Italian nationalism

• 1. Introduction

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  Italian nationalism traces its oldest political expression not to a parliament or a battlefield, but to a poem. In 1344, the scholar Petrarch wrote "Italia mia" - Rime 128 - denouncing the petty lords who had handed their country over to what he called "la tedesca rabbia," the German fury. That phrase, seared into Italian letters for centuries, captures the central anxiety of a movement that would not become a genuine political force until the 1830s: the sense that Italy was a civilization held hostage by outsiders.

  Who were the Italians, in their own telling? Nationalists placed their origins among the Latins, an Italic tribe from Latium whose descendants had come to dominate the peninsula and much of Europe. From that claim came a logic of empire as well as unity. Italian nationalism carried within it, from very early on, an imperialist strand alongside its liberating one.

  The story moves from Renaissance poets to revolutionary firebrands, from the idealistic Giuseppe Mazzini and his secret Young Italy society to the traumatic outcome of World War I, when nationalists coined the phrase "mutilated victory" and set in motion forces that would culminate in Fascism. What drove each turning point, and what did this movement become once the Fascists were gone? Those are the questions the chapters ahead will answer. The thread begins in a room in Lodi in 1454, where the representatives of every regional state on the Italian peninsula arrived to sign a treaty.

• 2. Renaissance Roots

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  In 1454, envoys from all the regional states of Italy gathered in Lodi to sign a peace treaty that was also, in its ambition, a declaration of collective identity. That settlement held for forty years, until French forces under Charles VIII crossed the Alps in 1494 and ignited the Italian Wars. The fragility of Italian solidarity was immediately exposed.

  Niccolò Machiavelli drew the lesson directly. Writing in The Prince in 1532, he appealed to Italian patriotism and urged his countrymen to seize Italy and free her from what he called "the Barbarians" - the foreign powers occupying the peninsula. To press the point, he quoted four lines from Petrarch's own "Italia mia," linking Renaissance political theory to the patriotic lyric tradition that had begun nearly two centuries earlier.

  Pope Julius II, who held the papacy from 1503 to 1513, took a more combative approach. During the Italian Wars he labored to forge Italian alliances against the French, whose presence he regarded as an occupation. His rallying cry - fuori i barbari, "put the barbarians out" - may be apocryphal, according to historians, but it captured the mood of many Italians at the time.

  By 1559 the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis ended Italy's era of relative autonomy and installed uncontested Spanish hegemony across the peninsula. In that climate of resentment, the writer Trajano Boccalini produced biting anti-Spanish pamphlets, including Pietra del paragone politico, published after his death in 1615. Followers published similar works that same year, including one that imagined the corpse of Spain's reputation being dissected by famous anatomists. It was bitter, satirical nationalism - the only kind then available. Girolamo Muzio had already gone further in 1566, when his treatise Discorso sopra il concilio advocated, for what historians identify as the first time, the outright political unification of Italy.

• 3. Savoy, Poets, and Patriotism

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  Charles Emmanuel I of Savoy lit a particular fire in Italian nationalist imagination. In 1614, Alessandro Tassoni published two anonymous pamphlets called the Filippiche, addressed directly to the Italian nobility. His message was direct: stop fighting each other, shed your lethargy, and join Savoy in pushing Spanish power out of Italy.

  At the same court, a young poet named Fulvio Testi published verses dedicated to Charles Emmanuel. In 1617 he followed those with the Pianto d'Italia, in which a personified Italy calls for a war of national independence and names the Duke of Savoy as its natural leader. Decades later, the chronicler Vittorio Siri recalled that "all Italy broke forth with pen and tongue in praises and panegyrics at the name of Carlo Emanuele," who had revived what Siri called the ancient Latin valor.

  Charles Emmanuel's foreign policy ultimately failed, and that failure sent Italian nationalists into a long depression. The poet Vincenzo da Filicaja gave it its defining image in his late seventeenth-century sonnet "Italia, Italia O tu, cui feo la sorte." Italy's beauty, he wrote, was an "unlucky gift" - it made the country perpetually attractive to conquerors, turning her into "the slave of friend and foe." That sonnet appeared in Sismondi's De la littérature du midi, where it was praised as the most celebrated specimen Italian literature of that century could offer, and it was frequently translated into English.

  The Dukes of Savoy continued building their position. In 1713 they obtained royal dignity and the title of imperial vicar of Italy, formally placing themselves above all other Italian princes. That elevation would matter later: it was the House of Savoy that eventually led unification in the nineteenth century. When France began annexing Corsica in the late eighteenth century, it was Pasquale Paoli - nicknamed Babbu di a Patria, or Father of the Fatherland, by Corsican Italians - who articulated what resistance looked like. In a 1768 letter, he wrote: "We are Corsicans by birth and sentiment, but first of all we feel Italian by language, origins, customs, traditions."

• 4. Mazzini and Young Italy

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  Giuseppe Mazzini became a nationalist in the 1820s, and his ambition went far beyond a flag or a border. He sought the liberation of Italy from Austrian occupation, from princely despotism, from aristocratic privilege, and from clerical authority - all at once. Ancient Rome captivated him. He described it as the "temple of humanity" and believed a united Italy could become a Third Rome, carrying forward Roman spiritual values that nationalists claimed the Catholic Church had preserved.

  In 1832 Mazzini formed Young Italy, a revolutionary patriotic society. When it collapsed in the 1830s he rebuilt it in 1839, this time with a strategy of winning workers' groups to the cause. He was, however, hostile to socialism; he believed that class unity was a precondition for national unity, not a rival to it.

  Not everyone shared Mazzini's republican vision. Vincenzo Gioberti, writing in 1843, proposed a federal state of Italy led by the Pope rather than a republic. Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour - who would later serve as Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Sardinia and then of Italy itself - worked as an editor at the nationalist newspaper Il Risorgimento in the 1840s. Cavour represented civic nationalism: his commitments were to freedom, tolerance, equality, and individual rights, held alongside a measured patriotism.

  Economic arguments also fed the movement. Before unification, tariff barriers between the Italian states blocked trade, and the railway system was too fragmented to support industrial development across the peninsula. Carlo Cattaneo, writing before the revolutions of 1848, advocated an economic federation as the practical path toward integration. The revolutions of 1848 themselves marked a turning point for the movement: the liberalization of press laws in Piedmont opened space for nationalist activity to expand, and the Italian National Society was formally created in 1857 by Daniele Manin and Giorgio Pallevicino to spread nationalist sentiment to political moderates.

• 5. Risorgimento and Unification

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  Daniele Manin believed in Italian unification years before Cavour did - and Cavour barely concealed his skepticism. During the 1856 Congress of Paris, Manin raised plans and strategies for achieving unity with Cavour, who afterward wrote that Manin had talked about "l'unità d'Italia ed altre corbellerie" - "the unity of Italy and other nonsense." A decade later, Cavour himself engineered the very outcome he had dismissed, working alongside Giuseppe Garibaldi through a combination of diplomacy and military force.

  The Risorgimento, as the unification movement became known, drew across the political spectrum. Conservatives and liberals both found reasons to support it. Literature and music played a direct role: writers and composers repeatedly invoked the glory of ancient Rome and the memory of ancestors who had defended the homeland and expelled foreign occupants. Unification was completed in 1870.

  What followed proved complicated. The new Italian government faced domestic paralysis and deep internal tensions. Its response was to launch a colonial policy, using imperial ambition abroad to distract Italians from conflicts at home. Italy colonized the East African coast of Eritrea and Somalia, but failed to conquer Ethiopia; some fifteen thousand Italians died in that campaign and the army was forced to retreat. Italy then waged war with the Ottoman Empire from 1911 to 1912, gaining Libya and the Dodecanese Islands from Turkey. Even those successes failed to stabilize the political situation. Rebellions and violent protests grew so intense that observers began wondering whether the young Kingdom would survive at all.

  Out of that frustration grew a harder nationalism. Gabriele d'Annunzio, Gaetano Mosca, and Vilfredo Pareto led a movement of bourgeois intellectuals that declared war on parliamentary government itself. D'Annunzio called on young Italians to seek fulfillment in violent action. In 1910 in Florence, Enrico Corradini founded the Italian Nationalist Association, the ANI, which preached martial heroism, total sacrifice of individualism to the nation, and the grandeur of ancient Rome.

• 6. World War I and the Mutilated Victory

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  At the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Italy held back despite its official alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary since 1882. The government's position was that Germany and Austria-Hungary were waging an aggressive war, and Italy refused to participate on those terms. In 1915 it reversed course, joining Britain and France against its former allies after receiving a promise of substantial territorial gains: west Inner Carniola, the former Austrian Littoral, Dalmatia, and parts of the Ottoman Empire.

  Freemasonry shaped how that decision was reached. The two main Masonic bodies - the Grand Orient and the Grand Lodge of Italy - together had twenty-five thousand members in five hundred or more lodges. Their membership spanned professionals, the middle class, parliament, the public administration, and the army. In 1914-15 they abandoned their traditional pacifist language and mobilized the press, public opinion, and the leading political parties in support of entering the war on the Allied side. By 1917 they were also pushing for a League of Nations to govern the postwar order.

  When fighting ended in November 1918, nationalist sentiment in Italy soared. The Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye in 1919 and the Treaty of Rapallo in 1920 delivered Trentino Alto-Adige, the Julian March, Istria, the Kvarner Gulf, and the Dalmatian city of Zara. But nationalists were enraged by the Allies' refusal to grant Italy control of Fiume. Fiume had not been included in Italy's 1915 demands, and awarding large portions of Dalmatia - where the population was majority Slavic - to Italy was said to violate Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points.

  D'Annunzio did not wait for diplomacy. He mobilized two thousand veterans and seized Fiume by force, drawing international condemnation but the support of a majority of Italians. Italy eventually did annex Fiume a few years later. Benito Mussolini called the overall settlement a "mutilated victory" - a phrase historians now regard as a political myth, but one that proved extraordinarily effective at fueling the grievances from which Italian fascism grew.

• 7. Fascism and Its Aftermath

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  Benito Mussolini took power as Prime Minister in 1922 and built a fascist totalitarian state that drew directly on nationalist ideology. His foreign policy rested on three pillars: continuing the ambitions of the Liberal regime that preceded him, addressing the disillusionment left by heavy World War I losses, and restoring the pride and glory of the Roman Empire.

  Fascist Italy's territorial claims were sweeping. To the east, the regime claimed Dalmatia as a land of Italian culture. To the south, it claimed Malta from Britain and Corfu from Greece. To the north, it claimed Italian Switzerland. To the west, it claimed Corsica, Nice, and Savoy from France. In 1935 Mussolini invaded Ethiopia, founding Italian East Africa and triggering international isolation and Italy's withdrawal from the League of Nations. Italy then allied with Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, supported Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War in 1936-37, and annexed Albania in 1939. In 1940 Mussolini entered World War II alongside Hitler's Germany. In September 1943 Italy surrendered to the Allies.

  After 1945, Italian irredentism collapsed along with Fascism and the monarchy of the House of Savoy. The Treaty of Paris in 1947 and the Treaty of Osimo in 1975 saw the Italian Republic formally abandon all territorial claims. The only party that kept explicit Italian nationalism as its stated ideology in the postwar decades was the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement, the MSI, which became the fourth largest party in Italy by the early 1960s.

  A partial revival came in 1953 around the Question of Trieste, when Italy's claim to full control of the city drew patriotic demonstrations across the country. In 1995 the MSI transformed into the Alleanza Nazionale, which joined three successive coalition governments under Silvio Berlusconi. Gianfranco Fini, the party's leader, was named Deputy Prime Minister after the 2001 general election. In the decades since, nationalist sentiment has surfaced in Italian anti-globalization protests and on important national days, while regionalism - in Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Naples, Sardinia, Sicily, and Veneto - and a persistent north-south economic divide have kept the idea of a single homogeneous Italian identity contested from within.