Blood group
Garibaldi’s famous team kit for invading Sicily, the Red Shirts, was apparently inspired by the outfits of South American slaughtermen.
New York humility
Garibaldi is the only figure to turn down a ticker tape parade through Manhattan. He declined the honour for fear of stirring up New York’s Irish Catholics.
occurred, many led by secret societies like Giovine Italia, a nationalist movement instigated in exile by patriot Giuseppe Mazzini. None achieved their ultimate aim of national unity. In 1848 Mazzini joined forces with military man Giuseppe Garibaldi and pushed the papacy from the capital. Again, however, the Republic of Rome they established was short-lived, and France soon seized control for the Pope.
Congratulations Mr and Mrs Italy, it’s a bouncing baby boot
It took an initiative from outside mainland Italy, from Sardinia, to finally bond the nation together. The liberal king of Sardinia, Piedmont and Savoy, Vittorio Emanuele, created a kind of safe haven on the island for the growing rabble of malcontents pushing for Italian unity. His shrewd Piedmont prime minister, Camillo Cavour, did a deal with the French, who fought and beat the Austrians and handed Vittorio Emanuele sections of Lombardy in 1859. And with that, il Risorgimento, as the movement for Italian unity (the Resurgence) was dubbed, was on.
The central northern belt around Romagna and Tuscany decided to join up with Sardinia by referendum in 1860. Garibaldi and his Red Shirts (armed volunteers) then enlisted covert help from Cavour to kick the Bourbon rulers out of Sicily; mission accomplished he moved on to Naples before trying his luck in the Papal States, at which point Cavour stepped in to make sure Vittorio Emanuele, not Garibaldi, was in control. The pope had to make do with Rome. As Umbria joined up with the king so, on March 17 1861, Vittorio Emanuele II declared himself ruler of the new Kingdom of Italy. Cavour was given the post of prime minister. It took ten further years to bring Venice (wrested from Austria in 1866) and Rome
Factions, social strife and land grabs: Italy’s difficult teenage years
The morning after the Risorgimento romp was always going to be something of a let down. Admittedly, by the
late 19th century Italy had a relatively liberal constitutional
monarchy, but the same old landed gentry still held most of the power. The south, as usual, had it worst: corruption increased and the peasants tried to rebel – Rome sent 30,000 troops to quell the farmers in Sicily.
Right and left fought vociferously in Parliament. One figure, the progressive Giovanni Giolitti brought some stability as well as social and political reform (alongside the usual quota of corruption) in five separate shifts as prime minister between 1892 and 1921, nudging Italy (particularly its industrialising northern regions) towards modernisation. He gave men over 30 the vote in 1912 (women would have to wait until 1945). Despite being a liberal, Giolitti couldn’t suppress new Italy’s greed for colonialism (‘why not, the rest of Europe’s doing it’): the humiliating failure to capture Ethiopia in 1896 was followed, to general international condemnation, by the more successful annexation of Libya and a few Aegean Islands in 1911.
Fighting in the streets
Italy was on the winning side in the First World War but felt more like it had lost. Perhaps it should have stuck with the gut instinct of 1914 and remained neutral; instead, tempted by the promise of new territory to the north and east, Italy joined the Allied cause in 1915. In 1918, with more than 600,000 dead, it received much of the land pledged (Trentino, Trieste and Süd Tirol included), but saw the main prize, Dalmatia, go to Yugoslavia. The loss of face fuelled a growing nationalism, while a powerful socialist movement emerged amid post-war economic, social and political trouble. Polarisation was swift. Armed gangs, the Fascisti and the Communists, fought pitched battles in city streets. Parliament limped
Garibaldi: an Italian hero
Giuseppe Garibaldi is still revered in Italy. Every town has its piazza or street named for the military leader of the Risorgimento, the great Italian patriot who was actually born in Nice. Condemned to death for his Giovine Italia activities as a young man, he escaped to South America and honed a talent for military leadership. He fled to the USA for three years after the failed 1848 Rome occupation, settling down in Staten Island, New York, where he worked making candles. After the famous assault on Sicily and Naples he was roused from semi-retirement on various occasions, employed to piece the Italian jigsaw together. Garibaldi is traditionally seen as a selfless figure, apparently unconcerned for personal power, although dissenting voices have been raised in recent years, notably among the Lega Nord, a political group seeking autonomy for northern Italy (Garibaldi brought false unity they say) and similarly separatist elements in Sicily.
on under old favourite, Giolitti, but the Biennio rosso, the two red years of 1919-20, in which revolutionaries seized factories and farms, found the nationalist, predominantly Catholic brigade looking round for a stronger antidote to the left. It appeared – bull-necked, uncouth but charismatic – in the shape of Benito Mussolini.
Black days with the Black Shirts
Mussolini started his political life as a red, editing Avanti, a well-thumbed Socialist newspaper. But the First World War reoriented his politics to the right, to a rabid (but rarely racist) nationalism, to a belief in the rule of a single, central figure (namely him): it was dubbed Fascism. Mussolini founded the Fascists in 1919, and their black-shirted Squadre d’Azione, action squads (or thugs-for-hire), won support from influential landowners, industrialists and military figures keen to see socialists and communists beaten down. Mussolini quickly became a force in Italian politics. By 1922 he was threatening to march on Rome to seize power. When King Vittorio Emanuele III refused to call in the army, there was little option but to offer Mussolini the prime minister’s job.
Initially, the Fascists governed with some respect for the constitution, but by 1926, via rigged elections, bullying and legislative wangling (new laws criminalised trade unions and censored the press), Italy had become a single party state run by a dictator, with all the brutal human rights abuses and restrictions on personal freedom which that entails. Mussolini wooed the Catholic Church in 1929 with the Lateran Treaty, establishing Catholicism as the state religion and securing papal recognition for the Kingdom of Italy in
fared comparatively well in the global economic gloom of the early 1930s) to sport to family life (Mussolini gave out medals to fecund mothers). Behind it all, controlling in their own ways, lay propaganda and an expanding military.
Losing on all fronts: Italy’s Second World War
Fascist Italy fell out with Britain and France (its allies) by invading and annexing Ethiopia in 1936, the same year that Italian forces helped General Franco’s Nationalists out in the Spanish Civil War. Adolf Hitler, in need of European friends, commended Mussolini on his African acquisition and the Rome-Berlin Axis began to bloom. By 1939 Italy and Germany had signed a pact of military agreement (of course, they couldn’t call it that; Mussolini suggested the suitably belligerent Pact of Steel).
Italy didn’t actually join the Second World War until 1940, when France was beaten and Britain was on the ropes. Mussolini sent Italian troops to Africa to take on
Symbol of power
The term Fascist comes from the Latin fasces, a ‘bundle’ of rods tied together and attached to an axe head. In Ancient Rome the
fasces symbolised a
magistrate’s power; Mussolini duly adopted the axe as an emblem of authority.
Beware the lies of march
Propaganda maestro Mussolini built the myth of the Fascists’ glorious ‘March on Rome’ in October 1922. He recalled 300,000 black-shirted devotees following their leader, who rode on horseback triumphant into the city. In truth Mussolini and a handful of Fascists travelled to the capital by train, first class, and didn’t march anywhere, power having been already handed over.
Mussolini and the Jews
Prodded into action by Hitler’s anti-Semitic policies, Mussolini’s government passed the first in a series of race laws in September 1938. Jews, a minority with a long-established place in Italian life (many actually supported the Fascist party in the 1920s), were barred from all public office, expelled from schools and denied marriage with non-Jews. Around 7,000 Italian Jews were later deported, most of whom died in Nazi concentration camps.
How the treasures of Rome were spared
In July 1943, British planes dropped leaflets on Rome, warning of their plans to bomb the city but pledging to spare the city’s cultural landmarks. Bombers then targeted strategic points – airfields, factories and so on – in and around the city. When Allied soldiers fought their way to Rome’s edge almost a year later, Hitler ordered the withdrawal from the city, apparently to prevent its destruction. Pope Pius XII addressed the cheering, liberated crowds under his balcony on June 5 1944: “Today we rejoiced because, thanks to the joint
the British, and then invaded Greece, looking for kudos (of the Hitler kind) and new territory. Neither move went well. It was all typical of Mussolini’s vanity. He excelled at bluster, at image building, but rarely backed it up with substance: the Italian army was poorly trained, equipped and coordinated. Mussolini had to call Hitler for help, and by 1941 Italy was a German pawn, its troops sent off to fight (and flounder) against the USSR. Back in Italy, rationing, the routine of life in a dictatorship and Allied bombings made for a miserable time.
With the Allied invasion of mainland Italy imminent, Mussolini, now aged 60, was confronted by the king and his own Fascist Grand Council in 1943, asked to resign and then locked up. His successor, Pietro Badoglio, commander-in-chief of the army under Mussolini, signed an armistice with the Allies, but the majority of Italy now fell to the Nazis who rushed south to grab land. Along the way they liberated Mussolini from incarceration at Gran Sasso in the Apennines, and set him up as head of a Republic of Salo, governing from Lake Garda. Two years of bitter fighting followed as Allied forces crept north, helped by growing bands of Italian partisans. The German retreat left burning towns and misery in its wake. In April 1945, partisans caught up with Mussolini as he attempted to flee for Switzerland. He was shot along with his mistress and their bodies were strung up in Milan’s Piazzale Loreto. A month later the Germans surrendered Italy to the Allies.
Cultivating la dolce vita
On its beam-ends in 1945, Italy slowly began to recover. America’s Marshall Plan (a financial aid programme) got the economy moving again, while elections brought the first taste of democracy in two decades. In April 1946 the public (or 54 per cent of them) voted for a republic and King Umberto II abdicated. The Christian Democrat governments that ruled (in coalition with myriad elements from left and right) for the next four decades were usually flawed and short-lived, but in the north it didn’t seem to matter – industry boomed in the hands of Fiat, Olivetti and others. Many of their staff were migrants newly arrived from southern Italy, where the post-war desperation was slower to shift. This was the period, the 1950s and early 60s, when Italian culture found modernity, when its cinema, fashion and cars became internationally important.
Facing up to the fascist past
Italy worked hard to forget Benito Mussolini and the Fascists after the war. Schools only taught history up to the First World War and fascist political groups were banned. To be labelled a fascist, particularly in the political arena, was the ultimate insult. And yet the perceived threat of communism and the reluctance to root out old offenders meant that elements of the far right remained (and still remain) an important political force. On an emotional level, Italians have only begun risking a collective look back in the last decade. Mussolini’s old homes are being restored and opened as curios, notably the Villa Torlonia, his state residence in Rome. As Walter Veltroni, Mayor of Rome, said on the Villa’s unveiling after years of restoration: “…a true democracy has no need to discard a part of its history”. Silvio Berlusconi, in particular, seems keen to address the difficult recent past. His move to grant veteran status to 200,000 volunteer soldiers who fought for Mussolini during the Republic of Salo, suggesting parity with partisans, brought lively debate.
The trouble with Italy’s royals
There’s no enduring royalism in Italy, no hankering for the monarchy’s return. The vote for a republic in 1946 reflected public disgust at the royals’ support for Mussolini and the way in which they fled Italy when the wartime going got tough in 1943. After the vote, a ban was placed on any male from the House of Savoy (the royal Italian house) from entering Italy. It was only lifted in 2002, as per a Berlusconi election promise. Vittorio Emanuele (son of King Vittorio Emanuele III), the last crown prince of Italy and still referred to as the Prince of Naples, hasn’t done the restoration cause many favours. He’s been tried (and acquitted) for murder, investigated for corruption and hasn’t been as condemnatory as he might when asked about Mussolini’s anti- Semitic laws. In 2007 he demanded Italy pay him 250 million euros in damages for the royals’ loss of assets after abdication.
The Years of Lead
In the late 1960s, the factionalism in politics – long held at bay by self-interest and double-dealing (compromise was easily bought) – bubbled out beyond the corridors of power. Students and workers began protesting and striking for reform, reaching a crescendo in the autunno caldo (hot autumn) of 1969. In the same year, neo- fascists bombed Piazza Fontana in Milan, killing 17 people and further stretching the tension between right and left. The ensuing period of violent terrorist activity, lasting through the 1970s and 80s, was dubbed the anni di piombo (Years of Lead).
The left had the most notorious faction, the Marxist- Leninist Brigate Rosse (Red Brigades) that kidnapped and killed former prime minister Aldo Moro in 1978, but the right committed the worst atrocity when they bombed Bologna train station in 1980, killing 85. Mass arrests and public revulsion helped end the worst of the violence by the early 1990s. Mainstream politics remained laughably corrupt, until finally, in the early 1990s, a series of mani pulite (clean hands) judicial investigations attempted to unravel the web of tangentopoli (kickbacks) with exhaustive trials. As the big historic political parties – the Christian Democrats and the Socialists – fell apart and the politicians went on trial (although few of the big names actually went to jail; indeed, many were acquitted), a new crop of characters filled the void.
Different millennium, same issues
Rising from the wreckage of the mani pulite investigations came Silvio Berlusconi, a media mogul (and one of the richest men in Italy) with a talent for whipping up popular support. His and Italy’s story have been intertwined since 1994 when he first became prime minister heading a rightist coalition. In 2008 he became premier for a third time, having overcome numerous corruption scandals. On Berlusconi’s watch, Italy gave the USA its help in Iraq (despite massive public protest), endured a continuing economic gloom, adopted the Euro and said goodbye to Pope John Paul II (see section 8.3 for more on Berlusconi and Italian politics).
Leaden legacy
Unanswered questions about the Years of Lead still hang in the air. Conspiracy theories abound. Did the police collude with the CIA and Gladio, the covert NATO ‘stay-behind’ operation in post-war Italy, to exaggerate the left-wing threat in the Cold War era? Why didn’t the Government do more to save Aldo Moro (i.e. compromise with his captors)? Groups claiming a connection to the old Red Brigades still sporadically commit murder, helping to keep the bad old days fresh in the collective psyche, as does the enthusiasm for pursuing figures like Cesare Battisti, a left- wing extremist wanted for murders in the 1970s but living as a ‘refugee’ in Brazil (he’s now a successful thriller writer).
“I AM THE JESUS CHRIST OF POLITICS. I AM A PATIENT VICTIM, I PUT UP WITH EVERYONE, I SACRIFICE MYSELF FOR EVERYONE.” Silvio Berlusconi