Recent fissures in the European Union remind us that no political union is historically inevitable. Such federations are human creations, established either for expediency or through expansionism, frequently artificial: sometimes so much so that, as in the case of Yugoslavia, they simply fall apart.
The historian, biographer and Italophile David Gilmour argues that Italy is another fragile union, and in “The Pursuit of Italy” he makes a persuasive (if not entirely unfamiliar) argument that the 1861 unification of the country, trumpeted by nationalists as a triumph of progressive statecraft, was a mistake. Gilmour says many thinking Italians have begun to wonder why their country has for so long been intractably dysfunctional, crippled by corruption, organized crime and a hateful bureaucracy, and governed by an endless parade of shady leaders, of whom Silvio Berlusconi was only the most recent. “Why, people asked, did Italy not function?” Gilmour writes. “Was it in fact a real nation or was it just a 19th-century invention? Except in a purely formal sense, could it really be said to exist?”
Gilmour has attempted to answer these questions by providing an alternative history of Italy, not taking the usual centripetal line but emphasizing the country’s longtime “centrifugal tendencies.” The modern nation stretches from the town of Aosta in the northwest, where the official language is French, to the Apulia region in the southeast, where many people still speak Greek. With its 4,500 miles of coastline, the peninsula was for centuries subjected to countless invasions. Its mountainous interior and unnavigable rivers made communications difficult and encouraged the growth of one of the world’s most eclectic collections of civilizations and mutually incomprehensible dialects. Only one in 40 Italians spoke standard Italian at the time of unification, and it wasn’t until the 20th century that the language became commonly known within the country.
There was no unified Italy at any time between the fall of the Roman Empire and 1861. Progressive waves of Byzantines, Lombards, Arabs, Normans, Angevins, Aragonese and other overlords helped mold the peninsula into an assortment of independent and highly individual city-states. There was Florence, with its bold experiments in republican government; Rome, seat of power of the Papal States, a once mighty city that became a byword for stagnation and corruption; Sicily, the former breadbasket of the Roman Empire, thereafter a political pawn and a prize for whatever power happened to be dominant in the Mediterranean; and the great city of Naples, which had, according to ­Stendhal, “the true makings of a capital,” while the other Italian cities were only “glorified provincial towns.”
The case of Venice, which Gilmour posits was “the most harmonious society in Italy,” is the most pertinent to his argument. From the founding of the republic in the late seventh century, Venice turned its back on the mainland and became an Adriatic power. Its historic and cultural links were with Byzantium rather than Rome; its traditional enemy was Genoa. The independent republic lasted 1,100 years, considerably longer than the Roman Empire, with a smoothly functioning government and a strong community identity. It survived until 1797, when it was conquered and dissolved by Napoleon and eventually turned over to Austria. Decades later, Gilmour asserts, Venice’s “incorporation into the kingdom of Italy — which its people did not want — was almost as much an aberration in its history as its forced membership” in the Hapsburg and Napoleonic empires.
Gilmour ably deconstructs the national myth of unification and its pantheon of Giuseppe Mazzini, Giuseppe Garibaldi, Camillo Cavour and King Victor Emanuel II. The myth, he writes, was the result of a monumental propaganda effort by the house of Savoy, enforced, after unification, by a nationwide campaign of “statue-­making and street-christening in homage to the heroic four.” (What provincial town doesn’t have its statues of Gari­baldi and Victor Emanuel, its Via Cavour and Piazza Mazzini? Or its Museo del Risorgimento, usually a gloomy edifice shunned by the Italian citizenry?) In reality, Gilmour reveals, the four were rather more human than heroic. Victor Emanuel, the Piedmontese king, was a reactionary anti-constitutionalist who once confided to the British ambassador that the only two ways to govern Italians were “by bayonets and bribery.” Contemporary Italian politicians deemed him “an imbecile.” Cavour, the undoubtedly brilliant Piedmontese politician, was only a last-minute convert to the cause of unity: when it became evident that Gari­baldi was going to conquer Sicily, Cavour thought it best to annex the island to Piedmont. Unification, therefore, began as “a war of expansion” conducted by one Italian state, Piedmont, against another, Sicily.
Despite triumphs like the “economic miracle” of the 1950s and ’60s, united Italy cannot be called a success story: its citizens still see themselves more as Romans, Sienese or Sicilians than as Italians. Campanilismo — loyalty to one’s local bell-tower, or to a “historical and essentially self-contained form of society designed many centuries ago,” as Gilmour writes — remains stronger than loyalty to the idea of the nation. Perhaps, Gilmour argues, this should be considered a strength rather than a weakness. He writes in the spirit of earlier historians, like the 16th-century Florentine Francesco Guicciardini and the 19th-century Milanese intellectual Carlo Cattaneo, who believed that the Italian cities formerly thrived because of mutual competition. “United Italy,” he concludes, was “predestined to be a disappointment.” Is it time, then, to give up on a failed union and return to the idea of a loose confederation? If so, Gilmour’s detailed, learned and politically challenging book provides a picture of what such a community of nation-states might look like.
Brooke Allen’s most recent book is “The Other Side of the Mirror: An American Travels Through Syria.” She teaches literature at Bennington College
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