The proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy (March 17, 1861) marked the end of a long wait, the 'realization of a dream', which occurred at different times and in ways most successful and widely unexpected, but strongly desired by those who were the closest advisors and prepared the conditions: Mazzini Action Party, the National Society of Manin, Garibaldi, flour, and the Count of Cavour, who was the secret inspiration.
The Italian revolution, the process which was given the name 'Renaissance' was, in fact, started much earlier, at the end of the eighteenth century, when the 'Italian Jacobins', inflamed by radical ideas and political and social changes introduced by the French Revolution, they realized the limitations of the reform of the principles 'enlightened' and understood that the necessary conditions of freedom and progress, in the peninsula, were the unity and independence of Italian people from foreign domination: what were the Austrian Empire or the French Republic.
The 'people' Italian, the nation, Italy as an idea and feeling existed for centuries and had their roots in the unity of language, culture and life, sharing a territory, a common history. This, despite the multiplicity and division policy which, for centuries, was the negative characteristic of the Italians and was perceived as such because the root cause of rivalries and incessant struggles between states and the consequent fall of the peninsula under the rule of national foreign powers: the Spaniards, the French the Austrians.
was Machiavelli in the sixteenth century, questions were raised about the creation of a single Italian state, which he wanted modeled on the Constitution of the Roman Republic and featuring an army of people able to defend its borders, even if they have entrusted the implementation to a "Prince" demiurge, with great political virtues. But it was for the moment, only a hypothesis generation, born from his acute mind a scholar of political events, which clashed, however, with three opposing forces: the political oligarchies, social and economic effects of various Italian states, particularistic ideologies, the Church, which took advantage of that division for its ambitions of absolute dominion over temporalistic conscience and his claims, based on deception of the false 'Donation of Constantine', and, therefore, the fed, organic establishing alliances with the political power to the detriment of freedom.
was the French Revolution, that breaking up the feudal structure and the regime of privilege of the nobility and clergy, in the name of three words 'liberty, equality, fraternity' (guiding ideas of any civilization worthy of the name), gave the young 'Jacobins' Italian surge and the belief in a possible ransom and 'revival' of the nation. The unity and independence of Italy passed, in fact, from the sphere of pure desire to ground the concrete facts of political struggle and revolutionary period in 1796-99, helped in part and together hampered by the presence of French arms in Italy.
The patriots of all the Italian States, found themselves under the single tricolor flag, which symbolized the spiritual unity and was inaugurated January 7, 1976 in Reggio Emilia, where, with the union of the four cities of Reggio, Modena, Bologna Ferrara, affrancatesi ducal and papal domination, the Republic had risen Cispadana: 'the first of the new democratic state Republican Italy' (Louis Salvatorelli).
Against clichés prevalent today, while preparing a celebration of 150 years of the Italian State, ambiguous, and skin tones populist - almost a celebration of the World Cup, the feeling was unitary, since then spread to all classes regionalistic and knew no bounds. Lombardy, where he instituted before the Cisalpine Republic and then the Italian Republic and the subsequent Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy, was the region where the national aspirations found one of the main land of culture. In Milan Melchiorre Gioia won the competition held by the Lombard with a dissertation, which demonstrates that the time was ripe for the formation of a single Italian state, independent, free and united Republican. And Venice, which now seem to prevail over the pro-Hapsburg nostalgia, suffered a real trauma for the betrayal of Napoleon at the peace of Campoformio, as witnessed by Ugo Foscolo.
How the South is the vain and misguided attempt at journalistic history, openly biased and instrumental, to accredit the occurrence of southern populations as anti-French riots against foreigners. Be, then, against the French, it meant encouraging the Austrian hegemony. To exit from the dilemma the only way was that taken by the Jacobins, who entertained with the French a dialectical relationship, given that their main intention was to break the feudal domain and in the short-lived Neapolitan Republic, set the subversion of the feudal system, which failed to achieve, and that was subsequently implemented in 1806, in fact, by the French. The Sanfedism was and remains an obscurantist and retrograde reaction, despite the contrary opinion of the 'revisionists'.
Historical revisionism, in its most serious, has the merit of bringing the focus of the reasons for those changes are overridden by the incessant motion of the story. And, in this case today we know that in the revolt of the people from Calabria and Naples Lazzaroni, suborn by Cardinal Ruffo, as well as the so-called 'bandits' post-unification, there were needs for survival, justice and empowerment, which can not be underestimated in any way and know the limits inherent innovative processes that developed during the nineteenth century. But the fundamental coordinates of history can not be blacked out and put in the cellar.
No revisionism can make us forget that the Renaissance was the historical process through which, in Italy, was passed the social-political system of feudalism with all its accompanying moral and material oppression of the people and the new state unit - which was the major outcome, with all the compromises that were necessary to achieve it, with all the shortcomings that have influenced heavily to this day, the life of the nation, has transformed from Italians in subjects free citizens, equal before the law. Of course civil equality was only the first important step in a journey that is still largely done and it still has as goal to be achieved, economic and social equality, that 'freedom right', ie, that it was in Mazzini's democratic aspirations and achieve. But in the meantime, you should mark the distinction between el Risorgimento 'Antirisorgimento perennial, which now regains strength through blocking forces of the traditional mental and social conservation.
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