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A BRIEF HISTORY
Italy has only existed as a nation since 1871. Before then,
despite the peninsula’s obvious geographical unity bounded by the Alps
and the Mediterranean, its story is a fragmented tale of
independent-minded cities, regions, and islands — and the outside
powers who coveted them.
We have abundant evidence of the ancient Etruscan, Greek,
and Roman communities in Italy, but know very little of the country’s
earlier, prehistoric settlers. Vestiges of dwellings survive — cabins
on stilts in the frequently flooded Po valley, larger clay houses on
the western marshlands of Tuscany, and Sardinia’s still visible domed
dry-stone nuraghi. But the inhabitants? Perhaps North Africans and
eastern Europeans peopled the Ligurian coast, while the Adriatic and
south may have been settled by people from the Balkans and Asia
Minor.
Nobody knows much about the early Etruscans. Some historians
believe that they were the first native Italians; others believe they
arrived from Asia Minor. During the millennium before the Christian
era, their civilization reached north beyond Tuscany to the Po valley
and south toward Naples. At a time when early Roman and other Latin
tribes were still primitive, Etruscan society — itself savage in many
respects — was also aristocratic and highly sophisticated. Solid gold
workmanship and other metal ornaments and tools showed a Greek
influence, but the Etruscans’ vaulted architecture, town planning, and
irrigation systems were indigenous.
Arriving in the eighth century b.c. , the Greeks set up
city-states in Sicily, dominated by Syracuse, as well as other
settlements on the Italian mainland, such as Naples, Paestum, and
Taranto. Together they formed Magna Graecia, whose zenith was reached
during the 6th and 5th centuries b.c.
After defeats by Greeks in the south, Latins in the center,
and Gallic invaders in the north, the Etruscan empire faded in the
fourth century b.c. As Greek colonial power grew weak from
Athens-Sparta rivalry back home and pressure from Phoenicians in
Sicily, the vacuum was filled by an uppity confederation of Latin and
Sabine tribes living on seven hills known collectively as Rome.
The Romans
Legend says Rome was founded by Romulus, sired with twin
brother Remus by Mars of a Vestal Virgin and abandoned on the Palatine
Hill to be suckled by a she-wolf. Historians agree with the mythmakers
that the site and traditional founding date of 753 b.c. are just about
right.
Under Etruscan domination, Rome had been a monarchy until a
revolt in 510 b.c. established a patrician republic, which lasted five
centuries. In contrast to other Italian cities weakened by internal
rivalries and unstable government, Rome drew strength from a solid
aristocracy of consuls and senate ruling over plebeians proud of their
Roman citizenship and only rarely rebellious.
Recovering quickly from the Gallic invasion of 390 b.c. ,
the Romans took effective control of the peninsula by a military
conquest reinforced by a network of roads with names that exist to this
day: Via Appia, Flaminia, Aurelia. All roads did indeed lead to — and
from — Rome. By 250 b.c. , the city’s population had grown to an
impressive 100,000.
Roman power extended throughout the Mediterranean with a
victory in the Punic Wars against Carthage (now Tunisia) and conquests
in Macedonia, Asia Minor, Spain, and southern France. The rest of Italy
participated only by tax contributions to the war effort and minor
involvement in commerce and colonization. Resentment surfaced when
former Etruscan or Greek cities such as Capua, Syracuse, and Taranto
supported Hannibal’s invasion in 218 b.c. Rome followed up defeat of
the Carthaginians with large-scale massacres and enslavement of their
Italian supporters. The Third and final Punic War ended in 149 b.c. ,
though national solidarity was still a long way off.
Under Julius Caesar, elected in 59 b.c. , provincial towns
won the privileges of Roman citizenship. His reformist dictatorship,
bypassing the senate to combat unemployment and ease the tax burden,
made dangerous enemies. After being appointed dictator for life, he was
assassinated by Brutus, among others, on the Ides of March, 44 b.c.
This led to civil war and the despotic rule of Octavian, nephew and
heir of Julius Caesar whose new title of Augustus Caesar signified the
collapse of the Roman Republic and the beginning of the Roman Empire in
27 b.c.
Conquest of the Greeks accelerated rather than halted the
influence of their culture in Italy. Romans infused Greek refinement
with their own energy to create a unique mixture of elegance and
realism, delicacy and strength, which have remained the essence of
Italian life and art.
In architecture, the Romans made a quantum leap forward
from the Greek structures of columns and beams by developing the arch,
vault, and dome, well suited to the needs of the empire. The Romans
built basilicas for public administration, pioneered the new
engineering of aqueducts and bridges, and erected triumphal arches for
victorious armies. They adopted the Greeks’ gods, convertingZeus into
Jupiter, Aphrodite into Venus, and placing the emperor — serving the
interests of the Roman state — at the apex of the gods.
Throughout the centuries of imperial expansion, decline,
and fall, Italy took a back seat as the realm of power moved with the
armies away from Rome, east to Byzantium and to the north as far as
Gaul or Germany.
Despite the dramatic persecution under Nero in the first
century a.d. , Christianity spread from Rome through southern Italy,
then continued northward. Constantine the Great declared Christianity
the official state religion in a.d. 313; he later boldly transferred
the capital to Byzantium (Constantinople) in 324. At the end of the
fourth century, Emperor Theodosius the Great organized the Church into
dioceses, making Ravenna the new capital of the Western Empire (with
Constantinople as capital of the Eastern Empire). Rome would never be
the same again. The position of Bishop of Rome as primate of the
Western Church (pope derived from “papa,” the Latin word for father),
first claimed in the second century, was later asserted by Pope Leo I
(440–461), who traced the succession back to St. Peter.
The invasion of Attila’s Huns and the Goths and Vandals who
came to sack, rape, murder, and pillage Rome brought an end to the
Western Empire in 476 with the abdication of Emperor Romulus
Augustus.
After the Empire
Wars between the Goths and Byzantines followed by new waves
of invasions made Italian unity impossible.
The dual influence of Greek and Latin culture persisted.
Emperor Justinian (527–565) and his wife Theodora reannexed Italy to
the Byzantine Empire and codified Roman law as the state’s legal
system. Under Heraclius (610–641), Greek was extended to Italy as its
official language.
Hellenistic and Oriental influences were most evident in
religion. Byzantine ritual colored the Roman liturgy. The Roman
basilica’s long colonnaded nave leading to an apse gave way to the
Greek cross with a central space surrounded by arches and topped by a
dome. Sculptural reliefs flattened out to symbolic decorative,
non-human forms, and painting and mosaics were rich in color, but more
rigid and formal. Spiritual preoccupations turned away from the world’s
few joys and woes in the present, to mystic contemplation of the
ineffable hereafter.
Things were much too ineffable, it seems, for Italian
tastes. The monastic movement, founded by St. Benedict of Umbria in the
sixth century, reasserted involvement in the realities of social life.
The Benedictine order emphasized moderation in the austerity of its
food, clothing, and sleep, not unlike the habits of any peasant of the
times. Flagellation and similar rigors introduced into other Italian
monasteries by the Irish monk Columbanus were soon modified by the
gentler Benedictine rule.
By the eighth century, the Byzantines held the balance of
power with the Lombards (a Germanic tribe), who had invaded Italy in
568 and set up their capital at Pavia four years later. The Lombards
controlled the interior in a loose confederation of fiercely
independent duchies. Lombard territory split Byzantine Italy up into
segments ruled from the coasts. The divisions resulted in Veneto
(Venice and its hinterland), Emilia (between Ravenna and Modena), and
Pentapolo (between Rimini and Perugia), plus Rome and Naples (with
Sicily and Calabria).
In Rome, the highly political popes played the Lombard
duchies against those of the Byzantine Empire. They cited a forged
document, the Donation of Constantine, supposedly bequeathing them
political authority over all of Italy. Seeking the powerful support of
the Franks, Pope Leo III crowned their king, Charlemagne, Emperor of
the West on Christmas Day in 800. But in turn the pope had to kneel in
allegiance, and this exchange of spiritual blessing for military
protection laid the seeds of future conflict between the papacy and
secular rulers, compounded in 962 when Otto I was crowned Emperor of
the newly formed Holy Roman Empire.
Venice, founded on its islets and lagoons in the sixth
century by mainland refugees fleeing Lombard raiders, prospered from a
privileged relationship with Byzantium and an uninhibited readiness to
trade with Muslims and others farther east. The merchants of Venice
that were the backbone of the Most Serene Republic were only too happy
to dessiminate their Oriental cargoes of exotic goods to the dour lives
of Lombards in the Po valley and beyond the Alps to the courts of
northern Europe.
Naples held on to its autonomy by combining links with Rome
and Constantinople. When Arabs conquered Sicily in the ninth century
and turned to the mainland, Naples at first sought an alliance. But as
the invaders advanced north towards Rome, Naples successfully linked up
with the then powerful maritime republic of neighboring Amalfi. Despite
military expeditions by the Franks and Byzantines, however, the Arabs
remained on the Italian scene for two centuries. Their influences in
the sciences and foods they brought with them are still felt today.
The Middle Ages
In the 11th century, the adventurous Normans put an end to
Arab control of Sicily and southern Italy. Exploiting a natural genius
for assimilating the useful elements of the local culture rather than
indiscriminately imposing their own, they adopted Arab-style tax
collectors and customs officials and Byzantine fleet-admirals for their
navy. In Palermo, churches and mosques stood side-by-side, feudal
castles next to Oriental palaces and their exotic gardens.
The Crusades against the Islamic threat to Christendom
brought great prosperity to Italy’s port cities. Pisa sided with the
Normans in Sicily and profits from its new commercial empire in the
western Mediterranean paid for its magnificent cathedral, baptistery,
and campanile (today’s Leaning Tower). Genoa’s equally powerful
merchant empire spread from Algeria to Syria.
Supreme master of the art of playing all sides, Venice
stayed out of the First Crusade to expand its trade with the faraway
East while ferrying pilgrims to Palestine. Later, when Byzantium
threatened its eastern trading privileges, Venice persuaded the armies
of the Fourth Crusade to attack Constantinople in 1204; conquering
Byzantium strengthened its position even more.
The Po valley’s economic expansion through land clearance
and new irrigation works brought a rapid decline of feudalism. Dukes,
administrators, and clergy lived in towns rather than isolated castles,
absorbing the hinterland into communes, forerunners of the
city-states.
The communes were strong enough to confine German Emperor
Frederick Barbarossa’s Italian ambitions to the south, where he secured
Sicily for his Hohenstaufen heirs by marrying his son into the Norman
royal family. Ruling from Palermo, Barbarossa’s highly cultured but
brutal grandson Frederick II (1194–1250) was a prototype for the future
Renaissance prince.
His power struggle with the papacy divided the country into
two highly volatile camps — Guelfs supporting the pope and Ghibellines
supporting the emperor. The backbone of the Guelfs was in communes such
as Florence and Genoa. In 1266, they financed the mercenary army of
Charles d’Anjou to defeat the imperial forces — and take the Sicilian
throne. But Palermo rose up against the French in the murderous
Sicilian Vespers of 1282, when the locals massacred everyone who spoke
Italian with a French accent and forced Charles to move his capital to
Naples. The Sicilians offered their crown to the Spanish house of
Aragon.
The Guelf-Ghibelline conflict became a pretext for settling
family feuds (such as the one typified in Shakespeare’s Romeo and
Juliet) or communal rivalries, from which Genoa and Florence emerged
stronger than ever. In Rome, the dissolute popes repeatedly switched
factions for temporary advantage and lost all political and moral
authority in the process.
After two centuries of religious heresy, the Church needed
a spiritual renewal, finding the perfect ally in Francis of Assisi
(1182–1226), pious without being troublesomely militant. His sermons
had immense popular appeal. He chose not to attack Church corruption
but instead to preach the values of a Christly life. The Franciscan
order provided a much needed manageable revival. The architecture of
the church built in his name at Assisi contradicted Francis’s humble
testament denouncing “temples of great dimension and rich ornament. ”
But Assisi’s frescoes of the saint’s life, painted by Cimabue and
disciples of Giotto (which barely survived the severe earthquake of
1997), proved an immensely effective act of artistic propaganda against
the prevalent libertinism and heresy.
The City-States
By the end of the 13th century, with the independent-minded
communes growing into full-fledged city-states, Italy was clearly not
to be subjugated to the will of one ruler.
The Middle Ages in Italy were far from being the murky era
that many humanist scholars liked to contrast with the brilliance of
the Renaissance. Bologna founded Europe’s first university, famous
above all for its law studies, in the 11th century, followed by
institutions of learning in Padua, Naples, Modena, Siena, Salerno, and
Palermo. Unlike other Church-dominated European universities, Italian
universities emphasized the sciences, medicine, and law over
theology.
In the absence of political unification, it was the
universities that awakened the national consciousness. Scholars
traveling across the country needed a common tongue beyond the elitist
Latin to break through the barriers of regional dialects. It was a
foreigner, German Emperor Frederick II, who launched the movement for a
national language at his court in Palermo, but Florentine-born Dante
Alighieri (1265–1321) provided the ardor, moral leadership, and
literary example to bring it to fruition.
The maritime republic of Genoa rose to challenge Venice’s
supremacy. It dislodged Pisa in the western Mediterranean, whittled
away at Venice’s hold on eastern ports, and set up colonies on the
Black Sea for trade with Russia and faraway Cathay. But Genoa’s 1381
participation in the ruinous Chioggia War on the Venetian lagoon
exhausted its resources. Its newly formed Bank of St. George had to
sell off overseas colonies. It ran the town like a private company for
the benefit of a local oligarchy, seeking future prosperity as
international financiers for the kings of Spain or France.
Venice and its Repubblica Serena rebounded to turn to the
mainland, extending its Veneto territory from Padua across the Po
valley as far as Bergamo. After relying exclusively on overseas trade,
Venice created a new land-owning aristocracy through this
expansion.
In its fertile Po valley, Milan prospered from trade with
Germany, principally in textiles and armor. Escaping unscathed from the
Black Death of 1348 and subsequent plagues, it built up a sound
economic base and maintained a strong army with plentiful manpower.
Florence was the first Italian town to mint its own gold
coin (fiorino or florin), a prestigious instrument for trade in
European markets, and it organized textile manufacture on an advanced
large-scale basis. Despite uprisings such as that of the Ciompi
(wool-workers), the resilient Florentines were well-fed and highly
literate compared to the rest of the country. The wealthy and ambitious
Medici (not doctors, as their name implied) emerged as the dominant
merchant family. Cosimo the Elder (1389–1464) became the city’s ruler
and founder of the Medici dynasty in 1434. A building boom underlined
the prosperity: Giotto’s Campanile was at last completed, as were
Ghiberti’s great baptistery doors, and Brunelleschi’s dome on the
cathedral.
Divided in the 14th century between the Spanish in Sicily
and the French in Naples, southern Italy remained solidly feudal. Its
almost exclusively agricultural economy suffered much more than the
north from plague and famine. Landlords resorted to banditry to
replenish their treasury. As Palermo was in decline, Naples flourished
as a brilliant cosmopolitan capital. In 1443, it was reunited with
Sicily and known as the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies under the Spanish
King Alfonso V of Aragon.
With the papacy in comfortable exile in Avignon since 1309,
the brutal rule of the Orsini and Colonna families reduced Rome to a
half-urban, half-rural backwater village. Self-educated visionary Cola
di Rienzo governed briefly in 1347 until the nobles drove him out.
After thirty years, the papacy returned.
The Renaissance
A new national fraternity of scholars with expertise in the
arts, sciences, and law emerged as itinerant consultants to visionary
rulers eager to make their city-states centers of cultural prestige and
political propaganda.
Men like Leon Battista Alberti, brilliant
architect-mathematician-poet, brought about a new spirit of inquiry and
scepticism. From their detailed study and translation of the Greek
philosophers, they developed principles of objective scientific
research, independent of all the political, religious, and emotional
bias characterizing medieval scholarship. The emphasis switched from
heaven to earth.
Leonardo da Vinci eagerly applied the new method to
architecture, civil and military engineering, urban planning,
geography, and map-making. It was Giorgio Vasari, facile artist but
first-rate chronicler of this cultural explosion, who allegedly dubbed
it a rinascita, or rebirth, of the glories of Italy’s Greco-Roman past.
But even more, it proved, with the humanism of Leonardo and
Michelangelo and the political realism of Machiavelli, to be the birth
of our modern age.
Unfortunately, the creative ferment by no means precluded
new horrors of war, assassination, persecution, plunder, and rape. It
was the heyday of the brilliant but lethal Spanish-Italian Borgias:
lecherous Rodrigo, who became Pope Alexander VI, and treacherous son
Cesare, who stopped at nothing to control and expand the papal lands.
His sister Lucrezia, forever smeared by anti-Spanish propaganda of the
day as mistress of both her father and brother, was in fact, as Duchess
of Ferrara, a generous patroness of the arts and benefactress of the
poor.
In Florence, where his family had to fight tooth and nail
to hold on to their supremacy, Lorenzo “il Magnifico” de’ Medici
(1449–1492) found time to encourage the art of Perugino, Ghirlandaio,
Botticelli, the young Leonardo, and tempestuous Michelangelo. But
decadence set in and Dominican monk and rabble-rousing preacher
Girolamo Savonarola (1452–1498) denounced the corruption of a Church
and society more devoted to pagan classics than to the Christian
gospel. At the Carnival of 1494, he shamed the Florentines into
throwing their “vanities” — not only clothes, jewelry, and cosmetics,
but books and paintings, with Botticelli contributing some of his
own — onto a giant fire on the Piazza della Signoria. Four years later,
when Savonarola declined to test the validity of his apocalyptic
prophesies with an ordeal by fire, he was arrested, hanged, and
ironically burned on the Piazza della Signoria.
On the international scene, the Turkish conquest of
Constantinople in 1453 closed Genoa’s Black Sea markets, but competitor
Venice worked out a new deal in Cyprus and even a modus vivendi in
Constantinople itself. But the Venetians’ empire declined as they lost
their taste for the adventure of commerce in favor of the safety of
their landholdings. From 1494 to 1530, the Spanish Hapsburgs and the
French turned Italy into a battleground for the Kingdom of Naples and
the Duchy of Milan. Genoa sided with the Spanish to give Emperor
Charles V access, via Milan, to his German territories, and later
became a lucrative clearinghouse for Spain’s newly discovered American
silver. Rome was plundered by imperial armies in 1527; the Medici were
driven out of Florence and returned to power only under tutelage of the
Spanish, who won effective control of the whole country.
When the dust of war settled, it was the dazzling cultural
achievements that left their mark on the age. The true father of Rome’s
High Renaissance, Pope Julius II (1503–1513) began the new St. Peter’s
cathedral, and commissioned Michelangelo to paint the ceiling of the
Vatican’s Sistine Chapel and Raphael to decorate the Stanze. Architect
Donato Bramante was nicknamed maestro ruinante because of all the
ancient monuments he dismantled to make way for the pope’s megalomaniac
building plans. With the treasures uncovered in the process, Julius
founded the Vatican’s magnificent collection of ancient sculpture.
Counter-Reformation
Badly shaken by the Protestant Reformation, the Church
convoked the Council of Trent (north of Lake Garda) in 1545.
Non-Italian bishops urged the Church to carry out its own reform,
hoping to democratize relations with the pope. But the threat of
Lutherans, Calvinists, and other heretics shifted the emphasis to
repression, culminating in the Counter-Reformation formally proclaimed
in 1563. The Church reinforced the Holy Office’s Inquisition and the
Index to censor the arts. The Jesuits, founded in 1534, quickly became
an army of theologians to combat heresy. Italian Protestants fled and
Jews in Rome were restricted to a ghetto (50 years later than the
Venice ghetto, Europe’s first) and expelled from Genoa and Lucca.
Cardinal Carlo Borromeo, nephew of Pope Pius IV and
Archbishop of Milan (1565–1584), was the exemplary spiritual leader of
Italy’s Counter-Reformation. In alliance with the Jesuits, he weeded
out corrupt clerics and what he considered too soft Umiliati order of
Catholic laymen. As a symbol of his crusading spirit, he consecrated
Milan’s new Flamboyant Gothic cathedral, which took centuries to
complete and remains one of the world’s largest and most famous Gothic
structures.
Art proved to be a major instrument of Counter-Reformation
propaganda, but it had to undergo some important changes. The vigor and
intellectual integrity of the High Renaissance had softened into the
stylized sophistication of Mannerism, the transition from the
Renaissance to the Baroque. Condemning the preoccupation with pagan
gods and worldly decadence, the Church urged artists to deliver a
strong, clear message to bring the troubled flock back to the fold. The
Madonna and saints of Annibale Carracci further paved the way for the
Baroque, attracting the faithful with a sensuous image of ideal beauty,
while Caravaggio made a more brutal, but no less effective, appeal with
a proletarian Mary and barefoot Apostles. As the Church regained
ground, it promoted a more triumphant image, epitomized by the works of
Bernini, the most productive of them all: His grandiose Baroque altar
in St. Peter’s speaks rather effectively to the time.
But such self-confidence had its limits. For example, in
1633, the Vatican ordered Galileo to deny the evidence of his own eyes,
as assisted by the new telescope he had designed, and stop teaching
that God’s earth was only one of many planets in orbit around the
sun.
After a 16th century in which Naples had become the largest
town in Europe — and one of the liveliest — the south was increasingly
oppressed and impoverished. The army had to crush revolts in Sicily and
Naples against heavy taxes and conscription for Spain’s wars in
northern Europe.
Towards Nationhood
Lacking the solidarity to unite and too weak to resist by
themselves, Italian kingdoms and duchies were reduced to convenient
pawns in Europe’s 18th-century dynastic power plays. At the end of the
Wars of Spanish, Austrian, and Polish Succession, the Austrians had
taken over northern Italy from the Spanish. The Age of Enlightenment
engendered a new cultural ferment. The theater of La Scala opened in
Milan, and La Fenice opened in Venice. Stimulated by the ideas of
Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot, the country’s intellectuals were more
keenly aware of being Europeans, but also Italians.
The hopes of progressives were raised by Austrian reforms
in Lombardy and Tuscany (where the Medici dynasty had fizzled to an end
in 1737). The results included fairer taxes; less Church influence in
schools; more public education; and removal of the Inquisition,
Jesuits, the death penalty, and instruments of torture. Outside the
Austrian sphere of influence, Italy remained solidly conservative.
Venice stagnated under the rule of a small entrenched élite, drawing
nostalgic comfort from the city’s petrified beauty as painted in the
vedute of Guardi and Canaletto. The papacy in Rome had lost prestige
with the dissolution of the Jesuits and the crippling loss of revenue
from the Hapsburg Church reforms. The south’s aristocracy resisted all
significant social reforms proposed by the Spanish. Don Carlos, a
descendant of Louis XIV who saw himself as a southern Sun King — with
Caserta Palace as his Versailles — is best remembered for launching the
excavations of Pompeii in 1748.
On the northwestern Alpine frontier, a new state had
appeared on the scene, destined to lead the movement to a united Italy.
With Savoy split in the 16th century between France and Switzerland,
its foothill region southeast of the Alps, Piedmont, had come into the
Italian orbit. Sidestepping the stagnant economic burden of Spanish
domination, the sparsely populated duchy expanded quickly. Turin was
little more than a fortified village of 40,000 inhabitants in 1600, but
it rose to 93,000 a century later. The pragmatic dukes of Piedmont
liked French-style absolutist monarchy but tempered it with a
parliament to bypass local fiefdoms. They copied Louis XIV’s
centralized administration and tax-collection, and by the 18th century
Turin was a sparkling royal capital built, quite unlike any other
Italian city, in classical French manner.
Napoleon Bonaparte, with his seductive ideas of Italian
“independence,” was welcomed after driving out the Austrians and
Spanish in 1797. But the French soon proved just as great a burden on
Italian treasuries, used to support their war effort and the Bonaparte
family. If Napoleon did not exactly “liberate” Italy, he did shake up
the old conservatism from Lombardy to Naples by creating new
universities and high schools, streamlining the bureaucracy, creating a
new legal system with his Napoleonic Code, and generally awakening the
forces of Italian nationalism.
Caution was the watchword among Italian rulers restored to
their lands after Napoleon’s defeat. Austria seized the occasion to add
the Veneto to its Lombardy territories. The 1823 conclave of zelanti
(zealot) cardinals elected arch-conservative Leo XII to help the papacy
recover from its Napoleonic shock. On the lookout for any contagiously
progressive movement, the Austrians helped Bourbon King Ferdinand of
Naples crush an 1821 revolt for constitutional monarchy and foiled a
similar uprising in Piedmont. The danger became clear in 1831 when
insurrection spread through Bologna, Modena, and Parma to the Papal
States of central Italy. But the Austrians defeated a rebel government
of “united Italian provinces,” weakened by regional rivalries and
conflicting personal ambitions.
The Risorgimento, the “resurrection” of national identity,
took two conflicting paths. Genoese-born Giuseppe Mazzini’s Giovine
Italia (Young Italy) movement sought national unity by popular-based
insurrection. He opposed Piedmontese patricians and intellectuals of
the Moderates party, seeking reform through a privilege-conscious
confederation of Italian princes blessed by the papacy — with Piedmont
providing the military muscle. The Moderates feared a new proletarian
militancy among factory workers. Landowners bringing in cheap migrant
day-labor faced mounting peasant resentment. Food riots broke out in
Lombardy, revolts in Tuscany, and southern peasants demanded a share of
common land.
Composer Giuseppe Verdi was the Risorgimento’s towering
artist. His operas’ romantic humanism inspired fellow patriots, who saw
in the Nabucco Freedom Chorus a positive call to action.
Outright rebellion erupted in Milan on 18 March 1848, a
year of revolution all over Europe. Emissaries flew by balloon to
nearby cities for reinforcements that freed Milan from the
14,000-strong Austrian garrison. The Venetians restored their republic,
a Piedmontese army joined up with troops from Tuscany, the Papal
States, and Naples, and a new democratic Roman Republic was proclaimed.
But the hesitant Carlo Alberto of Piedmont gave the Austrians time to
recover and Italian gains toppled like dominoes. National unity was
again sabotaged by provincial rivalries.
Conceding the need for more reform, the new king of
Piedmont, Vittorio Emanuele II, became a constitutional monarch with a
moderate-dominated parliament. His Prime Minister, Count Camillo
Cavour, a hard-nosed political realist, won over moderate left-wing
support for a program of free-trade capitalism and large-scale public
works construction. Among the political exiles flocking to Piedmont was
a veteran of the earlier revolts, Giuseppe Garibaldi.
With their French allies, Piedmont defeated Austria at
Magenta and Solferino to secure Lombardy in 1859. A year later, Cavour
negotiated the handover of Emilia and Tuscany. But it was the adventure
of Garibaldi’s Red Shirts that imposed the unification of the peninsula
in 1860. With two steamers, antiquated artillery, and 94,000 lire in
funds, Garibaldi set sail from Genoa with his “Expedition of the
Thousand. ” The heroic Red Shirts seized Bourbon Sicily and crossed to
the mainland. At Teano, outside Naples, they met up with Vittorio
Emanuele, who was proclaimed King of Italy. National unity was
completed with the annexation of the Veneto in 1866 and Rome, the new
capital, in 1871.
The Modern Era
Despite its extraordinarily fragmented history, unified
Italy took its place among modern nations as an unexceptional
centralized state, careful to protect the interests of its industrial
and financial establishment and granting reforms to the working classes
only under the pressure of their united action.
From working as migrant laborers in France and Germany,
Italian factory and farm workers brought back expert knowledge of union
organization and strikes. But in keeping with the Italians’ traditional
local attachments, their first unions were camere del lavoro,
regionally based chambers of labor linking workers to their town or
commune rather than their individual trade.
Both the politically left and the right wanted Italy to
join the European race for colonies — their eyes fixed on Ethiopia and
Libya. Conservatives supported expansion for reasons of national
prestige. Socialists talked of Italy’s “civilizing mission” in the
Mediterranean, seeking to divert the flow of emigrants (heading
increasingly to the Americas) to experimental collectiv e land
management in new African colonies in Tripoli and Cyrenaica.
At home, in addition to traditional textiles, industry was
expanding fast in metallurgy, chemicals, and machinery. The national
love affair with cars had begun — from seven produced in 1900 and 70 in
1907, there were 9,200 rolling out of the factories by 1914, most of
them from Fiat, which was founded in 1899.
With wily Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti manoeuvering the
forces of capital and labor, Italy began its 20th century in a blithe
state of calm and prosperity known as Italietta. Vacations were spent
by the sea or in the mountains; people listened to soothing operas like
Puccini’s La Bohème and Madame Butterfly; the first silent-movies of
The Last Days of Pompeii and Quo Vadis were made; one could partake in
intellectual conversations in open air cafés at the hour of the
passeggiata.
They were less amusing when hailing World War I as the
“world’s hygiene. ” Previously committed to a Triple Alliance with
Austria and Germany, Italy remained neutral in 1914. The following
year, acting with what Prime Minister Antonio Salandra acknowledged to
be “sacro egoismo,” Italy signed a secret treaty to enter the war on
the side of Britain, France, and Russia in exchange for the post-war
annexation of Austrian-held Trento, South Tyrol (now Alto Adige), and
Trieste.
The people were at first cool to the war, despite the
jingoism of flashy aristocratic aesthete and author Gabriele D’Annunzio
and his friend, an ex-socialist newspaperman named Benito Mussolini.
The Italian Army was the least well prepared of the combatants, lacking
artillery, machine guns, trucks, and properly trained officers, but the
infantry showed remarkable courage in the trenches. After the disaster
at Caporetto, the planned Austro-German 1917 advance across the Veneto
plain was held until the Italian counterattack of October–November 1918
permitted a triumphant entry into Trento and Trieste.
For most Italians, particularly the peasant, worker, and
petit bourgeois, war in uniform was their first real experience of
Italian nationality. Enthusiastic war-supporters like D’Annunzio, who
captured the popular imagination by flying over Vienna to drop
propaganda leaflets, were acclaimed as patriots, while democrats and
pacifist republicans were dismissed as defeatists. Parliament, which
was denied knowledge of the secret war treaty until the Peace
Conference of 1919, was exposed as impotent.
The political left was in disarray. The Socialists won the
elections but split over support for the Russian Revolution, leading to
the formation in 1921 of the Italian Communist Party. In an atmosphere
of economic crisis — stagnant productivity, bank closures, and rising
unemployment — conservatives wanted somebody tougher, more dynamic than
eternally compromising old-style politicians. As the black-shirted
Fasci Italiani di Combattimento (Italian combat groups) beat up Slavs
in Trieste and union workers in Bologna, Mussolini filled the bill.
Threatened by the Fascists’ March on Rome in 1922, King Vittorio
Emanuele III invited Mussolini, il Duce, to form a government.
The now all-too-familiar process of totalitarianism set in:
Opposition leaders were assassinated; their parties, free unions, and
free press all abolished. The Vatican was upset when the fascist youth
movement dissolved the Catholic Boy Scouts. The Lateran Treaty of 1929
had created a separate Vatican state and perpetuated Catholicism as
Italy’s national religion with guaranteed religious education in the
schools.
Italian fascism remained more of a style than a coherent
ideology, typified by the raised-arm salute replacing the “weakling”
handshake, bombastic architecture, and Mussolini’s arrogant harangues
from the Palazzo Venezia’s “heroic balcony” in Rome. The Duce’s motto
of “Better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep”
contrasted with the one he gave the country: “Believe, obey, fight. ”
Neither lions nor sheep, most Italians survived with lip-service and
good humor, while communists re-allied with socialists in the
anti-fascist underground, whose partisans linked up with the Allies
during World War II.
In 1936, Mussolini diverted attention from the worsening
economic climate at home with an invasion of Ethiopia and proclamation
of the Italian Empire. Italian war planes joined Hitler’s Luftwaffe on
General Franco’s side in the Spanish Civil War (5,000 Italian
communists and socialists fought on the Republican side). Following the
Germans’ lead in 1938, racist legislation was introduced against the
country’s 57,000 Jews. The next year, Italy invaded Albania and, after
France’s collapse in June 1940, plunged with Germany into World War II.
Its poorly equipped armies were defeated by the British in the African
desert and by the mountain snows in the Balkans. The Allies landed in
Sicily in June 1943, and liberated Rome one year later. Mussolini,
toppled soon after the Allied landings and reinstated briefly as a
German puppet in the north, was caught fleeing in German uniform to the
Swiss border. He was executed in April 1945.
The sordid hardships of post-war Italy — unemployment, the
black market, and prostitution — have been made graphically familiar
through the brilliant neo-realist cinema of Rossellini, de Sica, and
Fellini. Today, the remarkable economic recovery has silenced the old
condescension about Italy’s technological and managerial talents. In
the European Union, Italy has more than held its own in heavy industry,
agribusiness, and the new electronics industry. A specifically Italian
ingredient has come from highly productive clandestine — and as a
result, untaxable — manufacturing and other activities parallel to the
open market.
Italians didn’t take easily to national government. They
had existed through most of their history without it and Mussolini had
spoiled their appetite. Now, fatigued by his excesses, they rejected
the militant left for a little dolce vita with the less adventurous but
less disturbing Christian Democrats. Their perpetually changing
coalitions hardly constituted real national government, but the people
seemed to function quite well regardless. In the 1980s, a pragmatic
socialist coalition government with the Christian Democrats brought a
few years of unusual stability. Corruption and tax-evasion continued,
but police clamped down on the political terrorism of the Red Brigades
and neo-Fascists and the age-old criminality of the Mafia.
Sadly enough, as Italy put on its best face for the
nationwide celebration of Jubilee 2000, a series of corruption scandals
(tangenti) revealed the dirty and deep-rooted hold of politicians and
business tycoons alike that began in the early to mid 1990s. Much of
the dust is only now settling, as the Italians get on with their daily
lives. They’re administering the changes of the new century while
continuing to preserve their unparalleled past, much of which got a
long overdue dusting off. Billions of lire were spent on Rome alone for
the record-breaking numbers of pilgrims and tourists who flocked to the
country, one of the world’s greatest tourist destinations during the
year 2000.
HISTORICAL LANDMARKS
•Early Settlements
•9th circa b.c.First signs of pre-Roman Etruscans
•8th circa b.c.Greeks colonize Sicily and other southern
regions
•Roman Era
•753 b.c.Rome founded
•510Establishment of Roman Republic
•264–241Rome defeats Carthage (now Tunisia) in First Punic
War
•44Julius Caesar, dictator for life, assassinated on 15
March
•27Nephew and heir of Julius Caesar, Octavius (Caesar
Augustus), founds the Roman Empire and embarks on 200 years of peace
and prosperity
•a.d. 54–68 Christian persecutions in Rome under Nero
•79Vesuvius volcano buries Pompeii
•306–337Emperor Constantine converts to Christianity,
making it state religion. Capital transferred to Byzantium
(Constantinople).
•410Visigoths sack Rome
•476 The Fall of the Roman Empire, the Dark Ages begin
•600s Lombards invade Milan and much of Italy; Venice
founded on lagoon
•800Pope crowns Frankish King Charlemagne emperor
•827–1060Arabs invade and settle in Sicily
•1000–1100 Normans conquer south; First Crusade
•Middle Ages
•1182–1226St. Francis of Assisi
•1198–1250Frederick II of Hohenstaufen’s court in
Palermo
•1271–1295Marco Polo in Far East
•1305Giotto paints Padua Chapel
•1309–1377Papacy exiled to Avignon, France from Rome
•1312Dante writes Inferno
•1347Cola di Rienzo rules Rome
•1378–1381Maritime Republics Venice and Genoa fight for
supremacy
•Renaissance
•1434Cosimo I begins Medici rule in Florence
•1442Spanish rule Naples and Sicily, the “Two
Sicilies”
•1494–1559Spanish and French fight over
•Naples and Milan
•1497Leonardo’s Last Supper, height of High
Renaissance
•1498Savonarola burned in Florence
•1508–1512Michelangelo paints Sistine Chapel ceiling
•1527Sack of Rome by imperial troops
•Counter-Reformation and Enlightenment
•1545–1563Council of Trent
•1633Trial of Galileo
•1748Excavations of Pompeii begin
•1778La Scala theatre opens in Milan
•1796–1814Napoleon invades north then much of Italy
•Risorgimento
•1815–1832Austrians crush insurrection; national political
movement (Risorgimento) begins
•1831Mazzini founds la Giovine Italia to combat
Austria
•1848–1849Abortive countrywide revolts
•1859Franco-Piedmontese alliance takes Lombardy
•1860Garibaldi’s Expedition of 1,000 to Sicily/Naples
•1861Kingdom of Italy created; interim capitals of Turin
and Florence
•1871Rome named capital of unified Italy
•Modern Era
•1915Italy joins British/French/Russians in World War
I
•1919Trento, South Tyrol (Alto Adige), and
•Trieste acquired from Austria
•1921Italian Communist Party founded.
•1922Mussolini begins Fascist regime with March on Rome,
declaring himself Prime Minister then Duce
•1929Lateran Treaty establishes separate Vatican state
•1936Mussolini annexes Abyssinia (Ethiopia), bombs
•Republican Spain
•1940Italy joins Nazi Germany in World War II
•1943–1944Allies liberate Sicily, then Rome; Mussolini
arrested
•1945Execution of Mussolini and his mistress
•1946Abdication of Victor Emanuel III; proclamation of the
Republic
