Was it Camillo Benso, Conte di Cavour who, after the unification of Italy in 1861, admitted rather candidly: we have finally made Italy, now we need to make Italians?
In the aftermath of the latest general election, commentators are wondering whether Italy might at last pull off the mirage of a long stint of political stability. The results have never been so clear cut, the electoral message never so limpid. Yet the reality of Italian life goes deeper than surface institutional cosmetics. The truth is Italians, perhaps more than any other people on earth, are simply too suspicious of one another to guarantee long political honeymoons. Cavour’s Italians, unfortunately, might still be in the making.
This is indeed what underlies the story of the making of Italy: an assemblage of city States, great family clans, foreign and local kingdoms and principalities and an anachronistic State run by priests right in the middle of it were expected, after one thousand years of mutual animosity, to bury their hatchets and, against their natural instinct, follow a red shirted adventurer and a few woolly-headed intellectuals to form a nation. An astute Austrian politician in the 1830s by the name of Metternich dismissed the whole affair as doomed to failure and the very idea of Italy as nothing more than a geographical expression.
Well, Metternich was proved wrong in the end but the success of Italian unification and consolidation was probably more of an ideal and a myth to which everyone paid, and still pays, lip service, rather than a reality. Italy’s position as one of the leading eight world industrial nations in fact sits ill at ease with typically indigenous, endemic problems like the Mafia/Camorra, institutionalised corruption, small enterprise industry, bureaucratic and juridical stagnation. While the world would like to think that there are Italians leading their country in economic prowess, Italians feel that it is just Calabrians jumping on to the bandwagon of enterprising Lombards and claiming it as theirs by implication.
The refractory streak in the genetic and historical makeup of modern Italians will probably be a handicap in the modern globalised world but one has to admit that for more than a thousand years it was also their pride and glory, the one defining character trait that made them the most scintillating civilization of western Europe.
As long ago as the 12 and 13th centuries (1100-1300 AD), while the English were being moulded into a nation under the hammer blows of the Plantagenet kings, Italian cities were fighting each other for the exact opposite: freedom from each other’s territorial claims and from the cultural and political clutches of German Emperors and the Popes in Rome. In fact it was only when they finally tore down the Imperial web, that the city States of northern and central Italy felt free to embark on one of the most momentous adventures of the West: the rediscovery of commerce and classical civilisation.
They did it in spite of their being perennially divided and at war with each other, of being Guelfs and Ghibellines before being Sienese, Florentines and Milanese, before being Italians. While the English and French became dull nations under the deadening and centralising hegemony of their respective crowns, Italians rediscovered the essence and vitality of being free agents on their own soil. This competitive fervour eventually spilled over into areas other than just military prowess: the Montefeltro of Urbino, the Sforzas and the Farneses, who started out as mercenary soldiers of fortune and who would in time become civilian rulers and leaders, also competed for humanistic excellence, re-discovered the ancient Greeks’ fascination with pure science, philosophy, mathematics and literature and the Roman’s flair for architecture, engineering, commerce and capitalist enterprise.
Florentines, Genoese, Pisans and Venetians, in the midst of fratricidal wars whose complexity still defies the imagination, went on to develop the first European commercial networks and invented the first banks. Through them they financed the who’s who of European politics of the time and fuelled widespread economic growth with their offshore depots as far away as Constantinople and London. Thanks to those refractory Italians, Europe, after 700 years of stagnation, could breathe in civilisation again. It was apt indeed that Italians would discover the New World.
The modern Italians’ lack of a sense of State and their ineradicable distrust of institutions larger than the commune or the regione, are probably the natural consequence of a thousand years of fiercely contested, and often brutally denied, autonomy. And most of the time it was not just local big shots, such as the Viscontis or the Popes, who tried to stifle it but foreigners, such as the Spanish and French who, for most of the 300 years after the Renaissance, were engaged in a running European cold war with Italy as one of their main areas of conflict.
Italy for them was the forbidden fruit, the theatre of their dreams. Their meddling resulted in 500 years of bloody struggles and the embitterment of the Italian soul. So when we see and hear Italians spit and swear at policemen as a matter of pride, write off their politicians with denigratory ink as a matter of prejudice, we are seeing what remains of a traditional ingrained, often legitimate, mistrust of imposed authority.
Englishmen and other Europeans might sneer at the persistent anarchy of Italians. They of course had a different history and that makes all the difference. The anarchical instinct of Englishmen was extinguished long ago by the ascendancy of powerful single-minded monarchs, especially the likes of William I, Henry II, Henry VIII and Elizabeth I. The French had their Catherine de Medici, Richelieu, the Sun King; the Spaniards had Philip II and General Franco. While the English rallied around Elizabeth as a unified nation even though still a predominantly Catholic country, few Italians in the 1500s would have given a fig for the security of a heretical Queen in their midst. That is exactly the measure of the head start between the unity of England and that of Italy: five hundred years ago it was already abyssal.
It would be a bitter, colossal irony if that very same anarchical streak that helped Italians re-discover the ways and rewards of civilisation and capitalistic entrepreneurship during the Renaissance, before anyone else did, should now work against them in the modern world of high finance and globalised networks. But there it is: the modern world seems to care little for the Italians’ unrepentant campanilismo and their love of home-grown recipes.
While everyone else around Europe tries to streamline, centralise and economise, Italians keep doing the opposite. While the Spanish are succeeding in unifying their regional airports into a centralised, self-financing system, the Italians keep promoting theirs on a stand alone basis without reference to a national strategy, pumping hundreds of thousands of euros of public money, mostly down the drain, where the Spanish do not invest one single euro into theirs!
But old habits die hard. Italians are simply in love with their respective patch of Italy and their campanilismo permeates everything they do, from arguments about who makes the best cappellacci di zucca, Cremona or Ferrara, to running battles in the Campagnia for the appropriation of the right to rubbish collection.
Once, someone, probably an Englishman, remarked off the cuff that Italy should have been inhabited by Englishmen. Well, for one thing it would not have been Italy. That’s for sure!!
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