In the 1970s I visited a villa built in the fifteenth century by Lorenzo de’ Medici, the Florentine ruler known as ‘the Magnificent’. Shielded to the north by the wooded slopes of the Monti Pisani, it looked south over the Valley of the Arno; in the distance, beyond palm trees in the garden and olive groves a little farther off, you could see the Leaning Tower and the sea behind. The interior was of more recent decoration than the stark Renaissance façade: its enfilade of south-facing rooms breathed the nineteenth century, from their Empire furniture to the cluttered bric-à-brac of the fin-de-siècle. It was easy on later visits to imagine the house peopled with the noblemen of the Risorgimento, to envisage Count Cavour holding forth at the dining-room table with Baron Ricasoli or the Marquess d’Azeglio.
My host, Giovanni Tadini, was a dilettante of erudition and cosmopolitan tastes, an aristocrat of Piedmontese origin brought up in Siena. He remained a monarchist in republican Italy and stayed loyal to the Savoia, the exiled royal family; sometimes he talked, quite unpretentiously, about earlier Italian rulers such as the Medici as if they had been personal friends who had recently died. Showing me around his house, he might sigh at a portrait of Elisa Bonaparte, who had briefly ruled in Tuscany, or commend an etching of Santa Maria Novella, Alberti’s Renaissance masterpiece in Florence. On the piano he would open a book of caricatures of customers at the Caffè Michelangiolo or show me his first edition of The Struwwelpeter Alphabet, an Edwardian children’s book containing the immortally bad lines, ‘When the Empire wants a stitch in her / Send for Kipling and for Kitchener.’ As we wandered through rooms suffused with the scent of parma violets in brass jardinières, he would mix historical anecdotes with personal memories, recounted in a deep orotund voice and interspersed with much rolling laughter. Sometimes treated as an informal ambassador in his own country, he was once called upon to escort Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother to some of the great villas of Lucca and Florence as well as to Pisa cathedral at midnight. ‘Wherever we went,’ he recalled, ‘her chief anxiety was to avoid the cups of tea that everyone offered and to seek out the gin.’
Giovanni had had a governess, Miss Ramage, and spoke English with better syntax and a wider vocabulary than most Britons. But the governess had been gone for four decades, and some of her sayings had been amended in her absence. ‘As you can imagine,’ he would remark gurgling, ‘I felt like an elephant in a china shop’ or, concluding a salacious story with a rich chuckle, would say, ‘So I let them stew in their own gravy.’ If he heard an interesting remark he would ‘prop up’ his ears; if I answered one of his questions accurately, he would beam and say, ‘Hats off.’
After dinner I was examining a porcelain figurine of Cavour when a trim, elderly, silver-haired gentleman approached and introduced himself. He was Paolo Rossi, not the football player or the actor-musician but a distinguished politician and judge, a social democrat who in his youth had been an opponent of Mussolini. ‘So,’ he said, after seeing what I was looking at, ‘you are interested in the unification, in the Unità d’Italia?’ At the time I was a young journalist writing about Lebanon in the early years of its civil war, but I remembered enough from my schooldays to know what he was talking about.
My history teacher in the 1960s had been an old-fashioned liberal who, unfamiliar with the revisionist work of the great historian Denis Mack Smith, believed that Italy’s Risorgimento had been an exemplary case of liberty triumphing over repression. In consequence I was astounded by the next words of Signor Rossi, who twenty years earlier had been minister of education. ‘You know, Davide,’ he said in a low conspiratorial voice, as if nervously uttering a heresy, ‘Garibaldi did Italy a great disservice. If he had not invaded Sicily and Naples, we in the north would have the richest and most civilized state in Europe.’ After looking round the room at the other guests, he added in an even lower voice, ‘Of course to the south we would have a neighbour like Egypt.’
My work soon took me to Palestine, then back to Lebanon and next to post-Franco Spain, so it was several years before I could return to Italy and go to Palermo to write a biography of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, the author of The Leopard. Yet the judge’s words stayed in my mind, and I started to question whether the unification of Italy had been either a necessary or a successful enterprise. I never accepted his view that the Bourbon kingdom of Naples would have been like Egypt, but I sometimes wondered whether Italians might have been better off divided into three, four or even more states. Italians seemed to me to be internationalist and (in a good sense) provincial but not nationalist except when their leaders forced or cajoled them into being so. In any case nations are not inevitable, as the people of Kurdistan well know, and sometimes their creation is so artificial that, as with Yugoslavia, they simply fall apart. In today’s Europe, which contains so many successful small nations, there surely would have been room for a flourishing Tuscany, perhaps the most civilized state of the eighteenth century, and a prosperous Venice, a once great republic with a thousand years of independent history.
Several years ago, I decided to stay in each of Italy’s twenty regions and thus acquire some knowledge of them and their numerous diversities. Traditional histories of Italy had been written from a centripetal view, as if Italian unity had been pre-ordained. I wanted to look at the peninsula’s centrifugal tendencies and inquire whether the lateness of unification and the troubles of the nation state had been not accidents of history but consequences of the peninsula’s past and its geography, which may have made it unsuitable territory for nationalism. Were there not just too many Italies for a successful unity?
I thought at first of writing about the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the periods of Lampedusa’s novel and of his life, but I found myself always wanting to go further back, and then further still, to find what, if anything, earlier generations had felt about the concept of Italy, what the Enlightenment had thought, what Dante had believed, what Machiavelli had wanted, what the Emperors Augustus, Charlemagne, Frederick ‘stupor mundi’ and Napoleon had all made of it. When I told my editor, Stuart Proffitt, that Cicero had possessed an idea of Italy, he said, ‘David, go back to Cicero.’
I have gone back to Cicero and to Virgil and to subsequent eras too, all of which thought of Italy in their own, often different fashions. The early chapters in this book do not pretend to be a history of the 2,000 years before Napoleon Bonaparte pounced on Italy and created havoc in 1796; rather they are a chronological sketch that attempts to identify the diversities and centrifugal inclinations in Italian history and to assess the way they influenced the course of the peninsula’s more recent history.
Since this is not an academic work, I have allowed myself to be quirkily subjective in my selection of topics and to give perhaps disproportionate space to those that seem especially illustrative of various moments or eras: the medieval frescoes in Siena, for instance, and the commemorative statuary in Turin, the early operas of Giuseppe Verdi and a peculiar film by the marxist director Bernardo Bertolucci. This is the book of a modest traveller as well as of an historian – and of a listener too, because for many years I have enjoyed listening to Italians telling me about their lives and about their histories. The incomparable Richard Cobb, who taught me nearly forty years ago at Oxford, used to say that much of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French history could be walked, seen, smelled and above all heard in cafés, buses and on park benches in Paris and Lyon, his favourite cities. Much the same is true of Italy, of eighteenth-century Naples, for example, or nineteenth-century Turin. I once visited a dismal café near the Porta Nuova station in the Piedmontese capital where the kind but gloomy padrona talked at length of the crimes of Neapolitans before ending with a sigh and the words, ‘But while we know how to work, they know how to live.’ Even today the differences between the two cities are so strong that I sometimes wonder that they belong to the same state. Was Naples, which 400 years ago was the second-largest city in Christendom, destined to become merely a regional capital with the status of Bari or Potenza?
I have encountered much kindness and inspiration in the thirty-five years since I first travelled to Italy. My earliest and perhaps most important debt is to my first friend there, Angelo Pardini, an elderly Tuscan contadino who farmed some scrappy acres of vines and olives owned by my parents in a village north-west of Lucca. His rent consisted of a few litres of murky oil and some demijohns of red and white wine, each of which was undrinkable in alternate years; in defence of his product he claimed, no doubt rightly, that it was pure and free of chemicals. He worked at other farms too and complained of troppo lavoro, too much work, yet he was often to be found in the early afternoon at the local trattoria, drinking a caffè corretto, coffee ‘corrected’ with a slug of grappa or Vecchia Romagna brandy, and he once admitted that he drank water only twice a year. His politics were a little confused: he voted christian democrat, he belonged to the communist trade union and he thought Mussolini had been a good chap, molto bravo.
Angelo was a man of great charm and much earthy wisdom. He took me to council meetings of the local comune in Pescaglia, introduced me to his fellow agricultural workers (mostly Sardinians) and occasionally drove me to his ancestral village, high in the hills above Camaiore, where his neighbour, a veteran of the First World War, sang songs celebrating the Battle of Vittorio Veneto against the Austrians in 1918. He had a lovely, vaguely Alsatian dog and gave me one of her puppies, but he had been careless about supervising its paternity, and a charming but very curious-looking creature was presented to me. La Giulia, as everyone called Angelo’s wife, was a lady so large and formidable that she could only fit into his Fiat Cinquecento when the passenger seat had been removed. She was a wonderful cook of rustic dishes using a few local ingredients and made sublime polenta, served on linen and cut with a cotton thread. In the thirty years since her death I have been searching unsuccessfully for polenta of that quality, a quest which may explain some unappreciative remarks made about that yellow maize porridge later in this book.
I would like to be able to write similarly about other friends and acquaintances, Italian and British, who have helped me try to understand Italy, but must limit myself to making a list of those, many of them alas dead, to whom I am particularly indebted: Harold Acton, Giancarlo Aragona, Vernon Bartlett, Tina Battistoni, Boris Biancheri, Gerardo di Bugnano, Giancarlo Carofiglio, Franco Cassano, Cristina Celestini, Rosso Dante, Leglio Deghe’ and his wife Susan, Deda Fezzi Price, Bona Frescobaldi, Dino Fruzza, Giuseppe Galasso, Michael Grant, Roberta Higgins, Carlo Knight, Denis Mack Smith, Donatella Manzottu, Roberto Martucci, Gabriele Pantucci, Emanuela Polo, Paolo Rossi, Cintia Rucellai, Steven Runciman, Giuseppe di Sarzana, Ignacio Segorbe and his wife Gola, Gaia Servadio, Xan Smiley, Giovanni Tadini, Riccardo Tomacelli, Nichi Vendola, Dennis Walters, Giles Watson and his wife Mariagrazia Gerardi, Edoardo Winspeare and Francesco Winspeare.
I am especially thankful to those friends and relations who have read all or parts of the manuscript and who have given much useful advice on the text: Christopher Duggan, my brother Andrew Gilmour, my wife Sarah Gilmour, Ramachandra Guha, Richard Jenkyns, Robin Lane Fox, Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi, Nicoletta Polo, Maria Luisa Radighieri and Beppe Severgnini. The book has also had the good fortune to attract two great editors on either side of the Atlantic, Stuart Proffitt in London and Elisabeth Sifton in New York. I am immensely grateful to them both for their inspired, sustained and invariably good advice. Gillon Aitken, my literary agent, has been as generous as ever with soothing wisdom, and I am indebted also to those involved in the production of the book, especially Eugénie Aperghis van Nispen, Richard Duguid, Jenny Fry and David Watson. I owe special and perennial gratitude to my wife Sarah, who has at all times been reassuring, supportive and extraordinarily patient.
I have usually retained people’s Christian names in their original languages except for popes, kings and emperors whose anglicized forms are more familiar. I have, however, made the odd monarchical exception for the sake of clarity. In an era when Francis was a popular name for sovereigns, I have kept Francesco for the last King of the Two Sicilies and Franz-Josef for the penultimate Emperor of Austria. I have also decided not to inflict the name Humbert on those Kings of Italy baptized as Umberto.