A specific Italian history is hard to identify. Italy wasn’t formally a united country until 1861, and the history of the peninsula after the Romans is more one of warring city-states, colonization and annexation by foreign powers. It’s almost inconceivable now that Italy should fragment once again, but the regional differences remain strong and have, in recent years, become a major factor in Italian politics.
A smattering of remains exist from the Neanderthals who occupied the Italian peninsula half a million years ago, but the main period of colonization began after the last Ice Age, with evidence of Paleolithic and Neolithic settlements dating from around 20,000 BC and 4000 BC respectively. More sophisticated tribes developed towards the end of the prehistoric period, between 2400 and 1800 BC; those who left the most visible traces were the Ligurians (who inhabited a much greater area than modern Liguria), the Siculi of southern Italy and Latium, and the Sards, who farmed and raised livestock on Sardinia. More advanced still were migrant groups from the eastern Mediterranean, who introduced the techniques of working copper. Later, various Bronze Age societies (1600–1000 BC) built a network of farms and villages in the Apennines, and on the Sicilian and southern coasts, the latter population trading with Mycenaeans in Greece.
Other tribes brought Indo-European languages into Italy. The Veneti, Latins and Umbrii moved down the peninsula from the north, while the Piceni and the Messapians in Puglia crossed the Adriatic from what is now Croatia. The artificial line between prehistory and history is drawn around the eighth century BC with the arrival of the Phoenicians and their trade links between Carthage and southern Italy. This soon encouraged the arrival of the Carthaginians in Sicily, Sardinia and the Latium coast – just when Greeks and Etruscans were gaining influence.
Greek settlers colonized parts of the Tuscan coast and the Bay of Naples in the eighth century BC, moving on to Naxos on Sicily’s Ionian coast, and founding the city of Syracuse in the year 736 BC. The colonies they established in Sicily and southern Italy came to be known as Magna Graecia. Along with Etruscan cities to the north they were the earliest Italian civilizations to leave substantial buildings and written records.
The Greek settlements were hugely successful, introducing the vine and the olive to Italy, and establishing a high-yielding agricultural system. Cities like Syracuse and Tarentum were wealthier and more sophisticated than those on mainland Greece, dominating trade in the central Mediterranean, despite competition from Carthage. Ruins such as the temples of Agrigento and Selinunte, the fortified walls around Gela, and the theatres at Syracuse and Taormina on Sicily attest to a great prosperity, and Magna Graecia became an enriching influence on the culture of the Greek homeland – Archimedes, Aeschylus and Empedocles were all from Sicily. Yet these colonies suffered from the same factionalism as the Greek states, and the cities of Tarentum, Metapontum, Sybaris and Croton were united only when faced with the threat of outside invasion. From 400 BC, after Sybaris was razed to the ground, the other colonies went into irreversible economic decline, to become satellite states of Rome.
The Etruscans were the other major civilization of the period, mostly living in the area between the Tiber and Arno rivers. Their language, known mostly from funerary texts, is one of the last relics of an ancient language common to the Mediterranean. Some say they arrived in Italy around the ninth century BC from western Anatolia, others that they came from the north, and a third hypothesis places their origins in Etruria. Whatever the case, they set up a cluster of twelve city-states in northern Italy, traded with Greek colonies to the south and were the most powerful people in northern Italy by the sixth century BC, edging out the indigenous population of Ligurians, Latins and Sabines. Tomb frescoes in Umbria and Lazio depict a refined and luxurious culture with highly developed systems of divination, based on the reading of animal entrails and the flight of birds. Herodotus wrote that the Etruscans recorded their ancestry along the female line, and tomb excavations in the nineteenth century revealed that women were buried in special sarcophagi carved with their names. Well-preserved chamber tombs with wall paintings exist at Cerveteri and Tarquinia, the two major sites in Italy. The Etruscans were technically advanced, creating new agricultural land through irrigation and building their cities on ramparted hilltops – a pattern of settlement that has left a permanent mark on central Italy. Their kingdom contracted, however, after invasions by the Cumans, Syracusans and Gauls, and was eventually forced into alliance with the embryonic Roman state. Almost none of their towns have survived the archeological record – the only exception being modern-day Marzabotto or Misa, a fine example of Etruscan urban planning.
The growth of Rome, a border town between the Etruscans and the Latins, gained impetus around 600 BC from a coalition of Latin and Sabine communities. The Tarquins, an Etruscan dynasty, oversaw the early expansion, but in 509 BC the Romans ejected the Etruscan royal family and became a republic, with power shared jointly between two consuls, both elected for one year. Further changes came half a century later, after a protracted class struggle that resulted in the Law of the Twelve Tables, which made patricians and plebeians equal. Thus stabilized, the Romans set out to systematically conquer the northern peninsula and, after the fall of Veii in 396 BC, succeeded in capturing Sutri and Nepi, towns which Livy considered the “barriers and gateways of Etruria”. Various wars and truces with other cities brought about agreements to pay harsh tributes.
The Gauls captured Rome in 390, refusing to leave until they had received a vast payment, but this proved a temporary reversal. The Romans took Campania and the fertile land of Puglia after defeating the Samnites in battles over a period of 35 years. They then set their sights on the wealthy Greek colonies to the south, including Tarentum, whose inhabitants turned to the Greek king, Pyrrhus of Epirus, for military support. He initially repelled the Roman invaders, but lost his advantage and was defeated at Beneventum in 275 BC. The Romans had by then established their rule in most of southern Italy, and now became a threat to Carthage. In 264 they had the chance of obtaining Sicily, when the Mamertines, a mercenary army in control of Messina, appealed to them for help against the Carthaginians. The Romans obliged – sparking off the First Punic War – and took most of the island, together with Sardinia and Corsica. With their victory in 222 BC over the Gauls in the Po Valley, all Italy was now under Roman control.
They also turned a subsequent military threat to their advantage, in what came to be known as the Second Punic War. The Carthaginians had watched the spread of Roman power across the Mediterranean with some alarm, and at the end of the third century BC they allowed Hannibal to make an Alpine crossing into Italy with his army of infantry, horsemen and elephants. Hannibal crushed the Roman legions at Lago Trasimeno and Cannae (216 BC), and then halted at Cápua. With remarkable cool, considering Hannibal’s proximity, Scipio set sail on a retaliatory mission to the Carthaginian territory of Spain, taking Cartagena, and continuing his journey into Africa. It was another fifty years before Carthage was taken, closely followed by all of Spain, but the Romans were busy in the meantime adding Macedonian Greece to their territory.
These conquests gave Roman citizens a tax-free existence subsidized by captured treasure, but society was sharply divided between those enjoying the benefits, and those who were not. The former belonged mostly to the senatorial party, who ignored demands for reform by their opposition, the popular party. The radical reforms sponsored by the tribune Gaius Gracchus came too close to democracy for the senatorial party, whose declaration of martial law was followed by the assassination of Gracchus. The majority of people realized that the only hope of gaining influence was through the army, but General Gaius Marius, when put into power, was ineffective against the senatorial clique, who systematically picked off the new regime.
The first century BC saw civil strife on an unprecedented scale. Although Marius was still in power, another general, Sulla, was in the ascendancy, leading military campaigns against northern invaders and rebellious subjects in the south. Sulla subsequently took power and established his dictatorship in Rome, throwing out a populist government which had formed while he was away on a campaign in the east. Murder and exile were common, and cities which had sided with Marius during their struggle for power were punished with massacres and destruction. Thousands of Sulla’s war veterans were given confiscated land, but much of it was laid to waste. In 73 BC a gladiator named Spartacus led 70,000 dispossessed farmers and escaped slaves in a revolt, which lasted for two years before they were defeated by the legions.
Rome became calmer only after Sulla’s death, when Pompey, another general, and Licinus Crassus, a rich builder, became masters of Rome. Pompey’s interest lay in lucrative wars elsewhere, so his absence from the capital gave Julius Caesar the chance to make a name for himself as an orator and raiser of finance. When Pompey returned in 60 BC, he made himself, Crassus and Caesar rulers of the first Triumvirate.
Caesar bought himself the post of consul in 59 BC, then spent the next eight years on campaigns against the Gauls. His military success needled Pompey, and he eventually turned against his colleague, giving Caesar the chance to hit back. In 49 BC he crossed the river Rubicon, committing the offence of entering Roman territory with an army without first informing the Senate, but when he reached the city there was no resistance – everyone had fled, and Caesar became absolute ruler of Rome. He spent the next four years on civil reforms, writing his history of the Gallic wars, and chasing Pompey and his followers through Spain, Greece and Egypt. A group of enemies within the Senate, including his adopted son Brutus, conspired to murder him in 44 BC, a few months after he had been appointed ruler for life. Octavian, Caesar’s nephew and heir, Lepidus and Marcus Antonius (Mark Antony) formed the second Triumvirate the following year. Again, the arrangement was fraught with tensions, the battle for power this time being between Antony and Octavian. While Antony was with Cleopatra, Octavian spent his time developing his military strength and the final, decisive battle took place at Actium in 31 BC, where Antony committed suicide.
As sole ruler of the new regime, Octavian, renaming himself Augustus Caesar, embarked on a series of reforms and public works, giving himself complete powers despite his unassuming official title of “First Citizen”.
Tiberius (14–37 AD), the successor to Augustus, ruled wisely, but thereafter began a period of decadence. During the psychopathic reign of Caligula (37–41) the civil service kept the empire running; Claudius (41–54) conquered southern Britain, and was succeeded by his stepson Nero (54–68), who violently persecuted the Christians. Nero committed suicide when threatened by a coup, leading to a rapid succession of four emperors in the year 68. The period of prosperity during the rule of the Flavian emperors (Vespasian and his sons Titus and Domitian) was a forerunner for the Century of the Antonines, a period named after the successful reigns of Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antonius and Marcus Aurelius. These generals consolidated the empire’s infrastructure, and created an encouraging environment for artistic achievement. A prime example is the formidable bronze equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius in Rome – a work not equalled in sophistication until the Renaissance.
A troubled period followed under the rule of Marcus Aurelius’s son Commodus (180–193) and his successors, none of whom were wholly in control of the legions. Artistic, intellectual and religious life stagnated, and the balance of economic development tilted in favour of the north, while the agricultural south grew ever more impoverished.
In the middle of the third century, incursions by Goths in Greece, the Balkans and Asia, and the Franks and Alamanni in Gaul foreshadowed the collapse of the empire. Aurelian (270–275) re-established some order after terrible civil wars, to be followed by Diocletian (284–305), whose persecution of Christians produced many of the Church’s present-day saints. Plagues had decimated the population, but problems of a huge but static economy were compounded by the doubling in size of the army at this time to about half a million men. To ease administration, Diocletian divided the empire into two halves, east and west, basing himself as ruler of the western empire in Mediolanum (Milan). This measure brought about a relative recovery, coinciding with the rise of Christianity, which was declared the state religion during the reign of Constantine (306–337). Constantinople, capital of the eastern empire, became a thriving trading and manufacturing city, while Rome itself went into decline, as the enlargement of the senatorial estates and the impoverishment of the lower classes gave rise to something comparable to a primitive feudal system.
Barbarians (meaning outsiders, or foreigners) had been crossing the border into the empire since 376 AD, when the Ostrogoths were driven from their kingdom in southern Russia by the Huns, a tribe of ferocious horsemen. The Huns went on to attack the Visigoths, 70,000 of whom crossed the border and settled inside the empire. When the Roman aristocracy saw that the empire was no longer a shield against barbarian raids, they were less inclined to pay for its support, seeing that a more comfortable future lay in being on good terms with the barbarian successor states.
By the fifth century, many legions were made up of troops from conquered territories, and several posts of high command were held by outsiders. With little will or loyalty behind it, the empire floundered, and on New Year’s Eve of 406, Vandals, Alans and Sueves crossed the frozen Rhine into Gaul, chased by the Huns from their kingdoms in what are now Hungary and Austria. By 408, the imperial government in Ravenna could no longer hold off Alaric (commander of Illyricum – now Croatia) who went on to sack Rome in 410, causing a crisis of morale in the west. “When the whole world perished in one city,” wrote Saint Jerome, “then I was dumb with silence.”
The bitter end of the Roman Empire in the west came after Valentinian III’s assassination in 455. His eight successors over the next twenty years were finally ignored by the Germanic troops in the army, who elected their general Odoacer as king. The remaining Roman aristocracy hated him, and the eastern emperor, Zeno, who in theory now ruled the whole empire, refused to recognize him. In 487, Zeno rid himself of the Ostrogoth leader Theodoric by persuading him to march on Odoacer in Italy. By 493, Theodoric had succeeded, becoming ruler of the western territories.
A lull followed. The Senate in Rome and the civil service continued to function, and the remains of the empire were still administered under Roman law. Ostrogothic rule of the west continued after Theodoric’s death, but in the 530s the eastern emperor, Justinian, began to plan the reunification of the Roman Empire “up to the two oceans”. In 536 his general Belisarius landed in Sicily and moved north through Rome to Ravenna; complete reconquest of the Italian peninsula was achieved in 552, after which the Byzantines retained a presence in the south and in Sardinia for five hundred years.
During this time the Christian Church developed as a more or less independent authority, since the emperor was at a safe distance in Constantinople. Continual invasions had led to an uncertain political scene in which the bishops of Rome emerged with the strongest voice – justification of their primacy having already been given by Pope Leo I (440–461), who spoke of his right to “rule all who are ruled in the first instance by Christ”. A confused period of rule followed, as armies from northern Europe tried to take more territory from the old empire.
During the chaotic sixth century, the Lombards, a Germanic tribe, were driven southwest into Italy, and by the eighth century, when the Franks arrived from Gaul, they were extending their power throughout the peninsula. The Franks were orthodox Christians, and therefore acceptable to Gallo-Roman nobility, integrating quickly and taking over much of the provincial administration. They were ruled by the Merovingian royal family, but the mayors of the palace – the Carolingians – began to take power in real terms. Led by Pepin the Short, they saw an advantage in supporting the papacy, giving Rome large endowments and forcibly converting pagans in areas they conquered. When Pepin wanted to oust the Merovingians, and become King of the Franks, he appealed to the pope in Rome for his blessing, who was happy to agree, anointing the new Frankish king with holy oil.
This alliance was useful to both parties. In 755 the pope called on the Frankish army to confront the Lombards. The Franks forced them to hand over treasure and 22 cities and castles, which then became the northern part of the Papal States. Pepin died in 768, with the Church indebted to him. According to custom, he divided the kingdom between his two sons, one of whom died within three years. The other was Charles the Great, or Charlemagne.
An intelligent and innovative leader, Charlemagne was proclaimed King of the Franks and of the Lombards, and patrician of the Romans, after a decisive war against the Lombards in 774. On Christmas Day of the year 800, Pope Leo III expressed his gratitude for Charlemagne’s political support by crowning him Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, an investiture that forged an enduring link between the fortunes of Italy and those of northern Europe. By the time Charlemagne died, all of Italy from south of Rome to Lombardy, including Sardinia, was part of the huge Carolingian Empire. The parts that didn’t come under his domain were Sicily and the southern coast, which were gradually being reconquered by Arabs from Tunisia; and Puglia and Calabria, colonized by Byzantines and Greeks.
The task of holding these gains was beyond Charlemagne’s successors, and by the beginning of the tenth century the family was extinct and the rival Italian states had become prizes for which the western (French) and eastern (German) Frankish kingdoms competed. Power switched in 936 to Otto, king of the eastern Franks. Political disunity in Italy invited him to intervene, and in 962 he was crowned emperor; Otto’s son and grandson (Ottos II and III) set the seal on the renewal of the Holy Roman Empire.
On the death of Otto III in 1002, Italy was again without a recognized ruler. In the north, noblemen jockeyed for power, and the papacy was manipulated by rival Roman families. The most decisive events were in the south, where Sicily, Calabria and Puglia were captured by the Normans, who proved effective administrators and synthesized their own culture with the existing half-Arabic, half-Italian south. In Palermo in the eleventh century they created the most dynamic culture of the Mediterranean world.
Meanwhile in Rome, a series of reforming popes began to strengthen the Church. Gregory VII, elected in 1073, was the most radical, demanding the right to depose emperors if he so wished. Emperor Henry IV was equally determined for this not to happen. The inevitable quarrel broke out, over a key appointment to the archbishopric of Milan. Henry denounced Gregory as “now not pope, but false monk”; the pope responded by excommunicating him, thereby freeing his subjects from their allegiance. By 1077 Henry was aware of his tactical error and tried to make amends by visiting the pope at Canossa, where the emperor, barefoot and penitent, was kept waiting outside for three days. The formal reconciliation did nothing to heal the rift, and Henry’s son, Henry V, continued the feud, eventually coming to a compromise in which the emperor kept control of bishops’ land ownership, while giving up rights over their investiture.
After this symbolic victory, the papacy developed into the most comprehensive and advanced centralized government in Europe in the realms of law and finance, but it wasn’t long before unity again came under attack. This time, the threat came from Emperor Frederick I (Barbarossa), who besieged many northern Italian cities from his base in Germany from 1154. Pope Alexander III responded with ambiguous pronouncements about the imperial crown being a “benefice” which the pope conferred, implying that the emperor was the pope’s vassal. The issue of papal or imperial supremacy was to polarize the country for the next two hundred years, almost every part of Italy being torn by struggles between Guelphs (supporting the pope) and Ghibellines (supporting the emperor).
Henry VI’s son, Frederick II, assumed the imperial throne at the age of three and a half, inheriting the Norman Kingdom of Sicily. Later linked by marriage to the great Hohenstaufen dynasty in Germany, he inevitably turned his attentions to northern Italy. However, his power base was small, and opposition from the Italian commune and the papacy snowballed into civil war. His sudden death in 1250 marked a major downturn in imperial fortunes.
Charles of Anjou, brother of King Louis IX of France, defeated Frederick II’s heirs in southern Italy, and received Naples and Sicily as a reward from the pope. His oppressive government finally provoked an uprising on Easter Monday 1282, a revolt that came to be known as the Sicilian Vespers, as some two thousand occupying soldiers were murdered in Palermo at the sound of the bell for vespers. For the next twenty years the French were at war with Peter of Aragon, who took Sicily and then tried for the southern mainland.
If imperial power was on the defensive, the papacy was in even worse shape. Knowing that the pontiff had little military backing or financial strength left, Philip of France sent his men to the pope’s summer residence in 1303, subjecting the old man to a degrading attack. Boniface died within a few weeks; his French successor, Clement V, promptly moved the papacy to Avignon in southern France.
The declining political power of the major rulers was countered by the growing autonomy of the cities. By 1300, a broad belt of some three hundred virtually independent city-states stretched from central Italy to the northernmost edge of the peninsula. In the middle of the century the population of Europe was savagely depleted by the Black Death – brought into Europe by a Genoese ship returning from the Black Sea – but the city states survived, developing a concept of citizenship quite different from the feudal lord-and-vassal relationship. By the end of the fourteenth century the richer and more influential states had swallowed up the smaller comune, leaving four as clear political front runners. These were Genoa (controlling the Ligurian coast), Florence (ruling Tuscany), Milan, whose sphere of influence included Lombardy and much of central Italy, and Venice. Smaller principalities, such as Mantua and Ferrara, supported armies of mercenaries, ensuring their security by building impregnable fortress-palaces.
Perpetual vendettas between the propertied classes often induced the citizens to accept the overall rule of one signore in preference to the bloodshed of warring clans. A despotic form of government evolved, sanctioned by official titles from the emperor or pope, and by the fifteenth century most city-states were under princely rather than republican rule. In the south of the fragmented peninsula was the Kingdom of Naples; the States of the Church stretched up from Rome through modern-day Marche, Umbria and the Romagna; Siena, Florence, Modena, Mantua and Ferrara were independent states, as were the Duchy of Milan, and the maritime republics of Venice and Genoa, with a few odd pockets of independence like Lucca, for example, and Rimini.
The commercial and secular city-states of late medieval times were the seedbed for the Renaissance, when urban entrepreneurs (such as the Medici) and autocratic rulers (such as Federico da Montefeltro) enhanced their status through the financing of architectural projects, paintings and sculpture. It was also at this time that the Tuscan dialect – the language of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio – became established as Italy’s literary language; it later became the nation’s official spoken language.
By the mid-fifteenth century the five most powerful states – Naples, the papacy, Milan, and the republics of Venice and Florence – reached a tacit agreement to maintain the new balance of power. Yet though there was a balance of power at home, the history of each of the independent Italian states became inextricably bound up with the power politics of other European countries.
The inevitable finally happened when an Italian state invited a larger power in to defeat one of its rivals. In 1494, at the request of the Duke of Milan, Charles VIII of France marched south to renew the Angevin claim to the Kingdom of Naples. After the accomplishment of his mission, Charles stayed for three months in Naples, before heading back to France; the kingdom was then acquired by Ferdinand II of Aragon, subsequently ruler of all Spain.
The person who really established the Spanish in Italy was the Habsburg Charles V (1500–58), who within three years of inheriting both the Austrian and Spanish thrones bribed his way to being elected Holy Roman Emperor. In 1527 the imperial troops sacked Rome, a calamity widely interpreted at the time as God’s punishment of the disorganized and dissolute Italians. The French remained troublesome opposition, but they were defeated at Pavia in 1526 and Naples in 1529. With the treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis in 1559, Spain held Sicily, Naples, Sardinia, the Duchy of Milan and some Tuscan fortresses, and they were to exert a stranglehold on Italian political life for the next 150 years. The remaining smaller states became satellites of either Spanish or French rule; only the papacy and Venice remained independent.
Social and economic troubles were as severe as the political upheavals. While the papacy combated the spread of the Reformation in northern Europe, the major manufacturing and trading centres were coming to terms with the opening up of the Atlantic and Indian Ocean trade routes – discoveries which meant that northern Italy would increasingly be bypassed. Mid-sixteenth-century economic recession prompted wealthy Venetian and Florentine merchants to invest in land rather than business, while in the south high taxes and repressive feudal regimes produced an upsurge of banditry and even the raising of peasant militias – resistance that was ultimately suppressed brutally by the Spanish.
The seventeenth century was a low point in Italian political life, with little room for manoeuvre between the papacy and colonial powers. The Spanish eventually lost control of Italy at the start of the eighteenth century when, as a result of the War of the Spanish Succession, Lombardy, Mantua, Naples and Sardinia all came under Austrian control. The machinations of the major powers led to frequent realignments in the first half of the century. Piemonte, ruled by the Duke of Savoy, Victor Amadeus II, was forced in 1720 to surrender Sicily to the Austrians in return for Sardinia. In 1734 Naples and Sicily passed to the Spanish Bourbons, and three years later the House of Lorraine acquired Tuscany on the extinction of the Medici.
Relatively enlightened Bourbon rule in the south did little to arrest the economic polarization of society, but the northern states advanced under the intelligent if autocratic rule of Austria’s Maria Theresa (1740–80) and her son Joseph II (1780–90), who prepared the way for early industrialization. Lightning changes came in April 1796, when the French armies of Napoleon invaded northern Italy. Within a few years the French had been driven out again, but by 1810 Napoleon was in command of the whole peninsula, and his puppet regimes remained in charge until Waterloo. Napoleonic rule had profound effects, reducing the power of the papacy, reforming feudal land rights and introducing representative government to Italy. Elected assemblies were provided on the French model, giving the emerging middle class a chance for political discussion and action.
The fall of Napoleon led to the Vienna Settlement of 1815, by which the Austrians effectively restored the old ruling class. Metternich, the Austrian Chancellor, did all he could to foster any local loyalties that might weaken the appeal of unity, yet the years between 1820 and 1849 became years of revolution. Uprisings began in Sicily, Naples and Piemonte, when King Ferdinand introduced measures that restricted personal freedom and destroyed many farmers’ livelihoods. A makeshift army quickly gained popular support in Sicily, and forced some concessions, before Ferdinand invited the Austrians in to help him crush the revolution. In the north, the oppressive laws enacted by Vittorio Emanuele I in the Kingdom of Piemonte sparked off student protests and army mutinies in Turin. Vittorio Emanuele abdicated in favour of his brother, Carlo Felice, and his son, Carlo Alberto; the latter initially gave some support to the radicals, but Carlo Felice then called in the Austrians, and thousands of revolutionaries were forced into exile. Carlo Alberto became King of Sardinia in 1831. A secretive, excessively devout and devious character, he did a major volte-face when he assumed the throne by forming an alliance with the Austrians.
In 1831 further uprisings occurred in Parma, Modena, the Papal States, Sicily and Naples. Their lack of coordination, and the readiness with which Austrian and papal troops intervened, ensured that revolution was short-lived. But even if these actions were unsustained, their influence grew.
One person profoundly influenced by these insurgencies was Giuseppe Mazzini. Arrested as Secretary of the Genoese branch of the Carbonari (a secret radical society) in 1827 and jailed for three months in 1830, he formulated his political ideology and set up “Young Italy” on his release. Among the many to whom the ideals of “Young Italy” appealed was Giuseppe Garibaldi, soon to play a central role in the Risorgimento, as the movement to reform and unite the country was known.
Crop failures in 1846 and 1847 produced widespread famine and cholera outbreaks. In Sicily an army of peasants marched on the capital, burning debt collection records, destroying property and freeing prisoners. Middle- and upper-class moderates were worried, and formed a government to control the uprising, but Sicilian separatist aims were realized in 1848. Fighting spread to Naples, where Ferdinand II made some temporary concessions, but nonetheless he retook Sicily the following year. At the same time as the southern revolution, serious disturbances took place in Tuscany, Piemonte and the Papal States. Rulers fled their duchies, and Carlo Alberto altered course again, prompted by Metternich’s fall from power in Vienna: he granted his subjects a constitution and declared war on Austria. In Rome, the pope fled from rioting and Mazzini became a member of the city’s republican triumvirate in 1849, with Garibaldi organizing the defences.
None of the uprisings lasted long. Twenty thousand revolutionaries were expelled from Rome, Carlo Alberto abdicated in favour of his son Vittorio Emanuele II after military defeats at the hands of the Austrians, and the dukes returned to Tuscany, Modena and Parma. One thing that survived was Piemonte’s constitution, which throughout the 1850s attracted political refugees to the cosmopolitan state.
Nine years of radical change began when Count Camillo Cavour became Prime Minister of Piemonte in 1852. The involvement of Piemontese troops in the Crimean War brought Cavour into contact with Napoleon III at the Congress of Paris, at which the hostilities were ended, and in July 1858 the two men had secret talks on the “Italian question”. Napoleon III had decided to support Italy in its fight against the Austrians – the only realistic way of achieving unification – as long as resistance was non-revolutionary. Having bargained over the division of territory, they waited for a chance to provoke Austria into war. This came in 1859, when Cavour wrote an emotive anti-Austrian speech for Vittorio Emanuele at the opening of parliament. His battle cry for an end to the grido di dolore (cry of pain) was taken up over Italy. The Austrians ordered demobilization by the Piemontese, who did the reverse.
The war was disastrous from the start, and thousands died at Magenta and Solferino. In July 1859, Napoleon III made a truce with the Austrians without consulting Cavour, who resigned in fury. Provisional governments remained in power in Tuscany, Modena and the Romagna. Cavour returned to government in 1860, and soon France, Piemonte and the papacy agreed to a series of plebiscites, a move that ensured that by mid-March of 1860, Tuscany and the new state of Emilia (duchies of Modena and Parma plus the Romagna) had voted for union with Piemonte. A secret treaty between Vittorio Emanuele and Napoleon III ceded Savoy and Nice to France, subject to plebiscites. The result was as planned, no doubt due in part to the presence of the French Army during voting.
Garibaldi promptly set off for Nice with the aim of blowing up the ballot boxes, only to be diverted when he reached Genoa, where he heard of an uprising in Sicily. Commandeering two old paddle-steamers and obtaining just enough rifles for his thousand Red Shirts, he headed south. More support came when they landed in Sicily, and Garibaldi’s army outflanked the 12,000 Neapolitan troops to take the island. After that, they crossed to the mainland, easily occupied Naples, then struck out for Rome. Cavour, anxious that he might lose the initiative, hastily dispatched a Piemontese army to annexe the Papal States, except for the Patrimony around Rome. Worried by the possibility that the anti-Church revolutionaries who made up the Red Shirt army might stir up trouble, Cavour and Vittorio Emanuele travelled south to Rome, accompanied by their army, and arranged plebiscites in Sicily, Naples, Umbria and the Papal Marches that offered little alternative but to vote for annexation by Piemonte. After their triumphal parade through Naples, they thanked Garibaldi for his trouble, took command of all territories and held elections to a new parliament. In February 1861, the members formally announced the Kingdom of Italy.
Cavour died the same year, before the country was completely unified, since Rome and Venice were still outside the kingdom. Garibaldi marched unsuccessfully on Rome in 1862, and again five years later, by which time Venice had been subsumed. It wasn’t until Napoleon III was defeated by Prussia in 1870 that the French troops were ousted from Rome. Thus by 1871 Unification was complete.
After the Risorgimento, some things still hadn’t changed. The ruling class were slow to move towards a broader-based political system, while living standards actually worsened in some areas, particularly in Sicily. When Sicilian peasant farmers organized into fasci – forerunners of trade unions – the prime minister sent in 30,000 soldiers, closed down newspapers and interned suspected troublemakers without trial. In the 1890s capitalist methods and modern machinery in the Po Valley created a new social structure, with rich agrari at the top of the pile, a mass of farm labourers at the bottom, and an intervening layer of estate managers.
In the 1880s Italy’s colonial expansion began, initially concentrated in bloody – and ultimately disastrous – campaigns in Abyssinia and Eritrea in 1886. In 1912 Italy wrested the Dodecanese islands and Libya from Turkey, a development deplored by many, including Benito Mussolini, who during this war was the radical secretary of the PSI (Partito Socialista Italiano) in Forlì.
Italy entered World War I in 1915 with the chief aims of settling old scores with Austria and furthering its colonial ambitions through French and British support. A badly equipped, poorly commanded army took three years to force Austria into defeat, finally achieved in the last month of the war at Vittorio Veneto. Some territory was gained – Trieste, Gorizia, and what became Trentino-Alto Adige – but at the cost of over half a million dead, many more wounded, and a mountainous war debt.
The middle classes, disillusioned with the war’s outcome and alarmed by inflation and social unrest, turned to Mussolini, now a figurehead of the Right. In 1921, recently elected to parliament, Mussolini formed the Partito Nazionale Fascista, whose squadre terrorized their opponents by direct personal attacks and the destruction of newspaper offices, printing shops, and socialist and trade union premises. By 1922 the party was in a position to carry out an insurrectionary “March on Rome”. Plans for the march were leaked to Prime Minister Facta, who needed the king’s signature on a martial law decree if the army were to meet the march. Fears of civil war led to the king’s refusal. Facta resigned, Mussolini made it clear that he would not join any government he did not lead, and on October 29 was awarded the premiership. Only then did the march take place.
Zealous squadristi now urged Mussolini towards dictatorship, which he announced early in 1925. Political opposition and trade unions were outlawed, the free press disintegrated under censorship and Fascist takeovers, elected local governments were replaced by appointed officials, powers of arrest and detention were increased, and special courts were established for political crimes. In 1929, Mussolini ended a sixty-year feud between Church and State by reorganizing the Vatican as an autonomous Church state within the Kingdom of Italy. (As late as 1904, anyone involved in the new regime, even as a voter, had been automatically excommunicated.) By 1939, the motto “Everything within the State; nothing outside the State; nothing against the State” had become fact, with the government controlling the larger part of Italy’s steel, iron and ship-building industries, as well as every aspect of political life.
Mussolini’s involvement in the Spanish Civil War in 1936 brought about the formation of the “Axis” with Nazi Germany. Italy entered World War II totally unprepared and with outdated equipment, but in 1941 invaded Yugoslavia to gain control of the Adriatic coast. Before long, though, Mussolini was on the defensive. Tens of thousands of Italian troops were killed on the Russian front in the winter of 1942, and in July 1943 the Allied forces gained a first foothold in Europe, when Patton’s American Seventh Army and the British Eighth Army under Montgomery landed in Sicily. A month later they controlled the island.
In the face of these and other reversals Mussolini was overthrown by his own Grand Council, who bundled him away to the isolated mountain resort of Gran Sasso, and replaced him with the perplexed Marshal Badoglio. The Allies wanted Italy’s surrender, for which they secretly offered amnesty to the king, Vittorio Emanuele III, who had coexisted with the Fascist regime for 21 years. On September 8 a radio broadcast announced that an armistice had been signed, and on the following day the Allies crossed onto the mainland. As the Anglo-American army moved up through the peninsula, German divisions moved south to meet them, springing Mussolini from jail to set up the republic of Salò on Lago di Garda. It was a total failure, and increasing numbers of men and women from Communist, Socialist or Catholic parties swelled the opposing partisan forces to 450,000. In April 1945 Mussolini fled for his life, but was caught by partisans before reaching Switzerland. He and his lover, Claretta Petacci, were shot and strung upside down from a filling-station roof in Milan’s Piazzale Loreto.
A popular mandate declared Italy a republic in 1946, and Alcide de Gasperi’s Democrazia Cristiana (DC) party formed a government. During the 1950s Italy became a front-rank industrial nation, massive firms such as Fiat and Olivetti helping to double the GDP and triple industrial production. American financial aid – the Marshall Plan – was an important factor in this expansion, as was the availability of a large and compliant workforce, a substantial proportion of which was drawn from the villages of the south.
The DC at first operated in alliance with other right-wing parties, but in 1963, in a move precipitated by the increased politicization of the blue-collar workers, they were obliged to share power for the first time with the Partito Socialista Italiano (PSI). The DC politician who was largely responsible for sounding out the socialists was Aldo Moro, the dominant figure of Italian politics in the 1960s. Moro was prime minister from 1963 to 1968, a period in which the economy was disturbed by inflation and the removal of vast sums of money by wealthy citizens alarmed by the arrival in power of the PSI. The decade ended with the “autunno caldo” (“hot autumn”) of 1969, when strikes, occupations and demonstrations paralyzed the country.
In the 1970s the situation continued to worsen. More extreme forms of unrest broke out, instigated in the first instance by the far right, who were almost certainly behind a bomb which killed sixteen people in Piazza Fontana, Milan, in 1969, and the Piazza della Loggia bombing in Brescia five years later. Neo-fascist terrorism continued throughout the next decade, reaching its hideous climax in 1980, when 84 people were killed and 200 wounded in a bomb blast at Bologna train station. At the same time, a plethora of left-wing terrorist groups sprang up, many of them led by disaffected intellectuals at the northern universities. The most active of these were the Brigate Rosse (Red Brigades). They reached the peak of their notoriety in 1978, when a Red Brigade group kidnapped and killed Aldo Moro himself. A major police offensive in the early 1980s nullified most of the Brigate Rosse, but a number of hardline splinter groups from the various terrorist organizations are still in existence.
Inconsistencies and secrecy beset those trying to discover who was really responsible for the terrorist activity of the 1970s. One Red Brigade member who served eighteen years in jail for his part in the assassination of Aldo Moro recently asserted that it was spies working for the Italian secret services who masterminded the operation. A report prepared by the PDS (Italy’s party of the democratic left) in 2000 stirred up further controversy: it alleged that in the 1970s and 1980s the Establishment pursued a “strategy of tension” and that indiscriminate bombing of the public and the threat of a right-wing coup were devices to stabilize centre-right political control of the country. The perpetrators of bombing campaigns were rarely caught, said the report, because “those massacres, those bombs, those military actions had been organized or promoted or supported by men inside Italian state institutions and, as has been discovered more recently, by men linked to the structures of United States intelligence”. “Other bombing campaigns were attributed to the left to prevent the Communist Party from achieving power by democratic means,” said Valter Bielli, PDS MP, and one of the report’s authors. The report drew furious rebuttals from centre-right groups and the US embassy in Rome.
By whatever means, the DC government certainly clung to power. It was partly sustained by the so-called “historic compromise” negotiated in 1976 with Enrico Berlinguer, leader of the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI). By this arrangement the PCI – polling 34 percent of the national vote, just three points less than the DC – agreed to abstain from voting in parliament in order to maintain a government of national unity. The pact was rescinded in 1979, and after Berlinguer’s death in 1984 the PCI’s share of the vote dropped to around 27 percent. The combination of this withdrawal of popular support and the collapse of the Communist bloc led to a realignment of the PCI under the leadership of Achille Occhetto, who turned the party into a democratic socialist grouping along the lines of left-leaning parties in Germany or Sweden – a transformation encapsulated by the party’s new name – the Partito Democratico della Sinistra (“Democratic Party of the Left”).
In its efforts to exclude the left wing from power, the DC had been obliged to accede to demands from minor parties such as the Radical Party, which gained eighteen seats in the 1987 election, one of them going to the porn star Ilona Staller, better known as La Cicciolina. Furthermore, the DC’s reputation was severely damaged in the early 1980s by a series of scandals, notably the furore surrounding the activities of the P2 Masonic Lodge, when links were discovered between corrupt bankers, senior DC members, and fanatical right-wing groups. As its popularity fell, the DC was forced to offer the premiership to politicians from other parties. In 1981 Giovanni Spadolini of the Republicans became the first non-DC prime minister since the war, and in 1983 Bettino Craxi was installed as the first premier from the PSI, a position he held for four years.
Even through the upheavals of the 1970s the national income of Italy continued to grow, and there developed a national obsession with Il Sorpasso, a term signifying the country’s overtaking of France and Britain in the economic league table. Experts disagreed as to whether Il Sorpasso actually happened (most thought it hadn’t), and calculations were complicated by the huge scale of tax evasion and other illicit financial dealings in Italy. All strata of society were involved in the withholding of money from central government, but the ruling power in this economia sommersa (submerged economy) was, and to a certain extent still is, the Mafia, whose contacts penetrate to the highest levels in Rome. The most traumatic proof of the Mafia’s infiltration of the political hierarchy came in May 1992, with the murders of anti-Mafia judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, whose killers could only have penetrated the judges’ security with the help of inside information.
The murders of the immensely respected Falcone and Borsellino marked a fault-line in the political history of modern Italy, and the late 1980s and early 1990s saw the rise of a number of new political parties, as people became disillusioned with the old DC-led consensus. One was the right-wing Lega Nord (Northern League), whose autocratic leader, Umberto Bossi, capitalized on concerns that the hard-working, law-abiding North was supporting the corrupt South, while the Fascist MSI, renamed the Alleanza Nazionale (AN), or National Alliance, and now a wide coalition of right-wingers led by the persuasive Gianfranco Fini, has gained ground in recent years.
In 1992 the new government of Giuliano Amato – a politician untainted by any hint of corruption – instigated the biggest round-up of Mafia members in nearly a decade, leading to the arrest of Salvatore “Toto” Riina, the Mafia capo di tutti capi (boss of bosses) and the man widely believed to have been behind the Falcone and Borsellino killings. The arrest of Riina followed the testimony of numerous supergrasses, who also implicated key members of the establishment in Mafia activities, including the former prime minister Giulio Andreotti, who was brought to trial.
Bettino Craxi once called Andreotti a fox, adding “sooner or later all foxes end up as fur coats”, but it was Craxi himself who was one of the first to fall from grace. Craxi was at the centre of the powerful Socialist establishment that ran the key city of Milan, when in February 1992 a minor party official was arrested on corruption charges. This represented just the tip of a long-established culture of kickbacks and bribes that went right to the top of the Italian political establishment, not just in Milan but across the entire country, and was nicknamed Tangentopoli (“Bribesville”). By the end of that year thousands were under arrest and what came to be known as the Mani Pulite or “Clean Hands” investigation, led by the crusading Milan judge, Antonio di Pietro, was under way.
The established Italian parties, most notably the Christian Democrats and the Socialists, were almost entirely wiped out in the municipal elections of 1993, and the national elections of 1994 saw yet another political force emerge to fill the power vacuum: the centre-right Forza Italia or “Come on Italy”, led by the media mogul Silvio Berlusconi, who used the power of his TV stations to build support, and swept to power as prime minister in a populist alliance with Bossi’s Lega Nord and the fascist National Alliance. The fact that Berlusconi was not a politician was perhaps his greatest asset, and most Italians, albeit briefly, saw this as a new beginning – the end of the old, corrupt regime, and the birth of a truly modern Italian state. However, as one of the country’s top northern industrialists, and a former crony of Craxi, Berlusconi was as bound up with the old ways as anyone. Not only did he resist all attempts to reduce the scope of his media business, with which, as prime minister, there was a clear conflict of interest, but in time he himself came under investigation concerning the tax dealings of his Fininvest group.
At the end of 1994 Berlusconi was himself forced to resign after the withdrawal of Bossi’s Lega Nord from the coalition, and various factions took turns at governing until the formation of a broad centre-left alliance in 1996, known as the ulivo (“olive tree”), led by Romano Prodi, head of the small Partito Popolare Italiano, which in order to gain a majority in the Chamber of Deputies formed alliances with most of the other parties, including the Lega Nord.
In January 1999, Craxi was convicted with twenty others of corruption and sentenced to five years in prison, dying a year later in exile in Tunisia. The most influential public figure to be tried in the late 1990s, however, was Berlusconi, who was convicted and sentenced in August 1998 to two years and nine months in jail. Perhaps not surprisingly, Berlusconi has since been acquitted of a number of the charges against him, and, although further offences have come to light (bribing the judiciary among them), the ongoing proceedings have served more as a background to his resurgent political career than anything else.
Compared with the turmoil of the early 1990s, the political situation had reached a fairly even plateau. The Christian Democratic party had dissolved; the shift from proportional representation to a first-past-the-post system had begun; and a trend towards two large coalitions – one on the centre-left and the other on the centre-right – indicated a major break from the fragmented, multiparty political landscape of the postwar era. In October 1998, the relatively prolonged period of stability ended when the Prodi government was ousted, but the left coalition carried on for another three years under a succession of leaders – Massimo D’Alema, Giuliano Amato and the slick and successful ex-mayor of Rome Francesco Rutelli – until the April 2001 elections saw them crushingly defeated by Berlusconi’s Forza Italia.
In a televised interview Berlusconi made an unofficial agreement with the Italian people (“contratto con gli italiani”) whereby he promised to accomplish various economic reforms including lowering taxes and increasing employment. However, with the Italian economy at zero growth, high inflation and the highest debts in the EU, he failed to fulfil any of his electoral promises, although a number of bills were passed that conveniently protected his own business interests and thwarted any attempts by the judiciary to pursue charges of corruption. Berlusconi was also condemned by many Italians for his mismanagement of events at the G8 Summit in Genoa in 2001, during which demonstrator Carlo Giuliani was shot dead by a carabiniere. His support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq and his participation in the so-called “Coalition of the Willing”, along with the deployment of Italian troops in Iraq, fuelled further disquiet; in 2006 Berlusconi was forced to call early elections and on April 9 he was narrowly defeated by Romano Prodi. However, Prodi’s centre-left government was a disaster, lasting less than two years and beset by crisis after crisis, and Berlusconi swept back to power in April 2008, easily beating his main rival, the ex-mayor of Rome, Walter Veltroni.
The media tycoon’s third spell in power, at the head of a centre-right coalition with Gianfranco Fini has, if nothing else, provided the country with a measure of political stability, but it’s not been without its difficulties. The L’Aquila earthquake of April 2009 killed more than three hundred people and the thirty thousand or so it left homeless were advised by Berlusconi to treat it as a “weekend’s camping”. A month later, after a series of allegations regarding the procurement of prostitutes his wife announced their divorce, and in December 2009 the prime minister was famously attacked by a man with a souvenir model of Milan cathedral – an episode which evoked uncharacteristic waves of sympathy across the nation. But the government remains as fragile as ever; it narrowly survived a vote of no confidence in August 2010, and perhaps the only reason it staggers on is that there is no credible alternative. As Berlusconi himself modestly admits, he is “the Jesus Christ of politics… a patient victim, I put up with everyone, I sacrifice myself for everyone”. Where on earth would Italy be without him?
Perhaps the one thing the Italians aren’t very good at its politics. They’ve had 62 different governments since World War II, and the country was embroiled in a series of corruption scandals in the early 1990s that led to a shake-up of the entire system. Nonetheless Italians still don’t trust politicians, so perhaps they have the leader they deserve in media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi, first elected as prime minister in 1994 and currently prime minister for the third time. The gaffes, scandals and sleaze that have characterized his time in power are now the things for which contemporary Italy is most famous. A notorious and shameless womanizer, Berlusconi was almost brought down in 2009 when a series of prostitutes went public on their relationships with him (a number of tapes released by one confirmed that the prime minister, 72, didn’t use condoms). He survived as prime minister (Italians are relatively tolerant of sexual dalliances) but not as a husband – his wife Veronica Lario announced she was leaving him shortly after.
Berlusconi has also got into trouble when representing Italy abroad, famously accusing a German MEP of acting like a Nazi camp guard; and at home his battle with the Italian judiciary (“a cancerous growth” in his view), combined with, mostly successful, attempts to change laws to protect him from being tried for corruption, have arguably occupied more of his political time than any other issues. Unlike most modern politicians he just doesn’t seem to care what people think, which in Italy – a country of notorious naysayers – has helped to make him a popular leader. As for the fact that as head of a media business and prime minister he virtually controls all mainstream television (and has clearly used this to his own advantage), he simply says: “If I, taking care of everyone’s interests, also take care of my own, you can’t talk about a conflict of interest.” For sheer chutzpah, then, he casts the faceless suits of the rest of Italian politics into the shade; whether he is the leader Italy needs is another question.