National Consciousness in Italian Literature

CRITICISM NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS IN ITALIAN LITERATURE Joseph Rossi Prince Metternich, Chancellor of the Austrian Empire and the stoutest champion of the status quo in Restoration Europe, dismissed the national aspirations of the Italians by defining Italy as a "geographical expression." Thus he implied that Italy was no more to be considered a single political entity, even in a potential state, than the other large European peninsulas, like the Iberian, the Balkan, or the Scandinavian, which included more than one independent state. At a later time the Italian poet Carducci quipped that Metternich had been wrong in his definition, because Italy really was not a geographical expression but a literary expression; by this he obviously meant that Italy had been a perennial literary theme, though often enough a vacuous one, throughout the centuries when it did not have a political existence. To some extent both definitions are true, and their truth explains on the one hand why Italy attained its unification so late in its history and on the other why it was eventually able to achieve it at all. Metternich was justified in calling Italy a geographical expression for that is all it had been since the fall of the Roman Empire. For something like fourteen centuries, between the fall of the Roman Empire and the French Revolution, Italy had housed many states, served many masters, with a great variety of political forms co-existing at the same time, which resembled each other in only one respect—their instability. Many masters tried to control the entire peninsula; none ever succeeded. The Byzantines, the Lombards, the Swabians, the Angevines from Naples, the Viscontis from Milan, and later the Spaniards and the Austrians, all came more or less close to the final goal without achieving it. The only ruler who could have unified Italy was Napoleon , and he did not want to do it. But by that time the Italians were ready for unification, and they successfully enticed Napoleon's nephew to help them. This state of affairs is not surprising when one considers the geographical and historical peculiarities of Italy. Its geography seems designed specifically for the purpose of precluding the formation of a single state. The mainland of Italy is a strip of land running in a southeasterly direction, a little over 700 miles long and, on the average, about 100 miles wide. One chain of lofty mountains, the Alps, separates it from the rest of Europe, and another chain of mountains of respectable height, the Apennines, splits it lengthwise. Someone compared Italy to a veal chop, with the Alps and the Apennines representing the bones on the sides, and the rich Po Valley the tasty but 159 160RMMLA BulletinSeptember 1973 scanty morsel of meat in the middle. Indeed the peninsular part of Italy is mostly "bones," that is, mountains which slope down so sharply to the sea that their streams never really become rivers. In their brief course these streams run east to west or west to east, so that their valleys do not provide means of communication between North and South, but constitute an additional obstacle. Nor is communication by sea much better; the Italian coastline , though five thousand miles long, lacks numerous natural harbors. No wonder only the Romans were able to bring Italy under a single government, but were not able to do so until they became the great road builders everybody has heard about. Other obstacles to Italian unification came from historical causes, the first of which was the Papacy. As soon as the Papacy was established as a temporal power, sitting astride the middle of the peninsula, it became impossible for any other power to extend its control over the entire country without coming into conflict with it. When that happened the Papacy, because of its spiritual appeal, was always able to find some ally to check further advances. As Machiavelli pointed out, the Church was never strong enough to accomplish the unification of Italy, but never weak enough to allow some other power to do it. It was indeed the Church that stopped the southward advance of the Lombards in the eighth century, and the northward march of the Swabians in the thirteenth...