The Pursuit of Italy
Page 56
Vivaldi, Antonio 110
Volscians 22, 41
Voltaire 120, 171
Volterra 22
Volturno (1860) 196, 200
Wagner, Richard 77n, 166
Waiblingen 59
War of the Austrian Succession (1740–48) 110
War of the Polish Succession (1733–5) 119
War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14) 117, 119
Washington, George 211, 217
Webster, John 27
Welf dynasty 56, 59
Westminster 256, 366
Whitaker family 249
White, John 84
Wilhelm II, Kaiser 249, 282, 283
William I, King (of Sicily) 62
William II, King (of Sicily) 62
William III, King (of England) 12
Wilson, Woodrow 291, 296, 298
Wordsworth, William 94
Yeats, W. B. 53
Young Europe 156–7
Young Italy 156, 218
Yugoslavia 3, 291, 296, 325, 329, 345, 367
Zanardelli, Giuseppe 257, 277
Zanchi, Antonio 110
Zara 11, 98, 292
Zeno, Emperor 50–51
Zurich 91, 130
* See above map 3.
† An inexhaustive list of victorious invaders before 1060 would include Sicans, Elymians, Sicels, Greeks, Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Celts, Cimbri, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Vandals, Alans, Huns, Lombards, Byzantines, Franks, Magyars, Vikings and Arabs.
‡ The flag of the Italian navy retains the blue ensign of Amalfi quartered with the red ensigns of the three other ‘maritime republics’, Venice, Genoa and Pisa.
§ See below p. 30.
** See below p. 43–4.
†† In Tuscan-Italian ‘The crow had stolen a piece of cheese from a window’ is il corvo aveva rubato da una finestra un pezzo di formaggio, while in carrarese it is ‘i corv i avev robat da ‘na fnè ‘n toc d’formai.
‡‡ The islanders’ propensity to omit important consonants is reflected in the title of Giuseppe Tornatore’s recent film Baarìa, which is how its citizens pronounce the name of their home town Bagheria.
§§ Charles V, the Habsburg emperor, is alleged to have said that he spoke French to men and Italian to women; he also revealed that he conversed with God in Spanish and with his horse in German.
* See below p. 65–72.
* See above p. 55.
† Caesar and Cola di Rienzo remained sources of inspiration for many years. Rienzo inspired a novel by Bulwer-Lytton and an opera by Wagner, the latter much admired in Stalin’s Russia and in Hitler’s Germany. The title Caesar mutated to Tsar in 1547, when Ivan the Terrible assumed the role in Russia. In the German-speaking territories the emperor of Austria was a Kaiser (a Caesar), but to the rest of the world that title has referred to the Prussian Hohenzollerns who became emperors of Germany in 1871.
‡ While Santa Croce was given a neo-Gothic west front in the nineteenth century, San Lorenzo, Santo Spirito and Santa Maria del Carmine remain without façades to this day.
§ See below, chapter 4.
** In the seventy years after 1455 the Borgia, Piccolomini, della Rovere and Medici each provided two popes.
†† The Renaissance arrived very late in Spain. A century after Brunelleschi had built his dome in Florence, the Spanish were still building Gothic cathedrals.
‡‡ It also became the second largest in Europe after Paris. At the end of the sixteenth century it had a population of 280,000, twice the size of Venice and more than three times the size of Florence.
§§ By the end of the following century this figure had increased to 148. The island also contained 788 marquesses and about 1,500 dukes and other barons.18
* ‘On the Extinction of the Venetian Republic’ (1807).
† ‘De Gustibus’ (1855).
‡ In one of his more intemperate moments Ruskin declared of San Giorgio Maggiore that it was ‘impossible to conceive a design more gross, more barbarous, more childish in conception, more servile in plagiarism, more insipid in result, more contemptible under every point of rational regard’.
§ In fact the condition was not strictly obeyed. Although Colleoni had stipulated the Piazza San Marco as the location, the state decided to erect Verrocchio’s great equestrian statue in a lesser place with a similar name, outside the Scuola di San Marco in the sestiere of Castello.
* ‘On the Late Massacre in Piedmont’ (1655).
† Through a dynastic connection with Guy de Lusignan, a crusader who was briefly King of Jerusalem and then King of Cyprus in the twelfth century, the Savoia also claimed to be titular kings of Cyprus and Jerusalem. Official documents carried the title after that of Sardinia until they became Kings of Italy in 1861. The Habsburgs and Bourbons made similar claims.
‡ Bonaparte failed, however, to convince his underling that he also would win glory. ‘Well, Bourrienne, you too will be immortal.’ ‘How, general?’ ‘Are you not my secretary?’ ‘Tell me the name of Alexander’s.’22
* See above p. 32.
† Young Italy inspired the creation of numerous organizations around the world, including in the early twentieth century the Hindu nationalist Young India, whose members were taught to make bombs to blow up the British by a Russian revolutionary in Paris. Young India in turn inspired Nathuram Godse, the Hindu extremist who assassinated Gandhi in 1948.
‡ Formed in September 1815 by the sovereigns of Russia, Prussia and Austria.
* Germany in 1871 contained four kingdoms, five grand duchies, twelve other duchies or principalities and the free cities of Hamburg, Lübeck and Bremen.
* ‘The Centenary of Garibaldi’ (1907).
† ‘Garibaldi’ (1860).
‡ The legal title of the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia.
§ This poem, ‘To Ulysses’, is not the feeblest verse about him written by an English poet. Swinburne, Meredith and Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote even more gushing lines. A homier, happier image appears in The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame’s classic Edwardian children’s book. Along the walls of the Mole’s burrow are ‘brackets carrying plaster statuary – Garibaldi, and the infant Samuel, and Queen Victoria, and other heroes of modern Italy’.
* The word was not commonly used in the 1860s and in any case it meant different things to different people. Individuals of the era often identified as mafiosi include agents of absentee landowners in the latifondi, gangsters running protection rackets in the lemon groves of Palermo, and newly rich men who had enclosed the common lands after 1860 and held on to them by force. Some people even then regarded the Mafia as different from other criminal organizations, as a secret society with its own rituals and arcane rules. Discussion of the Mafia and how to deal with it was for a century hindered by the refusal of many Sicilians to admit that it and its ‘men of honour’ even existed.
† 419,846 from a population of 21.8 million in 1861 (i.e. without Lazio and Venetia); of these, 57 per cent (barely one-hundredth of the population) exercised their right to vote. A reform bill of 1882 increased the electorate to just over 2 million, and another in 1913 introduced universal male suffrage – five years before Britain. Italian women could not vote until after the Second World War, when they greatly assisted the christian democrats.
* Like those earlier chiefs of staff, Lamarmora and Cadorna, Badoglio enjoyed a career of constant promotion despite evidence of consistent incapacity. After the disaster of Caporetto he had been appointed deputy chief of staff although he was widely regarded as having been more responsible for the defeat than anyone except Cadorna: after a commission of inquiry wrote its report on the battle, thirteen pages on his contribution had to be deleted from the published version for him to retain some credibility in his new post. As Governor of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, he had even outdone Graziani in the butchery of his repression and, although he had captured Addis Ababa, his ‘triumph’ had been no more difficult or heroic than General Kitchener’s massacre o
f Sudanese at Omdurman in 1898. He was chief of staff during the invasion of Greece but resigned half way through the campaign.
* Not that the Communist Party was ashamed of the execution or of the executioner, Walter Audisio, who became one of its parliamentary deputies. In 1947 its leader, Palmiro Togliatti, said that the Duce’s execution had been ‘one of the greatest, perhaps the greatest contribution that the movement of national liberation made to the nation’.4
† One province in which Catholics were prominent in the Resistance was Lucca, which lacked the anti-clerical traditions of the rest of Tuscany. Fifty-seven Lucchese priests were executed by the nazis.7
‡ One director who ignored neo-realism was the great Federico Fellini, who took audiences into his private worlds of fantasy and surrealism. Instead of following the trend of filming on location, he preferred to recreate the Via Veneto or the streets of Rimini, his home town, in the studios of Cinecittà. Fellini was untypical in other ways, being uninterested in politics and claiming he had never kicked a football in his life. His films were more appreciated at foreign film festivals than by cinema-goers in Italy.
§ By this moment of the film, the Socialist Party must have split, which allows Depardieu to join the communists.
** In Italy magistrates are divided between the prosecuting and adjudicating components of the judiciary. A magistrate can therefore be a detective as well as a judge.
* See below p. 384.
† Another tactic, as Umberto Eco noted, was to ‘use his own formidable mass media apparatus to accuse the mass media of persecuting him’.14
‡ The Communist Party, for instance, metamorphosed successively into the Partito Democratico della Sinistra (PDS), the Democratici della Sinistra (DS) and the Partito Democratico (PD).
§ Pesto is not in fact a purely Genoese sauce. While the basil and the olive oil may come from Liguria, the cheese it contains is parmesan from Emilia-Romagna and pecorino usually from Lazio.
** See above p. 251.