page_title: Flag of Italy
section_title: The birth of Italian national colours on a cockade
hierarchical_section_title: Flag of Italy / History / The birth of Italian national colours on a cockade
caption_attribution_description: English: King Umberto II behind of Flag of Kingdom 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 Italian tricolor, like other tricolour flags, is inspired by the French one, introduced by the revolution in the autumn of 1790 on French Navy warships and symbol of the renewal perpetrated by the origins of Jacobinism. Shortly after the French revolutionary events, even in Italy the ideals of social innovation began to spread widely – on the basis of the advocacy of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789 – and subsequently also political, with the first patriotic ferments addressed to the national self-determination: for this reason the French blue, white and red flag became the first reference of the Italian Jacobins and subsequently a source of inspiration for the creation of an Italian identity flag.
  The first documented trace of the use of Italian national colours is dated 21 August 1789: in the historical archives of the Republic of Genoa it is reported that eyewitnesses had seen some demonstrators pinned on their clothes hanging a red, white and green cockade on their clothes. The Italian gazettes of the time had in fact created confusion about the French facts, especially on the replacement of green with blue, reporting the news that the French tricolour was green, white and red. The green was then maintained by the Italian Jacobins because it represented nature and therefore – metaphorically – also natural rights, or social equality and freedom.
  The Italian cockade then reappeared several years later on 13–14 November 1794 worn by a group of students of the University of Bologna, led by Luigi Zamboni and Giovanni Battista De Rolandis, who attempted to plot a popular riot to topple the Catholic government of Bologna, a city which was part of the Papal States at the time. The law students defined themselves as "patriots" and wore tricolour cockades to signal they were inspired by Jacobin revolutionary ideals, but modified them also to distinguish themselves from the French cockade. The chosen colours were white and red since those are the colours of the flag of Bologna, some scholars contend green was added only for the event to give it a more ideological effect; not all agree that the cockades used by the Bologna plotters actually had three colours, since a myth about that may have been created a year later.
caption: King Umberto II and the royal family of Italy behind of the Flag of Kingdom of Italy
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