A famous protest song of the time, alarming to both
industrialists and politicians, included the refrain: ‘What do we want?
We want everything/continuous fight in the factory and outside
it/Communism shall triumph’.
A response came, in different phases between 1969 to 1980,
through a series of atrocities later known as ‘the strategy of tension’.
In December 1969, with factories occupied and high levels of social
conflict all over Italy, a bomb exploded in Piazza Fontana in Milan,
killing sixteen people. Giuseppe Pinelli, an anarchist interrogated
about the event in a police station, died by falling from a window in
the building. An inquiry carried out by journalists and left-wing
militants, and published a few months later, documented the links
between the murders, the secret services and the Italian state. The
‘long 1968’ continued in Italy for a decade, shrouded in a climate of
violence. Neo–Fascists committed further atrocities, detonating a
bomb in Piazza Loggia in Brescia in 1974 which killed eight people,
and another at Bologna railway station in 1980 in which eighty-five
people were killed; then, from the mid-1970s, red terrorism (based
on the Red Brigades, first created in 1970) began to kidnap and kill
targeted politicians.

Box 8.5 Two intellectuals reflect on the strategy of

tension
The playwright Dario Fo (winner of the Nobel prize for literature
in 1997) sided with the left-wing movement and dedicated a play
to Pinelli: The Accidental Death of an Anarchist, while the poet,
writer and film director Pier Paolo Pasolini wrote a reflection on
the responsibility of intellectuals in unmasking the Christian
Democracy and neo–Fascist violence in Italy:

I know. I know the names of those responsible for what is

called a ‘golpe’ [coup] (which is in fact a series of golpes
instituted as a system to protect power). I know the names
of those responsible for the slaughter in Milan on 12
December 1969. I know the names of those responsible for
the slaughter in Brescia in 1974. I know the names of those
who, in between going to mass, have ensured political
protection for old generals, for young neo–Fascists ... I
know these names and I know all the facts (attempted
violence against institutions and murders) of which they are
guilty. I know. But I have no evidence. I do not even have
clues. I know them because I am an intellectual, a writer,
one who seeks to follow all current events, to know
everything that is published, to imagine all the facts that
are not known or that are kept silent.
(Pasolini, ‘What is this golpe?’, Il Corriere della Sera,
14 November 1974)

In the mid-1970s, the Communist Party decided for the first time
to support the Christian Democrats in a defence of Italian democracy
from terrorism, both black and red, a collaboration known as the
‘historic compromise’. In 1978, the Red Brigades kidnapped the
Christian Democrat leader responsible for the dialogue with the
Communist Party, Aldo Moro. Following the refusal of his party and
the Vatican to deal with the terrorists, Moro was assassinated less
than two months later. In the same year, the famous Sicilian writer
Leonardo Sciascia wrote an enquiry based on a careful study of the
letters Moro sent from his ‘people’s prison’. Sciascia claimed that the
Christian Democracy had decided to leave Moro to his destiny on
purpose, worried by his strategy of including the Communist Party in
the government (his absence from parliament was ‘more productive’
than his silence). Sciascia commented sarcastically on the Christian
Democrat line of the ‘strong state’:
It is as if a dying man had risen from his bed . . . The Italian state has revived. The
Italian state is alive and strong, safe and sound. For a century, for over a century it has
consorted with the Sicilian Mafia, the Neapolitan Camorra, the Sardinian bandits. For
three decades it has exploited corruption and incompetence, wasted public funds in
streams and rivulets of unpunished embezzlement and fraud . .. But now, confronted
with Moro’s sequestration by the Red Brigades, the Italian State rises up strong and
impressive.
(Sciascia, 2004, p. 49)

In confronting the Moro family’s request that a deal should be made

for his life, the DC found valuable assistance in the Vatican. Only a
few hours before the Red Brigades’ ultimatum, Pope Paul VI wrote a
public letter to the terrorists defining Moro as a ‘dignified and honest
man’ and pleading in the name of Christ: ‘I am begging you, I am
kneeling in front of you, please set Aldo Moro free.’ He added,
however, the words: ‘simply and unconditionally’.
Between the late 1970s and the early 1980s, organized crime
offensive by the Mafia and Camorra started to increase and expand
geographically. In 1977, the cover of the German magazine Der
Spiegel expressed Italy’s image abroad: a dish of spaghetti topped
with a P38 gun instead of Parmesan cheese.
This image was overcome in the 1980s as Italy emerged from the
economic and social crisis. The new decade was symbolized by
victory in the football World Cup in 1982, and by a new consumer
age that was considerably more hedonistic than during the 1960s
economic miracle. This time, the cover of Time magazine showed a
new image of Italy: the designer Giorgio Armani in triumphant
mood, promoting the idea that ‘all Italians are stylish’. Nevertheless,
the success of Italian fashion, football and food all over the world
could not prevent the development of a new political crisis, which led
to the collapse of the Italian political system at the beginning of the
new decade – the end of the ‘First Republic’. The 1980s were
characterized by the re-launch of the Mafia offensive; organized
crime had until then taken advantage of links with a section of the
political class (principally the Christian Democrats). In 1982, the
Communist MP Pio La Torre, author of the first attempt to propose
legal measures against the Mafia, was killed and many other
assassinations followed – including anti–Mafia prefects such as Carlo
Alberto Dalla Chiesa and the magistrates who organized a large-
scale trial against the Mafia in 1986–7 in which some important
crime bosses were given life sentences. After the results of this trial
were confirmed in the early 1990s, the mafiosi avenged themselves
on ex-allies who had been unable to save them, such as the
Christian Democrat Salvo Lima, and on the magistrates who had
organized the trial, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, murdered
in 1992. Many Christian Democrats, including some of the most
powerful politicians in the Italian Republic, such as Antonio Gava and
Giulio Andreotti, began to appear in public trials accused of having
links with the Mafia.
However, the links between the government and the Mafia only
came to light in the 1990s. The optimism of the 1980s had been
embodied in the figure of the Socialist Party leader, Bettino Craxi.
The party, which had been overtaken on the left by the Communists
since the first republican elections, had been allied to the DC for
almost two decades and had broken every link with its past. Not only
was the party no longer on the side of the workers, but it also
became involved in a corrupt system characterized by the mutual
and illegal exchange of favours between parties in the government
and the centres of industrial and financial power. Among the latter,
the entrepreneur Silvio Berlusconi, who had built up a private
television empire, won the passage of a law sanctioning his right to
broadcast his channels nationally – largely a result of Craxi’s efforts
on his behalf. After a massive trial in the early 1990s that was
dubbed ‘Tangentopoli’ (Kick-back City), in which a collection of
magistrates demonstrated the corruption of the existing governing
class, Berlusconi could present himself as the founder of a new
political party that was fit to govern a new Italy – Forza Italia. From
the ashes of the DC and with the fall of the Berlin Wall, new parties
appeared: National Alliance – the renamed MSI – declared that it
had left its Fascist past behind, while the Left Democrats (part of the
former PCI) abandoned their Communist identity, to the regret of
many militants, who adhered instead to a reformed left-wing
organization, Rifondazione Comunista. The reaction against politics
initially seemed to favour an entirely new party, the Northern
League, which pointed to Rome and to southern Italy as the sources
of corruption, and proposed, after more than a century of
unification, the re-division of Italy. These political changes together
marked the beginning of a ‘Second Republic’.

Box 8.6 The anti–Mafia reaction in Palermo in the early

1990s
We commit ourselves to educate our children to respect others,
with a sense of duty and justice. We commit ourselves not to get
used to the current dishonesty, and not to comply with it
passively simply because ‘everybody does’. We commit ourselves
not to ask as a favour what is owed to us as a right. We commit
ourselves not to sell our vote at any price ... We commit
ourselves to resist, by legal means, the impositions of the Mafia.
We commit ourselves not to forget Giovanni Falcone and all
those who died fighting the Mafia, and to remember them as if
they were relatives who gave their lives for us.
(‘The Commitment’, read at a wake in a church in Palermo
following a 40,000-strong demonstration over Falcone’s death,
13 June 1992)
A CONSUMER SOCIETY

The definition of ‘consumer society’ is applied specifically to the

significant change in consumer patterns in society during the post–
Second World War period – a definition of a particular variant of
capitalism characterized by the primacy of consumerism. In Italy,
consumer culture developed with the economic boom, fusing
together aspirations that originated in other countries, in particular
the United States, with local (national and regional) elements that
helped to generate new forms of collective identity. Remo Bodei has
observed that once the period of Fascist autarchy had ended and
their horizons widened, Italian citizens, who did not easily identify
with the state, began to look ‘outside’ for a higher standard of living
– particularly to the American ‘liberator’. As Franzina has remarked,
America again became ‘la Merica of many years earlier, that is to say,
the country of a better future’; many Italians began to dream of a
land of pleasures and comfort, and for them the United States
represented a ‘reproducible prosperity’.
However, the period called the ‘consumer age’ only began to take
shape from the end of the 1950s, in part because Italians were still
poor, and because spending and consuming were not part of a
lifestyle culturally acceptable to the Church and the left. Italian
cinema illustrates this slow transition: a kind of ‘lexicon of the
country’s journey along the road to reconstruction’, neo-realist
cinema did not embrace the emergence of the Hollywood values of
social climbing or enrichment condemned by the Church and the
communists. This gap was reflected in notions of feminine beauty:
compared to the female stars from Hollywood, the actress Anna
Magnani (who starred one of the first neo-realist films, Roberto
Rossellini’s Rome Open City, in 1945) represented a woman of the
people, a real woman in her thirties – not typically beautiful, but
passionate, instinctive and strong. But by the late 1950s there
emerged new models of Italian beauty and sexuality, personified by
Gina Lollobrigida (whose hairstyle was copied by women all over
Italy) and Sophia Loren. The new generation of glamorous female
stars were ignored in the Catholic press because they were
considered to be too sexually provocative.
In the 1960s, the fall in unemployment and wage rises prompted
a division of daily life between work and leisure time – the latter
intended to be time for consumption. Under Fascism, leisure time
had been organized by the regime; after-work societies were forced
on workers, although they also provided the opportunity for
socializing in the evenings. After the war, the left and the Catholics
set up their own social organizations, resulting in the birth of the
ARCI (Italian Cultural Recreational Association), a democratic
organization for leisure time (organizing film shows, exhibitions and
excursions); the ANPI (National Association of Italian Partisans)
organized for former partisans; and the UDI (Italian Women’s Union)
for women. Communist festivals called Festa dell’Unità (from the title
of the newspaper Unità, founded by Gramsci in 1924) became
popular, open-air social occasions held every summer in Italian cities,
towns and villages. The ACLI (Christian Association of Italian
Workers) represented the Catholic version of the ARCI and was
supported by a dense network of parish organizations that had
existed in Italy for centuries. ARCI and ACLI still exist, though they
entered a period of crisis from the 1970s with the emergence of a
new left-wing culture based on direct action that sought to distance
itself from political parties, a decline which continued in the 1980s
and 1990s, first with the challenge of consumerism that encouraged
new forms of socialization, then with the ‘fall of ideologies’ that
followed the end of the Cold War.
One novel transformation in the 1960s was holiday travel.
Holidays were no longer a luxury enjoyed by the bourgeoisie as they
had been when the Touring Club was first founded in the nineteenth
century, but were now within the reach of workers and their families.
Italians began to explore their own country in their millions: between
1959 and 1965 the number of Italians who took a holiday doubled,
and doubled again in the following decade, reaching 20 million in
1975. Internal migration began to break down regional barriers:
many Italians from southern regions and rural areas moved to the
northern industrial cities in the 1960s. Between 1958 and 1963, one
million people moved from the south to central and northern Italy.
Among the principal destinations were the provinces of Milan, Turin
and Rome, followed by Genoa, Florence and Bologna. In the area
surrounding Milan, whole new towns were developed, whose
inhabitants commuted to Milan every day, while the city centre was
redesigned with elegant skyscrapers, such as the Pirelli and the
Velasca towers. The journalist Giorgio Bocca described this
development in a 1963 article in Il Giorno as the ‘factory of the new
Italians’:
The Milanese industrial belt, which is made up of many names: Cinisello – Rho –
Cologno – Sesto, etc., is not a city but a malignant growth of a city; dwellings which
multiply like cells gone mad, underpasses, rail tracks, block of flats, closed streets, a
little bit of countryside which is neither green nor yellow, more flats, smoke, smell. How
is it possible that people who only a few days ago left the blue sea of Sicily or the
delightful smell of Calabrian mountains live here? . . . The village-cities of the belt (Sesto
has more than 80,000 inhabitants) are as hostile an environment to immigrants ... as
America was to the men who conquered it... But those who think that a new Italian can
be born here, hopeful and proud of his adventure like the American, are probably
wrong.
(Bocca, ‘The factory of the new Italians’, Il Giorno,
3–8 September 1963)

Emigration and tourism both had an impact on Italian architecture.

As more social housing developed around industrial areas,
motorways and hotels appeared all over Italy because of tourism; a
new architecture transformed coastal areas, while fishing villages
were transformed into tourist resorts, with the addition of
reproduced city entertainment in the shape of cinemas, theatres and
cafés. In the mountains, tourists joined forces with traditional
alpinists, and skiing villages began to appear; the growing popularity
of winter holidays also had an impact on the landscape as ski slopes
came to replace woods. Mass seaside holidays were typical of a
consumer culture composed by mundane pastimes, having fun,
exposing increasingly more of the body, and the importance of
appearing ‘fashionable’. Unlike the liberal age, the purpose of
holidays was not merely cultural, but also to have good time. Men
and women began to spend time together and gender role
distinctions began to fade.
Holidays were linked to the increase in individual mobility. The
Autostrada del Sole (the ‘motorway of the sun’ connecting northern
and southern Italy) was opened in 1960. Fiat produced the Seicento
car in 1954, and the cheaper and internationally famous smaller
Cinquecento in 1957. Significant sections of the lower classes gained
access to private motor transport: between 1950 and 1964, the
number of private vehicles on the roads increased from 342,000 to
4,670,000. Weekend trips by Vespa scooter or Cinquecento
diminished regionalism, as these ‘miracle vehicles’ took Italians all
round the peninsula. The scooter company Piaggio created the
Vespa in 1946 (it appeared on the roads by 1948); it was not too
expensive, had a modern aerodynamic design and low maintenance
costs. Young people who left the cities on Sundays on Vespas were
free from the influence of their parents, and this development also
changed the relationships between the sexes at a time when
parental control over young people’s sexual relations was very strict,
and when, at the Catholic oratorio (parish club), girls and boys were
kept as separate as possible during recreational activities. A number
of films contributed to creating the Vespa myth, such as Roman
Holiday (1953), in which Gregory Peck takes Audrey Hepburn around
Rome on a Vespa; and Pane amore e fantasia (1953) and Poveri ma
belli (1956), portraying an image of Italians who were ‘poor, but
handsome’. The birth of Vespa clubs around the world marked the
product’s success in the Western world; in Italy, such clubs
organized collective trips to the countryside, showing that tradition
continued to coexist with modernity; in this sense, the policy of the
Vespa clubs was in harmony with that of the Touring Club –
supporting internal tourism yet seeking to discipline the behaviour of
those who experienced it.
Television arrived in Italy in 1954, building on the success of radio
that had been used in the 1930s by Mussolini to underpin the
totalitarian system. After 1946, radio did not simply have a duty to
inform and became mainly a provider of light music, songs and
variety shows. Public taste was for easy-listening songs – which
remained in the memory like ‘summer torments’ – with titles such as
Abbronzatissima (‘Very tanned’) or Una rotonda sul mar (‘A pavilion
by the sea’). The TV advertising programme Carosello showcased
stylish kitchens and introduced modish furniture, as well as new
products, to the country. Advertisements were not breaks in the
middle of programmes, but were grouped together into short,
discrete programmes in the evenings, entertaining the audience with
little stories and comic sketches to make the brand names and
images of their products memorable. In November 1954, Mike
Buongiorno began Lascia o raddoppia (‘Double or quit?’), the first
television quiz show, which filled bars and emptied cinemas.
Buongiorno’s showgirls became as famous as actresses. Quiz shows
were successful because they incorporated elements of theatre,
soap, film and music, and the protagonists were ordinary people,
making it easy for others to identify with them. Mike Buongiorno was
an Italian–American who appeared so ordinary and conformist that
he gave weight to the notion that anyone could reach such heights.
Historians have regarded the introduction of television as being as
important as Dante’s Divine Comedy or the expedition of the
Thousand, because it united Italy linguistically and unified dialects
more effectively than decades of education had done.
The impact of consumption, with the migration of workers from
rural areas to the north, disrupted traditional habits that had lasted
for centuries. For example, as Luisa Passerini has explained, the
fashion for female underwear undermined the concepts of the
trousseau and the dowry, and the arrival of electrical appliances in
Italian kitchens also contributed to female emancipation, freeing
women from laborious housework. In the 1960s an ideology of
female emancipation became associated with consumption; though
it also created new forms of power, based on processes of emulation
and identification; gradually, forms of opposition began to emerge to
what came to be defined, negatively, as ‘consumerism’. This criticism
came predominantly from the left, though also from part of Catholic
culture, and gave life to forms of radical protest in the 1960s-1970s.
An anxious Pier Paolo Pasolini wrote in 1973 that not even Fascism
had been able to do what the civilization of consumerism had been
able to achieve: hedonistic ideology had nullified the differences
between right and left; the television culture was standardizing
behaviour and expectations, and Italians’ quality of life had become
the entire expression of their identity.
The transition in Italy from the attraction of consumerism to its
criticism was represented in music as well as in cinema. After the
Liberation, new songs encouraged Italians to forget the past, erasing
civil war memories in order to make Italians dream of a happier life
– in part for political reasons. The desire to forget was encapsulated
in the annual Sanremo festival of Italian song that was shown every
year on television. This was not (and has never been, up to the
present day) ‘good music’; yet despite its limited artistic value, the
festival still rates highly in the sentimental history of Italian society.
In 1958, Domenico Modugno triumphed at the festival with the song
Volare, coinciding with the arrival of ‘45s’ – 45 rpm records – and the
juke box, which some historians have taken as the symbolic start of
the economic miracle:
I think that a dream like that will never return/I painted my hands and my face with
blue/Then suddenly, I was taken by the wind/And I began to fly in the endless
sky.//Flying oh, oh/Singing oh, oh/In the blue sky, painted in blue/so glad to be up
there//And I was flying and flying, happily higher than the sun/and more/While the
world was slowly disappearing so far away/A sweet music was singing only for
me//Flying oh, oh ...

Other television programmes, such as Canzonissima, focused entirely

on one particular form of music, the canzonette (light songs) and
showcased the most acclaimed singers.
However, from the mid-1960s, some Italian songs became overtly
political, more closely connected with the concerns that neo-realist
cinema had expressed. In 1960, both La Dolce Vita and Luchino
Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers were released, the first set in
Rome, the second in Milan, both reflecting critically on the morality
of economic prosperity, illustrating the excitement and freedom
provided by the boom, but also the idea that something more
valuable had been lost. Cantautori (singer-songwriters) such as
Fabrizio De André wrote poetic songs that sided with the outcasts of
society and against the values of the dominant class. De André was
influenced by his study of centuries of Italian poetry, and by
Genoese and Sardinian dialect and traditional music, and he
identified with 1968 leftism; De André’s songs revived the first
examples of poetry in the Italian language, like the thirteenth-
century Tuscan poet, Cecco Angiolieri, who raged against Popes and
emperors in the beautiful sonnet S’i fosse foco (‘If I were fire’). De
André sympathized with the protest against bourgeois values in, for
example, the Canzone del Maggio (‘Song of May’, 1973), with its
menacing opening lines:
Even if the month of May/hardly affected you at all,/Even if the fear of confronting
reality,/made you turn away,/Even if your car/Was not torched,/Even if you absolved
yourselves,/It concerns all of you.

The rejection of a civilization based on work and consumption was

expressed in a youth culture. In music (Bob Dylan) and
contemporary art (Pop Art) this protest was influenced by the United
States – by the same country that had exported the model that was
now under attack. As Robert Lumley has observed, American
involvement in Vietnam provoked instances of anti–Americanism,
creating bonds between Europeans and Americans who opposed
both war and consumerism. Reactions among Italians were in fact
more complex than simple acceptance or rejection of the American
model. For example, the earliest kinds of advertising showed how
traditional elements were used to modify the appeal of American
products and to reinterpret their message in ways which applied to
an enduring local culture. In the 1950s, even while magazines and
newspapers were full of gossip about Hollywood celebrities,
advertising continued to reflect reality and the traditions of the
Italian family, promoting more sober forms of consumption and
attempting to reconcile consumerism with Catholicism, and with
habits and values that remained very different from those on the
other side of the Atlantic.
The protests of 1968 left their mark on many areas of Italian
society – in attitudes towards authority, in relationships between the
sexes, and in governmental reforms granted under pressure from
the movement. The legacy of the feminist movement led to the
passage of the laws on divorce (1970, confirmed with a referendum
in 1974) and on abortion (1978, confirmed with a referendum in
1981) – the latter putting an end to the dangerous recourse of
vulnerable women to illegal abortions. However, while it took almost
ten years for the Italian state to defeat the radical movements, the
protesters did not overturn the core values of capitalism and
consumerism. With the defeat of the movements, there was a return
to nuclear family consumer values in the 1980s.
Italians experienced a ‘second economic miracle’, even more
indulgent than the first, after the economic crisis in the 1980s. A
new generation emerged in America: the yuppies, devoted to
consumption as a lifestyle. These people bought and flaunted
branded objects and fashionable clothes, creating a mass culture
that also travelled to Italy – where rich yuppies were christened the
paninari (‘burger eaters’). The paninari met in new, American-style
‘fast-food’ bars, adopted right-wing values, and boasted in their
branded clothes about being rich adolescents with a right to
consume.
The history of Italian food followed the path of Italian
consumption more generally, a compromise between the imposition
of an American model and the resistance of a centuries-long
tradition. After 1945, the Italian food industry, which had until then
been limited by autarchy and war, began to invent new products and
to become competitive on the world market – Motta and Algida ice
creams, and Pavesi and Motta crackers in the 1950s; and Perugina
and Ferrero sweets and chocolate in first half of the 1960s. By the
end of the 1960s, the Italian food industry was able to compete with
the rest of Europe. One example is the invention of espresso
machines, which were exported and imitated abroad from the
1950s; their modern design being one of the symbols of Italy’s
economic miracle, alongside Vespas and Fiat cars.
Food modernization and mass consumption have progressively
‘Westernized’ Italy, but this process is not by any means complete.
Research in this field has demonstrated that Italian food has not
been significantly transformed over the last two centuries, and that
Italians, by resisting standardization and Americanization more than
other European countries, still use the ingredients of the past in their
cuisine – they simply eat more than before. The TV advertising
programme Carosello (broadcast every evening between 1957 and
1976) represented a compromise between Catholic values and the
values of consumerism, and this synthesis persisted during the
1970s with resistance to the Americanization of food and consumer
habits. One example is the publicity and success of Mulino Bianco
(‘white mill’) biscuits. In those years of engaged, radical and, at
times, violent politics, Italian society was deeply divided between the
dominant anti-consumerist forces of Communists and Catholics.
Mulino Bianco had to take into account the anti-industrial prejudice
of the Italian public, and its publicity and packaging focused on a
return to nature and the traditional values of the countryside,
reflecting the suspicion that Italian housewives had of mass-
produced food. This mistrust persisted into the hedonistic 1980s,
when prejudice against industrial consumerism seemed to wane: the
continuation of such advertisements played on the hope that people
wanted breaks from city life (at least at the weekends) and
confirmed a belief in the value of natural ingredients. While shopping
centres and big supermarkets have proliferated everywhere in Italy,
their number is still the lowest of any country in Europe. McDonalds
has been more contested in Italy than anywhere else, and the
American coffee chain Starbucks, which has opened almost
everywhere in the world and in every major European country, has
no branches in Italy. The worldwide organization Slow Food which,
like the Touring Club, promotes the knowledge of local culture and
traditional products, has its headquarters in Piedmont. For these
reasons, the Italian path to the modern consumer age has been
described as an alternative one to the world of conventional mass
consumption.
Perhaps the most revealing example of the dichotomy between
Italian modernity and tradition is that of espresso coffee, created for
the first time with the invention of a ‘cream coffee’ machine by the
Milanese firm Gaggia in 1948. Since then, Italian firms and coffee
roasters have insisted on the modern design of the machines, and
on the ‘cult’ aspect of drinking espresso, a symbol of urban life. Yet
in the 1980s, the Turin-based firm Lavazza, which is, in terms of
both distribution and marketing, the most popular of coffee roasters
among Italians, still focused its advertising on tracing a link between
the new, modern, espresso culture and the old history of Italy’s
famous cafeterias, where the intellectual and political elite met from
the eighteenth century onwards. Goldoni’s La bottega del caffè (see
Chapter 5) and traditional Venetian culture were used to describe
Lavazza’s view of Italian cafés:
Casanova, doges and ladies, soft armchairs and extravagant masks of an eternal
carnival. It is the Venice of the eighteenth century that meets at Florian café. And after
that, Habsburg magnificence and Risorgimento yearnings, Dannunzian frenzy and the
progeny of poets, painters and scholars. From three centuries the history of Venice and
of Italy meet at Florian; the first premises in Italy to serve a precious cup of steaming
coffee. Lavazza, today, intends to defend this tradition.
(‘Florian: da 300 anni Venezia si specchia in un caffè’, Bargiornale, no.
3, March 1987)

The sense of an enduring culture, continuous across the centuries, is

evident in manifestations of social life as well. In the summer of
2007, posters for the Festa dell’Unità in northern Italian cities
organized by the political centre-left showed a medieval painting of a
Commune, and bore the slogan: ‘the good government of the cities’.

SUGGESTED FURTHER READING

Two very useful syntheses are P. McCarthy (ed.), Italy since 1945 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2000) and J. Foot, Modern Italy (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003). Among the many
works on Fascist Italy, J. Pollard, The Fascist Experience in Italy (London: Routledge, 1998)
is a collection of translated and contextualized primary sources. First published in 1973, A.
Lyttelton, The Seizure of Power: Fascism in Italy, 1919–1929 (London: Routledge, 2004) is
still the most authoritative account in English on the origins of Fascism. R. Ben–Ghiat,
Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922–1945 (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2001)
is an innovative work on the cultural history of Italy in the inter-war period. Excellent
introductions to the post-war period are the two volumes by P. Ginsborg, A History of
Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics, 1943–88 (London: Penguin, 1990) and Italy and
Its Discontents: Family, Civil Society, State, 1980–2001 (London: Allen Lane, 2001). D.
Forgacs and R. Lumley (eds), Italian Cultural Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Prees,
1996) is a lively introduction to modern Italian culture. R. Gordon, An Introduction to
Twentieth–Century Italian Literature: A Difficult Modernity (London: Duckworth, 2005)
provides an overview of the complex responses of Italian literature to the challenges of the
century.
 9
........
Conclusion

In a recent address to the students of the Johns Hopkins University

in Bologna, Cardinal Biffi argued that it was necessary to return to
the values that have unified Italy: ‘and they are only two: religion
and pasta’. As this book has sought to demonstrate, there are also
other elements of continuity that have shaped Italian identity
throughout the centuries – art and architecture, a unitary literate
culture, and particularism in relationships between cities and
countryside, between religion and politics, between family and civil
society.
While the urban population and economy have been, until recent
times, small in comparison with the rural population and agriculture,
Carlo Cattaneo attempted to find a unitary thread in Italian history
through the history of its cities. His analysis was prompted by the
fact that, from the Middle Ages, Italy experienced a much higher
degree of urban development than did any other European country.
The landed aristocracy, together with the professional bourgeoisie,
controlled power in the cities and took part in commerce; peasants
were never far from the cities, and movement of population between
the two was constant. Feudal links also united communes and
countryside, as representatives of feudal families took part in the
government of the communes; the submission of the countryside to
the city was often a result of agreements between city governments
and feudal lords. The history of Italy is thus a history of the
relationship between the rural and urban worlds, between feudal
and mercantile power.
Mountains and sea are also the protagonists of Italian history. The
Alps have always constituted the most important physical and
symbolic frontier for Italians. It was from beyond the Alps that the
barbarian invasions first arrived, and, throughout the centuries, it
was from beyond the Alps that most of the emperors came who
dominated Italy for centuries; with the formation of Italian
nationalism, the Alps became a contested frontier between Italy and
Austria, symbolizing the enmity between the two countries: the
Austrians went back to their side of the Alps in 1848, only to return
after having crushed the revolutions and defeated the Italian army;
in the fight to obtain Trentino in the First World War, the population
of Venetia saw the return of the Austrians after the defeat at
Caporetto. In 1848, an anti–Austrian cry resounded all over the
peninsula: ‘down with the barbarians’; when the Allies bombed
Italian cities in the Second World War, in order to persuade Italians
to turn against the Fascist regime and to sabotage the Germans,
they threw leaflets to civilians which carried the message: ‘Italian
people! Mussolini has called back the barbarians from the north.’
After unification, as part of its programme of ‘making Italians’, the
liberal ruling class focused on the Alps as a symbol of Italianness,
and alpine excursions up to the Fascist period were used as a way of
strengthening patriotism.
Like the Alps, the Mediterranean constituted a frontier, and one
that involved most of the peninsula and its islands. There was never
a historical distinction between cities on the sea and those inland;
for centuries, inland cities had been linked to the sea by rivers and
canals, both natural and artificial. For example, Mantua, a city of the
north Italian plain, had ships of its own; Venice sent its ships all the
way inland to Lake Garda; Florence was connected to Livorno via the
River Arno and the Navicelli Canal; using the River Adige, wood was
transported from the Alps to Verona and Venice. Coastal cities lived
in symbiosis with inland villages, as did Genoa with the mountain
areas of Liguria. Cities confined within their walls did not exist.
Invaders also came from the Mediterranean, an area where Italy had
major interests throughout the period. The maritime cities – Venice,
Genoa, Pisa and Amalfi – controlled a large part of the commercial
traffic of the Mediterranean, while Venice dominated most of the
Adriatic. Both liberal and Fascist foreign policy later looked back at
this maritime tradition to justify Italy’s new imperial interest in
expanding into North Africa and the Balkans.
While cities continued to be at the centre of economic and cultural
growth, the major loser in Italian history was the peasantry. It was
certainly not the case that the peasant masses were always the
passive object of decisions taken in the cities, nor did their illiteracy
mean that they had no culture. The history of the peasantry has
been one of ruthless exploitation on the part of landowners, of
extreme poverty and of the violent repression of any attempt at
revolution; it has also been a history of resistance to conscription,
taxation and war. The peasantry’s last defeats came in the twentieth
century, in the aftermath of the First World War and the rise of
Fascism; and at the end of the 1940s, when Christian Democracy
and the Mafia made land reform impossible. The most dramatic
social conflict throughout the history of Italy has indeed been
between the ruling elite and peasants. Because of this, it sometimes
proved possible during moments of political crisis or war for an
outside enemy to mobilize the peasantry of a particular Italian state
on their behalf against the local ruling class: at the time of the ‘Viva
Maria’ revolts in Tuscany at the end of the eighteenth century, or of
the anti–Jacobin massacres in Naples at the time of Napoleon’s
invasion, or in Austrian-occupied Lombardy, when the Austrian
General Radetsky threatened to arm the peasantry against the
Milanese liberals.
Another constant element of Italian life across the centuries,
involving in particular art, politics and cuisine, has been loyalty to the
local city: even cities in the same region (for example, Siena, Pisa
and Florence) were political and artistic rivals, and even the
formation of region-states (such as Lombardy, the Venetian Republic,
Tuscany, the Papal States, and the Kingdom of Naples) in the
fifteenth century could not break down the barriers of local loyalty.
Nevertheless, a unitary art did result from the constant exchange
between cities and the fact that artists travelled regularly across the
country. All over Italy, open-air collective life meant paying particular
attention to ornamental architecture in squares and on external
façades, to urban spaces as monumental units. Art reflected the
country’s peculiar relationship between city and countryside, with the
fashion for villas in rural areas and the taste for ornamental gardens,
which were designed to fuse together art and nature: the ‘Italian
garden’ can be found from Piedmont to Sicily. Another specific
aspect of Italian art has been the continuous influence exerted
between the sacred and profane, and the unanimous rejection of the
Protestant hostility to the cult of images.
The period of Baroque art was followed by a revival of classicism
(neo-classicism), sustained by the myth of ancient Rome and a
renewed interest in archaeology, but which was also present in the
rhetorical and triumphal nationalist architecture of liberal Italy and of
the Fascist period. After the Second World War, in an attempt to
leave the Fascist past behind, architecture and art turned again to
the examples of the Renaissance and the Baroque age, creating new
‘models’ with neo-realist cinema, new forms of design and new
buildings that were intended to bear witness to the persistence of a
centuries-long tradition.
The development of an Italian language and literature also
mediated between the existence of local elements and the evolution
of a unitary experience. While the spoken vernacular was, until
unification, very varied, an Italian written literary and commercial
language emerged as early as the Middle Ages. Following the
influences of the Sicilian and the Tuscan schools of the thirteenth
century, poetical language was brought closer to the language of the
people, first of all by Dante; commercial language was also
developed during the communal age, despite the existence of
regional variants and dialects. Boccaccio wrote the Decameron in a
Tuscan Italian full of influences from Bologna, Venice, Milan, Naples
and Sicily. Throughout the long period preceding the Risorgimento,
from the thirteenth to the eighteenth centuries, the sense of
belonging to a literary community continued and was rooted
everywhere in Italy in the civilization of city courts. In the nineteenth
century, this Italy of the aristocracies was challenged by a new Italy
of the bourgeoisie, which in turn claimed the right to lead the people
and interpret their interests. Like the first, this was also a literary
Italy. The Risorgimento intellectuals never hesitated to root their
patriotic ambitions in literary imagery. Foscolo’s project was to
entrust literature with the duty of re-founding Italy by revisiting
Italy’s great ancestors (even when they were not, strictly speaking,
men of letters): Michelangelo, Machiavelli and Galileo. In the
histories of Italian literature from that period, great importance was
indeed attributed to philosophers, artists, and scientists and not just
to writers. For example, Giordano Bruno and Giovan Battista Vico
were ascribed a more central role than poets such as Ariosto or
Marino.
Writers in the nineteenth century believed that an old community
had ended and a new one was being born. The old community was
founded on the conventions of the court, on love poems, on the
language of Petrarch. The new one was to give precedence to action
over contemplation, ethics over aesthetics, to bring together the
world of writing and the world of popular military endeavour:
literature and music had to create collective passions that could
rouse the people to violent political action in order to unify Italy as a
nation. It was the age of the historical novel and of the opera;
Risorgimento writers entrusted them both with the responsibility of
providing a model for the moral and political redemption of Italy.
After unification, the project of creating an Italian community was
again entrusted to literature; this was the object, for example, of De
Sanctis, in his History of Italian Literature (1870–1): to rewrite the
history of Italy by setting aside the elements of its past considered
shameful in order to rescue moments of glory from the country’s
literary heritage and to announce an equally glorious future. In
1874, the poet Carducci made a speech entitled Presso la tomba di
Francesco Petrarca (‘At Francesco Petrarch’s grave’), arguing that
Italy was its literature: ‘when Metternich said that Italy was a
geographical expression, he had not understood that Italy was a
literary expression, a poetical tradition’.
During the period of liberal Italy, the triumphant romanticism of
the Risorgimento, underlined by the popularity of opera (the origins
of which lay in the tradition of singing and reciting literature, from
the first examples of Italian poetry onwards), was replaced by
another history, born of disillusionment and regret, of indifference
and opportunism, of social climbing and political ‘transformism’. This
history was narrated in a post-unification literature hostile to the
national rhetoric: Verga and Capuana, De Roberto and Svevo wrote
novels that had no moments of triumph but spoke instead of an Italy
overwhelmed by a sense of tragedy. This was the history of losers,
of communities whose traditional livelihoods had been swept away
by modernity, or of parvenus unable to win acceptance in the new
social context; of opportunists who recycled themselves into the new
state only to continue their lives in the old way. The continuity in
terms of literature between Risorgimento, Fascism and anti–Fascism
consists of this ambivalent bond between literature and national
identity. Yet once again, after the experience of wartime resistance,
literature was expected to build a new Italy.
Like language and art, Italian food also expressed great regional
variety; but a continuous process of exchange from region to region
has produced a unitary diet. The use of vegetables rather than meat,
of products based on a variety of flours (pasta, gnocchi, polenta,
focacce), of wine rather than beer, of olive oil rather than butter
(typical also of northern Italy, with the oil-producing areas around
Lake Garda and in Liguria), have characterized a cuisine very
different from that on the other side of the Alps. Local cuisine
distinguished Italians from their invaders. In a Commedia dell’Arte
written in 1632, La Lucilla costante by Fiorillo, the masked Pulcinella
addresses the Spanish rulers with the words: ‘Ah, Spaniard, enemy
of macaroni!’ Gastronomic guides of Italy appeared from the
thirteenth century onwards. It was food, more than language, that
unified Italy in the nineteenth century; as Piero Camporesi
remarked, Scienza in cucina e l’arte di mangiar bene (‘Science in the
kitchen and the art of eating well’) by Artusi had more of an impact
in making Italians than did Manzoni’s The Betrothed. Behind the
triviality of food, it is possible to find one of the most successful
aspects of Italianness. Historian Ruggiero Romano calculated that
between the first edition of Artusi’s book in 1891 and the 1970
edition, 640,000 copies had been sold – a huge number considering
that it is a book typically passed down through the generations from
mother to daughter. Its influence has been even wider than this,
since it became the inspiration behind a number of other equally
successful cookery books, the talis-mani and cucchiai d’argento (Ada
Boni’s Talismano della felicità – ‘Talisman of happiness’, and
Cucchiaio d’argento – ‘Silver spoon’, have continued to be re-
published from the interwar period onwards).
Another central element of the country’s identity is religion, and
its peculiar relationship with politics. The early-twentieth-century
historian Benedetto Croce pointed out in his A History of Italy, that it
was a mistake to yield to the temptation to write the history of Italy
as the history of separate states, because the Catholic Church had
diffused to the whole of Italy the same religious message. Because
of its presence on Italian soil, the Church never regarded Italy as it
regarded other countries: it constantly interfered in Italian politics
and saw itself as the ‘Roman’ or ‘Italian’ Church at the same time as
it proclaimed its universality. From the last centuries of the first
millennium, a unification of religious beliefs was established in the
whole of Italy around Christianity and the Roman Church. This
process took place over several centuries. From the time of Gregory
VII onwards, exploiting the mythical image of imperial Rome, the
Church was able to place itself at the head of the entire Western
Christian world, first through the Crusades, and, from the thirteenth
century, through the expansion of the mendicant orders. From the
ninth century onwards, a great majority of Popes and their closest
collaborators were indeed Italian, a symbiosis that intensified from
the thirteenth century, when the Papacy concluded political alliances
with a number of Guelph cities (such as Lucca and Florence), and
sought systematically to appoint Italians in the various chapter
houses in French or English cathedrals. While canonists of the
thirteenth century elaborated the precept ubi Papa, ibi Roma (‘where
the Pope is, there is Rome’), in the Avignon period Italian public
opinion never accepted the dissociation between the Papal institution
and its residence on the River Tiber. Catherine of Siena expressed
the most intimate beliefs of her Italian contemporaries when she
passionately argued that the Papacy could not remain absent from
the Roman site of the tombs of the apostles St Peter and St Paul, the
source of its legitimacy, without grave peril.
In the final period of the Middle Ages, the Church gained
substantial benefit from encouraging a cult of the saints, which
allowed local communities or special groups to choose their
particular saint – who would then, it was believed, intercede on their
behalf when they had particular aspirations to fulfil. One of the
factors that helped to give the Italian people a sense of unity was
the visibility of the sacred, manifested in the honour bestowed on
the graves and relics of the saints and martyrs, and on any traces
(the footprints, fingerprints of saints, and so on) that confirmed the
reality of the spiritual world and the possibility of communication
between this world and the afterlife. It is therefore not surprising
that the links between Italy and the Byzantine world, still very close
in the eighth century, began to fade when the emperors at
Constantinople decided to ban the use of icons and relics. From
north to south, the whole peninsula unanimously rejected a decision
that challenged the popular and sentimental belief in the mediating
role of religious images.
Catholic identity penetrated Italy’s civil and family ethics
profoundly. It succeeded most in the peasant world, and in general
among the poor, who found in the evangelical message a promise of
redemption and consolation. That elementary need for protection
and comfort was at the root of the immense diffusion of Marian
devotion, which, as the historian André Vauchez has written,
belonged to the people even more than it did to institutions. The
Virgin represented the most physical aspect of religion, the one that
most closely involved the sphere of emotions and feelings in contrast
to the desiccated sphere of theological detail and abstract dogma.
However, it would be wrong to think that devotion to the Virgin
developed entirely separately from the religious institutions of the
time; indeed, it was encouraged by the Church and by political
institutions from the Middle Ages onwards. The two social levels, the
‘people’ and the ruling class, converged in the cult: the image of the
Madonna in art was both a genuine artistic choice and a theme
regularly commissioned by patrons of the arts. The local feasts to
the Virgin brought together both civil religion (the Virgin of a certain
town) and the wider Marian cult. This is still evident today, when
statues of local Madonnas are carried around some Italian villages,
and processions led by the representatives of the Church and of local
authorities.
From the 1990s, when churches began to empty across Europe,
Pope John Paul II created more saints than his predecessors had
done over the previous five centuries; and Pope Benedict XVI
appears to be continuing this trend. Since the Fascist period, the
crucifix has been present in Italian schools and public buildings, and
images of the Madonna (joined by other saints) adorn the walls of
private homes and hospitals. Recurrent episodes of crying Madonnas
(always checked by the Church authorities to verify their veracity)
have been easy to find in Italian newspapers right up to the present
day. Popular religiosity also has its seamy side, however. The
bestemmia – the use of a rich variety of swear words against God,
the holy family and saints – is typical of the whole country, though
with some local variants, dictated by the existence of different local
patron saints.
In the 1960s, the writer Umberto Eco analysed a popular type of
literature, which he described as ‘thaumaturgic underground’. With
titles such as La voce della Madonna (‘The voice of the Madonna’) or
Araldo di Sant’Antonio (‘St Antonio’s herald’), these pamphlets
circulated all over Italy, asking readers for donations to charitable
activities; in exchange, people expected to receive future grace or
recompense. Eco calculated that, in Milan, one family in three
received a copy by post, and that around one million copies were
distributed within Lombardy alone; in southern regions, even more
prone to thaumaturgic advertising, the numbers were higher. The
historian Sergio Luzzatto has recently demonstrated how the most
famous Italian saint of the twentieth century, Padre Pio, became
popular after the First World War when stigmata allegedly appeared
on his body. From his village in Apulia, in the difficult and violent
post-war years, Padre Pio was able to meet the need for miracles
and divine signs of the Italian people; the cult expanded all over
Italy and is still alive today, symbolizing a country ‘suspended
between archaism and modernity’: 2,714 official prayer groups
devoted to Padre Pio existed in Italy in 2005, and in the following
year about six million pilgrims visited his village in Apulia, San
Giovanni Rotondo (in the same year, a similar number of pilgrims
went to Jerusalem). The popularity of Padre Pio grew particularly
during Fascism, representing an example of the clerico–Fascist
alliance, and reached its climax under Pope John Paul II, who made
him a saint in 2002.
Links between religion and politics have always characterized
Italian history. As Jeremy Boissevain has remarked, Catholic religion
represented a strong ideological basis for a political system based on
clientelism. Research by Piero Brunello on nineteenth-century letters
of recommendation to Fedele Lampertico (1833–1903), a moderate
Catholic politician in Vicenza, demonstrates a use of language that
placed powerful politicians on the same level as the saints. The use
of nepotism and clientelism in Italian society has long-term roots
from at least the time of the signorie onwards. Though Italy is
considered a ‘modern’ Western democracy, the use of the
recommendation and the exploitation of a corrupt nepotistic system
still govern a large part of the job market. When interrogated on the
provision of favours (such as jobs and tax exemptions) in exchange
for votes, a former Christian Democrat answered, in 1995: ‘Please let
me explain: this is not clientelism, this is Christian charity.’ There is a
belief, reiterated by many other politicians, that the system of
recommendation has helped many poor people, and has thus
addressed the issue of social inequality. As Brunello has explained,
this culture originates from the deep-rooted belief in the role of
mediator ascribed to saints: it is more effective, rather than to
address God directly, to act through patron saints, who are closer to
God than the supplicant and therefore more likely to persuade Him;
religious patronage and political clientelism continue to sustain each
other.
The use of clientelism to achieve personal objectives also
suggests a lack of faith in the state typical of all Italian regions.
Gramsci described in his Prison Notebooks the negative effects of
the Risorgimento as a ‘passive revolution’, in which the ruling elite
failed to integrate the popular masses into the new state. As
Ginsborg has remarked, the lack of identification between people
and state had the effect of accentuating the antagonism of the lower
classes and their propensity for self-organization, making them open
to class ideologies, both Marxist and anarchist. Revolutionary
minorities were at times able to win a wide base of support, as they
did at the time of the Sicilian fasci (1891–3), or during the red week
(1914) or the red biennial (1919–20), and again after the Second
World War, during the peasant strikes of 1949–50, or the case of
radical politics between 1968 and the late 1970s.
After unification, the repressive nature of the state encouraged
Italians to concentrate on the one structure in civil society over
which they could exercise any control – the family. Long-term
explanations for the lack of faith in the state focus on the experience
of centuries of foreign domination and on Catholic teachings about
the family. During the Renaissance, the importance of the family was
also emphasized by humanists such as Leon Battista Alberti. The
journalist Tullio Altan argued in 1985 that ‘in the largest part of
Italian society, in both the north and south, there prevailed, and
there still prevails, the moral viewpoint of the individualistic Albertian
family’. According to the historian Giovanni Levi, the roots of the
central role of the family are to be found in the long-term history of
the country and are intimately linked with the Catholic model of
family life. The co-existence of two centres of power in Italy, the
state and the Church, meant that the country developed a weak
institutional identity, which in turn led to the strengthened role of the
family; this model also had a positive effect, as it offered an
alternative to the extreme capitalist mentality of the Protestant
countries and prevented the emergence of intense class polarization
that has characterized, for example, Britain and, even more, the
United States.
As Ginsborg’s research has demonstrated, attachment to the
family coexisted at times with the experience of collective action and
radical politics. In 1949–50 the great mobilizations of the peasantry
in the south and the state repression that followed sparked further
protest and expressions of solidarity centred on the village rather
than the family. During that period, a Communist mass culture
spread in the countryside with the establishment of Case del Popolo
(meeting halls) and the festival organized by the newspaper Unità.
Another attempt to engage in civil society and to challenge the
individualism of the family came with the protest of 1968, when
Italian students attacked the dominant culture of family values and
the individualistic ethic encouraged by the economic ‘miracle’. At the
same time, the protests of the industrial workforce went beyond the
demand for higher wages to address issues outside factory life, such
as adequate transport for commuters, medical care, improved
schooling and higher standards of housing. All these social issues
encouraged forms of collective action that involved the whole family.
Women took part in the illegal occupation of dwellings and rejected
the Christian Democratic model of woman as solely a mother and
wife. More than in the 1940s, the nuclear family itself came under
attack.
However, the economic crisis of the 1970s did not interrupt the
growth of family prosperity, and while the protest left important
legacies it was not able to overcome the core values of capitalism
and consumerism; with the defeat of the movement of the left,
nuclear family consumer values were reasserted in the 1980s.
Stephen Gundle has observed that the optimism of the 1980s, with
its focus on the present (on affluence, comfort and consumption),
was more appealing than the pressure to build a different future that
characterized the ideology of the left. The attractions of Hollywood
defeated the myth of Moscow; and the optimism of Craxi, and later
of Berlusconi, defeated the values of the left. The fascination with
the image of the ‘star’, which arrived in Italy in the 1920s with
Hollywood cinema, became widely diffused in the 1950s when TV
advertising and light music, very different from the realist message
of Italian home-grown cinema, propagated an ideal of happiness.
Berlusconi won the election in 1994 not only because of the support
of the Mafia and the Vatican, but also through a successful
advertising campaign characterized by images of blue skies, happy
and wealthy families, and the slogan ‘for a new Italian miracle’.
To say that Italian families feel no attachment to the state does not
mean that there has never been a sense of nationalism in Italy. This
book has emphasized how different ideas of nationalism existed
during the process of unification, and has followed them through to
the Fascist period. It is important to examine these differences, in
order to understand recent public debate on Italy as a nation. The
conservative and monarchic idea of the nation that was passed on
by the Liberal elite to Crispi and, through the Great War, to
Mussolini, was only one possible option. Intellectuals, political
militants and writers proposed different views of the Italian future,
often from exile. For example, Giuseppe Mazzini’s civil ideal of
nationhood was centred on the concepts of unity, independence
from foreigners, and republicanism; when the Piedmontese king
began the first war of independence against Austria in 1848, Carlo
Cattaneo wrote that the Savoy monarchy would be even worse than
previous tyrants, and proposed a democratic, republican and
federalist model (as Ruggiero Romano has remarked, despite recent
manipulation of his thought by the Northern League, he proposed a
federalism that unified, not one that divided Italy); some
Risorgimento patriots, such as Pisacane, believed that the revolution
had to involve the peasant masses, a view that constituted one of
the origins of Italian socialism.
 Fascism claimed that it was restoring the glories of ancient Rome
and renewing the Italian people; it represented an extreme
nationalism and militarism. Yet the years of Fascism showed both
continuities and ruptures with earlier versions of the nation, and
despite the triumph of the Fascist ideal in the first half of the 1920s,
rival versions continued to develop abroad thanks to the network of
anti–Fascist exiles who returned to Italy during the period of the
Resistance. Between the end of the nineteenth century and the mid-
twentieth century, Italy was also a nation abroad thanks to mass
emigration, and those migrants took with them different aspects of
Italian history and identity that reflected the differences at home.
There were thus many different ‘Italies’ opposed to each other
during the process of nation-building, some surviving, some
disappearing. Paolo Macry has suggested that historians should
focus on the moments of crisis, on the collapse of the states, on the
losers as well as on the winners, and on all those who changed sides
in the process. In this way it is possible to find the many ‘Italies’ that
lost out in the political and ideological struggle and not only the one
that finally triumphed. Franco Benigno has reminded us how, in
seventeenth-century Naples at the time of Masaniello (see Chapter
5), women occupied the city centre, and wandered about armed
with all kinds of weapons; women also had central roles in the
revolutions of the nineteenth century, behind the barricades, or
organizing collections for the garibaldini, or during the plebiscites for
Italian unification (even if they could not vote); and during the First
World War they provoked pacifist protests all over Italy. However,
Italian feminists in the second half of the nineteenth century had to
confront a widespread belief, among the left, that the majority of
women were too heavily influenced by the Catholic Church and
would be unable or unwilling to vote for progressive causes; women
continued to count for very little in Italian politics, and obtained the
right to vote only in 1946. In Naples in 1860, at the dawn of
unification, many intellectuals, soldiers and politicians who had until
then worked for the Bourbons sought to recycle themselves into the
new liberal class, negotiating (among themselves too) their move to
the side of the ‘Piedmontese’. Others took up arms and joined the
bandits in a ferocious war against the new state. At that point, the
outcome of the conflict was still open, and, if it now seems inevitable
that Italy would eventually be unified, it was not inevitable that it
would be unified in any particular way; the ideas of the nation that
failed to win out did not disappear entirely but continued to exert an
influence on cultural and political life or even re-emerged at a later
date.
The nation built after unification was characterized by the politics
of transformism, a phenomenon so deep-rooted in the history of
Italy that it cannot be restricted to a particular period. According to
the political scientist Giorgio Galli, the bourgeoisie’s failure to build a
powerful liberal party in the middle years of the nineteenth century
nullified any role the parliamentary opposition might play, from
Cavour’s connubio (the alliance between right and left in parliament
over particular issues) to the transformism of the 1870s; from
Giolitti’s alliances in the first decade of the twentieth century to
Mussolini’s one-party state; and finally to the Christian Democratic
‘blocked’ system (which created a system of alliances in order to
prevent the Communist Party from ever entering government).
Transformism meant to transform political parties, eliminating
distinctions between right and left by creating alliances on specific
programmes or laws; the result was the reduction of political life to a
set of politicians who created clienteles, who above all had the
satisfaction of their own interests at heart. The pejorative meaning
of transformism thus derived from a system that placed private
above public interest, creating a gap between public rhetoric and the
reality of private motive, and between public argument and private
agreement. Giulio Bollati noticed that this finally led to a divorce
between politics and culture, a union that had been fundamental to
the process of the Risorgimento.
The primacy of politics during the Resistance was a reaction to
both liberal transformism and Fascist de-politicization, and the
partisans saw the Resistance as a second Risorgimento. In 1943, the
partisan Altiero Spinelli wrote: ‘we live at a time when politics have
so much penetrated human relations to have become a question of
life or death for an infinite mass of people’; civilization, for those
who contributed to the liberation of Italy and to the drafting of the
Constitution of 1948, implied the existence of people who ‘intended
to maintain a firm scale of values’. The compromise that had been
reached at the time of the Risorgimento between the monarchy and
Italian democratic forces was finally broken after the armistice of 8
September 1943, when the Italian army collapsed after the shift in
alliance that brought Italy over to the side of the Allies, Nazi
Germany occupied the country, and the monarchy fled from Rome in
order to save itself. The new Risorgimento was going to be
republican, to be based on the values and ideas of Italy that had
been suppressed at the time of Italian unification.
In its young history, Italy as a nation has taken part in a high
number of military conflicts. It also suffered a number of defeats,
caused chiefly by a lack of military preparation and the ineptitude of
Italian military leaders. One of the consequences of this has been
the creation of a stereotype of the Italian who ‘cannot fight’.
According to Girolamo Arnaldi, the origins of this can be found as
early as the Middle Ages; at the time of the wars between Italian
region-states and the German emperors (when Italian states claimed
they were fighting a war ‘for Italy’), Italians began to acquire the
reputation for being poor soldiers. Arnaldi finds one of the reasons
for this in the lack of a militaristic culture in Italian society because
of the limited success of poetic accounts of aristocratic knights
(which were very popular in other European countries), for whom
the most honourable feelings were courage in war and loyalty.
Instead of this feudal chivalric conception of life, Italy’s literature
produced the novella, whose heroes were merchants and artisans,
not warriors and knights; the best example was Boccaccio’s
Decameron. According to Machiavelli, the use of mercenaries, who
had no loyalty to a particular state, was a major cause of Italy’s
military weakness. Historians have explained how united Italy took
part, often for reasons of nationalistic prestige, in unnecessary
conflicts, badly prepared and ineptly led. The result has often been
to blame a largely peasant army for alleged cowardice, or to deplore
the widespread presence of pacifism in Italian society. The presence
of the Catholic Church, disloyal to the state but rooted among the
peasant masses, was one of the reasons for Italian pacifism; another
was the spread of socialism from the end of the nineteenth century,
which also encouraged the tendency among the peasantry not to
want to be involved in war. The levels of desertion in the First World
War were higher than in any other European country. During the
Second World War, not only the soldiers but also the home front
withdrew their support after the first military defeats and the
bombing of cities. An Italian anti–Fascist exile in London, Marie
Louise Berneri (daughter of Camillo Berneri, a well-known anarchist
militant killed during the Spanish Civil War), wrote in praise of Italian
cowardice:
Italian soldiers had to be sneered and laughed at. If the government did not teach the
British people to despise them, who knows, the British tommy might have begun to
think that there must be a reason why the Italian did not fight – that he had nothing to
fight for, and he might even have begun to wonder if he had anything to fight for
himself.
(‘Liberating Italy with Bombs’, War Commentary, June 1943)

Linked with the view that Italians do not want to fight is the myth of
the ‘good-hearted Italian’, which has won particular support since
the Second World War. Historians Angelo Del Boca and Gianni Oliva
have conducted detailed research on the brutal behaviour of Italian
soldiers from unification onwards, and have shown that Italians
acted in specific situations just as violently as the soldiers of other
armies, particularly from the early Fascist period to the end of the
Second World War, and that the image of the Italian soldier as
‘good-hearted’ is a myth that Italians have used to absolve
themselves during the Republican years of any accusation of
wartime atrocity. Del Boca has also demonstrated how the
totalitarian attempt by the Fascist state to transform Italians meant
the transformation of an otherwise docile rural population into an
army of brutal warriors; to replace a non-existent national military
tradition with slogans such as ‘believe, obey, fight’ resulted in mass
atrocities committed during the wars in Ethiopia and the Balkans.
Atrocities such as the establishment of concentration camps in Libya
in the 1920s, or the use of poison gas to exterminate the Ethiopian
resistance in 1936, have until recently been obscured in the public
memory. Another episode, still largely ignored, is the case of Italian
atrocities in the Balkans, particularly in Albania, Slovenia and Croatia,
during the Second World War. In order to ‘pacify’ Slovenia, Mussolini
supported a plan of mass deportation to concentration camps as part
of an operation of ethnic cleansing in which Italians sought to
destroy Slovenian and Croat cultural identity. During the war of
resistance against the Italian occupiers, Yugoslav partisans killed
some 4,000 Italian soldiers, throwing them into natural crevasses
called foibe. This terrible episode has been at the centre of political
debate in Italy up to the present time, while the death, deportation
and torture of up to 50,000 Slovenians has been ignored, despite the
objective results of a joint research project established in 1993 and
conducted by a mixed commission of Italian and Slovenian
historians.
The debate on these issues has been particularly lively in Italy
since the end of the Cold War, which reopened conflicts over the
history of the recent past, allowing the heirs of communism and
Fascism to enter the sphere of government; in 1994, the former
Fascist party, the National Alliance, joined a government coalition of
the Northern League (the secessionist party founded in the 1980s)
and Forza Italia, a party founded by the owner of a publishing and
television empire, Silvio Berlusconi. When the government fell and a
centre-left government was established in 1996, the new president
of the chamber, Luciano Violante, made a speech in favour of
‘national reconciliation’:
The Resistance and the war of liberation involved only a part of the country and a part
of the political forces. I ask myself what that part of Italy which believes in those values
. .. must do in order that the struggle for freedom from Nazi-fascism might become a
national value and how we might leave behind, in a positive manner, the lacerations of
the past. I ask myself whether the Italy of today should not start reflecting on the
defeated of yesterday. Not because they were right, or for some kind of unacceptable
argument that the two sides were equivalent. We must try to understand .. . the
reasons why thousands of young men, and above all, young women, chose to fight for
 Mussolini and the Republic of Salò, and not for the side that represented rights and
freedom.

The renewed sentiment of national reconciliation saw an attempt to

reconstruct the memory of the recent past in order to forget, or to
bridge over, formerly traumatic divisions, symbolized by the key
dates of 8 September 1943 (which some historians have called the
‘death of the Fatherland’) and 25 April 1945, when Italians entered a
bitterly contested democracy. Resistance, anti–Fascism, and the
Constitution began to be attacked as rhetorical ‘past things’ no
longer able to unify Italians, who were now one people under the
tricolour flag. The sentiment of sharing the nation’s grief together
was meant to reconcile the conflicting memories of a people who
were now to be united, as Remo Bodei has remarked, through the
pathos of ‘belonging to a one and only destiny’. According to
Giovanni Levi, this was an expression of a long-term tendency in
Italian political life, characterized by the continuous search for
mediation – an ideal with a religious origin, linked to the Catholic
sense of sin. Against this tendency, Italian intellectuals such as
Isnenghi or Bodei have suggested that the existence of a number of
separate and not necessarily reconcilable memories is an advantage
for a democracy; the experiment attempted by Fascism, to create a
monolithic ‘us’, should not be revived.
The last section of the book analysed Italian society and culture
during the Republican period after 1945: how the economic miracle
changed the life of Italians; the links between political power and
Catholicism under Christian Democracy; the communist challenge
and the creation of a communist mass culture within Italian society;
the relationship between new values of American consumerism and
European integration on the one hand, and on the other the
persistence of a culture and traditions that have endured for
centuries. When the Allies landed in Sicily in 1943, America was once
again perceived as the land of plenty to which many Italians had
emigrated from the nineteenth century onwards. As the writer
Leonardo Sciascia explained in his collection of short stories Sicilian
Uncles, so many Sicilians had relatives in America that they did not
perceive American soldiers to be foreigners. People in the villages
could be found wearing American clothes, and some Sicilians were
supported economically by their American relatives. The child
protagonist of one of the stories, ‘The Aunt from America’, describes
the wartime graffiti ‘viva America, viva the forty-ninth star’ and how
he believed with fanatical commitment that the forty-ninth star on
the American flag would represent a Sicily separated from the rest of
Italy. Reconstruction made its way between the myth of American
liberation and the will to create a renewed national myth. The
invention of new products was perceived as the way to create an
exportable Italian life style: these products (such as espresso
machines and Vespa scooters), as well as new consumer habits,
were presented as symbols both of economic modernity (the
transformation of Italy into an industrial country) and of cultural
modernity (the ‘made in Italy’ image). In the 1960s, the foreign
press labelled the Italian economic miracle a ‘second Renaissance’,
founded on revolutions in design and culture. Two decades of
economic growth and cultural creativity transformed the way of life
of many Italians, evident in the birth of a mass urban society (the
consequence of large-scale internal migration), in the tension
between Catholicism and consumerism, in new roles for women, but
also expressed more negatively through the rivalry between
Christian Democracy and the Communist Party in an age of terrorism
and state corruption. From the 1980s to the present, the increased
popularity of Italian style abroad, generated by fashion, food, home
furnishing, fast cars, luxury items and tourism, has created what
historians and sociologists have called the ‘icon of Italy’. Even in the
1970s, the ‘lead years’ of terrorism, there was a renewed interest in
Italy’s committed (‘organic’) intellectuals, particularly among the
European left; and in the 1980s, an Italian path to hedonism
developed, partly in opposition to American models imposed all over
the world: Italy responded to fast food with slow food, to
standardized chains with independent bars, and with the survival of
small shops alongside the arrival of huge supermarkets and
shopping centres.
 Italians have reacted more enthusiastically than any other country
(perhaps together with Belgium and Germany) to European
unification; one reason for this was the defeat in the Second World
War, but there are longer-term reasons, such as the persistence of a
Catholic universal tradition; the cosmopolitanism of many
intellectuals who had to spend large parts of their lives in exile; of
artists who were summoned to other European courts for a large
part of the medieval and early modern period; or the emigration of
peasant masses who had to leave the country because of poverty.
In the 1970s and 1980s, terrorism, the strategy of tension and
the discovery that part of the political class had colluded with illegal
secret services and the P2 Masonry lodge, all revealed how weakly-
rooted democracy was, both at the highest levels of the Italian state
and at the political fringes of society. Other aspects of the Italian
model in the postwar years have included the continued survival of
the Mafia and the Camorra, and a political system that has produced
continual government crises (though this did not necessarily imply
that the system was inherently weak, since Christian Democracy was
able to retain power for forty years). Salvatore Lupo has argued that
the Mafia originated in the episodes of banditry in the nineteenth
century, and was transformed into a powerful economic system that
expanded beyond Sicily and, thanks to the pattern of Italian
emigration, outside Italy as well. The French writer Stendhal had
already recognized in the nineteenth century that the presence of
bandits in Italy was not an irremediable evil, but what he called an
‘inconvenience necessarily inherent to the various localities’. Indeed,
at certain times in the past, determined leaders had been able to
suppress the phenomenon. Cola of Rienzo, who in 1347 led a
republic in Rome, ‘cleaned up the region from the bandits who were
already infesting it’ (Stendhal). At the heart of the centuries-long
problem lies what journalist Paolo Sylos Labini has defined as the
‘habit’ of acceptance or ‘tolerance’ towards illegality, again a product
of a Catholic morality that privileged forgiveness over justice. The
Mafia and its links with the state – demonstrated by impartial judicial
investigation, particularly in the case of Christian Democracy and of
Berlusconi’s new party – remains another archaic element that has
survived into the Italy of the third millennium.
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 Index

Abba, Cesare 198

Accetto, Torquato 141
Adda, river 43, 95, 229
Adige, river 15, 64, 172, 286
Adowa 217
Agilulf 14, 16
Agulhon, Maurice 205
Alaric 4, 23
Albania 258–9, 299
Alberti, Leon Battista 79–80, 106–8, 111, 120, 293
Alberti, Leandro 100
Albigensians 59, 70
Albini, Giacomo 138
Albinoni, Tomaso 156
Albizzi, family 68
Alemanni 4
Aleramo, Sibilla 230
Alexander III, Pope 37
Alexander VI, Pope 95, 100
Alexander VII, Pope 152
Alexandria 233
Alfieri, Vittorio xviii, 159, 185
Alfonso V 70
Alps xiv–xv, 6, 7, 18, 21, 2, 44, 50, 53, 64, 100, 114, 126, 139, 149, 164, 182, 200, 208,
212, 227, 234, 245, 261, 285–6, 289
Altan, Tullio 293
Alvaro, Corrado 265
Amalfi 39, 42–3, 129, 286
Amendola, Giovanni 249
America (North) xviii, 2, 220, 227–8, 255, 264, 266, 276–7, 282, 300
America (South) 180, 226–8
American Revolution 166
Amsterdam 161
Anagni, Treaty of 56
Anastasius I 9, 22
Ancona 13, 146, 153, 234
Andreotti, Giulio 265, 274
Anjou 38, 52, 55–6, 69, 86, 90
Angela of Foligno 80
Angeliche 114
Angiolieri, Cecco 52, 280
Anselm II, Bishop 76
Antonello of Messina 108
Aosta 100
Apennines 12, 60, 77–8
Apulia 61, 89, 126, 146, 246, 270, 292
Aquileia 38, 104
Aragón 56, 97
Arcadia 120, 157, 167
Ardigò, Roberto 265
Arditi del Popolo 246, 251
Arianism 6, 14
Ariosto, Ludovico 101, 104, 120, 159, 288
Aristotle 37, 85
Armani, Giorgio 274
Arnaldi, Girolamo 50, 297
Arnaldo xiii, 33, 170
Arno, river 39, 286
Arthur 59
Artusi, Pellegrino 211, 289
Ascheri, Mario 48
Asia Minor 42
Asor Rosa, Alberto 159
Aspromonte 200
Assisi 34, 61
Astarita, Tommaso 129
Attila, the Hun 16
Auerbach, Erich 23, 25, 84
Austria xviii, 98, 126–7, 173, 175–6, 184, 188, 190–1, 193–4, 198, 200, 216–17, 224, 234–
5, 239, 286, 295
Autari 16
Avignon 38, 70–2, 74, 88, 90, 290
Azalais di Porcoiragues 58
Axis, Rome-Berlin 238

Badoglio, Pietro 257, 261, 263–4

Baghdad 21
Bakhtin, Mikhail 25
Balbo, Cesare 191, 196
Balbo, Italo 246–7
Balearic Islands 4
Balkans 257, 286, 298
Bandiera, brothers 181
Banditry 131–2, 136, 221–5, 254, 263, 301
Banti, Alberto 186–7, 190
Barberis, Walter 96
Bari 42, 43, 164
Barletta 61
Barnabites 114
Barnave, Antoine 30
Baron, Hans 95, 103
Baronius, Caesar, Cardinal 20
Baroque xvi–xix, 116, 126, 131–2, 139, 146, 148–9, 151–153, 156–7, 167, 266, 287
Bartolini, Francesco 171, 191
Basil II 41
Basilicata 170
Bassani, Giorgio 258–9
Bassano 165
Battisti, Cesare 235, 240
Beatrice di Dia 58
Beccaria, Cesare 158, 163–5
Beccaris, Bava 220
Belisarius 8
Bede, Venerable 21
Belgium 52, 168, 236, 240, 301
Belli, Gioacchino 177
Bellini, Giovanni 118–19
Bellini, Vincenzo 183
Bembo, Pietro 88, 117, 120
Benedict IX, Pope 31
Benedict XV, Pope 243
Benedict XVI, Pope 291
Benevento 12, 17–18, 31, 38, 111
Benigno, Franco 295
Berchet, Giovanni 180
Bergamo 70, 95, 109, 150
BerlinWall 274
Berlusconi, Silvio 274, 294, 299
Berneri, Camillo 298
Berneri, Marie Louise 298
Bernini, Gian Lorenzo 78, 109, 116, 152
Bertolucci, Bernardo 246
Bettinelli, Saverio 165
Bianchi, Michele 247
Biella 229
Biffi, Cardinal 285
Biondo, Flavio 113
Bismarck, von, Otto 200
Bissolati, Leonida 218, 236, 240–1
Bixio, Nino 222
Black, Christopher 132
Black Death 64
Bocca, Giorgio 277
Boccaccio, Giovanni xvii 70, 72, 79, 83, 85–8, 90, 106, 121, 154, 159, 288
Bodei, Remo 275, 300
Boethius, Severinus 8
Boissevain, Jeremy 292
Boito, Camillo 206
Bologna 34, 37, 49, 50, 54, 60, 87, 91, 94, 105, 107, 114, 116, 123, 131, 140, 142, 171,
189, 240, 247, 272, 277, 285, 288
Boni, Ada 290
Boniface VIII, Pope 56, 58, 71–2, 82
Boniface IX, Pope 73
Borromini, Francesco 152–3
Borsellino, Paolo 274
Botero, Giovanni 163
Botticelli, Sandro 84
Bramante 109, 115–16, 147
Braudel, Fernand xvii, 4
Bravi 135–7
Bresci, Gaetano 220
Brescia xiii, 15, 17–18, 95–6, 126, 140, 193, 194, 272
Britain 4, 195–196, 234, 294
Bronte 222
Brunelleschi, Filippo 106
Brunello, Piero 184, 292
Bruni, Leonardo 94
Bruno, Giordano 139, 141, 170, 212–13, 288
Buonarroti, Filippo 175–6, 187
Buongiorno, Mike 279
Burke, Peter 102, 112, 119
Burckhardt, Jacob 110, 135
Burgundians 4
Busseto 183
Byron 182, 184
Byzantium (see also Constantinople) 11, 15, 21, 36, 40–2, 117

Cadorna, Luigi 244

Cairo 21
Cairoli, Benedetto 206, 216
Cairoli, brothers 216
Calabria xiv, 8, 29, 64, 142, 171, 198, 210, 226, 270
Calvi, Pasquale 196
Calvinism 100, 142
Calvino, Italo 265
Camorra 131, 222, 273, 301
Campanella, Tommaso 104, 141–3
Campania 126, 141
Campidoglio 74, 206
Campoformio, Treaty of 168, 188
Camporesi, Piero 60, 289
Canaletto (Antonio Canale) 151
Canossa, Boniface 47
Canossa, Matilda 76–7
Canova, Antonio 185
Cantastorie 112, 138, 144, 221
Caporetto 242–4, 263, 286
Capua 25, 104
Capuana, Luigi 225, 289
Capuchins 114
Cappellanus, Andreas 59
Carafa, Gian Pietro, Cardinal 114
Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi) 150, 265
Carbonari 172, 175
Carducci, Giosuè 183, 210–11, 231, 233, 240, 289
Carloman 17
Carnazzi, Giulio 166
Carosello 279, 282
Carrara 94
Casati, Gabrio (and law) 215
Cassiodorus, Aurelius 8, 9, 38
Catellani, Arrigo 179
Castiglione, Baldassarre 101, 110, 116, 120–1, 156
Catania 61, 219, 222, 225
Cateau-Cambrésis, peace of 100–1
Cathars 70
Catholic Church xiii, 143–4, 212–15, 253, 260, 268–9, 271, 290, 269, 298
and Rome see Rome (and the Church)
and the Germanic Emperors see Rome (and the Germanic Empire)
Cattaneo, Carlo 43–4, 48, 55, 192–3, 285, 295
Cavalcanti, Cavalcante 84
Cavalcanti, Guido 82, 84
Cavallotti, Felice 148
Cavour, Camillo Benso Count of 186, 191, 196, 199–200, 205–6, 264
Celenza, Christopher 80, 83
Cellini, Benvenuto 98, 118
Celts 4
Cesari, Antonio 158
Cesarotti, Melchiorre 158
Chabod, Federico 105
Chambéry 53, 100
Charlemagne 6, 17, 19–21, 31, 45
Charles I of Anjou 38, 55–6
Charles II 126
Charles III 127, 153
Charles V 97–8, 118, 182
Charles VI 127
Charles VIII 104
Charles Albert 171, 191, 193
Charles Emmanuel I 126
Charles Emmanuel III 163
Charles Nevers, Duke 125–6
Chastel, André 69, 109
Chiara of Montefalco 80
Chiaroscuro 109, 150
Chrétien de Troyes 59
Christian Democracy (DC) 268, 270, 272–4, 287, 300–302
Christine of Sweden 139
Christopher, Pope 31
Cicero 23, 85, 112
Cimabue 34, 61, 107
Ciompi, revolt of 67–8
Clavius, Christopher 145
Clement II, Pope 31
Clement IV, Pope 55
Clement V, Pope 71–2
Clement VII, Pope 74, 97, 105
Clement XIV, Pope 213
Clergy 15, 29, 31–3, 36, 61, 70–1, 86, 90, 127–8, 132, 145, 164, 224
regular 146
secular 145–6
Clovis 20
Coffee 167, 282–3, 300
Cola di Rienzo 73–4, 170, 302
Cold War xviii, 267, 270, 277, 299
Collodi, Carlo 209
Columbus, Christopher 143
Comencini, Luigi 263
Commedia dell’Arte 153–4, 265, 289
Como 50, 136
Constance
peace of 50
Council of 75
Constantine 6, 19–21, 23, 38, 104, 106–7
Constantine, donation of 19–20, 72, 85, 103
Constantinople (see also Byzantium) 2, 5, 7, 10, 18–19, 21, 34, 36, 40–3, 49, 51, 61, 64,
117, 291
Constitution
Piedmontese (see also Statuto) 193, 195–6, 215
of the Italian Republic 195, 267–8, 297, 299
of the Roman Republic 194
Neapolitan 191
Sicilian 173
Copernicus, Nicolaus 144
Coppino, Michele (and law) 215, 217
Corelli, Arcangelo 156
Corfu 127, 256
Corona, Nicola 171
Corradini, Enrico 232–3
Corsi, Jacopo 155
Corsica 4, 28, 39, 56, 166
Corsini, family 79
Cosenza 29
Counter-Reformation xviii, 81, 87, 112–13, 123, 125, 143, 147, 151, 159, 166, 214, 256
Craxi, Bettino 274, 294
Cremona 18, 50, 70, 240, 247
Crispi, Francesco 196, 198, 216–17, 219, 234, 295
Croatia 246, 299
Croce, Benedetto 125, 290
Croce, Giulio Cesare 138
Crusades 25, 30, 34–7, 43, 45, 78, 99, 108, 290
Crusca, Accademia 158
Cuoco, Vincenzo 172
Custoza 193, 200, 236

Dalla Chiesa, Alberto 274

Dalmatia 6, 42, 95, 234, 245
Damascus 21
Dante Alighieri xvii, 13, 20, 52, 55, 59–60, 62, 72, 78, 81–86, 88–91, 103–4, 157, 164, 185,
288
D’Acqui, Jacopo 90
D’Alberti, Francesco 158
D’Alembert, Jean Baptiste le Rond 166
D’Annunzio, Gabriele 241, 246
D’Aquino, Rinaldo 59
D’Azeglio, Massimo 196, 256
De Balzac, Honoré 184
De Bono, Emilio 247
De Amicis, Edmondo 201, 208–10, 215
De André, Fabrizio 280–1
Del Boca, Angelo 257, 298
Della Casa, Giovanni 111, 138
De Lamartine, Alphonse 184
Della Porta, Giambattista 141–2, 150
Della Rovere, Girolamo 100
Della Scala, family 53
Della Scala, Bartolomeo 82
Della Scala, Cangrande 13
De Longueil, Christophe xviii
De Martino, Ernesto 149
De Mauro, Tullio 179
De Pradt, Dufour 177
Depretis, Agostino 216–18
De Roberto, Federico 189, 255, 289
De Sanctis, Francesco 158–9, 288
De Sica, Vittorio 265
De Staël, Madame (Anne-Louise
Germaine Necker) 179
Desiderius 17, 31
De Vecchi, Cesare Maria 247
Diaz, Armando 244
Diderot 166
Dionisotti, Carlo 60, 83
Dominican order 32–4, 36–7, 48, 61, 70, 142
Donatello (Donato de’ Bardi) 108
Dubrovnik 42
Duby, Georges 29
Durazzo 42
Dylan, Bob 281

Ebro, river 19
Eco, Umberto 292
Egypt 39, 233
Elba, island 39
Elbe, river 19
Emilia 52, 70, 94, 146, 170, 197
England xvi, 21, 52, 54, 127, 141–2, 153, 175, 180, 187, 245
Enlightenment 93, 112, 125–6, 157–8, 160, 163–7, 173–6, 179, 186, 213, 251
Erasmus, Desiderius xvii, 122, 142
Ermengarda 17
Este, family 53, 68, 96, 100, 123, 131
Ethiopia 217, 257–9, 263, 298
Etna 222
Eugenius III, Pope 33, 36
Exiguus, Dionysius 10
Ezzelino da Romano 71

Falcone, Giovanni 274–5

Fano 13
Farinacci, Roberto 240, 246–7
Farinati, Paolo 78
Farnese, Alexander, Cardinal 111, 118
Fascism xviii, 230, 246–57, 261–4, 267–8, 270, 276, 279, 287, 289, 292, 295, 299–300
anti-248, 250–1, 259–60, 268, 289, 299
Fashion xvii–xviii, 89, 152, 155, 167, 207, 220, 274, 279, 287, 301
Fauriel, Claude 177–8
Fellini, Federico 266
Fenoglio, Beppe 263
Ferdinand of Aragón 97
Ferdinand I Habsburg 98
Ferdinand I Bourbon 173
Ferdinand II Bourbon 191, 198, 211
Ferrara 47, 53, 68–9, 96, 108, 114, 118, 123, 128, 131, 146, 171, 247
Ferraro, Joanne 134
Fiamma, Galvano 76
Fiat 230, 253, 271, 278, 282
Findlen, Paula xvi, 145
Fiorillo, Silvio 289
First World War (the Great War) 234, 250, 252–4, 257, 261, 270, 286, 292, 295–6, 298
Fiume (Croatia) 234, 245–7
Fiume, Giovanna 134
Flaubert, Gustave 225
Flavianus 5
Florence xv, xvii, 44, 64, 67, 79, 128, 133, 182, 223, 250, 277, 286–7
as a city-state 66–70, 74, 94–5, 290
 as a Signoria 95–6, 104
architecture, art, music and literature in 54, 60, 82, 84, 86, 88, 90, 98, 102–3, 105, 107–
9, 111, 116, 119–20, 122, 142, 144, 177, 231, 233, 254
as capital of Italy 200
Fo, Dario 272
Folgore of San Giminiano 90
Folengo, Teofilo 121
Fontana, Domenico 131, 151
Food xiv–xvi, 7, 23, 46, 54, 89–90, 122, 130, 138–40, 211–13, 257, 264, 274, 282–3, 289,
301
Formoso, Pope 31
Foscolo, Ugo 159, 168, 176–7, 180, 182, 188–189
France xv–xvi, xviii, 17, 21, 24, 35, 37, 40, 52–4, 58–59, 61, 71–2, 74, 88, 93, 97, 104, 109,
114, 117, 125, 127, 137, 141–2, 145, 155 164–5, 168, 172, 187–8, 195–6, 199–200, 205,
225, 228, 234, 240, 242, 257, 263
Francesco di Vannozzo 94
Franchetti, Leopoldo 223
Francis I 97
Francis II 198, 214
Franciscan order 32–4, 36, 48, 61
Franco, Francisco 259
François, Etienne 167
Franks 4, 13, 17–20
Franzina, Emilio 227, 276
Frederick I Barbarossa 37, 75
Frederick II 37, 54–5, 58–61, 69, 89–90
French Revolution xviii, 126, 164, 168, 180, 187, 213, 220, 234
Friuli 5, 16, 24, 95–6, 140, 188, 227, 243
Frosinone 9
Fusinate, Arnoldo 181

Gaeta 42
Galen of Pergamum 144
Galilei, Galileo 141, 144, 185, 188, 288
Galli, Giorgio 296
Garda, Lake 140, 264, 286, 289
Garibaldi, Anita 194
Garibaldi, Giuseppe 180–2, 186, 194, 196, 198–200, 205–6, 241, 259, 264
Garin, Eugenio 143
Gava, Antonio 274
Gelasius, Pope 22
Genoa xvii, 15, 29, 35, 39–40, 42–3, 52, 57, 87, 89, 94, 107, 140, 175, 180, 182, 189, 198,
227, 262, 270, 277, 286
Genovesi, Antonio 161
Gentile, Emilio 251
Gentiloni, Vincenzo (and agreement) 231
Germany 21, 37, 39, 55, 75, 97, 117, 122, 142, 175, 205, 217, 23, 236, 239, 242, 257–60,
297, 301
Gheri, Goro 112
Ghibellines 44, 65, 70, 89, 95
Ghiberti, Lorenzo 106
Giannone, Pietro 131, 163
Gimma, Giacinto 164
Ginsborg, Paul 186, 266, 293
Ginzburg, Carlo 133, 143
Ginzburg, Natalia 262
Gioanola, Elio 210, 233
Gioberti, Vincenzo 190, 204, 206, 213
Gioia, Melchiorre 112
Giolitti, Giovanni 221, 230–2, 239, 243, 246
Giordano of Pisa 33
Giorgione 118
Giotto xvii, 34, 61, 70, 109
Giovanni Bono 76
Giovanni of Viterbo 66
Giuliano, Salvatore 270
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 173, 184, 207
Goldoni, Carlo 155, 167
Golgi, Camillo 231
Gonzaga, family 68, 96, 100, 109, 139
Gonzaga, Vincent II 125
Gonzaga, Francesco 155
Gori, Pietro 220
Gorizia 234, 244
Gothic Wars 5, 11, 76
Gothic language 6
Gothic art/architecture 56, 61, 69, 106, 108
Goths 4, 7–9, 11, 13, 18, 38
Grado 104
Gramsci, Antonio 159, 185, 246, 264, 276, 293
Grand Tour xvii, 4, 152, 177, 207–8
Grandi, Dino 247, 258
Greece 42, 52, 95, 260–1
Gregory I (the Great), Pope 9, 15–16
Gregory II, Pope 17
Gregory III, Pope 20
Gregory V, Pope 20
Gregory VI, Pope 31
Gregory VII, Pope 32, 75, 77, 290
Gregory IX, Pope 37, 81
Gregory XI, Pope 72–4
Guadalajara 259
Guareschi, Giovanni 269
Guarini, Guarino 153
Guardi, Francesco 151
Guelphs 44, 65, 82, 95, 190, 290
neo- 51, 189
Guicciardini, Francesco xviii, 87, 93, 96, 101, 104, 106, 112
Guido da Montefeltro 84
Guiscard, Robert 19, 39
Guittone d’Arezzo 60
Gundle, Stephen 294

Habsburgs 13, 97, 125–6, 131, 164, 168, 182, 188, 226, 235, 283
Hadrian, Emperor 11
Hadrian I, Pope 17
Hadrian IV, Pope 33, 37
Hanlon, Gregory 143, 145
Haynau, von, Julius 194
Helstolsky, Carol 211
Henry III 31–2
Henry IV 76–7
Henry IV 155
Henry VIII 127
Hepburn, Audrey 278
Hobsbawm, Eric 205
Hollywood 264, 266, 276, 281, 294
Homer 85, 159
Hugo, Victor 182, 184
Humanism 96, 102–3, 111, 117, 122, 265
Hungary 12, 98, 234–5
Hus, Jan 75
Hyde, John Kenneth 65

Ignatius Loyola 114, 144

Innocent II, Pope 33
Innocent III, Pope 36, 59
Innocent IV, Pope 37
Innocent VII, Pope 81
Innocent X, Pope 152
Inquisition 36, 70, 81, 96–7, 111, 114, 123, 127–128, 133, 139, 142–5, 149
Interlandi, Telesio 260
Ireland 52
Islam 15, 30, 35, 55
Isnenghi, Mario 175, 241, 242, 255–6, 300
Istria 234
Italian Alpine Club 208
Italian Communist Party (PCI) 246, 265, 270–1, 273, 295–6, 301
Italian Nationalist Association 231
Italian Popular Party (PPI) 238
Italian Social Movement (MSI) 270, 274
Italian Socialist Party (PSI) 205, 231, 235, 242–3, 270, 274
Italian Socialist Reformist Party 235
Italian Touring Club 208–9, 211, 277–8, 283

Jacobins 170–1, 191, 205, 218, 287

Jacobson, Herbert 265
Jacopone da Todi 58
Jesuit Order 114–15, 127, 141, 144–7, 163, 213
Jews 37, 55, 97, 149, 258–60, 262
Joachim of Fiore 29, 34, 36
John the Deacon 18
John I, Pope 8, 10
John XXII 71, 81
John Paul II, Pope 291–2
Jones, Philip 45
Joseph II 165–6
Joseph Bonaparte 172
Jubilee 71, 80, 88, 151
Julius II, Pope 105, 115–16, 147
Justinian 2, 8, 11
Juvara, Filippo 153

Keller, Johann Christoph 2

Klopstok, Friedrich 184
Knox, MacGregor 257
Kublai Khan 39

La Cecla, Franco 212

Lambro, river 229
Lampertico, Fedele 292
Lanaro, Silvio 209
Landino, Cristoforo 44
Lando, Ortensio 140
Larner, John 65
Lateran
palace 20
III Council 70
IV Council 36
 pacts 253, 260, 269
Latini, Brunetto 66, 82
La Torre, Pio 274
Lazio 17, 31
League of Nations 245, 256–7
Lecce 146
Lecco 136
Legnano, battle of 37, 50, 76, 182, 192
Lentini da, Giacomo 59–60
Leo I, Pope 16
Leo III, Pope 19
Leo III 40
Leo V, Pope 31
Leo IX, Pope 34
Leo X, Pope 20, 97, 111, 115, 147
Leo XIII, Pope 147, 215
Leonardo da Vinci 109, 116, 150
Leopardi, Giacomo 88, 112, 176–8
Levi, Carlo 267, 271
Levi, Giovanni 293, 300
Levi, Primo 259
Lewis, Norman 268
Libya 232, 234, 257, 298
Liguria 16, 89, 147, 175, 187, 286, 289
Lima, Salvo 274
Lissa 200, 236
Liutprand 16
Liutprand, Bishop 18
Livorno 246, 286
Livy 85
Locke, John 141
Lodi 50, 168
peace of 95
Lodrisio 76
Lollobrigida, Gina 276
Lombard League 47, 50–1
Lombards xv, 4, 12–20, 40, 45
Lombardy 13, 29, 32, 43–4, 50, 52, 69–70, 94, 101, 109, 117, 126, 136–7, 150, 164–5,
168, 170, 173, 175, 187–9, 191, 194–5, 197, 215, 222, 229, 287, 292
Lombroso, Cesare 225
London 142, 155, 161, 184, 258, 298
Treaty of 234
radio 263
Loren, Sophia 276
Loreto 146–8
Loschi, Antonio 94
Louis IX 37–8
Louis XII 97, 100
Louis XIII 126
Lucca 60, 67, 76, 94–5, 107, 114, 290
Lucretius 142
Lumley, Robert 281
Luperini, Romano 120
Lupo, Salvatore 301
Lussu, Emilio 247
Luzzatto, Sergio 292
Lyon, Council of 37

Machiavelli, Niccolò xviii, 13, 30, 68, 87–8, 97, 100–1, 104–6, 111–112, 121–2, 153, 159,
164–5, 185, 188, 288, 297
Macry, Paolo 295
Madrid 98, 125, 128
Mafia 222, 253–4, 270, 273–5, 294, 301–2
Magenta, battle of 197
Magnani, Anna 276
Malatesta, Errico 242
Malatesta, Maria 167
Malato, Enrico 179
Mameli, Goffredo 182, 194, 264
Manetti, Giannozzo 115
Manin, Daniele 184, 192, 196, 205
Mannerism 117–119
Mantegna, Andrea 108, 119
Mantua 47, 67–8, 76–7, 96, 98, 107, 109–11, 118, 125–127, 155, 188, 197, 224, 286
Manutius, Aldus 85, 120
Manzoni, Alessandro 13, 136–1, 166, 177–9, 182, 185, 213, 225
Marche 13, 108, 131, 147, 176, 197
Marco Polo 38
Marconi, Guglielmo 231
Margherita of Savoy 212
Maria Theresa of Austria 164
Marie de Champagne 59
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 232–3, 254
Marinismo 154, 157
Marino, Giambattista 131, 153, 156, 288
Marino, John 125
Marsala 198–9
Marseilles 127, 175
Marsilius of Padua 72
Martellotti, Anna 90
Martin V, Pope 75
Martin, John 114
Martin Luther 103, 114, 115, 213
Martines, Lauro 52, 103
Marx, Karl 30, 240
Masaccio (Tommaso Cassai) 108
Masaniello (Tommaso Aniello) 129–30, 295
Masetti, Augusto 234
Massawa 217
Matteotti, Giacomo 248–51, 264
Mayer, Arno 232
Mazzantini, Carlo 264
Mazzini, Giuseppe 175–6, 180–1, 184, 189–90, 194, 206, 210, 218, 241, 264
Medici, family 69, 88, 96, 100, 105–6, 122
Medici, Cosimo the old 95
Medici, Cosimo I 95, 107, 128
Medici, Lorenzo the Magnificent 95, 105, 115
Medici, Maria 155
Medici, Piero 104
Melzi d’Eril, Francesco 168
Mercantini, Luigi 181
Meridionalismo 223
Messina 64, 150, 153, 219
Metternich, von, of Austria 184, 289
Michelangelo Buonarroti 109, 115–16, 188, 201, 288
Milan 17, 40, 43, 52, 64, 67, 75, 247, 262
Edict of (313) 19
as a city-state xv, 32, 37, 47, 50, 53, 76,
as a Signoria 67, 74, 77, 94–5
under the French monarchy 97, 101
under the Spanish monarchy 125–6, 128, 132, 136–137
and Napoleon 168, 170–2
and the Risorgimento 186, 191–3
as part of unified Italy 219–20, 228–9
and the foundation of Fascism 245
and the ‘First Republic’ 272, 277, 280, 312
architecture, art, music and literature in 108–9, 111, 163, 165–7, 177, 185, 207, 225, 233,
254, 288
Milani, don Lorenzo 271
Minghetti, Marco 200
Modena 107, 114, 127, 165, 168, 171
Modugno, Domenico 280
Moe, Nelson 224
Momigliano, Arnaldo 260
Moneta, Ernesto Teodoro 231
Monferrato, family 52
Montanari, Massimo 46, 138
Montefeltro, family 68, 96, 116
Montefeltro, Federico 108
Montesquieu (Charles-Louis de Secondat) 165
Monteverdi, Claudio 155
Monti, Vincenzo 158
Monza 69, 221
Moravia, Alberto 265
Moretto (Alessandro Bonvicino) 150
Moro, Aldo 273
Mozzoni, Anna Maria 230
Murat, Joachim 172, 195
Murat, Luciano 195
Muratori, Ludovico Antonio 161, 163
Muslims 30, 35, 39, 43, 48, 57, 149
Mussolini, Benito 233–6, 240–1, 245, 247–9, 251–2, 254–7, 260–1, 263–4, 279, 286, 295,
299

Naples xv, 64, 69, 89, 114, 140, 142, 148, 152
and Byzantium 18, 42, 43
Anjou and Aragonese 56, 69–70, 74, 86, 95, 97, 287–8
and Napoleon 168, 171–2, 195, 197–8, 287
and the Risorgimento 163, 166–7, 192, 195, 296
as part of unified Italy 211, 214, 227, 230, 248, 262
architecture, art, music and literature in 86–7, 107–8, 111, 131, 141–2, 150, 153, 155,
167, 172, 207
(Spanish) Habsburg 98, 101, 102, 104, 108, 126, 295
(Spanish) Bourbon 126, 128–31, 137, 172–3, 175, 191
Napoleon Bonaparte 127, 168, 170, 172–3, 185, 195
Napoleon III 197
National Alliance 274, 299
National Society 196–7, 199–200
Neera (Anna Radius Zuccari) 230
Neo-realism 265–6, 276, 280, 287
Netherlands, The xvi, 117, 166
New York 255
Nice 100, 187, 197
Nicea, Council of 6, 115
Nicholas V, Pope 103, 115
Nievo, Ippolito 188
Niola, Marino 139, 148
Nitti, Francesco Saverio 249
Nola 141, 212
Normans xv, 30, 34–5, 39, 41–2, 48, 55
Northern League 275, 295, 299
Novara 193
Novaro, Michele 182

Odoacer 2, 6–7
Oliva, Gianni 298
Olona, river 229
Opera 155–6, 183–4, 188, 206, 252, 288–9
Orbicciani, Bonagiunta 60
Orso, doge 40
Ossola, Carlo 111
Ostiglia 47
Ostrogoths 6–8
Otto III 20
Otto of Freising, Bishop 49
Ottoman Empire 99, 117, 127

Pact of Steel 259

Padre Pio 148, 292
Padua 94–5, 106–8, 111, 114, 122, 127, 140, 142, 144, 188
Palermo 43, 55–6, 58, 69, 98, 108, 130, 188, 191–2, 198, 275
Palladio, Andrea 119
Pannonia 12
Pantheon, civic pilgrimage to 147, 207, 217
Paoli, Pasquale 166
Papini, Giovanni 240
Parabiago 76
Parini, Giuseppe 157
Paris 33, 64, 101,153, 155, 161, 172, 184, 259
Paris Commune 205
Parma 37, 54–5, 107, 127, 183, 246
Pascoli, Giovanni 233
Pasolini, Pier Paolo 272, 279
Passerini, Luisa 279
Pasta 89, 101, 211–12, 285, 289
Pastoral literature 110, 132, 153, 155–6
Pataria 32, 36
Paul the Deacon 5, 14
Paul III, Pope 114, 116, 118, 147
Paul IV, Pope 114, 122
Paul V, Pope 127
Paul VI, Pope 273
Pauline Bonaparte 185
Pavese, Cesare 262–3
Pavia 5, 8, 14, 17, 43, 69, 109, 216
Peck, Gregory 278
Pellico, Silvio 176, 184
Perego, Pietro 192
Peri, Giacinto 155
Perugia 105, 116
Pesaro 13, 109
Pescara 241
Peter Damian 41
Peter III of Aragón 56
Petrarch, Francesco xvii, 70, 72–3, 81, 83, 85, 87–8, 103, 120–1, 157, 185, 288
Philip II 98, 101
Philip V 127
Philippe de Commynes 94, 117
Piacentini, Marcello 254
Piacenza 15, 47, 70, 112, 118, 168
Piave, river 243–244
Pica, Giuseppe (and law) 224
Piedmont 50, 52–3, 64, 94, 100–1, 104, 110, 126–7, 151, 163, 166, 172–5, 179–80, 187–8,
191, 193, 195–7, 199–200, 206, 215–16, 222, 239–40, 270, 283, 287
Pier delle Vigne 59
Piero della Francesca 108
Pietro da Cortona 152
Pietro Tribuno, doge 40
Pietro II Orseolo, doge 41
Pilo, Rosolino 196, 198
Pinelli, Giuseppe 272
Pinocchio 209–10
Pippin 17
Pirandello, Luigi 231, 256
Pirenne, Henri 2, 4, 29
Pisa 29, 33, 35, 39, 43, 52, 57, 68, 87, 95, 140–1, 286–7
Pisacane, Carlo 181, 196, 295
Pius II, Pope 108
Pius V, Pope 95
Pius VI, Pope 213
Pius IX, Pope 190, 201, 215
Pius XI, Pope 252
Pivato, Stefano 221
Pizza 211–12
Plato 112
Plebiscites 197, 199, 200–1, 296
Po river/valley 12–13, 15, 17, 43, 45, 47, 78, 89, 95, 97, 100, 120, 127, 168, 170, 217, 219,
246, 269–70
Poerio, Alessandro 181
Pohl, Walter 18
Poland 39, 260
Poliziano (Angelo Ambrogini) 122
Pontine Marshes 254–5
Porta, Carlo 177
Porta Pia 200, 201, 205, 214–15
Portella della Ginestra 270
Porto Ercole 150
Power, Eileen 79
Prampolini, Camillo 218
Prato 220, 241
Preziosi, Giovanni 260
Prezzolini, Giuseppe 240
Procopius of Caesarea 11
Protestantism 114, 125, 127, 214
Protonotaro, Stefano 59
Prussia 165, 200
Ptolemy of Lucca 66
Pugliese, Giacomino 59
Puoti, Basilio 158

Quadrio, Francesco Saverio 164

Quarto (Genoa) 198

Racial laws 258–60

Radetzky, Joseph 192
Raphael Sanzio 110, 115–16
Ravenna 8, 11–13, 17, 31, 41, 51, 75, 107
Recanati 147, 176
Red Brigades 272–3
Reformation xvi, 61, 78, 81, 93, 95, 100, 113, 119, 147, 213
Reggio Emilia 76, 140, 171
Reggio Calabria 210
Reinhardt, Volker 100
Renaissance 4, 77, 93–6, 98, 100, 125, 135, 141, 163
and humanism 80, 83, 94, 102–103, 114, 122, 293
and art/architecture xvii, xix, 61, 70, 79, 106–7, 115–17, 119, 149–51, 207
and language/literature 44, 83, 101, 106, 110–11
and fashion xvii, 54
and music 70, 156–7
and food xvii, 89, 138–9
 celebration of xvi, xviii, 125, 185, 265, 287, 300
Renouard, Yves 29
Repubblica
Ambrosiana 68
Cisalpina 170
Cispadana 170–1
Ligure 170
Partenopea 170
Resistance xviii, 185, 251, 259, 264–5, 267–8, 270, 289, 295, 297, 299
Restoration 171, 173, 180, 191, 213, 260
second 193–4
Revelli, Nuto 261
Rhine, river 4, 22, 200
Righettini, Cesare 138
Rigoni Stern, Mario 261
Rimini 13, 107
Rinuccini, Ottavio 155
Risorgimento xviii, 43, 51, 89, 125, 185–6, 190–4, 200–1, 205, 207, 216–17, 220–1, 223,
227, 231, 233, 235, 249, 267, 293, 297
and language/literature 13, 167, 178, 180–1, 183–4, 188–9, 226, 288–9
and the peasantry 172, 175, 205, 226, 295
and the Enlightenment 176
and Romanticism 179–80, 183–4, 189, 194
celebration of xvi, xviii, 125, 206–7, 210, 236, 240–1, 250, 252, 254, 264, 283, 289, 297
Rochat, Giorgio 243, 257
Roger II 34
Rogers, Ernesto 266
Romagna 13, 17, 86, 100, 105, 107, 113, 131, 138, 170, 173, 196–7, 211, 218, 234
Romanesque 52, 106
Romanino, Girolamo 150
Romano, Ruggiero xv, 289, 295
Rome
as capital of Italy xiii, 193, 197, 199, 200, 201, 206, 214, 260
ancient xv, 2, 10, 21, 47, 49, 72, 85, 87, 182, 187, 190, 206, 254, 287, 290, 295
and the Barbarian invasions 2, 4, 11, 16
and the Germanic Empire 18, 20–1, 31, 74, 85, 97, 104, 114
architecture, art, music and literature in 61, 68–9, 106, 107, 109, 111, 114–17, 119, 126,
139, 150–3, 155, 157, 177, 207, 241, 287
and the Church xiii, 10, 20, 31–3, 37–8, 51, 61, 70–3, 77, 88, 95, 104, 113–14, 139, 142,
144, 147, 149, 166, 168, 191, 195, 200, 212, 214, 290
republic of 170–1, 182, 194
and the Papal States 95, 213
Mussolini’s 247–9, 252–4, 259, 261–3, 295, 297
and the ‘First Republic’ 266, 275, 277–8, 280
Romulus Augustolus 2
Rosmini, Antonio 213
Rosselli, Carlo 185, 259, 264
Rosselli, Nello 259
Rossellini, Roberto 276
Rothari 16
Ruffini, Giovanni 180
Ruffo, Cardinal 171
Ruggiero, Guido 135
Russia 234, 241, 243, 261, 263
Russian Revolution 242
Ruzante (Angelo Beolco) 121

Sadowa, battle of 200

St Ambrose 76–7
St Anselm 76
St Augustine 35
St Benedict of Nursia 9, 14, 26
St Bernard 61
St Catherine of Siena 72–3, 80, 290
St Chiara of Assisi 80
St Clement 25–6
St Dominic 34
St Eustachio 46
St Faustinus 15
St Francis of Assisi 33–4, 52, 57–8, 61
St Gennaro 148
St Mark 42, 168, 184, 192, 194
St Paul 19, 21, 71, 290
St Peter 16–17, 19, 20–1, 32, 73, 115, 290
St Severo 75
St Thomas Aquinas 36–7
St Valentine 66
St Zeno 15
Salandra, Antonio 235, 239
Salaris, Claudia 233
Salerno 19, 55, 101
Salò Republic 264, 299
Saluzzo, family 52
Salvemini, Gaetano 185, 250, 255
Sangallo, Antonio 152
San Marino, Republic of 7
San Martino, battle of 197
Sannazzaro, Jacopo 101, 120
San Sepolcro (Arezzo) 108
San Sepolcro (Milan) 245, 256
Sansovino, Andrea 147
Sant’Elia, Antonio 254
Saracens 39–40
Sardinia 4, 39, 56, 64, 97, 104, 126, 164, 182
Sarpi, Paolo 127
Saviano of Siena 94
Savoldo, Girolamo 150
Savonarola, Girolamo 95, 104–5, 113–14, 122
Savoy
region 64, 197
House of 52–3, 100, 126, 138, 153, 171, 175, 191, 193, 196–7, 206–7, 221, 241, 264, 295
Saxons 4
Scarfoglio, Edoardo 230
Scarlatti, Alessandro 156
Scelba, Mario 270
Sciascia, Leonardo 273, 300
Scott, Walter 184
Schiller, Friedrich 184
Schio 229
Schmitt, Jean-Claude 81
Schneider, Jane 135
Shakespeare, William 184
Silone, Ignazio 267
Sciri 4
Second World War xviii, 185, 251, 258, 260, 266, 275, 286–7, 293, 298, 299, 301
Selassie, Haile 258
Sella, Quintino 208, 216
Senigallia 13
Serao, Matilde 208, 230
Serbia 236, 240
Sergius III, Pope 31
Sforza, family 67, 95, 100
Sforza, Ludovico il Moro 109, 111
Sforza, Francesco 109
Sicily xv, 44, 62, 89–91, 140, 180, 207
pre-Norman 6, 8
Norman 34, 37, 39, 48, 54–5
Anjou’s and Aragonese 56, 64, 69–70
(Spanish) Habsburg 97–8
(Spanish) Bourbon 126–8, 145, 173, 194
and the Risorgimento 186, 189, 197–8, 200, 213
part of unified Italy 217, 219, 221–3, 226, 242, 261, 270, 277, 301
 architecture, art, music and literature in 26, 30, 60–1, 87, 108–10, 126, 151–3, 164, 181,
233, 266, 287–8, 300
Siena 61, 67, 72, 86, 94–5, 114, 116, 140, 287
Silvio, doge 42
Simon Magus 32
Sixtus V, Pope 149, 151
Slovenia 243, 299
Sodano, Giulio 148
Soldani, Simonetta 189
Solferino, battle of 197
Sonnino, Sidney 223
South Tirol 234
Spain xiv, xviii, 17, 19, 39–40, 56, 93, 97–9, 108, 125, 127–8, 139, 149, 151, 178, 258–9
Spinelli, Altiero 297
Split 42
Squadrismo 240, 247
Squillace 8
Starace, Giovan Vincenzo 129
Statuto 193, 195, 215, 219
Stefani, Bartolomeo 139
Stendhal (Marie Henri Beyle) 137, 177, 301–2
Stephen II, Pope 17
Stephen VI, Pope 31
Stil Novo 60, 82
Stilo 142
Suevi 4
Suffrage
male 231, 243
universal 267
Sutri 17
Svevo, Italo 226, 289
Switzerland 52, 195, 247
Syllabus of Errors 213–14
Sylos Labini, Paolo 302
Sylvester I, Pope 19–20, 104
Sylvester III, Pope 31
Symmachus 8
Syracuse 61, 153, 219
Syria 42

Talamone 198
Tambroni, Fernando 270
Taranto 43, 140, 262
Tartaro, river 47
Tasca, Angelo 242
Tasso, Torquato 78, 123, 158–9
Telesio, Bernardino 141–2
Theatines 114
Theodoric 7–9, 11–12, 38
Theodosius I 2, 6
Thirty Years’ War 125–6
Thomas I 53
Thousand, the 188, 197–8, 279
Tiber, river 31, 33, 72, 290
Tiepolo, Giambattista 151
Tintoretto (Jacopo Robusti) 119
Tiraboschi, Girolamo 165
Titian Vecellio 110, 118, 134
Tivoli 104
Tobia, Bruno 207
Toledo, Pedro 128, 151
Tomasi di Lampedusa, Giuseppe 198
Tommaseo, Niccolò 213
Tortona 104
Transformism 196, 289, 296–7
Trent 114, 240, 243–4
Council of 79, 114, 115, 121, 125, 133, 148
Trentino 234–6, 286
Treves, Claudio 243
Trieste 226, 234–6, 243–4
Triple Alliance 217, 234
Turcilingi 4
Turin xvii, 100, 132, 153, 193, 196, 199, 242, 246, 260, 262, 277
Tuscany 12, 26, 43, 47–8, 56, 60, 85–6, 90, 95, 107–8, 111, 117–18, 127, 144, 150, 158,
164, 168, 172–3, 189, 194, 197, 220, 226, 287
Two Sicilies, Kingdom of the 30, 173, 179

Uccello, Paolo 108

Umberto I 207, 212, 220
Umbria 131
Ungaretti, Giuseppe 256
Unification, Italian xiii–xvi, xviii, 13, 105, 126, 147, 157, 160–1, 164, 170, 172, 180, 184–6,
190, 193–8, 200–201, 4, 206, 208, 210, 213, 216, 218, 220, 222–7, 229, 236, 239, 243,
252, 264, 275, 286, 288–9, 293, 295–7
Urban II, Pope 35, 75
Urban IV, Pope 74
Urban VIII, Pope 142, 144, 148
Urbino 68, 96, 107–11, 116, 128
Ursulines 114
Utrecht, peace of 126

Valerio, Giovan Francesco 120

Valla, Lorenzo 20, 103
Vandals 4, 6, 23
Vanvitelli, Luigi 153
Vasari, Giorgio 106–7, 109
Vatican Council 214
Vatican State 17, 201, 212, 215, 245, 252, 268, 273, 294
Vauchez, André 291
Venetia 38, 50, 70, 127, 168, 172–3, 175, 188, 191, 197, 200, 226–7, 243, 258, 286
Venice xiv–xv, xvii, 36, 64, 67, 133, 142, 152, 264, 283
origins of 38
and Byzantium 13, 40–3, 61
architecture, art, music and literature in 61, 68–9, 86, 106–7, 111, 114, 116–21, 151,
154–155, 158, 164, 167, 288
republic of (Serenissima) 29–30, 35, 40, 42–3, 67, 94–6, 100–1, 117, 126–7, 144, 168,
286
Habsburg 175, 181, 186, 189, 199
republic of (1848–9) 192, 194
part of unified Italy 200, 205
Ventura, Guglielmo 71
Verdi, Giuseppe 183–4, 220
Verga, Giovanni 222, 225–6, 289
Verismo 225, 230, 265
Verona 8, 13, 15, 25–6, 53, 64, 82, 94–6, 224, 286
Veronese (Paolo Caliari) 119
Verri, Alessandro 157, 167
Verri, Pietro 163, 165, 167–8
Verrocchio, Andrea del 109
Vespa (scooter) 278, 300
Vespers (Sicilian) 56, 69, 182
Vesuvius 130, 148
Vicenza 94–6, 119, 140, 292
Vico, Giambattista 131, 160, 163, 288
Victor Amedeo II 127, 153
Victor Emmanuel II 193, 195–6, 205–7, 220
Vienna 192
Congress of 173, 177
Villafranca, armistice of 197, 199
Villani, Giovanni 72
Villari, Pasquale 204, 223, 225
Violante, Luciano 299
Virgil 23, 84, 159
Visconti, family xv, 40, 53, 67, 77, 94, 97
Visconti, Gian Galeazzo 69, 94
Visconti, Luchino 76
Visconti, Luchino (film director) 280
Viterbo 17
Vitruvius 107
Vittoriano 206, 252
Vittorini, Elio 266–7
Vittorio Veneto 244
Vivaldi, Antonio 156
Vivarium 8
Volpe, Gioacchino 243
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) 165

Waldensian 70
Waley, Daniel 52, 66
Ward-Perkins, Bryan 5
Wars of Italian Independence xvi, 186, 223
first 189, 191, 193, 207, 295
second 197, 200
third 200, 224
Weber, Eugen 205
Wickham, Chris 4, 6
William 37
William of Ockham 72
Worms, Concordat of 32

Young Italy 175–6, 186

Zanardelli, Giuseppe 219

Zara 42
Zeno 6, 7
Zola, Émile 225