page_title: Flag of Italy
section_title: The birth of the flag of Italy
hierarchical_section_title: Flag of Italy / History / The birth of the flag of Italy
context_page_description: The flag of Italy, often referred to in Italian as il Tricolore; is a tricolour featuring three equally sized vertical pales of green, white and red, with the green at the hoist side. Its current form has been in use since 18 June 1946 and was formally adopted on 1 January 1948.
  The Tricolour Day, Flag Day dedicated to the Italian flag, is established by law n. 671 of 31 December 1996, which is held every year on 7 January. This celebration commemorates the first official adoption of the tricolour as a national flag by the Cispadane Republic, a Napoleonic sister republic of Revolutionary France, which took place in Reggio Emilia on 7 January 1797. The Italian national colours appeared for the first time in Genoa on a tricolour cockade on 21 August 1789, anticipating by seven years the first green, white and red Italian military war flag, which was adopted by the Lombard Legion on 11 October 1796.
  The Cispadane Republic supplanted the Duchy of Milan after Napoleon's victorious army crossed Italy in 1796.
context_section_description: The oldest documented trace that mentions the Italian tricolour flag is linked to Napoleon Bonaparte's first descent into the Italian peninsula. The first territory to be conquered by Napoleon was Piedmont; in the historical archive of the Piedmontese municipality of Cherasco is preserved a document attesting, on 13 May 1796, on the occasion of the Armistice of Cherasco between Napoleon and the Austro-Piedmontese troops, the first mention of the Italian tricolor, referring to municipal banners hoisted on three towers in the historic center. On the document the term «green» was subsequently crossed and replaced by «bleu», that is, by the colour that forms - together with white and red - the French flag. It is on the French flag that the documents, at least until the entrance of the Italian Napoleonic army in Milan in October 1796, refer when they use the term "tricolor".
  On 11 October 1796 Napoleon communicated to the Directorate the birth of the Lombard Legion, a military unit constituted by the General Administration of Lombardy, a government that was headed by the Transpadane Republic. On this document, with reference to its war flag, which followed the French tricolour and which was proposed to Napoleon by the Milanese patriots, it is reported that this military unit would have had a red, white and green banner (red and white in honor of the flag of Milan, and green from the uniform of the civic guard of Milan). In a solemn ceremony at the Piazza del Duomo on 16 November 1796, a military flag was presented to the Lombard Legion. The Lombard Legion was therefore the first Italian military department to equip itself, as a banner, with a tricolour flag.
  On 19 June 1796, Bologna was occupied by Napoleon's troops. On 18 October 1796, together with the establishment of the Italian Legion (the military banner of this military unit was composed of a red, white and green tricolor, probably inspired by the similar decision of the Lombard Legion), the wire Napoleonic congregation of magistrates and deputy deputies of Bologna, at the third point of the discussion, decided to create a civic banner red, white and green, this time released from military use. Following the adoption by the Bolognese congregation, the Italian flag became a political symbol of the struggle for the independence of Italy from foreign powers, supported by its use also in the civil sphere. The following adoption of the Italian flag by a state body, the Cispadan Republic, was inspired by this Bolognese banner, linked to a municipal reality and therefore still having a purely local scope, and to the previous military banners of the Lombard Legion and Italian Legion, which took place on 7 January 1797.
  The first red, white and green national flag of a sovereign Italian state was instead adopted, as mentioned, on 7 January 1797, when the Fourteenth Parliament of the Cispadane Republic, on the proposal of deputy Giuseppe Compagnoni of Lugo, decreed "to make universal the ... standard or flag of three colours, green, white, and red ...": 
  [...] From the minutes of the XIV Session of the Cispadan Congress: Reggio Emilia, 7 January 1797, 11 am. Patriotic Hall. The participants are 100, deputies of the populations of Bologna, Ferrara, Modena and Reggio Emilia. Giuseppe Compagnoni also motioned that the standard or Cispadan Flag of three colours, Green, White and Red, should be rendered Universal and that these three colours should also be used in the Cispadan Cockade, which should be worn by everyone. It is decreed. [...]
  — Decree of adoption of the tricolour flag by the Cispadane Republic
  This was probably because the Lombard Legion had carried banners of red, white and green, and the same colours were later adopted in the banners of the Italian Legion, which was formed by soldiers coming from Emilia and Romagna. The flag was a horizontal square with red uppermost and, at the heart of the white fess, an emblem composed of a garland of laurel decorated with a trophy of arms and four arrows, representing the four provinces that formed the Republic.
  The Cispadane Repu
caption: The Sala del Tricolore, which later became the council hall of the municipality of Reggio Emilia, where the Italian flag was born
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