The Pursuit of Italy: A History of a Land, Its Regions, and Their Peoples

Introduction

In the 1970s I visited a villa built in the fifteenth century by Lorenzo de’ Medici, the Florentine ruler known as ‘the Magnificent’. Shielded to the north by the wooded slopes of the Monti Pisani, it looked south over the Valley of the Arno; in the distance, beyond palm trees in the garden and olive groves a little farther off, you could see the Leaning Tower and the sea behind. The interior was of more recent decoration than the stark Renaissance façade: its enfilade of south-facing rooms breathed the nineteenth century, from their Empire furniture to the cluttered bric-à-brac of the fin-de-siècle. It was easy on later visits to imagine the house peopled with the noblemen of the Risorgimento, to envisage Count Cavour holding forth at the dining-room table with Baron Ricasoli or the Marquess d’Azeglio.

My host, Giovanni Tadini, was a dilettante of erudition and cosmopolitan tastes, an aristocrat of Piedmontese origin brought up in Siena. He remained a monarchist in republican Italy and stayed loyal to the Savoia, the exiled royal family; sometimes he talked, quite unpretentiously, about earlier Italian rulers such as the Medici as if they had been personal friends who had recently died. Showing me around his house, he might sigh at a portrait of Elisa Bonaparte, who had briefly ruled in Tuscany, or commend an etching of Santa Maria Novella, Alberti’s Renaissance masterpiece in Florence. On the piano he would open a book of caricatures of customers at the Caffè Michelangiolo or show me his first edition of The Struwwelpeter Alphabet, an Edwardian children’s book containing the immortally bad lines, ‘When the Empire wants a stitch in her / Send for Kipling and for Kitchener.’ As we wandered through rooms suffused with the scent of parma violets in brass jardinières, he would mix historical anecdotes with personal memories, recounted in a deep orotund voice and interspersed with much rolling laughter. Sometimes treated as an informal ambassador in his own country, he was once called upon to escort Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother to some of the great villas of Lucca and Florence as well as to Pisa cathedral at midnight. ‘Wherever we went,’ he recalled, ‘her chief anxiety was to avoid the cups of tea that everyone offered and to seek out the gin.’

Giovanni had had a governess, Miss Ramage, and spoke English with better syntax and a wider vocabulary than most Britons. But the governess had been gone for four decades, and some of her sayings had been amended in her absence. ‘As you can imagine,’ he would remark gurgling, ‘I felt like an elephant in a china shop’ or, concluding a salacious story with a rich chuckle, would say, ‘So I let them stew in their own gravy.’ If he heard an interesting remark he would ‘prop up’ his ears; if I answered one of his questions accurately, he would beam and say, ‘Hats off.’

After dinner I was examining a porcelain figurine of Cavour when a trim, elderly, silver-haired gentleman approached and introduced himself. He was Paolo Rossi, not the football player or the actor-musician but a distinguished politician and judge, a social democrat who in his youth had been an opponent of Mussolini. ‘So,’ he said, after seeing what I was looking at, ‘you are interested in the unification, in the Unità d’Italia?’ At the time I was a young journalist writing about Lebanon in the early years of its civil war, but I remembered enough from my schooldays to know what he was talking about.

My history teacher in the 1960s had been an old-fashioned liberal who, unfamiliar with the revisionist work of the great historian Denis Mack Smith, believed that Italy’s Risorgimento had been an exemplary case of liberty triumphing over repression. In consequence I was astounded by the next words of Signor Rossi, who twenty years earlier had been minister of education. ‘You know, Davide,’ he said in a low conspiratorial voice, as if nervously uttering a heresy, ‘Garibaldi did Italy a great disservice. If he had not invaded Sicily and Naples, we in the north would have the richest and most civilized state in Europe. ’ After looking round the room at the other guests, he added in an even lower voice, ‘Of course to the south we would have a neighbour like Egypt.’

My work soon took me to Palestine, then back to Lebanon and next to post-Franco Spain, so it was several years before I could return to Italy and go to Palermo to write a biography of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, the author of The Leopard. Yet the judge’s words stayed in my mind, and I started to question whether the unification of Italy had been either a necessary or a successful enterprise. I never accepted his view that the Bourbon kingdom of Naples would have been like Egypt, but I sometimes wondered whether Italians might have been better off divided into three, four or even more states. Italians seemed to me to be internationalist and (in a good sense) provincial but not nationalist except when their leaders forced or cajoled them into being so. In any case nations are not inevitable, as the people of Kurdistan well know, and sometimes their creation is so artificial that, as with Yugoslavia, they simply fall apart. In today’s Europe, which contains so many successful small nations, there surely would have been room for a flourishing Tuscany, perhaps the most civilized state of the eighteenth century, and a prosperous Venice, a once great republic with a thousand years of independent history.

Several years ago, I decided to stay in each of Italy’s twenty regions and thus acquire some knowledge of them and their numerous diversities. Traditional histories of Italy had been written from a centripetal view, as if Italian unity had been pre-ordained. I wanted to look at the peninsula’s centrifugal tendencies and inquire whether the lateness of unification and the troubles of the nation state had been not accidents of history but consequences of the peninsula’s past and its geography, which may have made it unsuitable territory for nationalism. Were there not just too many Italies for a successful unity?

I thought at first of writing about the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the periods of Lampedusa’s novel and of his life, but I found myself always wanting to go further back, and then further still, to find what, if anything, earlier generations had felt about the concept of Italy, what the Enlightenment had thought, what Dante had believed, what Machiavelli had wanted, what the Emperors Augustus, Charlemagne, Frederick ‘stupor mundi’ and Napoleon had all made of it. When I told my editor, Stuart Proffitt, that Cicero had possessed an idea of Italy, he said, ‘David, go back to Cicero.’

I have gone back to Cicero and to Virgil and to subsequent eras too, all of which thought of Italy in their own, often different fashions. The early chapters in this book do not pretend to be a history of the 2,000 years before Napoleon Bonaparte pounced on Italy and created havoc in 1796; rather they are a chronological sketch that attempts to identify the diversities and centrifugal inclinations in Italian history and to assess the way they influenced the course of the peninsula’s more recent history.

Since this is not an academic work, I have allowed myself to be quirkily subjective in my selection of topics and to give perhaps disproportionate space to those that seem especially illustrative of various moments or eras: the medieval frescoes in Siena, for instance, and the commemorative statuary in Turin, the early operas of Giuseppe Verdi and a peculiar film by the marxist director Bernardo Bertolucci. This is the book of a modest traveller as well as of an historian – and of a listener too, because for many years I have enjoyed listening to Italians telling me about their lives and about their histories. The incomparable Richard Cobb, who taught me nearly forty years ago at Oxford, used to say that much of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French history could be walked, seen, smelled and above all heard in cafés, buses and on park benches in Paris and Lyon, his favourite cities. Much the same is true of Italy, of eighteenth-century Naples, for example, or nineteenth-century Turin. I once visited a dismal café near the Porta Nuova station in the Piedmontese capital where the kind but gloomy padrona talked at length of the crimes of Neapolitans before ending with a sigh and the words, ‘But while we know how to work, they know how to live.’ Even today the differences between the two cities are so strong that I sometimes wonder that they belong to the same state. Was Naples, which 400 years ago was the second-largest city in Christendom, destined to become merely a regional capital with the status of Bari or Potenza?

I have encountered much kindness and inspiration in the thirty-five years since I first travelled to Italy. My earliest and perhaps most important debt is to my first friend there, Angelo Pardini, an elderly Tuscan contadino who farmed some scrappy acres of vines and olives owned by my parents in a village north-west of Lucca. His rent consisted of a few litres of murky oil and some demijohns of red and white wine, each of which was undrinkable in alternate years; in defence of his product he claimed, no doubt rightly, that it was pure and free of chemicals. He worked at other farms too and complained of troppo lavoro, too much work, yet he was often to be found in the early afternoon at the local trattoria, drinking a caffè corretto, coffee ‘corrected’ with a slug of grappa or Vecchia Romagna brandy, and he once admitted that he drank water only twice a year. His politics were a little confused: he voted christian democrat, he belonged to the communist trade union and he thought Mussolini had been a good chap, molto bravo.

Angelo was a man of great charm and much earthy wisdom. He took me to council meetings of the local comune in Pescaglia, introduced me to his fellow agricultural workers (mostly Sardinians) and occasionally drove me to his ancestral village, high in the hills above Camaiore, where his neighbour, a veteran of the First World War, sang songs celebrating the Battle of Vittorio Veneto against the Austrians in 1918. He had a lovely, vaguely Alsatian dog and gave me one of her puppies, but he had been careless about supervising its paternity, and a charming but very curious-looking creature was presented to me. La Giulia, as everyone called Angelo’s wife, was a lady so large and formidable that she could only fit into his Fiat Cinquecento when the passenger seat had been removed. She was a wonderful cook of rustic dishes using a few local ingredients and made sublime polenta, served on linen and cut with a cotton thread. In the thirty years since her death I have been searching unsuccessfully for polenta of that quality, a quest which may explain some unappreciative remarks made about that yellow maize porridge later in this book.

I would like to be able to write similarly about other friends and acquaintances, Italian and British, who have helped me try to understand Italy, but must limit myself to making a list of those, many of them alas dead, to whom I am particularly indebted: Harold Acton, Giancarlo Aragona, Vernon Bartlett, Tina Battistoni, Boris Biancheri, Gerardo di Bugnano, Giancarlo Carofiglio, Franco Cassano, Cristina Celestini, Rosso Dante, Leglio Deghe’ and his wife Susan, Deda Fezzi Price, Bona Frescobaldi, Dino Fruzza, Giuseppe Galasso, Michael Grant, Roberta Higgins, Carlo Knight, Denis Mack Smith, Donatella Manzottu, Roberto Martucci, Gabriele Pantucci, Emanuela Polo, Paolo Rossi, Cintia Rucellai, Steven Runciman, Giuseppe di Sarzana, Ignacio Segorbe and his wife Gola, Gaia Servadio, Xan Smiley, Giovanni Tadini, Riccardo Tomacelli, Nichi Vendola, Dennis Walters, Giles Watson and his wife Mariagrazia Gerardi, Edoardo Winspeare and Francesco Winspeare.

I am especially thankful to those friends and relations who have read all or parts of the manuscript and who have given much useful advice on the text: Christopher Duggan, my brother Andrew Gilmour, my wife Sarah Gilmour, Ramachandra Guha, Richard Jenkyns, Robin Lane Fox, Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi, Nicoletta Polo, Maria Luisa Radighieri and Beppe Severgnini. The book has also had the good fortune to attract two great editors on either side of the Atlantic, Stuart Proffitt in London and Elisabeth Sifton in New York. I am immensely grateful to them both for their inspired, sustained and invariably good advice. Gillon Aitken, my literary agent, has been as generous as ever with soothing wisdom, and I am indebted also to those involved in the production of the book, especially Eugénie Aperghis van Nispen, Richard Duguid, Jenny Fry and David Watson. I owe special and perennial gratitude to my wife Sarah, who has at all times been reassuring, supportive and extraordinarily patient.

NOTE ON NAMES

I have usually retained people’s Christian names in their original languages except for popes, kings and emperors whose anglicized forms are more familiar. I have, however, made the odd monarchical exception for the sake of clarity. In an era when Francis was a popular name for sovereigns, I have kept Francesco for the last King of the Two Sicilies and Franz-Josef for the penultimate Emperor of Austria. I have also decided not to inflict the name Humbert on those Kings of Italy baptized as Umberto.

1

Diverse Italies

FRACTURED GEOGRAPHY

Italy, complained Napoleon, is too long. It is indeed very long, the longest country in Europe outside Scandinavia and the Ukraine. It is also one of the thinnest, its peninsula about as narrow as Portugal and the Netherlands, broader only than Albania and Luxembourg. Ugo La Malfa, a republican politician of the twentieth century, liked to picture the country as a man with his feet in Africa and his hands clutching the Alps, trying to pull himself up into the middle of Europe.¹

We think of Italy as a country with a north and a south, but actually its 720 miles run diagonally through different climatic and vegetation zones from the town of Aosta in the north-west, where French is an official language, to the Salentine Peninsula in the Apulian south-east, where Greek is still spoken. On the battlements of the Castle of Otranto you feel you are in the Balkans, and in a sense you are: you can see the mountains of Greece and Albania across the water; you are closer to Istanbul and the Ukraine than you are to Aosta; the Black Sea is nearer than the west coast of Sardinia. When Apulia joined the Kingdom of Italy in 1861, the new state’s capital was Turin, a city so far away that Otranto is today closer to seventeen foreign capitals than it is to Turin. No wonder you sometimes hear Apulians refer to themselves as Greeks or Levantines. Sometimes they pretend that they are not also Italians.

In 1847 the Austrian chancellor, Prince Metternich, dismissed Italy as ‘une expression géographique’, a remark that has subsequently succeeded in annoying many people, especially Italians and historians. At the time Italy may have been more than a geographical expression – though it was still divided into eight independent states – but Metternich was repeating a view widely held for more than 2,000 years: Italy, like Iberia, may have been a geographical unit with natural borders but it had not been united since Roman times and did not seem to require political unity now or in the future.

Italy seems to begin with the myth of Hercules, the Greek hero who rescued a stray calf that had wandered across southern Italy and swum the Straits of Messina. The land the animal crossed duly became known as Italia, from the word ouitoulos or bull-calf, a word that has also bequeathed us, via Oscan and Latin, the word vitello or veal. A related theory, recorded by the Greek historian Timaeus, held that the ancient Greeks had been so impressed by the cattle in Italy that they had rewarded the land with the same name.

This may be the explanation for the origin of the name ‘Italia’, but it does not seem quite convincing. For centuries northern visitors have been scathing about the skinny appearance of Italian cows, especially the small, white, wide-horned ones bred mainly for pulling carts and drawing ploughs. The arid south of the peninsula, bereft of pasture and hay fields, can hardly have seemed a herdsman’s paradise even for the Greeks: the great Murge Plateau in Apulia cannot support cattle because it does not have streams. Italy today has to import more than half the milk it consumes and, if we associate the south with any kind of cattle now, it is with water buffaloes, producers of the milk used in making the soft white cheese mozzarella di bùfala. Yet the buffaloes are of Asian origin and were brought to Italy for ploughing in the early Middle Ages; later they went wild, roaming over Campania and the Pontine Marshes before they were domesticated once more in the eighteenth century. Used as draught animals rather than for milk and meat, the herds seemed to be dying out in the first half of the twentieth century. Their famous product did not become either famous or fashionable until the 1980s.

In the fifth century BC the word ‘Italia’ applied only to the Calabrian toe of the Italian ‘boot’, which was inhabited by a people known as the Bruttians. Later it was extended to Lucania and Campania, and later still the term spread northwards to describe Rome’s conquests in the peninsula. The Greek historians Herodotus and Thucydides did not regard the land beyond the River Po as a part of Italy, and indeed geographically the Po Valley belongs to the continental land-mass not the peninsula. But after the Romans had subdued its Gallic tribes and reached the Alps, that area too was added to Italia. By the second century BC another Greek historian, Polybius, confirmed that almost the whole of modern Italy was then Italia, though Roman poets of a later age sometimes called it by other names such as Hesperia, Ausonia, Saturnia terra and (appropriately for what is now the largest wine producer in the world) Oenotria, ‘the land of wine’.

There was one sharp check to this progress. In 91 BC some of Rome’s socii (subservient allies) rebelled and set up a state in the central Apennines called Italia, with a capital Corfinium (renamed Italica), administered by praetors, a senate and two consuls. The insurgents even produced coins showing the bull of Italia goring and about to rape the Roman wolf. They were defeated, however, in the ensuing Social War by Rome’s traditional tactic of brutality plus concessions, and no further attempt was made to set up a state called Italy for many centuries to come.

Within a century of the war, the earlier version of Italia was organized as an administrative unit by Augustus, the first Roman emperor, who divided it into eleven districts; the Istrian Peninsula, which was joined to Venetia, was the only part that does not belong to the modern state of Italy.a A later emperor, Diocletian, expanded Italia to include Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica and Raetia, a district that contained parts of what are now Switzerland, Bavaria and the Tyrol.

Augustan Italy, lauded by Virgil and his fellow poets, remained an inspiration to the poets of the Middle Ages, to Petrarch who sang of ‘the fair land / That the Apennines divide and the sea and the Alps surround’,² and to many others later on. Yet until the end of the eighteenth century Italy remained a literary idea, an abstract concept, an imaginary homeland or simply a sentimental urge. If at times people used it to express resentment at foreign occupation, its independence and unity were not political aspirations. And for a large majority of the population it meant nothing at all. Even in 1861, at the time of unification, some Sicilians thought L’Italia – or rather la Talia – was their new queen. A full century later, the social reformer Danilo Dolci encountered Sicilians who had never heard of Italy and asked him what it was.³

The geography we imbibe from school textbooks and atlases makes us think that Italy is peculiarly blessed in its position. According to the revolutionary patriot Giuseppe Mazzini, God had given Italians ‘the most clearly demarcated fatherland in Europe’.⁴ There it lies in the centre of the Mediterranean, protected in the north by its Alpine ramparts and everywhere else by its seas.

Italy is actually extremely unfortunate in its position, which has made it one of the most easily and frequently invaded places in the world. The Alps may look impressive but they have been penetrated without difficulty since the Bronze Age. In the twelfth century BC traders were bringing amber from the Baltic across the Alps to Etruria and Sardinia; by the Roman era seventeen of the twenty-three Alpine passes were being used. Few ramparts have been so consistently surmounted down the centuries. Hannibal brought his Carthaginian army over the Western Alps, while Alaric’s Goths and Attila’s Huns came from the east through the lower Julian and Carnic Alps. In 1796 General Bonaparte, as he then was, marched through the Maritime Alps between Nice and Genoa – allowing him to boast to his soldiers, ‘Annibal a forcé les Alpes – nous, nous les avons tournés’ – but four years later, now as first consul, he descended on Italy through five more northerly passes. Afterwards he had himself painted riding a white charger through the snows of the Great St Bernard, though in fact he had been led through them on a little grey mule.

Many other aggressors have emulated these invaders of Italy. Once they had got through the passes and on to the plain, they could speed up across the Po Valley, which was flat, inviting and difficult to defend, unless they were attacking from the west, in which case they were hindered by tributaries of the Po flowing southwards in parallel from the northern lakes: Milan was simple to capture, and those other ‘gateways’ to Italy, Turin and Verona, were not much harder. One reason why the eastern Roman Empire (Byzantium) lasted for a thousand years longer than its western counterpart was that it was much easier to defend. The Goths and Huns might rampage around the Balkans but they were halted at Constantinople by the city walls and a fleet that prevented them from crossing the Bosphorus and ravaging Asia Minor. Later the Byzantines performed a similar feat in reverse, blocking the Arabs in the seventh century and thus preventing them from pouring into eastern Europe, reaching Italy and doubtless islamicizing Rome. At a time, a century before Charlemagne, when Europe was militarily weak, Byzantium saved it and made possible its later rise to dominance. Apart from the French Riviera, the Italian peninsula has the only Mediterranean coasts that (except around Bari) have never been Muslim.

Its seas made Italy even more vulnerable than its mountains. With 4,500 miles of coastline, the peninsula and its islands are almost impossible to patrol. They can be attacked from all directions by predators from three continents.

Boats were man’s first means of transport, and by 5000 BC these had become sufficiently sturdy to undertake long sea voyages. In the fifth century BC Herodotus observed that a boat could sail 75 miles in twenty-four hours, a statistic suggesting that invaders of Italy from the Albanian shore could cross the 45 miles of the Strait of Otranto in summer daylight. The Adriatic was thus always a threat. To safeguard the Italian shore, one had to control the eastern shore with its useful harbours as well as Corfu, the island guarding the entrance to the strait. Venice could never have pretended to be the Queen (or Bride) of the Adriatic or the Lion of the Sea – let alone la Serenissima – if it had not bullied the Dalmatian city of Zara (now Zadar), if Trieste had become a serious rival or if Ragusa (later Dubrovnik) had developed a naval strength commensurate with its commercial power. During the great centuries of its republic, Venice was forced to construct its own integrated, protective world in the Adriatic, much of whose population was not Italian. No wonder that cartographers so often referred to the sea as the Gulf of Venice.

The islands were still more of a liability than the mainland coast. Despite its closeness to Tuscany, Elba in the sixteenth century was so frequently attacked by invaders from Africa (who were once known as the Barbary corsairs) that its inhabitants abandoned their homes along the shore and went to live in the hills. The same danger depopulated the coasts of Sardinia, whose forts and watchtowers did little to deter raiders questing for slaves; the island had already been an easy prey for invading Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Romans, Vandals, Byzantines, Arabs and Aragonese, as well as for more commercial colonialists in the form of Pisans and Genoese. Sicily had a similar problem on a grander scale, its position making it impossible for its inhabitants to control their destiny for the last two and a half thousand years. Syracuse’s defeat of the Athenians during the Peloponnesian War in the fifth century BC was the island’s most recent successful resistance against a serious invader. Since then, it has been too small and weak to defend itself, yet too large, too strategically important and (until the later Middle Ages) too fertile to escape invasions. It thus became a sort of prize for the dominant power in the western Mediterranean.

This Sicilian fate was in a less concentrated and continuous form the fate of the whole of Italy. Until the advent of Great Power diplomacy in the mid-nineteenth century, geography determined that for most of its history Italy had to conquer or be dominated by others. Its destinies could be those of either an imperial power or a type of colony but not those of a nation-state. A comparison with England, whose seas and navies have protected it, is illuminating. The Normans invaded Sicily in 1060 and England in 1066 and in both places established flourishing kingdoms, the Sicilian one being much the richer of the two. Over the subsequent millennium several English claimants crossed the Channel and seized the throne, but there has been only one successful invasion of England by a foreign army, the Dutch force in 1688, an event which was neither entirely foreign nor a typical invasion because William of Orange had been invited by powerful English politicians to overthrow the unpopular James II, his uncle and father-in-law. During the same nine centuries Italy was successfully invaded by Angevins, Aragonese, Germans (several times), French (many times), Spanish, Turks (briefly), Austrians (frequently), Russians, British and Americans.b None of them, however, was able to control the whole of the peninsula.

Whereas for England the North Sea is an obvious advantage, both economic and military, the virtues of the Mediterranean are less apparent to Italy. In fact the relationship of land and water around the peninsula is a complicated one. Despite its extensive coastline, Italy has only a few satisfactory ports, Genoa, La Spezia and Naples on the Tyrrhenian Sea, Taranto on the Ionian, Ancona, Brindisi and Venice in the Adriatic. Amalfi, which somehow managed to become a maritime power in the ninth century, has a very short beach and no proper harbour; it survived as a republic mainly by assisting Arab raiders attacking other parts of the Italian coast.c It did, however, have the advantages of Campanian hemp and flax for ropes and access to forests for building ships. Timber shortages in much of the rest of Italy hampered the construction of great navies. Although there were fine forests near the sea, especially in Tuscany and the Gargano Peninsula, the Mediterranean climate ensured that, once they had been cut down and the topsoil had been washed away, they did not regenerate properly, particularly in the south, where herds of goats roamed among the saplings. Much of the Sardinian coastline was thus covered by màcchia, the aromatic Mediterranean scrub that is good for the senses and perhaps for the soul but not for human welfare or the ecology of the zone.

The timber available in the peninsula was adequate during classical times, when deforestation had only just started, but it was not sufficient for Italians later on to compete with the Atlantic navies of England and Holland, which had access to Baltic forests, or the imperial fleets of Spain and Portugal. The shortage of oak, considered vital for ships’ hulls, was a perennial problem. The Venetians felled the forests of Dalmatia for their vessels, for the millions of stakes required for the foundations of their buildings and for the thousands of bricole, the posts strapped together in wigwam shape that mark the navigable channels of the lagoon. Naturally the forests could not suffice for very long. In the epoch of its triumph against the Turks at the Battle of Lepanto (1571), Venice was having to buy not only hulls but whole ships made in Holland.

A popular recollection of Naples today is of its restaurants on the seafront and its people merrily eating frutti di mare. Yet Italians have never been great fish-eaters, especially in the north, where they have usually preferred freshwater fish to the saltwater varieties. In classical times Roman plutocrats enjoyed the luxury of personal fishponds, while in the Middle Ages the people of Ferrara disdained the nearby Adriatic in favour of rivers and lakes where they could catch pike, tench and carp; the famous ‘merchant of Prato’, Francesco di Marco Datini, imported eels from the lagoons of Comacchio, near the sea north of Ravenna, bringing them over the Apennines to Tuscany.⁵ After the economic boom of the 1960s, when the poor were able to afford food other than bread, polenta, pasta and home-made soup, they preferred to buy meat rather than fish. Between 1960 and 1975 they multiplied their carnivorous intake by a factor of three, a trend encouraged by the Vatican’s relaxation of its rule forbidding meat to be eaten on Fridays. By the end of the century Italians were eating more meat than the British and less fish than the European average.

Fishing off the Italian coast has always been a seasonal and unpredictable occupation. Large numbers of tuna were traditionally slaughtered each year off Sardinia (as well as Sicily), but the ‘fishing’ (that is, channelling the victims into vast curtain nets) and the subsequent slaughter could only begin after the fish had swum into Sardinian waters in May, and could last for only a few weeks. A more general problem – though difficult to appreciate if you visit the thriving fish market in even a small port like Trani – is the scarcity of fish to catch: the only abundant species apart from tuna have been anchovies and sardines. In the mid-twentieth century – before the days of quotas – Italy had the largest fishing industry of those countries with a purely Mediterranean coastline, catching twenty times the tonnage of its nearest rival, Greece. Yet its total catch was only a sixth of that brought home by Britain’s fishing fleet.

Fernand Braudel, the great French historian, has been criticized for the allegedly ‘meaningless evolutionist terms’ he used in describing the Mediterranean water as ‘geologically too old’ and ‘biologically exhausted’. Yet he was right to stress the poverty of the Mediterranean compared to the Atlantic and to observe that ‘the much-vaunted frutti di mare are only moderately abundant’.⁶ The Mediterranean’s narrow coastal shelf and its lack of real tides restrict the growth of nutrients for fish. By contrast, warm Atlantic currents from the Gulf of Mexico reaching the waters and continental shelf of western Europe provide a dense mass of plankton for vast shoals to feed on around Britain, Iceland and Newfoundland. One historical consequence of Italy’s shortage of fish and fishermen was a shortage also of sailors. Venice had long been finding its crews in Dalmatia, and at the end of the sixteenth century Mediterranean states were recruiting sailors from northern Europe: following the failure of his Spanish Armada in 1588, Philip II apparently even tried to entice sailors from England.⁷

While Italy’s frontier geography has done little to impede people trying to enter the peninsula, its interior has hindered invaders as well as inhabitants from moving around very easily. The Alps have several advantages over the Apennines, Italy’s backbone which stretches in an arc for 870 miles down the peninsula and across to Sicily and the Egadi Islands. The northern mountains have rich summer pastures above the tree-line for sheep and cattle, their vegetation flourishes at a much higher altitude, and they have rivers and lakes that assist transport and commerce. They also contain the passes through which Italians can claim to have exported banking and capitalism to northern Europe in the Middle Ages. A mass of villages existed to supply their trade with guides and carts throughout the year: even in midwinter people and goods could come over the passes in sledges. While Milanese merchants of the thirteenth century built a route through the St Gotthard, from which they could penetrate Germany and the Low Countries via the Rhine, the Venetians preferred the Brenner, the lowest of the passes, which took them up to Innsbruck and thence to Nuremberg and Frankfurt. The size of the Transalpine trade – chiefly in fabrics, wine and spices – can be appreciated today by viewing the dimensions of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, the vast square building by the Rialto on the Grand Canal (until recently the central post office), where the German merchants had to live and work when they were in Venice.

The Apennines, by contrast, are a multi-layered barrier of mountains, torrents and ravines that are difficult to traverse; neighbouring villages in the Calabrian Sila traditionally knew little about each other because they were separated by deep chasms. There were numerous paths across the northern mountains in the Middle Ages, but these were mostly suitable only for mules: you could not transport wagon-loads of wine over them as you could up the Brenner; as late as 1750 there were only two tracts adequate for carts across the whole of the Tuscan-Emilian range. The Apennines have thus created an east – west divide in Italy that has been historically almost as significant as that between north and south. Communications across them were so bad before railways and tunnels that travellers between Rome and Ancona found it easier and cheaper to go all the way by boat – across the Tyrrhenian, Ionian and Adriatic Seas – rather than go straight across the interior.

These mountains do have a few advantages for their inhabitants. Their height – the Gran Sasso in the Abruzzi reaches 9,554 feet – enables them to preserve ice and snow even in summer, a prerequisite for developing local skills in making ice creams and sorbets. This accounts for the otherwise surprising fact that in the middle of August 1860, just after they had conquered Sicily, Garibaldi’s soldiers were seen climbing Aspromonte in the Calabrian toe to fetch snow for their refreshments.

A further advantage is the obstacles the mountainous interior has created for invading armies, which during the Second World War so benefited the Germans that British and American forces, despite their command of the air, took twenty-one months to fight their way from one end of Italy to the other. Mountains helped people retain their autonomy, as anyone who tried to rule the rugged interior of the Abruzzi soon learned. They also helped to preserve – and even create – cultural identities and variations for societies living only a couple of valleys apart. This again may seem a blessing to many of us: how fortunate we are to be able to contrast the Pisan-Lucchese Romanesque, dense and exquisite though internally sombre, with the sense of space and light in the Romanesque cathedrals of Bari and Trani. Yet a landscape which encourages cultural diversity is almost bound to promote political disunity. In the case of Italy it has done so since before Romulus founded Rome.

Few blessings, cultural or otherwise, come from the country’s two great volcanoes, Etna in Sicily – the largest active volcano in Europe – and Vesuvius looming over Naples. Yet lethal though volcanic eruptions have often been, earthquakes are a more frequent danger. There is scarcely a town in eastern Sicily or in the south-west of the peninsula that has not been devastated by them at least once. Since 1976 about 4,000 Italians have been killed in earthquakes in Friuli, Campania and Basilicata, Umbria and the Marches, Molise and Apulia, and in 2009 in the Abruzzi. In earlier periods the death toll was even higher. Three of the greatest southern writers of the twentieth century lost their closest relations in earthquakes: the novelist Ignazio Silone lost his mother in the Abruzzi in 1915, the philosopher Benedetto Croce lost his parents and only sister on Ischia in 1883, and the historian Gaetano Salvemini lost his wife, his sister and all five of his children at Messina in 1908, when an earthquake and the tsunami that followed it killed 70,000 people.

Rivers may be less destructive but, in the catalogue of geographical disadvantages that Italians must endure, they rank near the top. As classical writers attest, navigability in antiquity was better than it is now but it was never very good. In the first century BC the geographer Strabo wrote of the ‘harmonious arrangement’ of the rivers in France, which are today navigable for 4,000 miles. The navigable mileage of rivers in Italy is in the mid-hundreds: none of them has contributed to the growth in trade, industry and human movement comparable to that of the great rivers of northern Europe such as the Seine, the Rhône, the Rhine and the Elbe.

What benefits rivers bring to Italy are predictably in the north, which also enjoys summer rain, abundant springs and snow-fed Alpine streams. The Po is the only river in the country that is navigable for more than a fraction of its length; the waters of its delta contain high levels of plankton which support substantial numbers of fish; and together with its tributaries the river has created its great alluvial plain, Italy’s largest and most fertile expanse of arable land. Human ingenuity in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries also rearranged the area’s waters for economic use. By building one canal from the Ticino to Milan and another to Milan from the River Adda, the wealthy capital of Lombardy was linked to the waters of Lakes Como and Maggiore as well as to the tributaries of the Po.

Even so, the river is only relatively useful. It does not serve the north of Italy as the Marne, the Seine and the Oise serve northern France. Only one of its fourteen mouths on the Adriatic, the Po della Pila, can be used by boats. Although the Po itself is navigable for 300 miles, at least for small craft, seasonal fluctuations disrupt its flow; so does the enormous quantity of silt it carries to the sea. Some of its tributaries provide hydroelectricity and water for irrigation, as do the Piave and Adige rivers in the north-east. Yet none of them is navigable for more than a few miles – and even then only sporadically. The lower Adige is hampered by sandbanks at its mouth and in summer and early autumn it becomes, like the lower Piave, a small stream trickling between islands of dry pebbles.

The most hallowed river is Virgil’s ‘gentle Tiber’, the second-longest in the country, whose relationship with Rome is as famous as that of the Seine flowing through Paris or the Thames progressing through London. The founders of the Eternal City chose their site well: it had defensible hills, the salt plains of Ostia and a water supply adequate for its needs until it became a great city requiring aqueducts. Yet perhaps they over-estimated the value of its river. Until the late nineteenth century the Tiber was anything but gentle and so prone to flooding that no other city had been built on it in antiquity. As late as 1875, in the last quixotic venture of his life, Giuseppe Garibaldi tried to have the river diverted to prevent it from flooding the capital.

Another problem, inevitably, was navigability. In classical times boats could ply between the port of Ostia and Rome and continue upstream for about 20 miles further. Now the Tiber is navigable only within the city itself. By contrast boats can go up the Thames to Lechlade – barely a dozen miles from its source – while the Seine, which flows slowly and majestically for nearly 500 miles, is so welcoming to vessels that it boasts a great port (Rouen) 75 miles from the sea.

The other rivers of the Apennines are no more useful than the Tiber. Even in the Middle Ages the Arno was either a torrent or a trickle, and transporting Carrara marble from Pisa to Florence sometimes required winching boats to trees along the river bank. Many rivers are virtually useless: while they cascade in winter, in summer they are too dry for irrigation; in Apulia some of them even fail to reach the sea. Torrents are the main agent of erosion in the Apennines, rushing down the mountain sides and bringing large quantities of silt and stones with them; on reaching the plain, some rivers merely replenish the coastal marshes. Deforestation has made the situation worse, hastening soil erosion and leading to floods, silting and the formation of malarial marshland. In the south this tree-clearing dates from classical times, even before the Romans reached the area, and has continued ever since, a process accelerated by the requirements of goats, dockyards, railway sleepers and telegraph poles. Sicily was once a land of forests, of hardwoods as well as pines, but by the late twentieth century less than 5 per cent of the island was covered by trees.

Garibaldi’s campaign to divert the Tiber was motivated by the desire to prevent not only floods but also malaria. Rivers from the Volscian and Alban hills, to the east of Rome, poured so much water on to the coastal plain that they formed the Pontine Marshes, a long, stagnant expanse producing perfect conditions for the diffusion of malaria. Further north the Tuscan Maremma was a similar hazard; few people lived there until it was successfully drained in the 1950s. Only after Garibaldi’s death were mosquitoes identified as the cause of malaria, which each year killed 15,000 people and debilitated many times that number. It was not until 1962 that Italy was officially declared a malaria-free country.

Stressing Italy’s physical disadvantages helps explain the difficulties they have created for the cause of national unity. It is also useful to clarify why the country is not as rich as foreigners have often supposed it to be. There are many fertile parts of Italy, not just the Po Valley with its fields of maize and wheat but areas such as the lower Arno, the high Valtellina, the Capuan Plain (now controlled by the Camorra), the lemon groves of Palermo (recently destroyed by the Mafia) and the vineyards and olive groves of the Salentine Peninsula. Wine is grown in most areas except northern Veneto, western Piedmont, central Sicily and the Po Valley. Yet much of the peninsula is covered by mountains, which many Italians detest, seeing them as a cause of poverty and a waste of space. They are also an impediment to access and construction and in consequence encourage the building of endless periferìa over easier terrain. It sometimes seems there is barely a plain or a valley that has not been deemed a suitable site for development. Between 1950 and 2005 the Italian countryside lost to asphalt and concrete a total of 3.66 million hectares, a figure larger than the combined size of Tuscany and Umbria.⁸

Many foreigners, like me, have had the good fortune to sit watching the fireflies under a Tuscan pergola, drinking Chianti wine, pouring Lucchese olive oil over our rocket salads and feeling that the material life does not have much more to offer. There seems to be an abundance of good things, of funghi porcini and bistecca fiorentina, of figs and pulses and roasted vegetables, of hams hanging in the cantina awaiting the next visit. Tuscany enjoys a better climate, more fertile land and richer minerals than other parts of Italy; its share-cropping peasants, the ballad-singing contadini, were historically better off than agricultural workers elsewhere, and their traditional soup, ribollita, was a good deal more nutritious than polenta, the dismal and unhealthy staple of the north.

Yet even here, in one of the happiest and most civilized regions of the world, the land is not very productive. Even when Florence was the artistic and banking centre of the world, it was unable to survive on produce from its countryside for more than five months a year: in the four centuries after 1375 it experienced on average a famine in every fourth year, and in the sixteenth century the Medici grand duke had to import grain from as far away as England, Poland and Flanders. When Vernon Bartlett, a distinguished English journalist, settled in Tuscany after the Second World War, some of his neighbours, who had been prisoners in Britain, talked ‘with envious affection of the rich English soil’.⁹ Postcards and prosciutto, Capri and Chianti, gondolas and gorgonzola – such associations tell us and remind us of the Italy we want to remember.

ITALIAN PEOPLES

If you look through the telephone directory of Bari in Apulia you will be struck by the quantity of Italian surnames that indicate a foreign ancestry. There are some people named Greco, a good number called Spagnolo or Spagnuolo, and a great many with the name Albano or Albanese – not recent immigrants from Albania but people whose ancestors fled before the Turkish advances to the Adriatic in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The names testify to what Italy has been for most of its history since the fall of Rome: a land of desire for settlers, immigrants and foreign conquerors. Its accessibility and wealth – in parts – still make it a goal for migrants, though these now come from somewhat further away. By 2009 Italy contained more than 600,000 migrants from a single country, Romania, as well as substantial numbers of Moroccans, Albanians, Chinese, South Americans and sub-Saharan Africans. The Tuscan town of Prato officially has 10,000 Chinese residents and unofficially double that number.¹⁰ Perhaps it is their presence that has encouraged the arrival of a new type of immigrant, Manchurian prostitutes, who have annoyed their predecessors in the trade, mainly Brazilians and Africans, by charging less, working harder and doing their job in car-parks, alleyways and public conveniences. Many immigrants enter Italy illegally not because they have relations or good prospects there but because it is easier to reach than other countries.

If we agree with the French historian Lucien Febvre that the concept of prehistory is absurd, we should first acknowledge the Mesolithic people who were living in the Italian peninsula around 10,000 BC at the end of the Ice Age’s last freezing spell. They were nomads who hunted and gathered fruit and moved north as the earth warmed up.

Around 7000 BC, before Britain became an island, another people, now known as Neolithic, began to arrive in Europe from south-west Asia. They penetrated Italy by sea and by land through the Balkans, absorbing their more primitive predecessors as they moved west. By 6000 BC they were in Apulia; soon afterwards they reached Calabria and Sicily; and from there they sent fresh expeditions to Corsica and Sardinia. They seem to have had a compulsion to go west, like Tennyson’s Ulysses, ‘to sail beyond the sunset and … may be … touch the Happy Isles’. Reflecting on their pioneering spirit, the archaeologist Barry Cunliffe suggests they had ‘a desire to see what lies beyond, drawn on westwards, perhaps, by the fascination of the setting sun’.¹¹

There was little diversity among the Neolithic people, who had reached and settled in northern Europe by 4000 BC. They cleared land with stone axes, they grew wheat and barley, kept sheep, cattle and pigs, and built themselves homes instead of living in caves. The differences that emerged among them were fashioned by climate, vegetation and resources. The inhabitants of Britain and Ireland could not have initiated what we call the Bronze Age without a supply of copper and tin needed for the alloy. Along the Mediterranean coasts people used olive oil for their food and their lamps; further north, where olives did not grow, they relied on animal fats for nourishment and tallow