Even today, when you arrive in Naples by train from the north, you feel you have crossed a frontier and reached another land. As you leave the station and find yourself in the Piazza Garibaldi, the feeling is intensified by the sight of so many foreigners, young men from Africa and Latin America selling bracelets, sunglasses and fake designer bags, young women from Senegal and Brazil selling themselves, standing in clusters around the market by the Porta Nolana, trying to look unobtrusive to the police but obvious enough for potential customers to realize what they are offering. Yet even without the immigrants, the place seems different. There are sensually distinctive qualities about the air and the light, the bay and its vegetation, the way the inhabitants talk and gesticulate, the way they exist.
The Piedmontese who came uninvited in 1860 felt they had arrived not in another country but in another continent. Accustomed to the straight gridded streets of Turin, they were disgusted by Spaccanapoli, the heart of old Naples, a warren of dark, intimidating alleys thronged with urchins and card-players and hostile lazzaroni. They were familiar with Baroque churches – they had them at home – but theirs were restrained, almost classical structures situated logically on sober streets; they were not like these weird creations, almost obscene in their extravagant curves and their lavish ornamentation. The architecture of Piedmont had little use for majolica tiles, so profusely and meretriciously flaunted in Naples on floors and benches and even up pillars. Nor had it been tempted by guglie, those colossal marble obelisks set in the middle of small squares, follies bursting with a promiscuous mass of cherubs, mermaids and coats of arms, with scrolls and fruit and scallop shells, with popes and saints and dedications to the Virgin. To northern eyes they were the summit of bad taste.
Naples has changed much in the last 150 years. The street-urchins have gone, and so have most of the monks; motor-cars have come, along with car-horns and lawless driving. Yet it is still a city with nuns and child accordionists, a place of plaster saints and nativity scenes, of pizza and the Camorra, of lines of washing strung across its alleys, of pavement stalls and tiny food shops that seem to have strayed from the souks in Tunis. The old palaces, built on such narrow streets that you can hardly see their façades, are still inhabited, though not by the families that built them. A representative example of an unrestored palazzo in Spaccanapoli today will have a courtyard of peeling plaster cluttered with motorbikes and small businesses: a hairdresser’s, a travel agency and a jeweller’s repair shop; on the first floor you will find a notary and a dancing school and, further up, below the residential flats at the top, an oculist and a bed and breakfast. Outside, the little streets still have life and bustle, yet they also emanate a sense of death and unchanging religious custom. Black-edged funeral notices are ubiquitous, announcing that Anna or Maria, the widow Mazzella or Fassari, has died, her ‘dear existence extinguished’ in the same serene manner in which she had lived her life. Little shrines dedicated to the Virgin are still illuminated in the angles of tiny lanes, Mary and Jesus bedecked with glittering crowns above vases of fading lilies and fake dahlias.
For the Piedmontese the nutritional prospect must have seemed as foreign as the rest of Naples: the profusion of tomatoes and their sauces, the anchovies fried in oil, the sea bass and the sea-urchins, the street vendors with their cauldrons of steaming pasta. It was all so different from the stews and sausages of their native land. Politically the conquest of the south may have seemed a victory of polenta over pasta, of the Bolognese mortadella over the Neapolitan maccheroni. But in culinary matters the southerners resisted with success. One Neapolitan chef achieved renown with a pizza of tomato and mozzarella, which he named after Queen Margherita, the most gracious and elegant member of the Savoia dynasty, who accepted the honour. Eventually the southern cuisine went on to the offensive and was victorious across Italy and further afield. Just as olive oil has defeated butter almost everywhere except in the Cisalpine redoubts, pasta has vanquished polenta, that yellow maize porridge with a vitamin deficiency that causes pellagra disease and is now used chiefly as an accompaniment to calves’ liver.
In 1860 few northerners knew much about southern Italy and even fewer foresaw any difficulties they might have in governing their new acquisitions. They realized it had not recently been prosperous but thought this was a temporary problem, a consequence of Bourbon misrule, which they would soon be able to fix with parliaments, free trade and efficient administration. They had read about Magna Graecia and Campania Felix, they remembered what Virgil and more recently Goethe had written, and they believed the land was so fertile that southerners could afford to be lazy. They knew about the luxuries of ancient Sybaris, which was said to have invented the chamber pot as well as the ‘Turkish’ bath,1 but they had not visited its site in Italy’s instep and thus did not realize that the place could no longer support a sybaritic existence. They seemed quite unaware of drought and erosion and the other climatic and geographical disadvantages suffered by the south.
Ignorance was accompanied by the contempt of northerners from Italy and beyond. In the early nineteenth century one French traveller, Augustin Creuzé de Lesser, announced that ‘Europe ends at Naples and ends there quite badly’; Sicily, Calabria and the rest belonged to Africa. Fifty years later, another Frenchman, Alfred Maury, described a journey south as if he were in a time-machine going backwards: in Turin and Milan you were in modern society, in Florence you were with the Medici, by the time you reached Rome you were in the Middle Ages, in Naples you had gone back to the pagan era, and further south you found customs that had ‘all the naive simplicity of ancient times’.2 Most observers found the southern landscape magnificent but its people squalid; it was ‘a paradise inhabited by devils’ and governed by them too. Southerners were spineless, idle, corrupt and so carnally sensuous that the Marquis de Sade – of all people – found them ‘the most degraded species’ in the world.3 Yet they were also seen as savage, violent and irrational, perhaps taking after their earthquakes and volcanoes. Such prejudice was buttressed by historical example, pseudo-science and primitive anthropology. Racial differences, it was claimed, made southerners more likely to be corrupt than northerners, though it was accepted that not all southerners were the same. One theory, occasionally still uttered, held that western Sicilians have been mafiosi because they are descended from Arabs, whereas eastern islanders, especially the inhabitants of Syracuse, have been less violent and more civilized because their ancestors were Greeks.4
A politician who typified these attitudes was Cavour’s first viceroy of Naples, Luigi Carlo Farini, the man who compared Neapolitans unfavourably with the bedouin. To the interior minister in Turin, he described the people as ‘swine’ living in ‘a hell-pit’ and their lawyers as ‘tricksters … law-twisters, casuists and professional liars with the conscience of pimps’; what a pity, he added, that Piedmont’s civilization forbade floggings and ‘cutting people’s tongues out’. Farini began to have doubts about the wisdom of unification soon after he arrived in Naples at the end of 1860, but it was too late to go back. The ‘entire Italian question’, he believed, now revolved around Naples: ‘to succeed there [was] to create Italy’.5
It soon became clear that few southerners were eager to help in the creation. Neapolitans from the poorer districts could sometimes be heard shouting ‘Viva Garibaldi!’ or even ‘Viva Francesco!’, for they much preferred the old Bourbons, who had spoken their dialect and possessed the common touch, to Victor Emanuel, a foreign king who did not conceal his disdain for his new subjects and referred to them as ‘canaille’. Giacinto De Sivo, a local historian, railed against the nationalists’ misnomers: the destruction of his country should not be called a ‘risorgimento’; the northern oppression should not be called ‘liberty’; ‘this servitude to Piedmont, the servant of powers beyond the Alps’, should not be called ‘independence’. ‘Piedmont cries Italy,’ he exclaimed, ‘and makes war on Italians because she does not want to make Italy – she wants to eat Italy …’6 Other people held milder views yet still regretted the result of the plebiscite in which they had been voting less for Victor Emanuel than for Garibaldi, who was popular even though he was a northerner. They remembered that the Bourbon government had been often incompetent and sometimes irksome but they began to wonder if they really preferred to be ruled by an alien dynasty in distant Turin.
Since the summer of 1859 Azeglio had been warning it would be a disaster if the Piedmontese attempted to ‘swallow down Naples’. Two years later, after the swallowing had been done and the swallowed were in revolt, he suggested that the Neapolitans should be asked ‘once and for all whether they want us there or not’.7 Cavour was by then dead but he had already decreed that the Neapolitans would not be asked. Bixio had told him that southerners were ‘a bunch of orientals’ who understood ‘nothing but force’, and he had agreed with Bixio. He was determined, he told the king, ‘to impose unity on the most corrupt and weakest part of Italy’, and to do so by force if necessary. Disorder would not be tolerated, nor would political opposition or even a free press. However much the Neapolitans disliked the prospect of unification, they were going to be unified anyway: it would be better to have a civil war than the ‘irreparable catastrophe’ of a break-up of the new nation.8 It did not apparently occur to Cavour that, if southern Italy were denied liberty and social justice, its inhabitants might wonder what they were going to gain from unification.
Even northern populations resented the imposition of Piedmontese laws: the Tuscans, for example, had no desire to bring back the death penalty which they had first abolished in the eighteenth century. Yet the insensitivity of the Piedmontese in the south, and the arrogance of their assumption that they knew what was best for southerners, made their policies even more damaging in the former Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Back in the twelfth century, at the Assizes of Ariano, King Roger of Sicily had wisely proclaimed that, as there were so many different peoples and cultures in his kingdom, they must be allowed as far as possible to retain their own laws and customs. Such wisdom was denied to Cavour, who would not permit the Neapolitans to keep a legal system they were rightly proud of. He certainly paid no attention to Giuseppe Ferrari, a federalist deputy from Lombardy, who informed him in parliament that the laws of the southern kingdom compared well with those of other civilized nations and were probably the best in all Italy.
The officials of the new government were too blinkered to notice certain basic and important features of Neapolitan history. They seemed unaware that the capital had no town hall, no parliament building and no medieval traditions of self-government. It was a royal city dependent on a court and a bureaucracy; such prosperity as it had would therefore decrease when its status declined from national capital to provincial city. Nor did they realize how disastrous a doctrinaire application of free trade would be to industries which depended on tariffs and state orders to protect them from northern and foreign competition. Equally crass was their failure to anticipate the effect of high taxes on people unaccustomed to paying them, especially those directed at the poor such as the grist tax. Increased taxation was required primarily to build a national army and navy, institutions the south did not want or care about. It was also needed to service Piedmont’s large national debt, which was now shared with all the annexed territories. Naples, where the Bourbons had accumulated impressive gold reserves, was thus forced – on top of everything else – to help pay Piedmont’s debts.
Another cause for resentment was the treatment of the Bourbon army after its defeats in 1860 and 1861. A number of senior officers, especially those who had deserted or fought badly against Garibaldi, were welcomed into the Piedmontese forces. Yet about 60,000 men were disbanded and left without jobs and pay, and 13,000 of Francesco’s most loyal soldiers – those who had fought to the end at Capua, Gaeta and elsewhere – were kept as prisoners and incarcerated in Alpine fortresses. Conditions in the northern jails were so appalling that many of them died there of hunger, cold and disease.
In the south fighting continued for years after the arrival of Garibaldi. Within weeks of Francesco’s departure – and just after the proclamation of united Italy – an anti-Piedmontese revolt broke out in Basilicata; within a few more weeks it had spread throughout the southern mainland, up to the Abruzzi and down to Apulia and Calabria. The rebels did not attempt to form an army but remained divided among several hundred armed bands; their tactics were guerrilla – consisting mainly of killings, kidnappings and ambushes – and their victims were the soldiers and officials of the new regime. The previous year Cialdini had dismissed resisters as ‘brigands’, and the label stuck: the enemies were not considered normal enemies but brigands and outlaws who could be treated as such. Historians followed suit, with the result that a civil war lasting five years became known as il brigantaggio or ‘the brigandage’.
Some later historians, often marxists, regarded the revolt as a social insurrection and the rebels as freedom fighters defying a foreign aggressor. Like the earlier interpretation, this was simplistic because it ignored multiplicity of motive. Rebels may have shared the same target – the new regime – but they had diverse reasons for attacking it. Many were indeed brigands, the kind of men who had been around for many years and who had been encouraged to fight the French by both the Bourbons and the British half a century before. But there were many former soldiers as well, men loyal to the old monarchy who had been disbanded by the Piedmontese and who now joined the guerrillas in the hills. Other recruits included peasants fleeing conscription or refusing to pay the new taxes. As they moved around the interior, the rebels received support from the villages, from Bourbon loyalists and devout Catholics outraged by Piedmont’s recent anti-clerical policies. Some of the bands obtained assistance abroad from Bourbon supporters and Francesco’s exiled court in Rome.
The northern generals followed Cavour’s instructions to use force and received statutory support for this from a new law which empowered them to employ repressive measures in ‘those provinces declared by royal decree to be infested with brigands’. General Della Rocca, the future sluggard of the second Battle of Custoza, informed the prime minister that he had ordered his men ‘not to waste time taking prisoners’, and in his autobiography he boasted of the number of summary executions he had carried out; when told by the government to reduce the number and shoot only the capi (the chiefs), he and his commanders responded by calling all captured rebels capi and shooting the lot of them.9 Other generals took a more Old Testament approach, urging their soldiers to show no mercy in ‘purifying the countryside by fire and sword’. In August 1861 the inhabitants of Pontelandolfo, a large village north-east of Naples, were so overjoyed by the arrival of a band of brigands that they murdered the local tax collector and sang a Te Deum to King Francesco in the parish church. A small detachment of bersaglieri, which rashly went to see what was going on, was then wiped out by a force of armed peasants. Cialdini’s response was predictable: Pontelandolfo and a neighbouring village were to be reduced to ‘a heap of rubble’, and their adult male inhabitants were to be shot. Some 400 people, a good number of them neither male nor adult, were killed on the day of the consequent slaughter.
By 1865 the Italian army had contained the revolt, though some fighting stuttered on for another five years. The number of rebel dead, those executed or killed in combat, is difficult to calculate, and assessments vary from under 6,000 to over 60,000. Whatever the true figure, unification had provoked a civil war of such atrocities and such dimensions that most of the Italian army was dispatched to the south to deal with it. It was so appalling a way to begin life as a ‘united’ kingdom that the government tried to suppress information about what was happening. Members of parliament hissed and shouted if a brave soul uttered the words ‘civil war’: no, no, they cried, it was a punishment of brigands. They were equally outraged when a Neapolitan parliamentarian compared the Piedmontese in Naples to the conquistadors in Mexico and Peru. Foreigners could also be hostile to those among them who doubted the sacred nature of Italian unity. One MP at Westminster risked unpopularity by dismissing the idea of brigandage and speaking of ‘a civil war, a spontaneous popular movement against a foreign occupation’. In a debate in 1863 Benjamin Disraeli wondered why Parliament was allowed to consider the condition of Poland but not the situation in Naples. ‘True,’ he observed, ‘in one country the insurgents are called brigands, and in the other patriots; but, with that exception, I have not learned from this discussion that there is any marked difference between them.’10
As violence faded on the mainland, it flared up in Sicily, a large-scale revolt in 1866 following a smaller one three years earlier. Taking advantage of the withdrawal of the island’s garrison (sent north in the summer of 1866 to fight the Austrians), armed bands emerged from the hills and occupied most of Palermo. The composition of the bands was similar to that of the Neapolitan ‘brigands’, a mixture that included criminals, peasants, deserters and other former soldiers. As usual the government failed to consider whether it might have been responsible for the revolt; instead of perceiving the outbreak as a social insurrection provoked by the policies of Turin, ministers blamed the Mafia* and sent in the army. Once again force was the policy adopted by the government and carried out by generals who believed that Sicilians were too barbarous to understand anything else. While the navy bombarded Palermo, the army went on the rampage, arresting and executing islanders.
The Sicilian desire for autonomy was not a new passion. It had reached insurrectionary point on many occasions over the previous six centuries and four times already in the previous fifty years; it remains an important political issue even though the island today enjoys an autonomous status. Cavour had taken note of this sentiment and promised he would satisfy it if Sicilians voted for annexation; after they had done so, he changed his mind and pressed ahead with ‘piedmontization’. The islanders had also been promised a redistribution of land, but this too was revoked. Like the common lands, the former Church estates might have been utilized in some scheme of agrarian reform to benefit the poor; in the event they were sold cheaply to prototype mafiosi from the middle classes, and the peasants received nothing. Although Sicilians had been told they would benefit from annexation, the advantages must have been difficult for many of them to discern. As in Naples, the poor were often left unemployed by the consequences of free trade, they were conscripted by an army they regarded as an enemy, and they were forced to pay taxes that seemed specifically aimed at them: why else were heavy dues imposed on their beasts (donkeys and mules) and lighter ones levied on the landowners’ cattle?
The imposition of liberalism upon Sicily seemed a good idea to Cavour and his colleagues: they were confident that everyone would benefit from a combination of free trade, representative government and anti-clerical legislation, and they were thus puzzled by the reluctance of the population to embrace it. In 1875 two perceptive young Tuscans, Sidney Sonnino and Leopoldo Franchetti, went to Sicily and afterwards explained why: Italian institutions on the island, they reported, were ‘based on a merely formal liberalism’ and had simply ‘given the oppressing class a legal means of continuing as they always’ had done. The oppressing class may have been changing, as hard-headed businessmen replaced a dwindling aristocracy, but the oppressiveness remained: as a leading Sicilian historian, Rosario Romeo, later observed, the new ruling class had simply appropriated the worst characteristics of the old.11
In 1955 an impoverished Sicilian prince, Giuseppe di Lampedusa, decided at the age of fifty-eight to forsake his idle existence and become a writer. Over the following two and a half years, before he died of lung cancer, he wrote incessantly, his production including two short stories, a memoir of his childhood and his great novel known as The Leopard or Der Leopard in German but published in Italian as Il Gattopardo (denoting a serval or ocelot though the author intended the animal to be considered a leopard) and translated as Le Guépard (a cheetah) in French and De Tijger Kat (a margay or tiger cat) in Dutch. Set in the years of the Risorgimento, with aristocratic decadence as its theme, the novel depicts a Palermitan atmosphere charged with the optimism of liberalism. One character claims that unification will bring ‘liberty, security, lighter taxes, ease, trade. Everything will be better …’ Yes, everything will be better, ‘the only ones to lose will be the priests’. But Lampedusa knew that very little had got better and that few people had won except the opportunists, the men of ‘tenacious greed and avarice’ who had made fortunes from the state’s seizure and subsequent sale of Church lands. Prince Fabrizio, the protagonist based on the author’s great-grandfather, remains undeceived by unification and the advent of liberalism. He knows that nothing much will change. The Sicilian Risorgimento would be little more than a change of dynasty (‘Torinese instead of Neapolitan dialect’) and the substitution of one class by another. All the rest would be a veneer, a superficial application of liberalism on a rough and brutal society that was plainly unready for it. In his book Lampedusa was quite charitable towards the Piedmontese in Sicily, satirizing their naivety rather than their ignorance of the south or the arrogance of their behaviour. More critical was he of the opinions and activities of his fellow islanders, although he sympathized with their anxieties about the future, about their feeling that they were a conquered people and that they would not really belong to the new state. Prince Fabrizio, like his creator, understands that antagonism towards the Bourbons had not required so drastic a remedy, that it was crazy for Sicilians to think that heavy rule from Turin would suit them better than loose control from Naples.
Sicilians and other southerners suffered a number of disadvantages, among them the ancient miseries of drought and unproductive land together with dismal transport to their potential export markets in the distant north. After unification they also had to endure the government’s ill-considered economic policies. The insistence on free trade at the time of independence had ruined heavy industry around Naples and silk and other textiles elsewhere in the south. So deluded had the government been that it thought it could inject the spirit of Manchester into southern manufacturers, men who had never been to Lancashire and had neither the capital nor the experience to adapt their industries. A generation later, the government itself repudiated the Manchester dogmas, and in 1888 the prime minister, Francesco Crispi, decided to pick a quarrel with the French by launching a tariff war so ruinous for Italy that its exports to France fell by two-thirds. Tariffs may have helped northern farmers and cereal growers in the south, who were not harvesting for export, but they were disastrous for the growers of fruit and vines. After the devastation of French vineyards by phylloxera in the years after 1875, southern Italian wine makers had invested in their businesses and had prospered with their exports. Yet they could not compete with the resurgent French vintners after the introduction of retaliatory tariffs in France. Nor were citrus growers able to export their produce when, in addition to transport costs, it was subject to import duties. The two regions most damaged by Crispi’s tariff war were Apulia and Sicily, his own island.
In the 1870s a small number of remarkable parliamentarians began to visit the south, report on its condition and propose remedies that the government should adopt. Subsequently known as meridionalisti, the first generation of these altruists included Sonnino, Franchetti and Giustino Fortunato, a liberal, enlightened but deeply pessimistic landowner from Basilicata. Their investigations were thorough and reliable, leading to devastating revelations of poverty, neglect, a dearth of public works and an almost complete absence of social, fiscal or economic justice. Perhaps they concentrated too much on the south’s most benighted areas and thus missed certain nuances that might have tempered their stark vision of the ‘two Italies’. Yet their findings were valid and their advice perceptive, and it was a tragedy for Italy that they failed to persuade governments to pursue policies that might have encouraged the south to feel it was part of the new nation.
In the Abruzzi Franchetti reported that agricultural workers were virtually slaves to the local landowners. In Sicily Sonnino concluded that the peasants were worse off than in any other part of Europe; they were even worse off than they had been before unification. Both men pointed out that liberalism was a meaningless notion in such coerced and impoverished societies; both also blamed landowners for showing such little interest in improving their land and building houses for their farmworkers. Estate owners, old and new, remained in control of enormous areas after 1860 and became even more powerful than they had been under the Bourbons. So weak was the new state in rural parts that they were effectively the government, the employers, the arbiters of justice, the selectors of members of parliament, and the providers of bridges and roads in places that suited themselves. Their position was secure because governments in Rome acquiesced in their dominance in return for their parliamentary votes. Projected reforms could thus be blocked or diluted whenever they wished.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century the wealth gap expanded in Sicily as it did in the rest of Italy and in much of Europe. In the west of the island the Florio family amassed a huge fortune from shipping, sulphur and wine; another bonanza was secured by an English family called Whitaker, whose profits from Marsala wine enabled them to build splendid villas and a palazzo in Palermo designed in Venetian Gothic. The capital’s exotic, partly eastern character attracted the royal families of northern Europe, and a procession of princes, including Kaiser Wilhelm and King Edward VII, turned up on holiday in their yachts. The society of Palermo’s Belle Epoque was no doubt frivolous, its members disporting themselves at balls and race meetings and fancy-dress parties, but it was majestic in its way, above all in scale, and glittering enough to attract the talents of Sarah Bernhardt and Giacomo Puccini. Yet its brilliance was brief, dulled by the squandering of fortunes and by the Messina earthquake of 1908, so that its style remained in the memory of its survivors as part of a transient golden age. Towards the end of his life the Duke of Verdura, who made his fortune as a jewellery designer in New York, recalled the garden parties of the epoch:
ladies in light colours with boas, veils under enormous straw hats, gentlemen with their boaters under their arms and a few cavalry officers thrown in. Lace parasols against a background of palm trees and cypresses and long tables covered with white cloths spread with pyramids of strawberries and every sort of ice-cream.12
Yet throughout the epoch Palermo remained a city of slums as well as sumptuousness. The capital and its provinces were lawless lands, places of private violence where men did not wait for justice from the state; the murder rate in Sicily was fourteen times higher than it was in Lombardy. Much of the violence was committed by the enigmatic Mafia, but a lot of it had social causes. In the 1890s there were frequent peasant riots against both the actions and the inaction of the government: against the scarcity of land, higher rents, higher food prices (a result of Crispi’s ‘corn laws’), and against unfair taxes, especially the grist tax, a symbol of repression since the rule of the Spanish. Social unrest led to the creation of a movement called the fasci, left-wing peasant leagues that encouraged strikes, the seizure of land and sometimes the burning of tax-offices. Like the fascists of the following century, they took their name from the Latin word fasces (a bundle of rods surrounding an axe and symbolizing ancient Roman authority), but the two movements had little else in common.
Crispi, who became prime minister for the second time at the end of 1893, saw the fasci as promoters of revolution. In a move that would have appalled his mentor, this former garibaldino thus declared martial law, banned the fasci, arrested their leaders and deported many of them to penal islands. Angst and memories of his radical past may have persuaded Crispi subsequently to propose a land reform that would have emasculated the latifondi, but it was sabotaged by landowners and other conservatives in parliament. This reverse marked the ultimate defeat of the south: over the next two decades millions of people from Sicily and the southern mainland gave up on Italy and emigrated to the continents of America.
Those who remained continued to feel estranged from the new state. With the south’s industry ruined, its agriculture in decline and its people so poor that many were forced to leave, what improvements were they able to see – apart from some new railways? Many southerners concluded that unification had been a mistake and, when confronted by nationalists who insisted it was their destiny, argued that at least it should have been done differently, that a federal system should have been established. Two of the greatest southern figures of the period pleaded early in the new century for such a system to be set up. Let the south grow, declared the Apulian historian Gaetano Salvemini, by letting it be autonomous of the central government. Leave us alone in the south, urged the Sicilian priest Luigi Sturzo, who became the inspiration for the future Christian Democratic Party.
Leave us in the south to govern ourselves, plan our own financial policy, spend our own taxes, take responsibility for our own public works, and find our own remedies for our difficulties … we are not schoolchildren, we have no need of the North’s concerned protection.13
In 1899 Giustino Fortunato, one of the wisest of Italian politicians, declared that it was ‘no accident that there are those who say – and I am quoting my father! – that the unification of Italy was a sin against history and geography’.14 He himself sometimes felt the same and, loyal patriot though he was, he privately admitted that unification had ruined the south and prevented its economic revival in the 1860s; for him the nation frequently seemed to be on the verge of breaking up. In the same era a gentleman from Piedmont presented the French novelist René Bazin with an intriguing image: ‘We are too long a country, signore. The head and the tail will never touch each other, but if they are made to do so, the head will bite the tail.’15
The new Italian capital was sometimes referred to as the Third Rome, distinguishing it from the Rome of the Caesars and the Rome of the popes. As the successor to such imposing forebears, politicians felt the need to refashion it with appropriate and equivalent splendour. Third Rome must have wide streets, imposing bridges and public buildings that were above all grandiose; it also required embankments to stop the Tiber from flooding.
Glorious as it still is, Rome lost a great deal during the transformation. Many convents and monasteries were pulled down, and old villas and gardens were flattened to make way for new development. The travel writer Augustus Hare complained in 1896 that old Rome had been ‘spoilt’, ‘destroyed’ and reduced by the Piedmontese ‘occupation’ to an ‘inferior mediocrity’.16 Some of the replacements are certainly monstrous, notably the huge Palace of Justice, a pompous and over-ornamented pile built on the banks of the river in 1893. As it was constructed without regard for the spring underneath it, subsidence in its foundations has brought it close to collapse. Another vast deformity is the Vittoriano, which commemorates the first king of united Italy and may be the largest monument to one person erected since the Great Pyramid of Giza. Often compared derisively to a wedding cake or a typewriter, it is the dominant symbol of the Third Rome. Its very position – blocking the view of Michelangelo’s palaces on the Capitoline – suggests its designers wanted themselves to be considered superior to the builders of the first and second cities. Not only is the monument bombastic and badly sited, it is also built in a material – bright white Brescian marble – that contrasts flashily with Rome’s local stone, the warm and lightly ochred travertine.
Apart from competing worthily with earlier Romes, Third Rome was intended to overshadow its rival and victim, Vatican Rome. One way of doing this was by building new streets near the papal enclave and naming them after pre-Christian Romans such as Scipio, Cicero, Pompey and the Gracchi. There is also a Piazza Cavour and a Piazza del Risorgimento, which adjoins the Vatican walls, though most martial episodes of unification (Solferino, Milazzo, Volturno etc.) are commemorated in streets further away, near the railway station.
Pope Pius IX reacted to Rome’s capture in 1870 by excommunicating ‘the sub-Alpine usurper’ (Victor Emanuel) and refusing to recognize united Italy. Yet in spite of hostile relations, the new state understood the need for Catholic support and made some early concessions in the hope of attracting it. The Law of Papal Guarantees of 1871 granted the pontiff the status of a sovereign, with foreign ambassadors accredited to him, and gave him a generous income and free ‘enjoyment’ of the Vatican. This munificence was not excessive but, even so, it may have been unwise because it permitted the formation of ‘a state within a state’, one that could denounce the larger entity with impunity for the next sixty years.
The pope, who liked to describe himself as ‘the prisoner of the Vatican’, was not mollified by the law. Still resentful of the conquest, the closure of convents and the loss of his territories, he refused to have any dealings with the government and continued to insist that he was the rightful ruler of the Papal States. His response to Italian nationalism and to much of the modern world was to lead the Church into zones of obscurantism unvisited by most of his predecessors. In 1854 he had asserted that the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception – the belief that the Virgin Mary herself was conceived without sin – had been revealed by God. Ten years later, the Syllabus of Errors had condemned eighty modern ‘errors’ and declared it impossible for the pontiff to accept ‘progress, liberalism and civilization as lately introduced’. More recently, in 1870, Pius had proclaimed the doctrine of Papal Infallibility, which asserted that the pope himself could make no errors when speaking, in his capacity as Bishop of Rome, on matters of faith and morals. Yet he and his four successors were curiously reluctant to exercise the power he had insisted upon. No pope claimed infallibility until 1950, when Pius XII declared that ‘the ever Virgin Mary’ had been ‘assumed in body and soul to heavenly glory’.
In 1864 the longest-serving of all popes had told Italian Catholics it was ‘not expedient’ to vote in parliamentary elections, a position he reiterated after the fall of Rome and one which was strengthened by his successor, Leo XIII, who in 1881 forbade any members of his flock to stand for parliament or vote in national elections. Not until the following century did a pope publish an encyclical allowing Catholics to vote in order to preserve social stability – that is, to prevent the emerging Socialist Party from dominating the country’s politics.
Many Catholics entitled to vote did so anyway, despite the papal pronouncements. All the same, the Vatican’s refusal to recognize the Italian state was fatal to the cohesion and consolidation of the new nation. Catholicism was the one thing shared by nearly all Italians, and the papacy was the only institution in the country that could claim both longevity and continuity. Pius could have been a unifier yet decided alas to be a disruptor. His outrage and hostility encouraged many people to question the legitimacy of the new state and thus weakened the loyalty of millions of its citizens. An alliance of nationalism and Catholicism could have made a powerful force, as it did in Ireland, Spain and Poland. Instead, the animosity between them within Italy led to a divide in an already fractured country that lasted until Mussolini’s Lateran Treaty of 1929. Devout Catholics were unable to play a commanding role in Italian politics until a christian democrat became prime minister after the Second World War.
The parliament of united Italy, chosen by an electorate of under half a million people,† had not begun auspiciously in Turin or improved much during its few years in Florence. Cavour’s predominance in the 1850s may have obscured the innate instability of a system that gave too much power to a capricious monarch: the new kingdom had six prime ministers in its first three and a half years. In Rome the turnover of governments slowed down for a while before speeding up again and carrying on at a similar pace (except under Mussolini) until the beginning of the twenty-first century. As for the Chamber of Deputies, housed in the huge but unlovely Palazzo Montecitorio, this institution never succeeded in becoming a focus of national pride or a repository of the people’s trust. Some of the blame for this situation should be assigned to Victor Emanuel, who despised parliament and told Lanza, one of his best prime ministers, that it had no business to discuss matters of high policy.
For fifteen years after 1861 Italy was governed by men who had been Cavour’s colleagues and supporters. These were liberal conservatives from the north, patriotic and high-minded on the whole, law-givers who sometimes liked to think they shared the virtues and values of Roman senators of old: a plaque in the baptistery of Pistoia cathedral commemorates one parliamentarian not only as a saint in his family life but also as an ‘example of integrity’, moderation, austerity and altruism. Known as la Destra (the Right), though they were not notably more right-wing than the so-called Left, they strove to turn unification into unity, a task that proved beyond them – as it was probably beyond anyone. A succession of able finance ministers managed to increase revenue and balance the budget, though at the cost of making Italy among the most highly taxed countries in the world. One of their most useful contributions to the state was their success in preventing Victor Emanuel and his generals from fighting more foreign wars after 1866. In 1870 the prime minister (Lanza) and the finance minister (Quintino Sella) stood firm when General Cialdini, a close ally of the king, demanded the resignation of the government because it would not declare war on Prussia. When Cialdini also demanded a stronger army to protect private property at home, Sella sensibly pointed out that a larger army would mean higher taxes and hence be an incitement to social disorder.
With all their limitations and their failures in the south, the Piedmontese leaders of la Destra were the nearest thing to a responsible ruling class that united Italy ever produced. They had hoped that Piedmont would become the Prussia of the peninsula, the kingdom around which the other states coalesced, yet it was always an unrealistic ambition. Their north-western state was too small, too weak and too remote – culturally and historically as well as geographically – to sustain such a role once Italy had been achieved.
The last government of la Destra fell in 1876 and was replaced by a ministry of the Left, headed by Agostino Depretis. The new prime minister was in certain ways very Piedmontese – sensible, cautious and incorrupt – but his political power came from the southern deputies, especially the lawyers among them, whose profession dominated the parliamentary benches. Apart from compulsory primary education, introduced by Depretis, differences between Left and Right were more discernible in moods and attitudes than in political ideology. The liberal conservatives had stood for fiscal rectitude and a state that interfered as little as possible in the lives of its citizens. By contrast, many on the Left wanted a powerful state that could engender jobs and public works; it was also keener than the Right on foreign wars and colonial adventures. In consequence public debt grew to alarming heights during Depretis governments.
Under the dominance of the Left, politics became less principled and more corrupt, more a matter of deals and manipulation than of policies and programmes. Depretis encouraged this development with his reliance on ‘trasformismo’, his method of retaining a parliamentary majority by constantly conjuring alliances between shifting and sometimes incompatible factions. At the heart of his coalition with southern deputies was a simple formula: he gave them control of their regions, and they gave him control of the nation. Depretis gained their votes but in exchange he lost the power to carry out reforms that the south so badly needed. His method, a bartering of votes for favours, prevented the emergence of a political class in the south and left power with what Sonnino called ‘the oppressing class’ – landowners and mafiosi – men who would deliver votes at elections on condition that at other times they were largely left alone.
Trasformismo discouraged the formation of political parties with distinctive programmes and led to paralysis in government. Lanza had hoped that Italy would adopt the British practice of two parties offering different policies and alternating in government. Leaving aside the fact that the Westminster customs had taken centuries to evolve, there was little chance of organizing an opposition in Rome when the government was able to seduce potential opponents with easy promises of favours. Depretis claimed to be governing in the interests of everyone and not of factions; in fact he was governing in the interests of those who gave him a majority in the Chamber. His power was secured by patronage, bribery and the fixing of elections, which he instructed the prefects in the provinces to implement. Francesco Crispi described in 1886 how parliamentary business was carried out during Depretis’s third and longest term as prime minister.
You should see the pandemonium at Montecitorio when the moment approaches for an important division. The agents of the government run through the rooms and corridors to gather votes. Subsidies, decorations, canals, bridges, roads, everything is promised; and sometimes an act of justice, long denied, is the price of a parliamentary vote.17
The decline of parliamentary standards was not, of course, all the fault of Depretis. Deputies managed to damage the reputation of parliament by their involvement in bank scandals, their poor attendance record and their often rowdy behaviour, which sometimes led to the throwing of inkwells and to fights on the floor of the Chamber. Though duelling was illegal, one deputy was killed in 1898 while fighting his thirty-first duel. Such irresponsible behaviour was by no means confined to the backbenches. There were numerous challenges and duels involving ministers, including one such contest when the current premier (Marco Minghetti) fought with a former premier (Urbano Rattazzi). Depretis was witness to an extraordinary incident in his bedroom when, while he lay ill in bed, Giovanni Nicotera (the minister of the interior) tried to hit Giuseppe Zanardelli (a fellow minister and a future prime minister) with a chair and, having failed, apparently tried to push him out of the window. On a subsequent occasion Nicotera spat at a fellow deputy and forced his unwilling victim to fight a duel. Perhaps it was not surprising that Milan’s Corriere della Sera should report that in this era the Chamber had not ‘the slightest popular support’ and was ‘generally laughed at and despised’. Nor is it difficult to understand Sonnino’s wider point, made in a speech to the Chamber in 1881.
The vast majority of the population, more than ninety per cent … feels entirely cut off from our institutions. People see themselves subjected to the State and forced to serve it with their blood and their money, but they do not feel that they are a vital and organic part of it, and take no interest at all in its existence or its affairs.18
In 1865 the prime minister, General Lamarmora, claimed in parliament that Italy was ‘far more united than older, more established nations’.19 The statement was loudly applauded by deputies, who knew it was nonsense. Yet they believed it vital to pretend that it was true and to hope that repetition, together with various unifying measures, would persuade Italians to think it really was true. One urgent task for them was thus to cultivate the nation’s founding myth, to promote and implant the idea that unity had been achieved by a united people determined to gain its liberty. The cultivators were well aware that the myth was indeed mythical but they were convinced of the need to nurture it. Giovanni Giolitti, the ablest prime minister since Cavour, understood the logic of protecting ‘beautiful national legends’: Italians needed to believe they shared a common glory and a common destiny.
Giolitti’s point engenders sympathy. Nations need traditions, however distant and mythical, but a country cannot have genuine national traditions if it has only just become a nation. Even if the Lombard League had produced an iconic figure like William Tell or Joan of Arc, such a person would not have been inspiring to Sicilians and other peoples whose ancestors had fought against the League. Italy simply did not have the symbols or rituals that other European nationalities possessed through inheritance: no fleur-de-lis or ‘Marseillaise’, no Magna Carta or Union Jack; even the flag, the tricolore, was an adaption of the French revolutionary banner. Nor, even more crucially, was there that intimate connection between religion and monarchy that had been so useful in the establishment or strengthening of older nations, as in Spain with los Reyes Católicos or in England with Henry VIII. Italy may have been a Catholic nation, but the leader of the Catholic Church refused to recognize it.
Perhaps the most active promoter of the Risorgimento myth was Francesco Crispi, who had been one of Garibaldi’s Thousand. In his later career the need for Italy to feel great and be thought great became the principal determinant of his policies. Governments and institutions, he told parliament, had ‘a duty to immortalize themselves in marble and monuments’. So did monarchy. Although he had personally disliked and despised Victor Emanuel, Crispi believed that the cult of the founding monarch, whose funeral he had organized in the Pantheon in 1878, would be useful to the quest for national greatness. Fosterage of this cult also required the suppression of inconvenient evidence, and to this end officials were dispatched to the homes of the king’s deceased correspondents to remove letters that might contain some of his unpatriotic and derogatory opinions of Italians. This problem was not, of course, unique to the royal correspondence. When Cavour’s letters were published, descriptions of the ‘cowardly’ Tuscans and the ‘disgraceful’ and ‘savage’ Garibaldi were expunged; so too was the prime minister’s desire to ‘exterminate’ the garibaldini.20
Garibaldi sometimes and Mazzini always had been regarded as enemies by the Turin government, but they had to be incorporated into the national myth because they had plainly been more romantic and self-sacrificing figures than Cavour and Victor Emanuel. Mazzini would have been astonished by his apotheosis and his posthumous appearance on monuments and city streets and in school textbooks (perhaps a more useful vehicle for childhood indoctrination than an endless array of statues). Educational primers were useful both for inventing glory – Magenta became a Piedmontese victory although the Piedmontese had not fought at it – and for identifying the nation’s enemies: as we have seen, King Ferdinand was vilified as ‘Bomba’ for his bombardment of Messina in 1848, though Victor Emanuel naturally did not figure as the bombarder of Genoa, Ancona, Capua and Gaeta. Another scheme for the cultivation of patriotism was the creation of Risorgimento museums, which proliferated across the north but not surprisingly proved to be less popular in the south.
The most revealing exhibits in these museums are the prints and posters that encourage viewers to sense the harmony that had allegedly existed between the giants of the Risorgimento generation. Garibaldi and Mazzini may have parted company in the 1850s, but many years later they could be reunited in engravings with such titles as ‘Thought and Action’, their portraits framed by a wreath of oak and olive leaves floating above a sword and a pen. In one street poster they were joined together with Verdi under the title ‘The Three Giuseppes – The Three Stars of Italy’. Above each bearded and incorruptible head is a scripted eulogy: Verdi’s explains that he ‘illuminated la patria with his melodies’.
Such articles in Risorgimento museums are invariably dwarfed by massive oil paintings depicting heroic scenes from the ‘wars of liberation’. Favoured subjects include Garibaldi carrying the dying Anita through the marshes of Comacchio, Garibaldi on Caprera with the evening sun shining on his red shirt and mournful face, the Italian camp on the battlefield of Magenta (the depiction of wounded soldiers implying that they had taken part in the action) and the breach in the Roman walls in 1870, which was painted to suggest that the incident was a tremendous victory though the defeated side lost only nineteen men. The figure most commonly represented in the pictures is Victor Emanuel, almost always shown on a white horse leading his troops into battle; the scene is usually San Martino, with blue-coated Piedmontese soldiers advancing as if on parade and white-coated Austrians lying dead or dying or being captured in the foreground. The Palazzo Pubblico in Siena, which Lorenzetti and Simone Martini had once adorned, contains a large and garish room, the Sala Vittorio Emmanuele, in which the king is acclaimed as ‘liberator of Italy’, ‘bravest of leaders’, ‘best of princes’, ‘father of the nation’ and ‘restorer [sic] of national unity’. The enormous frescoes, three of which portray the monarch on a white or grey horse, are pure hagiography, gaudy and badly painted distortions of actual events. After looking at such displays, it is a relief to go somewhere else and look at the macchiaioli (‘blotchers’), Tuscan impressionists, or artists of the next generation such as the Divisionists, who were more skilful, more human and more socially conscious, men such as Angelo Morbelli, compassionate chronicler of the old and the lonely, and Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo, the sympathetic painter of the working class in protest.
Wealthy middle-class Italians of the nineteenth century seldom established art collections as their counterparts did in Britain and Germany. Their most conspicuous expenditure on visual art was on funerary sculpture, on the creation of vast, ornate, often beautiful monuments to deceased members of their families. The erection of these was traditionally a private matter even for public figures – the Venetian Republic did not provide them for its doges – except in the case of remote heroes such as Dante, who was awarded a dismal cenotaph in Florence’s Santa Croce in 1829. The state concerned itself with public statues of heroic and exemplary men, works that could be seen not in a chapel or a cemetery but in the middle of a square.
Many towns voluntarily commissioned statues of Victor Emanuel and his fellow giants. Others were encouraged and even chivvied by the government to follow suit. Yet a few remained relatively unmolested, including Cremona, home of the great violin makers, a delightful town which has retained this free-spirited tradition, which commemorates organists and choirmasters as well as generals and garibaldini, and which recently renamed its Piazza Cavour the Piazza Stradivari. It is a relief to walk into the town’s Piazza Roma and find a statue not of the king but of its second-best composer, Amilcare Ponchielli; if you wander into the Piazza Lodi, you will then see a sculpture of the best, Claudio Monteverdi, the first of Italy’s great musical dramatists.
Venice also stands out, permitted to retain its anti-public statue tradition with only a few exceptions such as a massive equestrian bronze of Victor Emanuel on the Riva and statues of its local Risorgimento heroes, Daniele Manin and Niccolò Tommaseo, in squares near San Marco. Lucca was less fortunate. That city too had a traditional aversion to statuary in public places: only the Madonna dello Stellario, a lovely Virgin with stars, dates from before the nineteenth century. The Restoration bestowed an ugly sculpture on the Piazza Napoleone of the Bourbon-Parma duchess, Maria Luisa, but at least she did something for her subjects, providing them with an aqueduct and a good water supply. The ‘giants’ did nothing at all for Lucca, yet here they are in the city: Garibaldi in marble, typically imposing outside the theatre, Victor Emanuel in bronze, typically bombastic near the main gate, Mazzini in stone, typically gaunt and forlorn, in a melancholy spot on the ramparts under the ilex trees. And all these are reinforced by the inevitable arteries, the Viale Cavour, the Corso Garibaldi, the Via Vittorio Emanuele and the Piazzetta del Risorgimento.
A cheaper and even more popular way of fostering the cult was the affixing of commemorative plaques in town centres all over Italy. These often contain a specific historical and political message, like the one in Cremona for a soldier who was killed in the capture of Rome during ‘the final battle to lay low a priestly domination unwanted by Christ and condemned by reason and history’. The most ubiquitous are those recording where Garibaldi stayed and made a speech, inviting the local population to conquer Rome or to die in the endeavour, making the ultimate sacrifice for the redemption of Italy. Sometimes they are merely banal, recording that his brief stay in a house has glorified it for all time. A large marble tablet in Palermo’s Piazza Bologna proclaims that from ‘this illustrious building’ Giuseppe Garibaldi ‘rested his tired limbs for two hours’. Perhaps feeling that this was an inadequate inscription for all the effort entailed, its authors added a sentence relating how, ‘with extraordinary valour’, the ‘genius-exterminator of all tyranny slept serenely’ in the house in the middle of a battle.
Other means of buttressing the cult included the naming of ships and the celebration of anniversaries, though these sometimes commemorated pre-Risorgimento history as well: ships might be christened Lepanto or Dandolo as well as Savoia or Italia; the 600th anniversary of the Sicilian Vespers could be celebrated as well as the twenty-fifth anniversaries of the capture of Rome and the conquest of Palermo. The most common and least subtle exercise in Risorgimento propaganda was the renaming of streets. Communes had traditionally respected local traditions when choosing new labels, often, as in Pistoia, expunging a mellifluous-sounding name such as Via del Vento (Street of the Wind) in order to commemorate a long-dead, long-forgotten local worthy, in this case a Pistoiese who had once been a pupil of Bramante the architect. After 1861 such traditions were discarded in favour of a uniform policy of genuflecting to the giants. The name-changing epidemic swept all over Italy except Venice, partly protected by the strength of its dialect, though even there the street bordering the public gardens, aptly called the Strada dei Giardini, became the Strada (today Via) Garibaldi. Elsewhere there was a purge of local names, especially religious ones: a typical example is Arezzo, where Garibaldi replaced St Augustine and Mazzini took over from the Madonna of Loreto. In Padua three of the city’s main squares were renamed in honour of Cavour, Victor Emanuel and ‘the Unity of Italy’.
Patriotic citizens of Piedmontese and other northern towns may have welcomed the new names, but southerners often resented the changes even though they were authorized by their own municipalities. For centuries Neapolitans had been happy with their Via Toledo, their favourite street, and its alteration in 1870 to the Via Roma simply underlined their new subservience. Similarly insensitive was the substitution of the Foro Carlino (named after their best recent monarch, the Bourbon King Charles) by the Piazza Dante, named after a poet who had never visited Naples. Another example is the Piazza dei Martiri, with its monument to the ‘glorious fallen’, which commemorates men regarded as martyrs by northern patriots but who to most Neapolitans were rebels or even traitors who rose against their lawful sovereign.
A wanderer in Italian cities who sees all these statues and walks down all these streets may well ponder what effect they had on the people of the time. Crispi had insisted it was the duty of governments and institutions to immortalize themselves in monuments, but he did not explain why they had such a duty. Most citizens of the new state were doubtless less cynical than Pasquale Turiello, a writer who wondered why Italy was commemorating so many ‘heroes’ in marble when Italians had not won a battle by themselves since Legnano 700 years earlier.21 Yet many of them were perplexed by the expense and effort involved. By the end of the nineteenth century their primary allegiances were more likely to be to the new socialism or the old Church than to the narrowly based liberal state that had disappointed so many of them. For those who had no vote, for those who planned to emigrate, for those who often had less to eat than their ancestors in the Middle Ages, the endless recycling of ‘beautiful legends’ was an irritation and an irrelevance.
The Italian peninsula had experienced much warfare in its history, but its peoples had created little in the way of martial traditions except in Piedmont and to a certain extent in Naples. Venice and Genoa had of course possessed their navies, as had Pisa and Amalfi for briefer periods. In the interior the city states had fought against each other throughout the Middle Ages and had expanded or disappeared in consequence. Yet this was not like fighting foreigners such as the French or the Germans, and the richer cities often preferred to delegate their campaigns to foreign mercenaries. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the armies of most Italian states were pitiful: Tuscany, Modena and the Papal States were all incapable of fighting even a short war.
Yet it was an axiom of united Italy that the state must be martial. The ethos of Piedmont and the ambitions of its kings combined to give it a culture of warfare from the beginning. Victor Emanuel and his son Umberto, who became king in 1878, demanded huge armies and fought hard to prevent governments from cutting expenditure on the military. Umberto often said he would rather abdicate than accept a reduction in the size of the armed forces. Like his father, he got his way. By the early 1890s Italy had built itself an enormous navy although, as it was now an ally of Austria, it had no enemies. It had also created a great many admirals, virtually one for each ship, important-looking men splattered with medals acquired for reasons that few people understood, since after Lissa Italy did not fight naval battles. Military expenditure doubled under Umberto and was higher than spending on education, public works and all the rest of the ministries combined.
Other European countries spent more on their armed forces, but all were richer and some had empires to defend and enlarge. Italy’s forces were excessive for a poor, unthreatened country without colonies until at the end of the century it acquired some outposts in the Red Sea. In the mid-1860s Italy had nearly 400,000 troops in its peninsula, more than Great Britain deployed in an empire spread across six continents of the globe.22
The state needed an army not for defensive purposes but for other reasons such as gaining prestige, quelling riots and putting down ‘brigands’. Governments also saw it, quite reasonably, as a prop to the national project, an instrument that would help them weld the people into a cohesive nation. The army was thus considered a crucible into which young men would go as Sicilians or Ligurians and come out as Italians. One scheme to foster national understanding was to put men from different regions into the same regiment, an idea which seemed admirable in theory but in practice led to the formation of regional ‘gangs’ inside a unit whose members spoke in dialects that the others did not understand.
Although the Italians had no foes, except those they chose to make in the Red Sea, they had not stopped dreaming of a military triumph against someone. The defeats at Custoza and Lissa still rankled and, in the minds of many, still required a ‘baptism of fire’ to avenge them. Italian feelings of humiliation after those defeats were exacerbated in 1878 at the Congress of Berlin, called to settle borders after the most recent war between Russia and Turkey. The congress ended up allowing the British into Cyprus, the French into Tunisia (to which numbers of Italians had emigrated in recent years and which Italy also wanted) and the Austrians into Bosnia-Herzegovina. Italy received nothing. When its minister suggested that Austria might cede the Trentino, where Italian speakers were in a majority, the Russian delegate touched the rawest of Italian nerves by joking that Italy would need to lose another battle before acquiring further territory belonging to Austria.
The results of Berlin, followed by the French invasion of Tunisia three years later, enraged many Italians, who reacted by calling for the occupation of Albania and the building of an even larger army. The government responded with plans for colonization in east Africa and also by forming the Triple Alliance alongside Germany and Austria. This was a bizarre diplomatic move that gained Italy nothing except the chimerical prestige of being on officially equal terms with the other two Powers. The alliance forced the Italians to renounce their territorial ambitions in Trieste and the Trentino, it alienated France and Britain, who were meant to be their friends, and it encouraged nationalists to vent their frustration with Europe on the tribes of Eritrea.
Foreign policy at the end of the nineteenth century was dominated by the bulky figure of Francesco Crispi, who was prime minister from 1887 to 1891 and from 1893 to 1896. This former garibaldino was a man of energy, ability and massive self-importance; in the Chamber of Deputies he once compared himself to Mount Etna, the snowy summit of his formidable will dominating the fieriness of his spirit and the passions of his nature. The domestic policies of his ministries indicated that he retained vestiges of his revolutionary youth: he abolished the death penalty and carried out important reforms in public health, local government and administrative justice. Yet in foreign affairs he discarded his red-shirted, freedom-fighting background and stridently became a militarist, an expansionist and an imperialist. Once he had wanted Italians to be the ‘Saxons of the Latin race’, building parliamentary institutions like the English; now he renounced that aspiration, concluding that his countrymen were unsuited to representative government. Contemporary Italians, he believed, required discipline more than democracy; instead of remaining decadent and effete, they needed to be turned into soldiers and empire-builders. Crispi thought Italians had been injected with ‘the morphine of cowardice’ and he feared the nation would break up through lack of patriotism. In other countries, he noticed, people stopped talking and bowed their heads when their national flags were raised; in Italy the raising of the flag seemed to be a signal for everyone to start gabbling.23
Believing that an aggressive foreign policy was the best way of inculcating a sense of patriotism, Crispi was eager to quarrel – and if possible fight wars – with almost everyone (especially the French) except Britain and Germany. Yet not even these two nations were great admirers of Crispi or his projects. Lord Salisbury, the prime minister and foreign secretary, found him an ‘embarrassing ally’ and, in a comparison with his least favourite and most difficult colleague, he told Queen Victoria he was ‘the Randolph Churchill of Italy’. Bismarck, to whom Crispi sent annual presents of Sicilian wine, was scarcely more sympathetic to the Italian’s ambitions. He dismissed Italy as of ‘no account’ in international affairs and as ‘the fifth wheel on the wagon’ of the European powers; he also observed that its colonial failures in the 1880s showed that, although it had a very large appetite, it had very poor teeth. A quarter of a century before 1914, Crispi was eager for the Triple Alliance to fight a war against Russia and France. The German army, backed by the future and final Kaiser, was also keen, but Bismarck, entering the last year of his chancellorship, managed to defeat the scheme. ‘What could Germany gain from a war now?’ he asked. Within the country’s current borders, there were ‘more Poles than we need, and more Frenchmen than we could ever digest’.24
Italy could not realistically begin a war in Europe by itself. Yet it did not require foreign allies or the permission of others to fight colonial wars in Africa. Several other nations were busily engaged in ‘the scramble’: huge empires had already been acquired there by Britain, France and Portugal, and in the Congo the King of the Belgians was creating the largest colony on the continent. Colonial projects for Italy in other places had been mooted over the years. Victor Emanuel had been keen on either Sumatra or New Guinea, while his almost equally bellicose son wished to take Rhodes from the Turks and to establish a naval base in China. Expansion in the Balkans was another Italian ambition though, until the First World War, Africa was to be the chief focus of the country’s imperial hopes.
The French proposed Libya – then part of the Ottoman Empire – as a suitable colony, but the Italians were still so angry about Tunisia that they chose to go to the Red Sea instead. Colonies were expected to bring riches as well as prestige to their possessor, but neither of these options seemed likely to provide them. Assab, Italy’s first colony on the Red Sea, looked especially unpromising. It was the terminus of caravans crossing the Danakil Desert and a place the Italians knew so little about that the colonel in charge of disembarkation admitted he had never seen a map of it. Three years later, another colony was founded further up the Eritrean coast at Massawa. As the troops landed there, Crispi (who was not then in government) insisted that they should have a single objective, to assert Italy’s name in Africa and to show ‘the barbarians’ that Italians were strong and powerful. In the language employed earlier by Piedmontese officers in southern Italy, he added that, since the barbarians understood nothing but the power of guns, the artillery would soon be ‘thundering’.25 As it turned out, the guns did not always overawe the tribesmen. In 1887 an Italian force of 500 men ventured into the interior and was wiped out by Ethiopian troops at Dogali, a humiliating defeat transformed into an heroic sacrifice by nationalist painters who revelled in painting the courageous few being swamped by hordes of Africans. As a commemorative plaque still proclaims in the Apulian town of Locorotondo, the ‘heroes’ had died ‘like Romans, devoted to the honour of the fatherland’.
On becoming prime minister soon after Dogali, Crispi sent a revenge force to the Red Sea to teach ‘the barbarians’ a lesson for their ‘unjust aggression’. The expedition helped restore morale and led to the occupation of Asmara, which in turn led to the proclamation of Eritrea as well as Somaliland as Italian colonies. Crispi’s exclusion from office between the beginning of 1891 and the end of 1893 brought colonial activity to a halt, but when he returned to power he was more pugnacious than ever. Even King Umberto, who was no slouch when war was on the agenda, was puzzled. ‘Crispi wants to occupy everywhere,’ he noted, ‘even China and Japan.’26 Yet in practice the prime minister restricted his ambitions to an expansionist drive into Ethiopia, where he intended to overthrow the Emperor Menelik and install Umberto on his throne. In February 1896, in a move that recalls the government’s order to Admiral Persano thirty years before, Crispi told his reluctant commander in Eritrea to advance ‘at whatever cost to save the honour of the army and the prestige of the monarchy’. Incompetently led, a large Italian force duly advanced and was annihilated by an Ethiopian army at Adowa. 6,000 men were killed, and many others were taken prisoner. No other European country ever suffered such a colonial calamity.
Fortunato thought Adowa a well-deserved defeat for a weak and impoverished country that was wasting its resources on trying to become a Great Power. Crispi’s reaction to the disaster was to demand another expedition to punish the barbarians; even ‘the little King of Belgium’, he reminded the proud King of Italy, had done that. But Umberto realized that such a course would be unpopular and that it was time for Crispi, now in his late seventies, to retire. The new prime minister, Antonio Di Rudinì, was a Sicilian aristocrat who had succeeded Crispi after his first resignation in 1891. Now as then, Di Rudinì wanted to withdraw from Africa altogether but was persuaded that this would be too embarrassing and too heavy a blow to Italy’s prestige. He thus reluctantly agreed to keep Eritrea and Somaliland but to recognize Ethiopia as an independent state.
Colonial adventures were not popular until 1911, when a reluctant prime minister felt obliged to go to war to capture Libya from the Turks. In Milan and other cities Crispi’s aggression had provoked demonstrations in favour of Menelik, and many statesmen apart from Di Rudinì opposed colonial projects. One former prime minister, Rattazzi, believed the money squandered in Africa should have been used to develop Sicily, Sardinia and Calabria; one future head of government, Sonnino, who had visited Eritrea and was an expert on finance, mocked the idea that such places could be profitable to Italy. The notions that Eritrea might enrich its colonizer, that it could furnish it with a native army (as India did for Britain) or that it would become a magnet for Italians who wished to emigrate were laughable. Few people believed in them even if they subscribed to the ideas in public. How many of their countrymen could be expected to prefer to live in Eritrea than to begin a new life in the Americas? Even after Italy had acquired Libya before the First World War, only one Italian emigrant in a hundred chose to settle in the African colonies.
The 1850s had been Giuseppe Verdi’s great decade. With Rigoletto in 1851 he surpassed anything he had done before, a feat he repeated with its equally memorable successors, Il trovatore and La traviata. Although the next brace of operas, I vespri siciliani (The Sicilian Vespers) and Simon Boccanegra, were never so popular, he finished the decade on a high note with the glorious Un ballo in maschera (The Masked Ball). Verdi now was, and remained, Italy’s favourite composer, overtaking Donizetti. In the ten years up to 1848 the playhouse at Ancona had staged twenty-five productions of Donizetti’s operas and only four of Verdi’s (fewer than for Bellini and Mercadante), yet over the following decade the number of Verdi’s productions there rose to twenty-six, more than half of the total.27
However much they admired the recent operas for their music and drama, nationalists were unable to detect a whiff of jingoism in the librettos. Naturally, and often with reason, they complained about the behaviour of censors in the Italian states and in Lombardy-Venetia. In Austrian Venice, for instance, the authorities objected to the character of Rigoletto, a hunchbacked jester who has to drag his daughter’s corpse across the stage in a sack, though in the end he was not prevented from being or doing either of these things at the première at La Fenice. Some of the censorship, however, was – in the mid-century circumstances – understandable. In the aftermath of 1848, following the defiance of the republics in Rome and Venice, the monarchies naturally did not wish audiences to watch lecherous kings, however fictitious, behaving badly in the theatre and even ravishing a subject. In consequence the monarch in Victor Hugo’s Le Roi s’amuse became the Duke of Mantua (a title that no longer existed) in Verdi’s operatic version of the play, Rigoletto.
Another thing monarchist censors disallowed was the killing of royalty on stage in case the sight encouraged members of the audience to emulate the assassins. Again, the anxiety was not wholly irrational. Verdi’s own sovereign, the Bourbon Duke of Parma, was stabbed to death by a saddle-maker in 1854, and Napoleon III was very nearly killed by the Italian Orsini four years later. In 1857 Verdi agreed to write an opera for the San Carlo in Naples and chose as his protagonist King Gustavus III, an amiable enlightened despot who had been assassinated at the Stockholm opera house in 1792. As a soldier had recently tried to kill the Neapolitan king, Ferdinand II, the Bourbon censors were understandably reluctant to stage a regicide at the royal opera house. In fact they demanded so many changes that the composer withdrew the work and put it on at Rome, where the papal censors also made demands. Gustavus eventually appeared in public as a governor of Boston in the seventeenth century, while his enemies, Count Horn and Count Ribbing, became Tom and Samuel.
Un ballo came out in 1859 at a time when patriots were eager to retrieve Verdi for the Italian cause. One consequence of their eagerness was the inception of the most enduring of all Verdian myths – the legend that audiences up and down the peninsula were forever shouting ‘Viva Verdi!’ during performances and using the composer’s name as an acronym to indicate their loyalty to Italy: what they were really meaning was ‘Long live Vittorio Emanuele Re d’Italia!’ Recent scholarship limits the shouting to a few months at La Scala at the beginning of 1859, and some of it queries even that. One German scholar claims that the use of Verdi’s name to mean Victor Emanuel is a propaganda trick invented many years after unification had been completed.28
Although Verdi was now writing operas which no one could claim were patriotic, he was still, of course, a patriot. In 1855 he became so angry with Eugène Scribe, the French dramatist who had written a libretto he disliked for I vespri, that he insisted on changing ‘everything that attacks the honour of the Italians … I am an Italian above all and … I will never become an accomplice in injuring my country.’29 Yet if his patriotism remained constant, his republicanism had diminished, as it had with Garibaldi, and he had concluded that the Savoia were now the best hope for Italy. In 1856 he accepted an honour from Victor Emanuel that made him a knight of the Order of St Maurice and St Lazarus.
At the outbreak of war in 1859 Verdi claimed it was only his health that prevented him from enlisting: he was ‘unable to complete a three-mile march’ or ‘stand five minutes of sun’ on his head. Yet he gave a generous donation to wounded soldiers and to families of those who died in battle. As in 1848, he was full of enthusiasm and was prepared to ‘adore’ Napoleon III for his role in the war. Yet he refused a request to write a national hymn after the victory at Solferino, which was just as well because news of the armistice that allowed Austria to keep Venice left him aghast and outraged by the French emperor’s ‘betrayal’.
After the overthrow of the ducal regime in his home city, Verdi was elected a deputy to the new assembly of Parma, which subsequently voted for annexation by Piedmont. He then went to Turin, where he formally presented Victor Emanuel with the results of the plebiscite, and visited Cavour, who was then briefly out of office. Much impressed by the politician, he afterwards wrote him an obsequious letter, hailing him as ‘the great statesman, the first citizen, the man whom every Italian will call the father of his country’.30 He even called him ‘the Prometheus of our people’, by which he presumably meant the titan who brought fire to mankind rather than the trickster of Zeus or the figure chained to a rock while an eagle gnawed his liver. Cavour replied that the letter had moved him ‘very, very much’.
Verdi applauded Garibaldi’s expedition to Sicily, while his wife Giuseppina Strepponi considered ‘Giuseppe of Caprera’ to be ‘the purest and greatest hero since the world was created’. Although reluctant to stand for the new Italian parliament in Turin, the composer allowed himself to be persuaded by Cavour that his presence in the Chamber would ‘contribute to the dignity of parliament in and beyond Italy’ and that it was especially needed ‘to convince our colourful colleagues in the south’, who were so much more ‘susceptible to the influence of [his] artistic genius …’ than northerners. As a deputy, Verdi took an interest in such matters as agriculture and artistic copyright but he played little part in national and political debates. He was content to vote the same way as Cavour so as to be ‘absolutely certain of not making a mistake’. When, soon after taking his seat, he told the prime minister he was thinking of resigning, Cavour said, ‘No, let us go first to Rome.’ ‘Are we going there?’ ‘Yes’, replied the statesman, but he would say nothing definite about the timing, though he assured him it would be ‘soon’. Cavour’s death a few weeks later left Verdi so distraught that he wept at the memorial service he had organized in Busseto. ‘Poor Cavour! Poor us!’31 He remained in parliament until 1865, when he did not seek re-election. He was later appointed a senator.
Official censors and morality-mongers had disapproved of Verdi’s sympathetic treatment of ‘fallen’ women in three operas he wrote in the early 1850s, Lina in Stiffelio, Gilda in Rigoletto and Violetta in La traviata. His neighbours near Parma were even more appalled when the composer came to live in Busseto in 1849 with Giuseppina Strepponi, his mistress for years before she became his wife in 1859. A woman as ‘fallen’ as any of the characters in his works, Giuseppina possessed charm and talent and had combined a career as one of Italy’s leading sopranos with a succession of lovers as well as babies, who had been adopted or left at foundling hospitals. She had produced at least three children by at least two fathers, continuing to sing throughout her pregnancies and giving birth to one baby six hours after a performance.
Giuseppina was happy to live as the mistress of Verdi in Paris or Naples or whatever city he happened to be working in, but she loathed being in Busseto, where the townsfolk refused to speak to her. Verdi came to hate the place too, and after a while they moved out to Sant’ Agata, the farm he had bought in 1848, where he was soon extending the acreage and transforming the farmhouse into an attractive and unpretentious villa. He admitted the countryside was not pretty – it was even ugly – but it was his, where he had been born and where he could now afford to buy. He felt comfortable in the flat Emilian landscape with its fogs, its ditches, its poplar trees and its large fields of corn. It was to him what Caprera was to Garibaldi. He appreciated the solitude, which gave him peace to think, and he liked working in his own fields and living in a place where he did not have to tip his hat to counts and marquesses. At Sant’ Agata he was close to the earth, could call himself ‘a peasant from Roncole’, could even pretend that all he wanted to do for the rest of his life was to plant beans and cabbages and trade livestock in the market at Cremona. Giuseppina, who was sometimes bored there, grumbled at her husband’s mania for getting up at dawn to inspect his trees and crops, to watch the digging of an artesian well or to supervise construction work on the farm buildings. Eventually he agreed to break the monotony of the Po Valley year by making a summer visit to the Tuscan spa of Montecatini and by wintering in Genoa, renting an apartment of the Palazzo Doria Pamphilj, which must have been an idyllic place before its grounds were expropriated to build roads, a railway line and a motorway on stilts.
As he grew older, Verdi frequently felt depressed. Pessimistic by nature, he became increasingly gloomy about the future of Italy and even of life itself. When people complained that Il trovatore had too many deaths, his revealing reply was that ‘death is all there is in life. What else is there?’32 At home he was often gruff and grumbly, especially with his wife and servants, and he admitted that Giuseppina was right to call him a bear. Yet while he could be a difficult man to do business with, his conductors and singers adored him, and even the prima donnas did not flounce out. He was innately, if undemonstratively, a kind and generous person. Near his home he constructed a hospital and in Milan he built the Casa de Riposo, a retirement home for impoverished musicians. Throughout his life he gave money to victims of earthquakes and other disasters, and in his will he left large sums to hospitals and schools as well as to individuals, including an annual payment to the fifty poorest people in Roncole.
Verdi’s pace of composition slowed down after 1859. In twenty years he had written twenty-one operas but over the next four decades he produced only five, each of them a masterpiece. He returned to La Scala in 1862 with La forza del destino, went to the Paris Opéra in 1867 for his immense Don Carlos, and in 1871 sent to Cairo his opera Aida, a work often supposed to have been performed at the opening of either the Suez Canal or the Cairo Opera House, though both events had in fact taken place two years earlier. There was then an operatic gap of sixteen years until Otello, though the abstinence did produce the incomparable Requiem, composed in honour of Manzoni, the only man apart from Cavour whom Verdi revered. Although the composer claimed to have retired, Arrigo Boito, his last and ablest librettist, was able to cajole him into writing the great final works, Otello and Falstaff, the old man producing the latter in 1893, his eightieth year. Boito was so skilful in condensing Shakespeare and conflating several minor characters that he made the opera a far finer and funnier work than the original, The Merry Wives of Windsor. People sometimes complain that there are no tunes in Falstaff, but actually there are a great many, only they do not last long enough to become arias.
The acclamation and adulation that greeted the two operas made Verdi mellow and more relaxed and much less like a bear. Yet if he was happier with himself and kinder to his wife, he was still anxious about what he called his ‘troubled patria’, which seemed to him to have been going downhill ever since the death of Cavour. The politicians were now so bad that they just made ‘coglionerie’ (balls-ups) after coglionerie. The composer had been so distraught by Austria’s victories in 1866 and by Italy’s consequent humiliation – receiving Venetia as a gift from Napoleon III – that he even tried to cancel Don Carlos for Paris because he felt it would be embarrassing to be an Italian in France at that moment. Although he recognized that the capture of Rome four years later was ‘a great event’, it left him ‘cold’ because he could not imagine how a modus vivendi could be arranged between ‘Parliament and the College of Cardinals, a free press and the Inquisition, the Civil Code and the Syllabus of Errors’. Verdi’s concern about a possible break-up of Italy may have been reflected in a revision of Simon Boccanegra in 1881, in which the Genoese protagonist confronts demands for war against the Venetians with the argument that the two great maritime republics share a common patria and must not behave like Cain to Abel.33
The rise to power of Crispi, his near contemporary, briefly persuaded Verdi that Italy had found its saviour. He saluted the prime minister who, so he thought, controlled the ‘destinies of our beloved country’ with such wisdom and energy, and he even sent him a photograph dedicated to ‘the great patriot’.34 Verdi’s strong social conscience welcomed Crispi’s social reforms, but the rest of him was soon disenchanted, particularly with the military and colonial adventurism. How, he wondered, could the government waste so much money in Africa when there was so much poverty in Italy to contend with? Verdi was especially appalled by the advance against the Ethiopians, whom he regarded as ‘in many ways … more civilized than we’. For him Adowa was a salutary defeat for a country ‘playing the tyrant in Africa’.
After Verdi’s death in January 1901, the novelist and senator Antonio Fogazzaro acclaimed the composer as ‘our great unifier’, the man who ‘deserved, more than anyone, to be the symbol of the heroic era of our Risorgimento, because of the mystic fusion of his music [and] the longed-for, prayed-for, unity of the nation’.35 Verdi had for years been hailed as ‘il maestro della rivoluzione italiana’, the artistic herald of the Risorgimento; posthumously he became a hero of school textbooks, the man whose name was taught to generations of children as the symbol of Italian aspirations: ‘Long live Verdi! Long live Victor Emanuel King of Italy!’
Scholarly revisionism has done little to dent the mythology surrounding Verdi’s life and political role. In the BBC’s fine television series on Italian opera, broadcast in 2010, the excellent Antonio Pappano, music director of Covent Garden, was still extolling the maestro for his patriotism and the symbolism of Nabucco. Without doubt Giuseppe Verdi was a great man, a great composer and a great philanthropist, but he was not Italy’s ‘great unifier’. He was not even a great nationalist.