Italian National Identity Before 1861
In the Middle Ages, the Italian peninsula was split into five large and small sovereign states that were subsequently subdivided into several smaller, semi-autonomous, mini-sates. In the mid 19th century, Napoleonic conquests resulted in French control over most of Italy.
This 14-year period of Napoleonic rule is substantial to Italian self-recognition, because the administration of the French influenced Italians into entertaining the idea of a constituted Italian nation state. The repressive nature of this era also acted to engender a new generation of Italian national revolutionaries. One of which was Giuseppe Mazzini, known as a founder of the Risorgimento. Mazzini saw Italian nationality as inclusive: “For Mazzini, all Italians, irrespective of class and property, were impoverished and oppressed, and all were therefore included in his noton of 'the people'”
Read more about this topic: History Of Italian Citizenship
Famous quotes containing the words italian, national and/or identity:
“The French courage proceeds from vanity—the German from phlegm—the Turkish from fanaticism & opium—the Spanish from pride—the English from coolness—the Dutch from obstinacy—the Russian from insensibility—but the Italian from anger.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“I would dodge, not lie, in the national interest.”
—Larry Speakes (b. 1939)
“Unlike Boswell, whose Journals record a long and unrewarded search for a self, Johnson possessed a formidable one. His life in London—he arrived twenty-five years earlier than Boswell—turned out to be a long defense of the values of Augustan humanism against the pressures of other possibilities. In contrast to Boswell, Johnson possesses an identity not because he has gone in search of one, but because of his allegiance to a set of assumptions that he regards as objectively true.”
—Jeffrey Hart (b. 1930)