What my country means to me
Every state is ultimately an attempt to realize an idea of justice. For human beings do not come together without rules or for no reason: on the contrary, it is a common idea of justice and right that brings them together.
For instance: a school of what were once revisionist historians, and who have by now become not only the orthodoxy but the old-fashioned orthodoxy, taught the very children in junion classes that the Magna Charta of England was not, as the previous orthodoxy ("the Whig interpretation of history") had taught, the foundation of all the liberties of the English people, but merely an account-settling between an irritated aristocracy and an unsuccessful king, preserving mainly the interests of the baronage. But these historians were thinking in modern terms. The society of King John Lackland's time was a much more earth-bound one, a society of farmers and tenants, where the king himself was nothing but the biggest farmer; and the fact that this Grand Charter settled the rights of property in land, dowry, tools for craftsmen, house, and home, meant, not only to the barons, but to churchmen, merchants, villeins of every class, a more important guarantee of freedom and personal dignity than any abstract statement of rights and duties. To know that the king was not allowed to force inconvenient marriages, to compel the building of bridges, to impose taxes without the consent of his council or parliament, was more significant, to every member of English society, than to be told, in the abstract, that they had a certain amount of rights that no court, perhaps, would or could enforce. This was a society bound to the soil, to its realities and its demands; when King John granted the various classes so many specific rights - under pressure or not - he taught them to think of themselves as free men with rights and prerogatives that nobody could break. The long road to liberty was open.
And so with Italy. The term Italy has a twofold meaning; on the one hand, a naturally beautiful geographical area, further embellished by 3000 years of history and the brightest artistic heritage of any country in the West, perhaps in the world; a territory of bewildering variety, speaking dozens of languges and with dozens of separate histories, almost a continent compacted into a middle-sized European country; a country, indeed, whose proper comparison is not with Britain or Spain or Sweden, but with continent-countries like India and China; a country whose beauty and antiquity makes for inevitable pride. On the other hand, it means a political entity that has only existed since 1861, much younger than most Western countries, arising out of the ruin of previous, semi-colonial regimes, and designed to resist their re-instatement.
To be somewhat simple, the one idea is the cause, the other the effect. It is true, as the Greek proverb says, that nobody loves his country because it is great, but because it is his. But any Italian citizen of the first half of the nineteenth century could not possibly have missed the distance between past grandeur and present misery. And the past grandeur was not only present in ancient ruins: it was the palaces the nobles lived in, the cities in which the people gathered, their churches, their squares, their city halls - an enduring, ill-kept, crumbling, but ever-present splendour, hanging over the impoverished and helpless contemporaries like a reproach. In Italy in the early nineteenth century, to be politically aware and to be shamingly conscious of one's poverty and helplessness were one and the same thing.
And the country would not bear it. The powers of Europe had decided how it would be; but Italy would not have it. And so, for fifty years, Europe had no peace, until the colonial power was driven out of the country, and, for the first time in eight hundred years, a single political power dominated most of the land from the Alps to Sicily. Revolt after revolt after revolt; hangings, torture, incarceration; oppression and spite; and finally, five great and bloody wars. Europe did not have peace until Italy was free.
And by "free", the fathers of my country meant both "independent of other countries" and "endowed with free, liberal institutions". It was only after independence that the possible conflict between nationalism and liberalism started becoming active; until the liberal state of Italy was set up in 1861, the two ideas went instinctively, intuitively together. They were part of the political experience of oppressed Italy. To hear a foreign soldier ordering a native to shift, in a foreign language or else in an arrogantly distorted echo of the language of the country, would explain well enough, to any spectator, the elemental link between language and political freedom, between nationality and individual rigths.
So Italy was made not only in the name of autonomous national development, but in the name of a stern and demanding set of ideals. The three-coloured flag stood not only for an identity and a language, but above all for a kind of government, for a certain relationship between rulers and ruled, for fixed laws made by Parliament, for certain rights and duties on both citizens and the State, and at the same time (and this is something that I feel is very typical of us, and tends to go unnoticed in the general sense of inefficiency and corruption) a presumption that there is something about the State that is really intimately connected with civic values, that demands, and rightly demands service, so that when one writes of "the State" or "the Republic", this has a slight but enduring overtone of duty to be done. All these things are wrapped up in the ideal that is Italy as the fathers of the nation made it; most typically in an insistence on duty above right, on fulfilling one's duty to one's fellow citizens and to the State. I do not know that these values are perfect; but they are what, for me, is bound up in the word, the idea, the thought of ITALIA; the thing for which good men and women have lived and died.
It is for this reason that there are things that mean "Italy" to me when others, even though they may be part of the national landscape, do not; to the extent that I can even say that, in certain periods, the reality of "Italy", the values incarnate in the word, the idea of justice and law that goes with the three-coloured flag, are not found in the country. From 1922 to 1943, the true Italy was in exile; it was with Toscanini in New York, with the Rosselli brothers and Sandro Pertini in France, wherever men and women had taken the memory of a country raised and built according to the ideal of freedom under the law. Italy for me is not the inert aggregate of so many people, so many buildings, so much land. It is not even the merely empirical operations of the society, economically, politically, socially; rather, it is the set of ideas and the memories of past and present heroes who fought and died for these ideas. It is something higher than the society, the ideal that shapes the society, that the society itself recognizes even where it does not respect it, and that, by its mere existence, judges and, where necessary, condemns the society. Italy is the Constitution, the patriots, the policemen murdered by the Mafia and by terrorism, the men and women who stand up for justice, the passion to tell the truth in spite of every fear, the flag that has stood in their eyes for all these things. Italy is the ideal that Italy has developped, of what is true and just and right.
In the last few years, a mixture of old problems grown gangrenous - a poorly designed, overmanned and wasteful state structure; a timid and corrupt capitalist class; a chronic shortage of capital blocked by small and inefficient banks - and the new and appalling political evils of Bossi and Berlusconi, have reduced my country to a state where it is literally impossible to see where recovery can start. The country is in devastating debt, ran by a frightful gang of incompetents, completely rudderless. Only the other day, I was IMing a fellow Italian who, like me, has found the atmosphere so depressing that she has left for Blair's Britain. I wonder whether the age of Berlusconi is not preparing, like that of Mussolini, a time where the best of Italy will be found, again, abroad, driven into exile not by tyranny but by untreatable and unteachable mismanagement backed by media power. But neither one nor a thousand Berlusconis can remove my love both for the Italy of history, the beautiful country, and for the ideal of Italy - an ideal for which good men have found it easy to go to their deaths.
For instance: a school of what were once revisionist historians, and who have by now become not only the orthodoxy but the old-fashioned orthodoxy, taught the very children in junion classes that the Magna Charta of England was not, as the previous orthodoxy ("the Whig interpretation of history") had taught, the foundation of all the liberties of the English people, but merely an account-settling between an irritated aristocracy and an unsuccessful king, preserving mainly the interests of the baronage. But these historians were thinking in modern terms. The society of King John Lackland's time was a much more earth-bound one, a society of farmers and tenants, where the king himself was nothing but the biggest farmer; and the fact that this Grand Charter settled the rights of property in land, dowry, tools for craftsmen, house, and home, meant, not only to the barons, but to churchmen, merchants, villeins of every class, a more important guarantee of freedom and personal dignity than any abstract statement of rights and duties. To know that the king was not allowed to force inconvenient marriages, to compel the building of bridges, to impose taxes without the consent of his council or parliament, was more significant, to every member of English society, than to be told, in the abstract, that they had a certain amount of rights that no court, perhaps, would or could enforce. This was a society bound to the soil, to its realities and its demands; when King John granted the various classes so many specific rights - under pressure or not - he taught them to think of themselves as free men with rights and prerogatives that nobody could break. The long road to liberty was open.
And so with Italy. The term Italy has a twofold meaning; on the one hand, a naturally beautiful geographical area, further embellished by 3000 years of history and the brightest artistic heritage of any country in the West, perhaps in the world; a territory of bewildering variety, speaking dozens of languges and with dozens of separate histories, almost a continent compacted into a middle-sized European country; a country, indeed, whose proper comparison is not with Britain or Spain or Sweden, but with continent-countries like India and China; a country whose beauty and antiquity makes for inevitable pride. On the other hand, it means a political entity that has only existed since 1861, much younger than most Western countries, arising out of the ruin of previous, semi-colonial regimes, and designed to resist their re-instatement.
To be somewhat simple, the one idea is the cause, the other the effect. It is true, as the Greek proverb says, that nobody loves his country because it is great, but because it is his. But any Italian citizen of the first half of the nineteenth century could not possibly have missed the distance between past grandeur and present misery. And the past grandeur was not only present in ancient ruins: it was the palaces the nobles lived in, the cities in which the people gathered, their churches, their squares, their city halls - an enduring, ill-kept, crumbling, but ever-present splendour, hanging over the impoverished and helpless contemporaries like a reproach. In Italy in the early nineteenth century, to be politically aware and to be shamingly conscious of one's poverty and helplessness were one and the same thing.
And the country would not bear it. The powers of Europe had decided how it would be; but Italy would not have it. And so, for fifty years, Europe had no peace, until the colonial power was driven out of the country, and, for the first time in eight hundred years, a single political power dominated most of the land from the Alps to Sicily. Revolt after revolt after revolt; hangings, torture, incarceration; oppression and spite; and finally, five great and bloody wars. Europe did not have peace until Italy was free.
And by "free", the fathers of my country meant both "independent of other countries" and "endowed with free, liberal institutions". It was only after independence that the possible conflict between nationalism and liberalism started becoming active; until the liberal state of Italy was set up in 1861, the two ideas went instinctively, intuitively together. They were part of the political experience of oppressed Italy. To hear a foreign soldier ordering a native to shift, in a foreign language or else in an arrogantly distorted echo of the language of the country, would explain well enough, to any spectator, the elemental link between language and political freedom, between nationality and individual rigths.
So Italy was made not only in the name of autonomous national development, but in the name of a stern and demanding set of ideals. The three-coloured flag stood not only for an identity and a language, but above all for a kind of government, for a certain relationship between rulers and ruled, for fixed laws made by Parliament, for certain rights and duties on both citizens and the State, and at the same time (and this is something that I feel is very typical of us, and tends to go unnoticed in the general sense of inefficiency and corruption) a presumption that there is something about the State that is really intimately connected with civic values, that demands, and rightly demands service, so that when one writes of "the State" or "the Republic", this has a slight but enduring overtone of duty to be done. All these things are wrapped up in the ideal that is Italy as the fathers of the nation made it; most typically in an insistence on duty above right, on fulfilling one's duty to one's fellow citizens and to the State. I do not know that these values are perfect; but they are what, for me, is bound up in the word, the idea, the thought of ITALIA; the thing for which good men and women have lived and died.
It is for this reason that there are things that mean "Italy" to me when others, even though they may be part of the national landscape, do not; to the extent that I can even say that, in certain periods, the reality of "Italy", the values incarnate in the word, the idea of justice and law that goes with the three-coloured flag, are not found in the country. From 1922 to 1943, the true Italy was in exile; it was with Toscanini in New York, with the Rosselli brothers and Sandro Pertini in France, wherever men and women had taken the memory of a country raised and built according to the ideal of freedom under the law. Italy for me is not the inert aggregate of so many people, so many buildings, so much land. It is not even the merely empirical operations of the society, economically, politically, socially; rather, it is the set of ideas and the memories of past and present heroes who fought and died for these ideas. It is something higher than the society, the ideal that shapes the society, that the society itself recognizes even where it does not respect it, and that, by its mere existence, judges and, where necessary, condemns the society. Italy is the Constitution, the patriots, the policemen murdered by the Mafia and by terrorism, the men and women who stand up for justice, the passion to tell the truth in spite of every fear, the flag that has stood in their eyes for all these things. Italy is the ideal that Italy has developped, of what is true and just and right.
In the last few years, a mixture of old problems grown gangrenous - a poorly designed, overmanned and wasteful state structure; a timid and corrupt capitalist class; a chronic shortage of capital blocked by small and inefficient banks - and the new and appalling political evils of Bossi and Berlusconi, have reduced my country to a state where it is literally impossible to see where recovery can start. The country is in devastating debt, ran by a frightful gang of incompetents, completely rudderless. Only the other day, I was IMing a fellow Italian who, like me, has found the atmosphere so depressing that she has left for Blair's Britain. I wonder whether the age of Berlusconi is not preparing, like that of Mussolini, a time where the best of Italy will be found, again, abroad, driven into exile not by tyranny but by untreatable and unteachable mismanagement backed by media power. But neither one nor a thousand Berlusconis can remove my love both for the Italy of history, the beautiful country, and for the ideal of Italy - an ideal for which good men have found it easy to go to their deaths.