The Pursuit of Italy: A History of a Land, its Regions and their Peoples

"Yes. The region that triggered unification was Piemonte, which is in the north. The first time some envoys from Piemonte went down to Sicily they couldn’t understand the dialect. The first prime minister of Italy preferred to speak French. Now it’s more homogenous because of TV and, after 150 years of unification, people have travelled and there is a degree of uniformity. But to this day, there is still a bit of a divide. One of the major parties in Italy used to be called the Northern League. Their main goal was for people in northern Italy to retain their own taxes under some sort of fiscal federalism. In The Pursuit of Italy , David Gilmour tries to show not only that Italy is still an incomplete work, but that Italians aren’t necessarily better off under a single flag. After all, for centuries the peninsula thrived in trade and arts within a fragmented system of cities and states. The competition between self-governing Italian city-states (Florence, Milan, Ferrara, Mantua, etc.) from the Middle Ages onwards fostered the surge of Italian arts, philosophy and science. Early modern Italy is considered by many the cradle of modern Western political thought and civic freedom. Of course, there was a limit to the military and economic power that a single comune could reach. Political fragmentation is a recurring feature in Italian history. The Italian regions are still culturally very diverse, and nationalism is seen by many as an evil forcefully imposed upon people, especially during Fascism. Gilmour is particularly tough on the leaders of the Risorgimento , the movement that eventually led to the country’s unification, whom he deems overrated, and on modern/contemporary Italy, which he sees as plagued by corruption and political misbehaviour. Gilmour quotes the Austrian statesman, Klemens von Metternich (1773-1859), who argued that Italy is “only a geographical expression.” We can now say with ease that he was wrong. He said that in 1814, so Metternich should probably be forgiven."