Book Review: The Pursuit of Italy

From The Pursuit of Italy: A History of a Land, Its Regions, and Their Peoples, by David Gilmour:

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  I was astounded by the next words of Signor Rossi, who twenty years earlier had been minister of education. ‘You know, Davide,’ he said in a low conspiratorial voice, as if nervously uttering a heresy, ‘Garibaldi did Italy a great disservice. If he had not invaded Sicily and Naples, we in the north would have the richest and most civilized state in Europe.’ After looking round the room at the other guests, he added in an even lower voice, ‘Of course to the south we would have a neighbour like Egypt.’ "

Cramming 2,500 years of history and culture into a dense 400 pages, this book focuses on Italy's divisions. It's a wonder that Italy ever came together into a single modern state. That didn't happen until the 1860s. Maybe it hasn't happened yet. B+

After the jump, my full review.

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Grade: B+

Italy. Only a brief look at a map is needed to make it seem to be so obviously a nation. "According to the revolutionary patriot Giuseppe Mazzini, God had given Italians ‘the most clearly demarcated fatherland in Europe.’ But David Gilmour shows through 2,500 years of history why "Italy is actually extremely unfortunate in its position, which has made it one of the most easily and frequently invaded places in the world."

It's a bit of shock that the concept of "Italy" as a nation is really a modern invention. 2,500 years ago, there was the Roman Empire. It rapidly emerged from the city state of Rome into an empire encompassing the whole Mediterranean world without ever pausing at the notion of a nation consisting of the Italian peninsula.

After the fall of Rome, there was a thousand years of city states: Rome, Venice, Turin, Milan, Naples, Florence, etc. Citizens of these cities didn't think of themselves as Italians. The notion is anachronistic. They thought of themselves as citizens of Piedmont, Lombardy, the Papal States, Naples, Sicily, etc. Many of these regions were ruled, on and off, but mostly on, by foreign powers (notably the Hapsburgs and the Bourbons) with capitals in far-off Vienna or Paris or Madrid. These regimes were constantly fighting wars, shifting the boundaries of their territories on the peninsula.

Finally, after the chaos of the Napoleonic Wars and the revolutionary movements that followed, culminating in the Revolutions of 1848 in France, Germany, and Italy, came the movement for Italian unification called Risorgimento. That movement, in a series of battles, led to a unified state in the 1860s. To give an idea of how fractured Italy remained, even then, Gilmour provides this astonishing fact: "In 1861, the year the Kingdom of Italy was born, it has been calculated that one Italian in forty (2.5 per cent of the population of the peninsula) spoke Italian."

David Gilmour covers it all, in excruciating detail. Not just the wars and shifting politics, but the cultural history as well. Painting, architecture, and especially opera, all get detailed coverage in this history. The story of how pasta (from the South) supplanted polenta (from the North) is here as well. This book is a slog, no question about it, but I found it worth it for the knowledge it imparts about a country that I thought I knew and now realize that I didn't know at all.