Italy is about to mark the 150th anniversary of its unification, but in a country where local identity often trumps any sense of nationhood, there are more party poopers than candles on the birthday cake.
With Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi mired in sex and corruption scandals and the country’s image abroad at a low point, even the government’s decision to declare March 17 a public holiday did not manage to inject a sorely needed dose of pride and unity.
“Given the real problems of the country, this is pretty petty stuff. But this tug of war about March 17 is a symptom of widespread confusion,” said Giovanni Belardelli, a commentator for the Corriere della Sera newspaper.
Indeed, Italy’s 150th birthday party has shone a magnifying glass more on what divides the country than what unites it.
Two Cabinet ministers from the Northern League, a pro-devolution party in Berlusconi’s coalition government, voted against making the day a holiday and a third did not attend the meeting.
This sparked fresh accusations, including from a former Italian president, that their long-term aim is not federalism but secession by the prosperous north.
The confusion was such that the education minister vowed that schools would be open but was overruled. Business leaders said the last thing the economy needed was another non-working day so a holiday later in the year was scrapped in exchange.
“This anniversary is very artificial. The people have no feeling for it because it does not relate at all to the reality of the country,” said Manlio Graziano, author of the book The Failure of Italian Nationhood.
“We are celebrating unity at a time when the government is weak and discredited and divided ... it seems that the ruling class want it more than the people,” said Graziano, who teaches at Paris’ Sorbonne university.
Italy was only united as a single political entity in 1861 after the overthrow of the Kingdom of Naples by a nationalist movement led by the revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi and backed by the rival Kingdom of Piedmont.
However, strong regional identities remain firmly entrenched throughout the country with a particularly marked division between northern Italy and the poorer southern half.
Last week in the northern Veneto region youths burned an effigy of Garibaldi, who was known as the “Hero of Two Worlds” because he also took part in a South American revolution. Around his neck was a sign reading “the hero of trash.”
One hundred and fifty years of putative unity is a drop in the bucket of time for a peninsula that has seen the rise and fall of empires, wars between city-states, invasions, domination by the papacy and two world wars that shifted northern borders.
During the debate, Luis Burnwalder, president of the bilingual Alto Adige region which Austria ceded to Italy after World War One, said his region had “nothing to celebrate.”
This sparked protests from area hoteliers, who feared a boycott by “Italian tourists.”
The biggest party pooper by far has been the Northern League, whose battle cry is “Roma Ladrona” (Rome the big thief) because, its political apostles preach, the capital takes taxes from the hard-working civic north and waste it on the slothful south.
Critics say the League is racist and xenophobic and harbors dreams of an independent “Padania” (a name derived from the Latin word for the river Po) made up of eight regions.
League militants call southerners Terroni, an inflammatory derogative roughly meaning “ignorant peasant” which Italy’s highest court ruled in 2005 was offensive.
The north-south divide hangs around the country’s neck.
In a recent poll for the La Repubblica newspaper, 77 percent of northern Italians believed that they were more respectful of laws and 50 percent of them believed that they have a stronger worth ethic than southerners. Southerners strongly disagreed.
In 1861, statesman Massimo d’Azeglio uttered the famous phrase: “We have made Italy. Now we have to make Italians.” One hundred and fifty years on, that is still a work in progress.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema