“Oh mia patria sì bella e perduta!” [Oh, my country, so beautiful and lost]

                                                                      --From Verdi’s “Nabucco”

There is something quite bizarre going on in Italy as I write this piece. In the first place there are ongoing enthusiastic celebrations to commemorate the one hundred-and-fifty years of Italian unification. Recently, there was also the indignant reaction of a mayor of a northern Lombardia city at the fact that somebody, at three in the morning, had dared to surreptitiously plant the Italian flag on the balcony of city hall. He did not want the flag there because he belongs to the Lega party which professes no allegiance to the country called Italy; he and his fellow leghistas consider themselves a separate people—il popolo Padano, mostly in Lombardia and Veneto, i.e., the thousands of people that paradoxically are promoting the separation of Veneto and Lombardia from the rest of Italy, as a separate independent country, while at the same time Europe continues to expand and unify. The Lega as a name is a historical throw back to the 12th century “lega” when some northern Italian cities made a temporary alliance (that is what lega means) to assert their independence from the Holy Roman German emperor. Obviously those people, the very people from which the original impetus for Italian unification came, have now no intention to celebrate the one hundred-and-fifty anniversary of its unification. They now have another kind of unification in mind characterized by economic and even racial considerations. They often disparagingly call the Southern Italians “terroni” or agricultural people.

Meanwhile, together with these assorted celebrations and protests with various motives and political agendas, we have the shameful spectacle of a Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, who has recently been indicted for his wild and decadent “bongo bongo” parties where he has allegedly seduced a minor, quite reminiscent of the ancient times of Caligula and Nero. An overall scene this, worthy of a Fellini movie complete with clowns and Roman circuses and sages on stage, which must have both Garibaldi, the general who unified Italy, and De Gasperi, the first prime minister of Italy after World War II, twisting in their graves.

How did we get to this sorry stage of events? One could of course begin in a Vichian key with the Romans and analyze how the virtuous Romans of the Republic arrived at the imperial Nero and Caligula and how the Empire fell not so much from without because of the barbarians’ pressure but from within for moral decadence. But that would take us too far afield. Or one could take a hard look at how the unification of 1861 culminated with one of its architects, Camillo Benso di Cavour, declaring that “now that we have made Italy, we need to make the Italians,” perfect example of the cart put before the horse reminiscent of today’s united Europe without a sense of cultural identity…; but I have already written whole articles for Ovi on those subjects. I have also brought to bear on my analysis Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s prophetic novel Il Gattopardo.

Let us rather take a brief look at the Italian national anthem and see if it mirrors a mind-set which has brought about today’s predicament. This lead theme has been inspired by sundry musings on Verdi’s opera Nabucco which have been placed on the table in a friend’s forum to which I participate. Whether or not it will ultimately address the conundrum there expressed, I know not but, for all its worth, I will not fail to share those reflections with them. Let’s look in the first place at the very first stanza of the so called hymn of Mameli, a poem which eventually was transformed into the national anthem. Mameli was a patriot who at the age of 22 died fighting the occupiers of northern Italy, the Austrians, ironically the German speaking Austrians are the same people to which some German speaking Italians of the Friuli region would now like to be annexed. Be that as it may, it made sense that such a patriotic poem would eventually be proposed and accepted as the national anthem. I transcribe it in its entirety below: