Posthumous Myth
Ferruccio was one of the most famous soldiers of the age, but was not and could not have been an Italian Nationalist, a concept which did not exist in his time. His positive fame was largely exaggerated by Italian writers and poets in search of national myths in the course of the Unification of Italy (19th century).
L'Assedio di Firenze, the most famous novel of Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi, was based on - and greatly glorified - the life Ferruccio. He is indeed cited in "Il Canto degli Italiani", the national anthem of Italy composed in 1847 by Goffredo Mameli. In a 1849 speech at Livorno, Garibaldi likened himself to Ferruccio: "I have touched with my sword the ashes of Ferruccio, and I will know how to die like Ferruccio"
Under Fascism, the legend of his life and death was much celebrated, and a festival in his name was set up in Florence to inculcate his life as an exemplary model. This partially accounts for the popularity of naming male children in Tuscany born at that period Ferruccio'
Read more about this topic: Francesco Ferruccio
Famous quotes containing the words posthumous and/or myth:
“Fashion, though in a strange way, represents all manly virtue. It is virtue gone to seed: it is a kind of posthumous honor. It does not often caress the great, but the children of the great: it is a hall of the Past.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“That, of course, was the thing about the fifties with all their patina of familial bliss: A lot of the memories were not happy, not mine, not my friends’. That’s probably why the myth so endures, because of the dissonance in our lives between what actually went on at home and what went on up there on those TV screens where we were allegedly seeing ourselves reflected back.”
—Anne Taylor Fleming (20th century)