The Pursuit of Italy Read online

  BY THE AUTHOR

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  DAVID GILMOUR

  The Pursuit of Italy

  A History of a Land, its Regions and their Peoples

  ALLEN LANE

  an imprint of

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  ALLEN LANE

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published 2011

  Copyright © David Gilmour, 2011

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All rights reserved.

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book

  ISBN: 978-0-14-192989-7

  To Ming and Elspeth Campbell

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  Introduction

  1 Diverse Italies

  Fractured Geography

  Italian Peoples

  Linguistic Italy

  2 Imperial Italies

  Roman Italy

  Barbarian and Byzantine Italy

  Italia Germanica

  3 Cities and Powers

  Communal Dreams

  Communal Realities

  Republican Italy

  Princely Italy

  4 Adriatic Venice

  5 Disputed Italies

  Foreign Rulers

  Enlightened Italy

  Napoleonic Italy

  Italy and the Restoration

  6 Revolutionary Italies

  Romantic Italy

  Insurgent Italy

  Operatic Italy

  7 The Making of Italy

  Piedmont 1850s

  Lombardy and the Duchies 1859

  Sicily and Naples 1860

  Venice (1866) and Rome (1870)

  8 Legendary Italy

  The Generation of Giants

  The Wisest Statesman

  The Noblest Roman

  Father of the Nation

  Some Generals and an Admiral

  The Risorgimento without Heroes

  9 Making Italians

  Piedmont Comes to Naples

  Sicily Goes Downhill

  Rome and Parliament

  Beautiful Legends

  The Quest for Glory

  The Bear of Busseto

  10 Nationalist Italy

  Little Italy

  Bellicose Italy

  Ruptured Italy

  11 Fascist Italy

  Italia Romana

  Italia Imperiale

  12 Cold War Italy

  Christian Democrats

  Communists

  Affluent Italy

  13 Modern Italy

  Centrifugal Italy

  Berlusconi

  Resilient Italy

  List of Books Used and Cited in the Text

  Notes

  Index

  ‘Italiam non sponte sequor’

  ‘[It is by divine will] not my own that I pursue Italy.’

  Virgil, Aeneid, Book 4

  List of Illustrations

  1 General view of the Forum (copyright © Gerard Degeorge/Bridgeman Art Library)

  2 Bust of Marcus Tullius Cicero (Musei Capitolini, Rome/Alinari/Bridgeman Art Library)

  3 Virgil (70–19 BC) and the two muses, from the house of Virgil in Hadrumetum, Sousse, Tunisia, early 3rd century (Musée du Bardo/Akg-images/Erich Lessing)

  4 Empress Theodora with her court of two ministers and seven women, Byzantine School, c. 547 AD (San Vitale, Ravenna/Giraudon/Bridgeman Art Library)

  5 Dante reading from the ‘Divine Comedy’ (detail), by Domenico di Michelino (1417–91) (Duomo, Florence/Bridgeman Art Library)

  6 Bologna, Torre degli Asinelli (built 1109–19) and Torre Garisenda (built 1110) (Akg-images/Electra)

  7 Trani Cathedral (built 1150–1250) (Trani, Apulia/Akg-images/Schütze/Rodemann)

  8 San Michele in Foro, Lucca (San Michele in Foro, Lucca/Bridgeman Art Library)

  9 Palazzo Vecchio, Florence; photograph 1890 (Akg-images)

  10 Façade of Santa Maria Novella, by Leon Battista Alberti (1404–72), built c. 1458–70 (Santa Maria Novella, Florence/Bridgeman Art Library)

  11 Portrait of Isabella d’Este (1474–1539), by Titian (c. 1488–1576), 1536 (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria/Ali Meyer/Bridgeman Art Library)

  12 Portrait of Federigo da Montefeltro (1422–82), Duke of Urbino, by Piero della Francesca (c. 1415–92), c. 1465 (Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence/Giraudon/Bridgeman Art Library)

  13 Portrait of Cosimo I de’ Medici (1519–74), by Agnolo Bronzino (1503–72), c. 1559 (Galleria Sabauda, Turin/Bridgeman Art Library)

  14 Pope Julius II (detail from The Mass of Bolsena, the Stanza dell’Eliodor), by Raphael (1483–1520), 1511–14 (Vatican Museums and Galleries, Vatican City/Bridgeman Art Library)

  15 Exterior of the Ducal Palace, Venice, by John Ruskin (1819–1900) (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford/Bridgeman Art Library)

  16 The Miracle of the Relic of the True Cross on the Rialto Bridge, by Vittore Carpaccio (c. 1460/5–1523/6), 1494 (Galleria dell’Academia, Venice/Giraudon/Bridgeman Art Library)

  17 Kaiser Joseph II and the Grand Duke Leopold of Tuscany, by Pompeo Batoni (1708–87), 1769 (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna/Bridgeman Art Library)

  18 General Bonaparte Giving Orders at the Battle of Lodi, 10 May 1796, by Louis Lejeune (1775–1848), c. 1804 (Chateau de Versailles/Bridgeman Art Library)

  19 Front of La Scala Theatre, by Angelo Inganni (1807–80), built 1852 (Civica Raccolta Stampe Bertarelli, Milan/Bridgeman Art Library)

  20 Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901), c. 1886 (Akg-images)

  21 Massimo d’Azeglio (1798–1866), by Francesco Hayez (1791–1882), 1860 (Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan/copyright © 2006 Alinari/Topfoto)

  22 Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–72) (Archives Larousse, Paris/Giraudon/Bridgeman Art Library)

  23 Count Camillo Benso di Cavour (1810–61) (private collection/Alinari/Bridgeman Art Library)

  24 Ferdinand of Savoy (1822–55), Duke of Genoa, by Alfonso Balzico (1825–1901) (copyright © 2006 Alinari/Topfoto)

  25 Victor Emanuel II (1820–78), King of Sa
rdinia and Italy, by P. Litta (Service Historique de l’Armée de Terre, France/Archives Charmet/Bridgeman Art Library.

  26 Francesco II of Bourbon (1836–94) of the Two Sicilies and his wife Queen Maria Sofia of Bavaria (1841–1925), c. 1865 copyright ©Alinari/Topfoto)

  27 Pope Pius IX (1792–1878) (private collection/Bridgeman Art Library)

  28 Giuseppe Garibaldi at Caprera, by Pietro Senno (1831–1904) and Vincenzo Cabianca (1827–1902) (Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Florence/Alinari/Bridgeman Art Library)

  29 The Italian Camp at the Battle of Magenta, June 1859, by Giovanni Fattori (1823–1908) (Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Florence/Alinari/Bridgeman Art Library)

  30 Panorama of Naples (copyright © 2006 Alinari/Topfoto)

  31 Piazza Castello, Turin (copyright © 2006 Alinari/Topfoto)

  32 Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) making a speech, by A. Pompeiani, 1925–30 (Museo di Storia della Fotografia Fratelli Alinari, Florence/Alinari/Bridgeman Art Library)

  33 Italian Fascists carrying captured pictures of Karl Marx, Lenin and Trotsky on their arrival in Rome (copyright © Topfoto)

  34 Olivetti, by Marcello Dudovich, 1926 (Associazione Archivio Storico Olivetti, Ivrea)

  35 Sculpture of nude Roman and rearing horse, Palazzo della Civilta Italiana, EUR, Rome (copyright © Clement Guillaume/Bridgeman Art Library)

  36 Giuseppe di Lampedusa and Lucio Piccolo, 1926 (photograph in the possession of the author; photographer unknown)

  37 Enrico Berlinguer (copyright © 2006 Alinari/Topfoto)

  38 Alcide De Gasperi (1881–1954), c. 1950 (Akg-images)

  39 Silvio Berlusconi with two unidentified women, Porto Rotondo, Sardinia (Antonio Satta/AP/Press Association Images)

  Introduction

  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 Ital
y 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.