Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: una espressione geografica reloaded

e cosi' l'unita' d'Italia sarebbe stato un errore. Ma che vadaff
 
http://tinyurl.com/bweuzat
 
 
THE PURSUIT OF ITALY
 
A History of a Land, Its Regions, and Their Peoples
 
By David Gilmour
 
Illustrated. 447 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $32.50.
 
Recent fissures in the European Union remind us that no political
union is historically inevitable. Such federations are human
creations, established either for expediency or through expansionism,
frequently artificial: sometimes so much so that, as in the case of
Yugoslavia, they simply fall apart.
 
The historian, biographer and Italophile David Gilmour argues that
Italy is another fragile union, and in “The Pursuit of Italy” he makes
a persuasive (if not entirely unfamiliar) argument that the 1861
unification of the country, trumpeted by nationalists as a triumph of
progressive statecraft, was a mistake. Gilmour says many thinking
Italians have begun to wonder why their country has for so long been
intractably dysfunctional, crippled by corruption, organized crime and
a hateful bureaucracy, and governed by an endless parade of shady
leaders, of whom Silvio Berlusconi was only the most recent. “Why,
people asked, did Italy not function?” Gilmour writes. “Was it in fact
a real nation or was it just a 19th-century invention? Except in a
purely formal sense, could it really be said to exist?”
 
Gilmour has attempted to answer these questions by providing an
alternative history of Italy, not taking the usual centripetal line
but emphasizing the country’s longtime “centrifugal tendencies.” The
modern nation stretches from the town of Aosta in the northwest, where
the official language is French, to the Apulia region in the
southeast, where many people still speak Greek. With its 4,500 miles
of coastline, the peninsula was for centuries subjected to countless
invasions. Its mountainous interior and unnavigable rivers made
communications difficult and encouraged the growth of one of the
world’s most eclectic collections of civilizations and mutually
incomprehensible dialects. Only one in 40 Italians spoke standard
Italian at the time of unification, and it wasn’t until the 20th
century that the language became commonly known within the country.
 
There was no unified Italy at any time between the fall of the Roman
Empire and 1861. Progressive waves of Byzantines, Lombards, Arabs,
Normans, Angevins, Aragonese and other overlords helped mold the
peninsula into an assortment of independent and highly individual city-
states. There was Florence, with its bold experiments in republican
government; Rome, seat of power of the Papal States, a once mighty
city that became a byword for stagnation and corruption; Sicily, the
former breadbasket of the Roman Empire, thereafter a political pawn
and a prize for whatever power happened to be dominant in the
Mediterranean; and the great city of Naples, which had, according to ­
Stendhal, “the true makings of a capital,” while the other Italian
cities were only “glorified provincial towns.”
 
The case of Venice, which Gilmour posits was “the most harmonious
society in Italy,” is the most pertinent to his argument. From the
founding of the republic in the late seventh century, Venice turned
its back on the mainland and became an Adriatic power. Its historic
and cultural links were with Byzantium rather than Rome; its
traditional enemy was Genoa. The independent republic lasted 1,100
years, considerably longer than the Roman Empire, with a smoothly
functioning government and a strong community identity. It survived
until 1797, when it was conquered and dissolved by Napoleon and
eventually turned over to Austria. Decades later, Gilmour asserts,
Venice’s “incorporation into the kingdom of Italy — which its people
did not want — was almost as much an aberration in its history as its
forced membership” in the Hapsburg and Napoleonic empires.
 
Gilmour ably deconstructs the national myth of unification and its
pantheon of Giuseppe Mazzini, Giuseppe Garibaldi, Camillo Cavour and
King Victor Emanuel II. The myth, he writes, was the result of a
monumental propaganda effort by the house of Savoy, enforced, after
unification, by a nationwide campaign of “statue-­making and street-
christening in homage to the heroic four.” (What provincial town
doesn’t have its statues of Gari­baldi and Victor Emanuel, its Via
Cavour and Piazza Mazzini? Or its Museo del Risorgimento, usually a
gloomy edifice shunned by the Italian citizenry?) In reality, Gilmour
reveals, the four were rather more human than heroic. Victor Emanuel,
the Piedmontese king, was a reactionary anti-constitutionalist who
once confided to the British ambassador that the only two ways to
govern Italians were “by bayonets and bribery.” Contemporary Italian
politicians deemed him “an imbecile.” Cavour, the undoubtedly
brilliant Piedmontese politician, was only a last-minute convert to
the cause of unity: when it became evident that Gari­baldi was going
to conquer Sicily, Cavour thought it best to annex the island to
Piedmont. Unification, therefore, began as “a war of expansion”
conducted by one Italian state, Piedmont, against another, Sicily.
 
Despite triumphs like the “economic miracle” of the 1950s and ’60s,
united Italy cannot be called a success story: its citizens still see
themselves more as Romans, Sienese or Sicilians than as Italians.
Campanilismo — loyalty to one’s local bell-tower, or to a “historical
and essentially self-contained form of society designed many centuries
ago,” as Gilmour writes — remains stronger than loyalty to the idea of
the nation. Perhaps, Gilmour argues, this should be considered a
strength rather than a weakness. He writes in the spirit of earlier
historians, like the 16th-century Florentine Francesco Guicciardini
and the 19th-century Milanese intellectual Carlo Cattaneo, who
believed that the Italian cities formerly thrived because of mutual
competition. “United Italy,” he concludes, was “predestined to be a
disappointment.” Is it time, then, to give up on a failed union and
return to the idea of a loose confederation? If so, Gilmour’s
detailed, learned and politically challenging book provides a picture
of what such a community of nation-states might look like.


 
Un poliedrico suddito britannico..
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfXL7m2889k&feature=related
 
 
 
 
fe...@delenda.net
 
-- 
http://delendanet.blogspot.com
 

 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfXL7m2889k&feature=related
 
 
ti intendi poco di saggistica inglese. Sara' che le sconfitte in
guerra bruciano (il nonno che ti diceva degli inglesi?)

 guerra bruciano (il nonno che ti diceva degli inglesi?)
 
Non ascoltava i PF, temo.
 
fe...@delenda.net
 
-- 
http://delendanet.blogspot.com
 

 Non ascoltava i PF, temo.
 
e in Germania ammirava le strade pulite.
 


Pensa che, 70 anni dopo, diverse centinaia di lavoratori sparsi in varie 
città italiane ogni volta che si preparano a pulire le strade (cosa che 
continueranno a fare ancora per taaaaaaanto tempo) quando vengono a 
sapere ogni mattina dove sono di ramazza, ringraziano un po' anche me...
 
 
 
fe...@delenda.net
 
-- 
http://delendanet.blogspot.com
 

 Pensa che, 70
 
scusa, puoi ripetere?


Non hai idea di quanto un progettino apparentemente banale possa 
richiedere per essere messo a punto a dovere.
 
 
fe...@delenda.net
 
-- 
http://delendanet.blogspot.com
 

 Non hai idea
 
per curiosita', solo su Usenet hai questa abitudine di non rispondere
mai alle domande dell'interlocutore?

 mai alle domande dell'interlocutore?
 
No, no, dovevi rispondere:
 
"era quel progettino che tuo nonno aveva avuto in consegna a Wannsee, 
settanta anni fa, vero?"
 
fe...@delenda.net
 
-- 
http://delendanet.blogspot.com
 

 No, no, dovevi rispondere:[..] Wannsee,
 
Lascio che sia tu a nominare certi luoghi. Che vedo ti ossessionano,
anche quando si parla di altro. L domanda resta li' sopra, neh.