The Antiquity of the Italian Nation: The Cultural Origins of Political Myth in Modern Italy

"Yes and no. We cannot really understand this book without going back to the debate that followed the publication of Banti’s book. As we have seen, Banti depicts a homogeneous version of the national patriotic narrative. And he also claims, and claimed very explicitly in more recent publications, that we can trace a continuity between the nation of the Risorgimento and, for example, the nation of fascism. De Francesco reacts against this interpretation strongly. His main point is that there was no single Italian nationalism. His book is all about analysing the varied and multifaceted interpretations of this phenomenon over a long period of time, going well beyond the Risorgimento. “At the time of the unification in 1861, only about 2% of Italians actually spoke Italian” As well as reacting very strongly against Banti’s interpretation, he challenges the opposite idea that we can easily and unequivocally distinguish between the nation of the Risorgimento and the nation of fascism as though these were two distinct and non-communicating constructs. Going back to your question regarding Rome. This particular theme—the myth of Rome—was very popular, especially towards the end of the 19th century and during the fascist period and is only one of the main themes of this book. There are at least two other focal points in this book, namely the debate on the origins of the Italian nation and the conversation surrounding its ethnic composition. Needless to say, the three are interconnected. Yes. The book explores the notion of ‘antiquity’, often connected to the idea of ‘autochthony’, and how scholars and intellectuals working in different disciplines reflected on these issues, often locating the origins of the Italian nation in pre-Roman times. The topic was debated throughout the 19th century and in fact since the end of the 18th century. For example, Vincenzo Cuoco traced these origins back to the Etruscans, which allowed him to claim that the Italian nation could rely on some kind of ethnic unity—on top of the cultural glories. On the contrary, others such as Giuseppe Micali focused on the differences between the ancient peoples that inhabited the peninsula, challenging the idea of an ethnic unity. Of course what is interesting is not only the study of what these people wrote, but also the analysis of how their work was received, interpreted and used during the Risorgimento and in the early 20th century. I always tell my students that we must contextualise the work of historians, and not only our primary sources . Yes. He’s definitely claiming that we cannot trace a direct continuity between the Risorgimento and fascism, precisely because he claims that the Risorgimento is much more multifaceted than Banti would have it. He also highlights the contradictions between these different understandings of the Risorgimento, of the Italian nation and its origins and how these can be the foundation of very different political projects and versatile political imagery. That’s a very good question. It was indeed a difficult heritage. It was a moment when Italian cities developed as internationally important cultural and economic centres and sometimes Italian cities united against foreign invasion, but it was also a time when Italy was divided. Italy in fact did not exist as a political entity. These images actually play a very important role in the cultural and political imagination of the Risorgimento especially insomuch as they are linked to Romanticism and to Romantic aesthetics. If we look at some of the novels and poems that are chosen by Banti as part of the ‘canon’ of the Risorgimento, we can find that they are full of images evoking precisely this past. Sometimes these are turned into glorious images of Italians resisting the foreign invader, like the Lombard League against the [Holy Roman] Emperor in the 12th century. At the same time, you find very powerful descriptions of Italians being like a herd of cattle without an identity, an easy prey of foreign invaders. In fact, in order to have the nation it is not only important to have the flesh and blood of the people; it is also important to have an awareness that the nation exists. This idea that Italians did exist at the time, but were a flesh with no name and no awareness of themselves, is also quite common. For example, in a very famous—in Italy at least—quotation from Manzoni’s Adelchi , Italians are described as ‘ un volgo disperso che nome non ha’ —something like ‘a scattered heard with no name’."