The Pursuit of Italy

by David Gilmour

  For fifteen years after 1861 Italy was governed by men who had been Cavour’s colleagues and supporters. These were liberal conservatives from the north, patriotic and high-minded on the whole, law-givers who sometimes liked to think they shared the virtues and values of Roman senators of old: a plaque in the baptistery of Pistoia cathedral commemorates one parliamentarian not only as a saint in his family life but also as an ‘example of integrity’, moderation, austerity and altruism. Known as la Destra (the Right), though they were not notably more right-wing than the so-called Left, they strove to turn unification into unity, a task that proved beyond them – as it was probably beyond anyone. A succession of able finance ministers managed to increase revenue and balance the budget, though at the cost of making Italy among the most highly taxed countries in the world. One of their most useful contributions to the state was their success in preventing Victor Emanuel and his generals from fighting more foreign wars after 1866. In 1870 the prime minister (Lanza) and the finance minister (Quintino Sella) stood firm when General Cialdini, a close ally of the king, demanded the resignation of the government because it would not declare war on Prussia. When Cialdini also demanded a stronger army to protect private property at home, Sella sensibly pointed out that a larger army would mean higher taxes and hence be an incitement to social disorder.

  With all their limitations and their failures in the south, the Piedmontese leaders of la Destra were the nearest thing to a responsible ruling class that united Italy ever produced. They had hoped that Piedmont would become the Prussia of the peninsula, the kingdom around which the other states coalesced, yet it was always an unrealistic ambition. Their north-western state was too small, too weak and too remote – culturally and historically as well as geographically – to sustain such a role once Italy had been achieved.

  The last government of la Destra fell in 1876 and was replaced by a ministry of the Left, headed by Agostino Depretis. The new prime minister was in certain ways very Piedmontese – sensible, cautious and incorrupt – but his political power came from the southern deputies, especially the lawyers among them, whose profession dominated the parliamentary benches. Apart from compulsory primary education, introduced by Depretis, differences between Left and Right were more discernible in moods and attitudes than in political ideology. The liberal conservatives had stood for fiscal rectitude and a state that interfered as little as possible in the lives of its citizens. By contrast, many on the Left wanted a powerful state that could engender jobs and public works; it was also keener than the Right on foreign wars and colonial adventures. In consequence public debt grew to alarming heights during Depretis governments.

  Under the dominance of the Left, politics became less principled and more corrupt, more a matter of deals and manipulation than of policies and programmes. Depretis encouraged this development with his reliance on ‘trasformismo’, his method of retaining a parliamentary majority by constantly conjuring alliances between shifting and sometimes incompatible factions. At the heart of his coalition with southern deputies was a simple formula: he gave them control of their regions, and they gave him control of the nation. Depretis gained their votes but in exchange he lost the power to carry out reforms that the south so badly needed. His method, a bartering of votes for favours, prevented the emergence of a political class in the south and left power with what Sonnino called ‘the oppressing class’ – landowners and mafiosi – men who would deliver votes at elections on condition that at other times they were largely left alone.

  Trasformismo discouraged the formation of political parties with distinctive programmes and led to paralysis in government. Lanza had hoped that Italy would adopt the British practice of two parties offering different policies and alternating in government. Leaving aside the fact that the Westminster customs had taken centuries to evolve, there was little chance of organizing an opposition in Rome when the government was able to seduce potential opponents with easy promises of favours. Depretis claimed to be governing in the interests of everyone and not of factions; in fact he was governing in the interests of those who gave him a majority in the Chamber. His power was secured by patronage, bribery and the fixing of elections, which he instructed the prefects in the provinces to implement. Francesco Crispi described in 1886 how parliamentary business was carried out during Depretis’s third and longest term as prime minister.

  You should see the pandemonium at Montecitorio when the moment approaches for an important division. The agents of the government run through the rooms and corridors to gather votes. Subsidies, decorations, canals, bridges, roads, everything is promised; and sometimes an act of justice, long denied, is the price of a parliamentary vote.17

  The decline of parliamentary standards was not, of course, all the fault of Depretis. Deputies managed to damage the reputation of parliament by their involvement in bank scandals, their poor attendance record and their often rowdy behaviour, which sometimes led to the throwing of inkwells and to fights on the floor of the Chamber. Though duelling was illegal, one deputy was killed in 1898 while fighting his thirty-first duel. Such irresponsible behaviour was by no means confined to the backbenches. There were numerous challenges and duels involving ministers, including one such contest when the current premier (Marco Minghetti) fought with a former premier (Urbano Rattazzi). Depretis was witness to an extraordinary incident in his bedroom when, while he lay ill in bed, Giovanni Nicotera (the minister of the interior) tried to hit Giuseppe Zanardelli (a fellow minister and a future prime minister) with a chair and, having failed, apparently tried to push him out of the window. On a subsequent occasion Nicotera spat at a fellow deputy and forced his unwilling victim to fight a duel. Perhaps it was not surprising that Milan’s Corriere della Sera should report that in this era the Chamber had not ‘the slightest popular support’ and was ‘generally laughed at and despised’. Nor is it difficult to understand Sonnino’s wider point, made in a speech to the Chamber in 1881.

  The vast majority of the population, more than ninety per cent … feels entirely cut off from our institutions. People see themselves subjected to the State and forced to serve it with their blood and their money, but they do not feel that they are a vital and organic part of it, and take no interest at all in its existence or its affairs.18

  BEAUTIFUL LEGENDS

  In 1865 the prime minister, General Lamarmora, claimed in parliament that Italy was ‘far more united than older, more established nations’.19 The statement was loudly applauded by deputies, who knew it was nonsense. Yet they believed it vital to pretend that it was true and to hope that repetition, together with various unifying measures, would persuade Italians to think it really was true. One urgent task for them was thus to cultivate the nation’s founding myth, to promote and implant the idea that unity had been achieved by a united people determined to gain its liberty. The cultivators were well aware that the myth was indeed mythical but they were convinced of the need to nurture it. Giovanni Giolitti, the ablest prime minister since Cavour, understood the logic of protecting ‘beautiful national legends’: Italians needed to believe they shared a common glory and a common destiny.

  Giolitti’s point engenders sympathy. Nations need traditions, however distant and mythical, but a country cannot have genuine national traditions if it has only just become a nation. Even if the Lombard League had produced an iconic figure like William Tell or Joan of Arc, such a person would not have been inspiring to Sicilians and other peoples whose ancestors had fought against the League. Italy simply did not have the symbols or rituals that other European nationalities possessed through inheritance: no fleur-de-lis or ‘Marseillaise’, no Magna Carta or Union Jack; even the flag, the tricolore, was an adaption of the French revolutionary banner. Nor, even more crucially, was there that intimate connection between religion and monarchy that had been so useful in the establishment or strengthening of older nations, as in Spain with los Reyes Católicos or in England with Henry VIII. Italy may have been a Catholic nation, but the leader o
f the Catholic Church refused to recognize it.

  Perhaps the most active promoter of the Risorgimento myth was Francesco Crispi, who had been one of Garibaldi’s Thousand. In his later career the need for Italy to feel great and be thought great became the principal determinant of his policies. Governments and institutions, he told parliament, had ‘a duty to immortalize themselves in marble and monuments’. So did monarchy. Although he had personally disliked and despised Victor Emanuel, Crispi believed that the cult of the founding monarch, whose funeral he had organized in the Pantheon in 1878, would be useful to the quest for national greatness. Fosterage of this cult also required the suppression of inconvenient evidence, and to this end officials were dispatched to the homes of the king’s deceased correspondents to remove letters that might contain some of his unpatriotic and derogatory opinions of Italians. This problem was not, of course, unique to the royal correspondence. When Cavour’s letters were published, descriptions of the ‘cowardly’ Tuscans and the ‘disgraceful’ and ‘savage’ Garibaldi were expunged; so too was the prime minister’s desire to ‘exterminate’ the garibaldini.20

  Garibaldi sometimes and Mazzini always had been regarded as enemies by the Turin government, but they had to be incorporated into the national myth because they had plainly been more romantic and self-sacrificing figures than Cavour and Victor Emanuel. Mazzini would have been astonished by his apotheosis and his posthumous appearance on monuments and city streets and in school textbooks (perhaps a more useful vehicle for childhood indoctrination than an endless array of statues). Educational primers were useful both for inventing glory – Magenta became a Piedmontese victory although the Piedmontese had not fought at it – and for identifying the nation’s enemies: as we have seen, King Ferdinand was vilified as ‘Bomba’ for his bombardment of Messina in 1848, though Victor Emanuel naturally did not figure as the bombarder of Genoa, Ancona, Capua and Gaeta. Another scheme for the cultivation of patriotism was the creation of Risorgimento museums, which proliferated across the north but not surprisingly proved to be less popular in the south.

  The most revealing exhibits in these museums are the prints and posters that encourage viewers to sense the harmony that had allegedly existed between the giants of the Risorgimento generation. Garibaldi and Mazzini may have parted company in the 1850s, but many years later they could be reunited in engravings with such titles as ‘Thought and Action’, their portraits framed by a wreath of oak and olive leaves floating above a sword and a pen. In one street poster they were joined together with Verdi under the title ‘The Three Giuseppes – The Three Stars of Italy’. Above each bearded and incorruptible head is a scripted eulogy: Verdi’s explains that he ‘illuminated la patria with his melodies’.

  Such articles in Risorgimento museums are invariably dwarfed by massive oil paintings depicting heroic scenes from the ‘wars of liberation’. Favoured subjects include Garibaldi carrying the dying Anita through the marshes of Comacchio, Garibaldi on Caprera with the evening sun shining on his red shirt and mournful face, the Italian camp on the battlefield of Magenta (the depiction of wounded soldiers implying that they had taken part in the action) and the breach in the Roman walls in 1870, which was painted to suggest that the incident was a tremendous victory though the defeated side lost only nineteen men. The figure most commonly represented in the pictures is Victor Emanuel, almost always shown on a white horse leading his troops into battle; the scene is usually San Martino, with blue-coated Piedmontese soldiers advancing as if on parade and white-coated Austrians lying dead or dying or being captured in the foreground. The Palazzo Pubblico in Siena, which Lorenzetti and Simone Martini had once adorned, contains a large and garish room, the Sala Vittorio Emmanuele, in which the king is acclaimed as ‘liberator of Italy’, ‘bravest of leaders’, ‘best of princes’, ‘father of the nation’ and ‘restorer [sic] of national unity’. The enormous frescoes, three of which portray the monarch on a white or grey horse, are pure hagiography, gaudy and badly painted distortions of actual events. After looking at such displays, it is a relief to go somewhere else and look at the macchiaioli (‘blotchers’), Tuscan impressionists, or artists of the next generation such as the Divisionists, who were more skilful, more human and more socially conscious, men such as Angelo Morbelli, compassionate chronicler of the old and the lonely, and Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo, the sympathetic painter of the working class in protest.

  Wealthy middle-class Italians of the nineteenth century seldom established art collections as their counterparts did in Britain and Germany. Their most conspicuous expenditure on visual art was on funerary sculpture, on the creation of vast, ornate, often beautiful monuments to deceased members of their families. The erection of these was traditionally a private matter even for public figures – the Venetian Republic did not provide them for its doges – except in the case of remote heroes such as Dante, who was awarded a dismal cenotaph in Florence’s Santa Croce in 1829. The state concerned itself with public statues of heroic and exemplary men, works that could be seen not in a chapel or a cemetery but in the middle of a square.

  Many towns voluntarily commissioned statues of Victor Emanuel and his fellow giants. Others were encouraged and even chivvied by the government to follow suit. Yet a few remained relatively unmolested, including Cremona, home of the great violin makers, a delightful town which has retained this free-spirited tradition, which commemorates organists and choirmasters as well as generals and garibaldini, and which recently renamed its Piazza Cavour the Piazza Stradivari. It is a relief to walk into the town’s Piazza Roma and find a statue not of the king but of its second-best composer, Amilcare Ponchielli; if you wander into the Piazza Lodi, you will then see a sculpture of the best, Claudio Monteverdi, the first of Italy’s great musical dramatists.

  Venice also stands out, permitted to retain its anti-public statue tradition with only a few exceptions such as a massive equestrian bronze of Victor Emanuel on the Riva and statues of its local Risorgimento heroes, Daniele Manin and Niccolò Tommaseo, in squares near San Marco. Lucca was less fortunate. That city too had a traditional aversion to statuary in public places: only the Madonna dello Stellario, a lovely Virgin with stars, dates from before the nineteenth century. The Restoration bestowed an ugly sculpture on the Piazza Napoleone of the Bourbon-Parma duchess, Maria Luisa, but at least she did something for her subjects, providing them with an aqueduct and a good water supply. The ‘giants’ did nothing at all for Lucca, yet here they are in the city: Garibaldi in marble, typically imposing outside the theatre, Victor Emanuel in bronze, typically bombastic near the main gate, Mazzini in stone, typically gaunt and forlorn, in a melancholy spot on the ramparts under the ilex trees. And all these are reinforced by the inevitable arteries, the Viale Cavour, the Corso Garibaldi, the Via Vittorio Emanuele and the Piazzetta del Risorgimento.

  A cheaper and even more popular way of fostering the cult was the affixing of commemorative plaques in town centres all over Italy. These often contain a specific historical and political message, like the one in Cremona for a soldier who was killed in the capture of Rome during ‘the final battle to lay low a priestly domination unwanted by Christ and condemned by reason and history’. The most ubiquitous are those recording where Garibaldi stayed and made a speech, inviting the local population to conquer Rome or to die in the endeavour, making the ultimate sacrifice for the redemption of Italy. Sometimes they are merely banal, recording that his brief stay in a house has glorified it for all time. A large marble tablet in Palermo’s Piazza Bologna proclaims that from ‘this illustrious building’ Giuseppe Garibaldi ‘rested his tired limbs for two hours’. Perhaps feeling that this was an inadequate inscription for all the effort entailed, its authors added a sentence relating how, ‘with extraordinary valour’, the ‘genius-exterminator of all tyranny slept serenely’ in the house in the middle of a battle.

  Other means of buttressing the cult included the naming of ships and the celebration of anniversaries, though these sometimes commemorate
d pre-Risorgimento history as well: ships might be christened Lepanto or Dandolo as well as Savoia or Italia; the 600th anniversary of the Sicilian Vespers could be celebrated as well as the twenty-fifth anniversaries of the capture of Rome and the conquest of Palermo. The most common and least subtle exercise in Risorgimento propaganda was the renaming of streets. Communes had traditionally respected local traditions when choosing new labels, often, as in Pistoia, expunging a mellifluous-sounding name such as Via del Vento (Street of the Wind) in order to commemorate a long-dead, long-forgotten local worthy, in this case a Pistoiese who had once been a pupil of Bramante the architect. After 1861 such traditions were discarded in favour of a uniform policy of genuflecting to the giants. The name-changing epidemic swept all over Italy except Venice, partly protected by the strength of its dialect, though even there the street bordering the public gardens, aptly called the Strada dei Giardini, became the Strada (today Via) Garibaldi. Elsewhere there was a purge of local names, especially religious ones: a typical example is Arezzo, where Garibaldi replaced St Augustine and Mazzini took over from the Madonna of Loreto. In Padua three of the city’s main squares were renamed in honour of Cavour, Victor Emanuel and ‘the Unity of Italy’.

  Patriotic citizens of Piedmontese and other northern towns may have welcomed the new names, but southerners often resented the changes even though they were authorized by their own municipalities. For centuries Neapolitans had been happy with their Via Toledo, their favourite street, and its alteration in 1870 to the Via Roma simply underlined their new subservience. Similarly insensitive was the substitution of the Foro Carlino (named after their best recent monarch, the Bourbon King Charles) by the Piazza Dante, named after a poet who had never visited Naples. Another example is the Piazza dei Martiri, with its monument to the ‘glorious fallen’, which commemorates men regarded as martyrs by northern patriots but who to most Neapolitans were rebels or even traitors who rose against their lawful sovereign.