The Pursuit of Italy

by David Gilmour

  The conquest of Rome was not official government policy, but many people in Turin were hoping that the city would – like Naples – unofficially fall into their lap. In 1862 both the king and the prime minister, Urbano Rattazzi, were secretly encouraging Garibaldi to do the job for them. Although he had become a deputy in Turin, the conqueror of the Two Sicilies was uncomfortable in parliament, and he yearned for adulating crowds and exhilarating campaigns. He also yearned for Rome. In the summer of 1862, while he was speaking to an ecstatic audience in Palermo, someone in the crowd shouted ‘Roma o morte!’ (‘Rome or Death!’) The orator heard the cry and adopted it as his slogan for the rest of the decade. From Lombardy to Sicily, Italy is still studded with marble plaques affixed to buildings announcing that ‘from this balcony Garibaldi harangued the populace and swore Rome or Death!’

  Nobody prevented the idol of the people from assembling an army of volunteers in Sicily and then embarking them and sailing to Calabria, though the politicians in power were as equivocal about his current venture as they had been about his previous one in 1860. Perhaps they hoped the pope would run away when he saw Garibaldi coming; maybe they wished to repeat the trick of sending in a force to protect somewhere from Garibaldi and then taking it for themselves. Whatever they hoped or wished for, they lost their nerve. Fearing the anger of the Emperor Napoleon, who sought popularity with French Catholics by allying himself with the pope, they sent the Italian army to stop the volunteers at Aspromonte in Calabria. Although Garibaldi realized he had been misled and betrayed, he ordered his men not to fire on the troops advancing and shooting at them. A few volunteers were killed and their leader was wounded, badly in the ankle and less damagingly in the thigh. The others surrendered. After the affair Azeglio commented scathingly on the slogan ‘Rome or Death!’: of its alternatives, one had been renounced and the other had been chosen by fewer than 1 per cent of the garibaldini.

  Most Italians did not want Turin as their capital. It was too French, too near the French border and too far from the centre of the peninsula; besides, it had little of the cultural character and historical resonance that had been the glory of Italy during the eras of the communes and the Renaissance. Rome was the choice of most patriots, but this was not an option, at least not for the time being. In 1864 Napoleon agreed to move his French garrison from Rome on condition that Italy established a new capital somewhere else and promised not to invade the remaining papal territory, the so-called ‘Patrimony of St Peter’ around Rome. An alternative thus had to be found. Milan, which has been tagged ‘the citiest city in Italy’, may have been the logical choice – and in retrospect the right one – but like Turin it was too northern and, moreover, it lacked resonance of a political kind; although it had succeeded Rome as capital of the western empire in the fourth century, it had been a viceregal court rather than the capital of an independent state for more than 300 years.

  Naples was another possibility, one favoured by several cabinet ministers, but it would have been strange to turn a recently conquered and widely despised city into a capital. So the choice fell on Florence, a distinction it did not want and which Ricasoli described as ‘a cup of poison’. Yet the Tuscan city satisfied all cultural and historical criteria, it was the country’s financial capital (until overtaken by Milan in the 1880s), and it was favoured by the military because it could not be captured or bombarded from the sea. In May 1865 Florence duly became the capital of Italy, to the joy of Azeglio, who loved the city and hoped it would retain the position for all time. The Pitti Palace once again became a royal residence, while the older Medici palace near the cathedral housed the interior ministry, the Uffizi hosted the Senate, and the Palazzo della Signoria became the Chamber of Deputies. In Piedmont the news that Turin would lose its status led to a riot in the city and a massacre of its citizens by soldiers. The official report, which minimized the significance of the event, noted casualty figures of 52 dead and 130 wounded.

  After Aspromonte and the agreement with Napoleon, the patriotic gaze moved from Rome to Venice, which was a less controversial target because its capture would not enrage the French emperor. It also seemed a more feminine one, ‘the Queen of the Adriatic’ being represented in the iconography of the time as a damsel in distress in need of rescue by a virile new Italy. A painting by Andrea Appiani (the Younger) in Milan’s Museo del Risorgimento illustrates the sentiment in the early 1860s: entitled Venice Who Hopes, it portrays the city as a queen in white with her crown fallen on the ground and her lion impotent in the background. Another picture in the same museum, painted after the rescue of the distraught lady, depicts a female Italia welcoming two other women, Venice and Rome, into her home.

  It was widely felt that, for the sake of its prestige, Italy needed to defeat Austria and complete its unification without the help of France. As Francesco Crispi, Garibaldi’s former lieutenant in the south, insisted in parliament, Italian ‘dignity’ required an heroic victory against a foreign power, a ‘baptism of blood’ that would drive foreigners out of the peninsula for ever. In an argument repeated by Italian politicians for another eight decades, Crispi demanded such a victory so that ‘the great nations of Europe should know that [Italy] too is a great nation, with sufficient strength to ensure that it can make itself respected in the world!’24

  As it turned out, Italy did not need to fight alone because Prussia, eager to acquire hegemony in German-speaking Europe, was intent on fighting Austria and happy to help the Italians gain Venetia. The warmongers were given a fright in May 1866 when the Austrians, anxious not to campaign simultaneously on two fronts, offered to surrender Venetia in exchange for Italian neutrality in the war against Prussia. Italy was thus given the opportunity to achieve its territorial objective without the expense and suffering of a war. It refused to take it. Victor Emanuel claimed that honour forbade him to abandon the alliance with Prussia, but in truth he was mesmerized by the allure of military glory.

  The unnecessary war could hardly have gone worse. At the Battle of Custoza near Verona in June the Italian army was beaten by a much smaller Austrian force and, instead of rallying, retreated twenty miles to the west. A few days later, the Prussians defeated a far larger Austrian army at Sadowa in Bohemia, a decisive victory which effectively ended their war. The Italians could have stopped then too and would still have received Venetia, but they remained determined to have their ‘baptism of blood’. This time the blood was maritime and it was shed off Lissa, an island in the Adriatic, where the Italian navy was defeated by a smaller and less well-equipped Austrian fleet. Even after this second reverse, Victor Emanuel was keen to try again and was only dissuaded from doing so by his chief of staff. The national mood of bellicose self-confidence became quickly transformed into one of embarrassment and despair, and it was scant solace to learn that Garibaldi and his followers had as usual fought better than the regular army and had won some skirmishes in the Trentino and the South Tyrol. A further blow occurred shortly afterwards when an uprising in Sicily demonstrated the islanders’ true feelings about annexation. The insurrection captured Palermo and required 40,000 troops for its suppression.

  Italy did in the end receive Venetia though it was ashamed of the manner of its acquisition. Austria refused to cede it to the country it had defeated and instead surrendered it to France, which then handed it over to the Italians. The Venetians, governed since 1797 by rulers they had not chosen, showed little enthusiasm for the latest lot: there was no popular rising in support of Italy or Victor Emanuel. Although the state organized the usual overwhelming vote in a plebiscite, the myths of the Risorgimento were never as popular or pervasive in the Venetian provinces as they were in other parts of Italy. The benefits of Italian unification remained a mystery to many people who for centuries had been finding it difficult to reconcile themselves to their ever-declining status. ‘When Venice was a republic,’ one of its patricians lamented in 1922, ‘our word was law all down the Adriatic. Now that we are part of a greater kingdom, every petty lit
tle southern Slav can defy us with impunity!’25

  Today you can still find traces of nostalgia for the Habsburgs in the regions of the Veneto and Friuli-Venezia Giulia. An official guidebook of Treviso criticizes the French historical role in Italy while praising the Austrians for their ‘wise government’ and their array of impressive public works.26 In Udine, near the Slovenian border, people talk of the benefits of Habsburg rule as if they personally remembered them, and in Cormons, a pleasant town at the heart of the region’s vineyards, a festival of music and gastronomy is held each August to celebrate the birthday of Emperor Franz Josef, the last Austrian ruler of Venice.

  The demoralization induced by the defeats at Custoza and Lissa and by the events in Sicily did not dampen nationalist fervour for the next stage in the patriotic programme, the capture of Rome. An earlier generation of educated patriots had not been much inspired by the example of the capital of the classical world; events of the Middle Ages such as the victory at Legnano and the Sicilian Vespers had been more important in their creation of a national past than tales of Horatius and ancient Rome. Yet by the 1860s there was virtual unanimity among patriots, ranging from Mazzini to Victor Emanuel, regarding the importance and desirability of Rome. For ardent Garibaldi, the city was like a ‘mistress’ whom he ‘worshipped, with all the fervour of a lover’. In a different mood he called papal Rome ‘a cancer’ which must be removed because Italy would not be Italy without Rome as its capital.27 One of the few men who stood out against the clamour was the elderly Azeglio. He had warned that the annexation of Naples would create vast problems for Italy; he now predicted that the capture of Rome would create more, alienating the Church and Catholics everywhere at a time when the state needed their support. He himself was not an enthusiast for classical Rome, ‘that immense monument of human arrogance’, but he knew that others might be dazzled by its glory and realized that this would be dangerous for the young kingdom.28 A new Italy needed a new capital, not an ancient one it might find difficult to live up to.

  Rattazzi was again prime minister when in 1867 Garibaldi made another attempt to capture Rome; yet again he encouraged but did not endorse the enterprise. The volunteers invaded in October, coinciding with a failed uprising in Rome, and won a skirmish against papal troops. A few days later, under Catholic pressure at home, Napoleon came to the pope’s aid by sending French forces back into Italy to stop Garibaldi. In early November at Mentana, north-east of Rome, the volunteers seemed on the verge of defeating the papal army when a couple of thousand French soldiers arrived and drove them off. A chastened Garibaldi retreated to the Italian border and surrendered to the authorities. As his decisions demonstrated, ‘Rome or Death!’ were not the only alternatives. There was a third option.

  One notable feature of the campaign to capture Rome was the lack of popular support in the towns and countryside of the Roman state. Garibaldi was neither acclaimed by crowds nor assisted by peasants nor mobbed by aspiring volunteers. Even in Rome he had few supporters, and it must have been galling for him to learn afterwards that the French had been thanked for saving Rome from him. In 1870 there was a similar lack of enthusiasm for the national cause, even though the Italian government sent money to assist an uprising. Yet this time, as so often in the Risorgimento wars, the outcome was decided outside Italy. The French emperor withdrew his Roman garrison for his war against Prussia and ceased to be a factor in Italian politics after his defeat at the Battle of Sedan at the beginning of September. Later in that month, the Italian government took the opportunity of sending an army to Rome, where it breached the walls at the Porta Pia, overcame a symbolic defence and quickly captured the city. Garibaldi was not present at this occasion: quixotically he had gone to fight for the new republic in France.

  The manner in which Italy had been unified was disheartening for many patriots: unity had been achieved without a ‘baptism of blood’ or a spectacular victory by anyone except Garibaldi in Sicily. In 1870, as in 1859 and 1866, Italy acquired territory as the result of a huge bloody battle fought between countries from beyond the Alps. Patriots liked to say that Italy would ‘make itself’, but Bismarck was closer to the truth when he observed that the nation was made by three battles beginning with S – Solferino, Sadowa and Sedan. Without these decisive contests it is difficult to see how Italy would have been united, at least while the patriotic idea enjoyed such exiguous popular support. There had been no eagerness for ‘liberation’ in Venice or Rome and not much in Lombardy. When Garibaldi was recruiting volunteers in Naples, the most populous city in the peninsula, only eighty men had responded to the call of Italy.

  8

  Legendary Italy

  THE GENERATION OF GIANTS

  In 1896 an American historian, A. Lawrence Lowell, described the makers of Italy in reverential prose.

  Victor Emanuel is the model constitutional king; Cavour, the idea of a cool, far-sighted statesman; Garibaldi, the perfect chieftain in irregular war, dashing but rash and hot-headed; Mazzini, the typical conspirator, ardent and fanatical; – all of them full of generosity and devotion.1

  Other foreigners were even more laudatory. In 1907, on the centenary of Garibaldi’s birth, George Meredith conjured a fair and bounteous Italia that owed her existence to the men

  Who blew the breath of life into her frame

  Cavour, Mazzini, Garibaldi: Three:

  Her Brain, her Soul, her Sword; and set her free

  From ruinous discords, with one lustrous aim …*

  If he left out Victor Emanuel, another British poet rectified the matter: ‘My King, King Victor, I am thine!’ moaned Elizabeth Barrett Browning, placing the words improbably in the mouth of Garibaldi.†

  British liberals were especially prone to adulation. The historian Trevelyan hailed the Italian prime minister as ‘great Cavour … this marvellous man’ and placed him in a category on his own, above Gladstone, Bismarck and Disraeli, when nominating him ‘the most wise and beneficent of all the European statesmen of the nineteenth century, if not of all time’; as a nation-maker he was on a pedestal beside William the Silent and George Washington.2 Like many with his political views, Trevelyan regarded Italian unification as a triumph of progress and liberalism, a process comparable to the constitutional advances in England after the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688.

  Italian liberals preached a similar line and succeeded in persuading teachers and their students to accept it. One aim, as the historian Carlo Tivaroni tried to demonstrate, was to inculcate the idea that the main actors complemented each other.

  Thus the prudence of Cavour and Victor Emanuel helped, as did Mazzini’s constancy and Garibaldi’s audacity … Without these four men, each with his own sphere of action, if only one had been missing, what would have become of Italy?3

  As a way of implanting the message in the public consciousness, Italian governments embarked upon sprees of statue-making and street-christening in homage to the heroic four. In almost every Italian city you can find statues of Garibaldi and Victor Emanuel; in almost every smaller town you can follow an itinerary that with minimal variations takes you along a Via Cavour to a Piazza Garibaldi and thence through a Via Mazzini and a Corso Vittorio Emanuele before depositing you in a Piazza dell’ Unità. Unlucky Mazzini usually comes last in the queue in the matter of nomenclature. In Turin his statue is in a side-street, in Lucca his name designates a car-park, and in Genoa, his home town, he is commemorated by a galleria, an elegant arcade of designer clothing shops. The last seems an especially unkind memorial to an impecunious, black-cladded ascetic whose only extravagance was cheap Swiss cigars.

  Italy honoured other ‘titans’ (as they were labelled) apart from the famous four. Statues and routes also commemorate men such as Manin, Ricasoli, Azeglio and Crispi, though the last lost a few of his street names after the Second World War when people began to suspect him of having been a precursor of Mussolini. Patriots of the Romantic era had found it difficult to identify heroes since the Middle Ages, so it wa
s natural to exalt contemporary titans and to recall, as the poet Giosuè Carducci recalled in 1886, ‘those days of sun, liberty and glory of 1860’, that sublime ‘epoch of the infinitely great’. Before his death in 1876 the patriot Luigi Settembrini exhorted Italians to learn ‘what posterity will say of us. It will say that this was a generation of giants because it carried out a task which had been impossible for many generations and many centuries.’4 Settembrini did not stop to consider whether Italian giants, like most other giants, might sometimes be mythical.

  THE WISEST STATESMAN

  If Camillo Cavour had taken one on a gastronomic tour of Turin, it would have been an instructive and entertaining experience. Leaving his family’s eighteenth-century palazzo in what is now Via Cavour, he might take one to Al Bicerin, a tiny café next to the Baroque church of the Consolata, which still serves by the glass its famous concoction of coffee, hot chocolate and cream. From there we might amble to Del Cambio, his favourite restaurant next to the parliament, and thence to Fiorio, the café which housed the Whist Club, an institution later moved to the Piazza San Carlo above his favourite confectioner, the Confetteria Stratta. One would be tempted to eat a lot in a city so liberal with confetterie and gelaterie, though it might be wise in restaurants to omit the bollito misto, a local speciality consisting of boiled meat in a stew that often contains donkey.