The Pursuit of Italy

by David Gilmour

  There was little diversity among the Neolithic people, who had reached and settled in northern Europe by 4000 BC. They cleared land with stone axes, they grew wheat and barley, kept sheep, cattle and pigs, and built themselves homes instead of living in caves. The differences that emerged among them were fashioned by climate, vegetation and resources. The inhabitants of Britain and Ireland could not have initiated what we call the Bronze Age without a supply of copper and tin needed for the alloy. Along the Mediterranean coasts people used olive oil for their food and their lamps; further north, where olives did not grow, they relied on animal fats for nourishment and tallow candles.

  This north–south European divergence was replicated in Italy – and still is, as anyone who has compared Neapolitan cooking with butter-based Piedmontese dishes will know. While chestnuts, which have a nutritional value comparable to wheat, have hardly featured in southern diets, they have been an important resource in the north-west, where they grow well and where bread baked with their flour became a staple diet during the famished years after the Second World War. Yet the land is not simply divided between north and south or indeed between east and west but also partitioned, minutely and extensively, by the rugged limestone ridges of the Apennines. From the beginning, the Neolithic settlers lived in isolated territories, a segregation that fostered the development of distinctive languages, cultures and local customs.

  Around 700 BC different groups were recognized as distinct entities and were later classified as such by Greek and Roman writers. In the north were the Ligurians, the Taurini (the ‘bull-like’ people of Turin) and the Veneti (who were famous, a thousand years before the foundation of Venice or the invention of gondolas, as warriors, feasters and breeders of chariot-horses); the central Apennines were inhabited by Umbrians, Sabines, Volscians and Samnites, and further south the mountains contained Lucanians and the Calabrian Bruttians; the Adriatic coast was divided south of Veneti territory among Picenes, Daunians, Peucetians and Messapians, while along the Tyrrhenian lived Etruscans, Latins, Faliscans and Campanians; the most recent arrivals were Greek colonists in the south. It was all very unlike Greece, whose inhabitants resembled each other, talked the same language and already thought of themselves as Greek. In Italy the population spoke about forty languages and did not consider themselves the same people, let alone as Italians.

  Apart from the Greeks, the most distinctive and advanced people were the Etruscans, who were based in Etruria, where they built hilltop towns such as Volterra, and from where they spread north to the Po Valley and south to the Bay of Naples. In his Lays of Ancient Rome, which drew on the work of the classical historian Livy, Thomas Babington Macaulay described the Roman hero Horatius Cocles holding a bridge over ‘Father Tiber’ and defying a mighty Etruscan army led by Lars Porsena of Clusium, who ‘by the nine gods’ had sworn to capture Rome and avenge its exiled dynasty. In fact the Etruscan leader probably did capture the city, some of whose kings had actually been Etruscans. At this stage, the middle of the first millennium BC, Rome had little identity separate from its Etruscan and Latin neighbours. Eventually Etruria was defeated and absorbed by the Romans, but by then its power had already been reduced by challenges from Gauls, Greeks, Phoenicians and the peoples of the interior.

  Greek colonies appeared in Italy as early as the middle of the eighth century BC. Euboeans founded Cumae on the western promontory of the Bay of Naples, Achaeans settled in south-east Italy (where they seem to have made the connection between Italia and the bull-calf), Ionians went for south-west Italy and north-east Sicily, Dorians sailed for southern Sicily, and Spartans established a colony at Taranto, the best port south of Naples. They all set up city-states – an autonomous polis, consisting of a city and its hinterland – which were prosperous, cultured and toughly governed by rulers who have gone down in history as the original ‘tyrants’ – somewhat unfairly because the Greek turannos merely means autocrat. These colonies, precursors of the city-states of medieval Italy, nurtured Archimedes and Pythagoras but few democrats and no rulers capable of uniting them against threats from outside.

  The classification of the other peoples of the peninsula is less scientific, partly because they spoke languages related to each other within the Italic group.§ The tribes of Apulia were supposedly divided into Daunians, Peucetians and Messapians in the heel, but these names come from Greek writers and were adopted by Roman ones; perhaps the people themselves did not recognize such distinctions. As for the Samnites, highland tribes from Molise and the centre, they cannot rigorously be separated from the Lucanians and Bruttians whose ancestors they were.

  The mountain communities, however separate and secure in their mountain enclaves, were not of course stationary. Since nowhere in the peninsula is more than seventy miles from a sea, their members were bound to meet the inhabitants of the coast – and to envy their prosperity. From the fifth century BC large numbers of Samnites migrated from the Apennines to Campania, where they ended Etruscan rule, and further south to the Ionian and Tyrrhenian coasts, the area known as Magna Graecia, where they clashed with the Greek colonies. Equally large changes were simultaneously taking place in the north. Huge waves of Gauls (also known as Celts) came from southern France across the Alps, their tribes settling in the Po Valley and ejecting the Etruscans who were living there. After founding Mediolanum (Milan), they surged south through Umbria and Etruria to Rome, which they sacked in 390 BC, forcing the priestesses known as the Vestal Virgins to flee from their temple; legend has it that the Capitoline Hill was saved by its sacred geese, who cackled at the approach of the Gallic infiltrators and woke up the guards. Eventually the invaders were paid an early form of danegeld to go away. Rome was not captured again for 800 years.

  The so-called ‘Romanization’ of Italy** was carried out at an increasing pace in the final centuries BC. It imposed a political and a cultural identity on the peninsula but not an ethnic one; the Romans had no ethnic identity to impose. The satirist Juvenal even complained that the capital itself was multiracial because it had so many Greeks and Syrians living in it. During the imperial centuries millions of people travelled the great roads to settle or be stationed in provinces far from their birthplace. Yet there were no enormous changes to the ethnic composition of Italy in this long period except for a constant influx of foreign slaves: the great transformations took place before Rome’s rise and after its collapse.

  The barbarian invasions that had a significant impact on Italy’s ethnic blending were those of the Ostrogoths, the first rulers after the last emperor had been deposed in AD 476, and the langobardi, another German people, who came over the eastern Alps in the following century. For two centuries the langobardi (‘long-beards’, later Lombards) ruled in most of Italy before succumbing to the Frankish army of the future Emperor Charlemagne.

  By the ninth century AD Italy was inhabited by many people whose origins were in west Asia, north Africa, and northern and eastern Europe. Most northerners were Lombards and Romanized Italians. But in the south there were also Arabs, who established a brief emirate at Bari and ruled Sicily until they were displaced by the Normans; Greeks, some of them descendants from the colonies of Magna Graecia, others who had arrived more recently to administer Byzantium’s territorial conquests of the sixth century; and a sizable Jewish population together with smaller numbers of Slavs, Armenians and Berbers.

  All subsequent conquerors of areas of Italy brought people who settled in the country, mainly soldiers, merchants and officials. Yet none arrived in great numbers. More significant was the immigration of Albanians who in the later Middle Ages built themselves villages along the Adriatic coast and in the mountains of the Calabrian Sila, where towards the end of the twentieth century the inhabitants still spoke arbëresh, which they regarded as the purest form of Albanian.12 They also settled in Sicily, where the town of Piana degli Albanesi south of Palermo still celebrates an Albanian Epiphany, commemorating the visit of the Magi to Bethlehem with flamboyant costumes and Greek Orthod
ox rites. Renowned as fighters, they served in the armies of Naples and Rome and also Venice, which was the most ‘multicultural’ and cosmopolitan of Italian cities. Apart from its Albanian minority, St Mark’s lion presided over communities of Greeks, Jews, Turks, Germans, Persians, Armenians and Slavs. The last, who were mostly from Dalmatia, gave their name to the Riva degli Schiavoni (the long quayside outside the Doge’s Palace) and to their Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, which houses Carpaccio’s most appealing paintings, episodes in the lives of St Jerome, St George and St Augustine.

  The lengthy ethnic hybridization that produced modern Italians did not of course mean that they all now look similar. No one denies that Sardinians are easily recognizable or that the inhabitants of Parma do not resemble those of Palermo. Yet, however noticeable physical differences may often be, race has never been a serious factor in Italian history: there is no Italian race and there never has been one. The arguments of those who claim otherwise, usually fascists or extreme nationalists, are ludicrous. So is the more recent boast by a leader of the Venetian League that, while Lombards are upstarts descended from the Gauls, his own people have a pure ethnic pedigree.13 The truth was recognized long ago by the Risorgimento liberal Cesare Balbo, who observed that Italy was ‘a multiracial community composed of successive waves of immigrants’; it had ‘one of the most mixed bloodlines, one of the most eclectic civilizations and cultures which there has ever been’.14

  The French president Charles de Gaulle famously asked how he could be expected to govern a country that had 246 different kinds of cheese. Italians may have fewer cheeses than the French but in other spheres of human accomplishment and behaviour there are more varieties in diverse and diffuse Italy than in highly centralized France. Both countries retain a predilection for stereotypes. In France Gascons are passionate, Bretons are hard-headed, Normans are stolid and sensible, while the male population of Perpignan has traditionally been ridiculed by other Frenchmen as people who do nothing apart from sitting in floppy berets sipping pastis or playing bowls and arguing under the plane trees.15 Italians are also given eternal characteristics: the Tuscan temperament, for example, is apparently a blend of shrewdness, scepticism, individualism, enterprise, frugality, honesty, common sense and moderation in all things, especially religion, politics and pleasure.16

  Italians have suffered from stereotyping both by foreigners and by their compatriots. In Renaissance Europe Italian merchants living abroad were often envied and despised by northerners, particularly Poles, who regarded them as feeble and effeminate, weedy lute-players who preferred wine and salads to beer and roast meat. Italians also acquired a reputation for being Europe’s worst soldiers, a reputation that endured. When the Stuart pretender, Bonnie Prince Charlie, turned to flee at the Battle of Culloden, his subordinate Lord Elcho chose to remember not the prince’s Scottish ancestors or his Polish mother but his Roman childhood and Modenese grandmother when he allegedly shouted after him, ‘Run then, you damned cowardly Italian!’ Yet while the image of Italians was unmanly, it was often also violent and treacherous, linked to the stiletto, the stab in the back, or the craftily administered poison, especially in Elizabethan drama: in John Webster’s tragedies The White Divel and The Duchess of Malfi, Italian characters find four different means of poisoning their victims.17 Two centuries later, one of Walter Scott’s characters is accused of behaving ‘like a cowardly Italian’ when he draws his ‘fatal stiletto’ and kills ‘the man whom he dared not meet in manly encounter’.18

  In Italy even books of high scholarship reinforce regional stereotypes. People are routinely referred to as ‘typically Florentine’ or ‘typically Sicilian’ in a way that perplexes those who would never write of someone as ‘typically Lancastrian’ or a ‘typical Aberdonian’. In the introduction to one of his books, the distinguished Torinese philosopher Norberto Bobbio is described as ‘typically Piedmontese’, while in the book he himself used a similar technique to classify others. Writing of the historian Gaetano Salvemini and the economist Luigi Einaudi, two of the great figures of modern Italy, he described the second as ‘the image of the reserved Piedmontese, a man of much good sense and few words, never eloquent, apparently cold, almost arid, precise as a clock’, while the first became the archetypal southerner, ‘the portrait of the combative southern Italian, generous and impetuous, incisive in his speech and penetrating in his gaze, inhabited by the demon of sincerity to the point of rudeness’.19

  When intellectuals accept stereotypes, it is not surprising that other people do the same. I have several times heard Pisans disparaging the citizens of Lucca, alleging that the Lucchesi are narrow-minded and backward, although the latter like to think of themselves as reflective, religious, mild, acute, tenacious, ironic and creative20 – a people understandably proud of their beautiful city and the independence that it maintained for so long. Yet despisers are often despised in turn: I have also witnessed astonished Pisans being told by Livornesi that they, citizens of a comparatively modern, cosmopolitan port, are more progressive and broad-minded than the guardians of the Leaning Tower.

  Milan and Turin are great cities of the north-west with many things in common, including industry and southern immigrants who came north in the 1950s and 1960s to work in their factories. Yet citizens of one city often speak of the inhabitants of the other as if they were foreigners with characteristics peculiar to themselves. The Torinese may be honest but he is austere and aloof and too careful with his money; the Milanese may be generous but he is noisy and materialistic, obsessed about work and food and having a warm overcoat for winter. Italians sometimes claim they can distinguish between the two sets of citizens without hearing them speak. Taking an example of stereotyping nearer home, I have heard that the Genoese are supposed to be as stubborn as the Scots, have read that Sicilians are as taciturn as the Scots, and have listened to a Sardinian admiral telling me, without explication, that his fellow islanders are the Scots of Italy – possibly because both have remote highlands. Perhaps somebody somewhere has complained that the Torinese are as thrifty as the Picts.

  We frown now on stereotypes, especially those that contain a tinge of truth. Yet all over Italy cities tenaciously conserve qualities and quirks that distinguish them from their neighbours in a fashion unimaginable to someone setting out to compare Nottingham with Northampton. Many of the ideas about rival places, ‘the people over there’, are nonsense, and few Italians really believe in them. Yet if you go to the Venetian lagoon, you might meet a man from the island of Murano who says the inhabitants of nearby Burano are savages, and if you go to Crema in Lombardy you might be told that the Cremonese, the residents of a neighbouring town, are untrustworthy because they supported the German emperor against the Lombard cities in the Middle Ages. All the same, real differences do exist, and, if you want to see for yourself, you could spend a day in Naples, with eyes, ears and nostrils open, followed by a night on the Palermo ferry and the next morning among Sicilians.

  LINGUISTIC ITALY

  In the spring of 2008 I was walking in the Apulian city of Bari with a friend, a film director from Lecce, a beautiful Baroque town of pale-yellow limestone some 90 miles to the south-east. After passing a group of young men talking loudly on the pavement, I told him I couldn’t understand what they were saying, to which he replied that he couldn’t either, adding only half in jest that the Leccesi were traditionally cultured and aristocratic while the Baresi were crafty and materialistic. A native of Apulia, a man who speaks both Italian and the leccese dialect of the Salentine Peninsula, he was defeated by the phonetic sounds and inflections of barese. Though the same foreign influences – mainly French and Spanish – have affected both cities, their dialects are spoken so differently that speakers of one find the language of the other almost incomprehensible. While today barese sounds similar to the dialects of Naples and Basilicata, leccese is more like Sicilian and Calabrian, even though Messina and Reggio are much further from Lecce than Bari.

  Similar situ
ations are found in other parts of Italy. Carrara is a town in north-west Tuscany whose inhabitants do not easily understand what other Tuscans are saying because their area once belonged to Modena – it was that duchy’s ‘outlet to the sea’ – and they continue to speak in the modenese dialect. In fact they feel themselves to be psychologically so unTuscan that, when they go outside their town, they talk about ‘going to Tuscany’.†† In the same way inhabitants of the Giudecca talk about ‘going to Venice’ when they cross the half mile of water that separates them from the Doge’s Palace. Even in provinces where everyone speaks in the local dialect, a person’s geographical upbringing can be located from accent, vocabulary and manner of speaking; the same is true of islands in the Venetian lagoon. A Tuscan contadino who taught me some of the lucchese dialect in the 1970s used to demonstrate how he could identify a man’s village by the way he spoke. He also taught me words that were unintelligible beyond Lucca: when I used them recently in Lucca itself, I was told that my friends must have been very old peasants. Dialects, the most prominent manifestation of Italian diversity, have been so prevalent in the history of the peninsula that many people did not hear standard Italian being spoken until they first listened to the wireless.

  Most of the tongues spoken in ancient Italy belonged to the Indo-European group of languages, whose precursors were brought thousands of years ago by Neolithic migrants from south-west Asia. Like the people themselves, two groups of these languages were soon formed, one going north, the other entering Italy from the Balkans and spreading west through the Mediterranean; two notable peoples who resisted the advance were the Basques and the Etruscans. Different Indo-European languages were spoken in Italy by Gauls in the north, Messapians in the Salento and Greeks on the coast, who introduced the alphabet to Europe and thereby encouraged everyone to start carving inscriptions. Most people, however, spoke one of the Indo-European languages that later became known as ‘Italic’. Closely related forms of this were Oscan and Umbrian, used by the peoples of the interior and along the Adriatic; the populations of the west coast spoke more distant varieties such as Latin and Faliscan. The language of the Latins, who had their own cultural and linguistic identity by the sixth century BC, was used and later diffused across Italia by the Romans. In consequence, all the other languages, except Greek but including Etruscan, had died out in their written form by the time of Augustus; some may still have been spoken for a time but they were no longer used for inscriptions or other writing, which were now done in Latin. Most Sicilians remained Greek-speakers until the Arab conquest, though after the arrival of the Normans in the eleventh century both Greek and Arabic went into decline.