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Italy History |
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A specific Italian history is hard to identify.
Italy wasn't formally a united country until 1861, and
the history of the peninsula after the Romans is more
one of warring city states and colonization and
annexation by foreign powers. It's almost inconceivable
now that Italy should fragment once again, but the
regional differences remain strong and have even, in
recent years, become a major factor in Italian politics
Early times
A smattering of remains exist from the Neanderthals who
occupied the Italian peninsula half a million years ago,
but the main period of colonization began after the last
Ice Age. Evidence of Paleolithic settlements dates from
this time, around 20,000 BC, the next development being
the spread of Neolithic tribes across the peninsula,
between 5000 and 6000 years ago. More sophisticated
tribes developed towards the end of the prehistoric
period, between 2400 and 1800 BC; those who left the
most visible traces were the Ligurians (who inhabited a
much greater area than modern Liguria), the Siculi of
southern Italy and Latium, and the Sards , who farmed
and raised livestock on Sardinia. More advanced still
were migrant groups from the eastern Mediterranean, who
introduced the techniques of working copper. Later,
various Bronze Age societies (1600-1000 BC) built a
network of farms and villages in the Apennines, and on
the Sicilian and southern coasts, the latter population
trading with Mycenaeans in Greece.
Other tribes brought Indo-European languages into Italy.
The Veneti, Latins and Umbrii moved down the peninsula
from the north, whilst the Piceni and the Messapians in
Puglia crossed the Adriatic from what is now Croatia.
The artificial line between prehistory and history is
drawn around the eighth century BC, with the arrival of
the Phoenician alphabet and writing system. Sailing west
along the African coast, the Phoenicians established
colonies in Sicily and Sardinia, going on to build trade
links between Carthage and southern Italy. These soon
encouraged the arrival of the Carthaginians , who set
themselves up on Sicily, Sardinia and the Latium coast,
at the same time as both Greeks and Etruscans were
gaining influence.
Etruscans and Greeks
Greek settlers colonized parts of the Tuscan coast and
the Bay of Naples in the eighth century BC, moving on to
Naxos on Sicily's Ionian coast, and founding the city of
Syracuse in the year 736 BC. The colonies they
established in Sicily and southern Italy came to be
known as Magna Graecia . Along with Etruscan cities to
the north they were the earliest Italian civilizations
to leave substantial buildings and written records.
The Greek settlements were hugely successful,
introducing the vine and the olive to Italy, and
establishing a high-yielding agricultural system. Cities
like Syracuse and Tarentum were wealthier and more
sophisticated than those on mainland Greece, dominating
trade in the central Mediterranean, despite competition
from Carthage. Ruins such as the temples of Agrigento
and Selinunte , the fortified walls around Gela, and the
theatres at Syracuse and Taormina on Sicily attest to a
great prosperity, and Magna Graecia became an enriching
influence on the culture of the Greek homeland -
Archimedes, Aeschylus and Empedocles were all from
Sicily. Yet these colonies suffered from the same
factionalism as the Greek states, and the cities of
Tarentum, Metapontum, Sybaris and Croton were united
only when faced with the threat of outside invasion.
From 400 BC, after Sybaris was razed to the ground, the
other colonies went into irreversible economic decline,
to become satellite states of Rome.
The Etruscans were the other major civilization of the
period, mostly living in the area between the Tiber and
Arno rivers. Their language, known mostly from funerary
texts, is one of the last relics of an ancient language
common to the Mediterranean. Some say they arrived in
Italy around the ninth century BC from western Anatolia,
others that they came from the north, and a third
hypothesis places their origins in Etruria. Whatever the
case, they set up a cluster of twelve city states in
northern Italy, traded with Greek colonies to the south
and were the most powerful people in northern Italy by
the sixth century BC, edging out the indigenous
population of Ligurians, Latins and Sabines. Tomb
frescoes in Umbria and Lazio depict a refined and
luxurious culture with highly developed systems of
divination, based on the reading of animal entrails and
the flight of birds. Herodotus wrote that the Etruscans
recorded their ancestry along the female line, and tomb
excavations last century revealed that women were buried
in special sarcophagi carved with their names. Well-preserved
chamber tombs with wall paintings exist at Cerveteri and
Tarquinia , the two major sites in Italy. The Etruscans
were technically advanced, creating new agricultural
land through irrigation and building their cities on
ramparted hilltops - a pattern of settlement that has
left a permanent mark on central Italy. Their kingdom
contracted, however, after invasions by the Cumans ,
Syracusans and Gauls , and was eventually forced into
alliance with the embryonic Roman state.
Roman Italy
The growth of Rome , a border town between the Etruscans
and the Latins, gained impetus around 600 BC from a
coalition of Latin and Sabine communities. The Tarquins
, an Etruscan dynasty, oversaw the early expansion, but
in 509 BC the Romans ejected the Etruscan royal family
and became a republic , with power shared jointly
between two consuls, both elected for one year. Further
changes came half a century later, after a protracted
class struggle that resulted in the Law of the Twelve
Tables , which made patricians and plebeians equal. Thus
stabilized, the Romans set out to systematically conquer
the northern peninsula, and after the fall of Veii in
396 BC, succeeded in capturing Sutri and Nepi , towns
which Livy considered the "barriers and gateways of
Etruria". Various wars and truces with other cities
brought about agreements to pay harsh tributes.
The Gauls captured Rome in 390, refusing to leave until
they had received a vast payment, but this proved a
temporary reversal. The Romans took Campania and the
fertile land of Puglia after defeating the Samnites in
battles over a period of 35 years. They then set their
sights on the wealthy Greek colonies to the south,
including Tarentum, whose inhabitants turned to the
Greek king, Pyrrhus of Epirus for military support. He
initially repelled the Roman invaders, but lost his
advantage and was defeated at Beneventum in 275 BC. The
Romans had by then established their rule in most of
southern Italy, and now became a threat to Carthage. In
264 they had the chance of obtaining Sicily , when the
Mamertines, a mercenary army in control of Messina,
appealed to them for help against the Carthaginians. The
Romans obliged - sparking off the First Punic War - and
took most of the island, together with Sardinia and
Corsica. With their victory in 222 BC over the Gauls in
the Po Valley, all Italy was now under Roman control.
They also turned a subsequent military threat to their
advantage, in what came to be known as the Second Punic
War . The Carthaginians had watched the spread of Roman
power across the Mediterranean with some alarm, and at
the end of the third century BC they allowed Hannibal to
make an Alpine crossing into Italy with his army of
infantry, horsemen and elephants. Hannibal crushed the
Roman legions at Lago Trasimeno and Cannae (216 BC), and
then halted at Capua. With remarkable cool, considering
Hannibal's proximity, Scipio set sail on a retaliatory
mission to the Carthaginian territory of Spain , taking
Cartagena, and continuing his journey into Africa . The
Carthaginians recalled Hannibal, who was finally
defeated by Roman troops at Zama in 202 BC. It was
another fifty years before Carthage was taken, closely
followed by all of Spain, but the Romans were busy in
the meantime adding Macedonian Greece to their territory.
These conquests gave Roman citizens a tax-free existence
subsidized by captured treasure, but society was sharply
divided into those enjoying the benefits, and those who
were not. The former belonged mostly to the senatorial
party , who ignored demands for reform by their
opposition, the popular party. The radical reforms
sponsored by the tribune Gaius Gracchus came too close
to democracy for the senatorial party, whose declaration
of martial law was followed by the assassination of
Gracchus. The majority of people realized that the only
hope of gaining influence was through the army, but
General Gaius Marius , when put into power, was
ineffective against the senatorial clique, who
systematically picked off the new regime.
The first century BC saw civil strife on an
unprecedented scale. Although Marius was still in power,
another general, Sulla, was in the ascendancy, leading
military campaigns against northern invaders and
rebellious subjects in the south. Sulla subsequently
took power and established his dictatorship in Rome,
throwing out a populist government which had formed
while he was away on a campaign in the east. Murder and
exile were common, and cities which had sided with
Marius during their struggle for power were punished
with massacres and destruction. Thousands of Sulla's war
veterans were given confiscated land, but much of it was
laid to waste. In 73 BC a gladiator named Spartacus led
70,000 dispossessed farmers and escaped slaves in a
revolt, which lasted for two years before they were
defeated by the legions.
Barbarians and Byzantines
In the middle of the third century, incursions by Goths
in Greece, the Balkans and Asia, and the Franks and
Alamanni in Gaul foreshadowed the collapse of the empire.
Aurelian (270-75) re-established some order after
terrible civil wars, to be followed by Diocletian
(284-305), whose persecution of Christians produced many
of the Church's present-day saints. Plagues had
decimated the population, but problems of a huge but
static economy were compounded by the doubling in size
of the army at this time to about half a million men. To
ease administration, Diocletian divided the empire into
two halves, east and west, basing himself as ruler of
the western empire in Mediolanum (Milan). This measure
brought about a relative recovery, coinciding with the
rise of Christianity , which was declared the state
religion during the reign of Constantine (306-337).
Constantinople , capital of the eastern empire, became a
thriving trading and manufacturing city, while Rome
itself went into decline, as the enlargement of the
senatorial estates and the impoverishment of the lower
classes gave rise to something comparable to a primitive
feudal system.
Barbarians (meaning outsiders, or foreigners) had been
crossing the border into the empire since 376 AD, when
the Ostrogoths were driven from their kingdom in
southern Russia by the Huns , a tribe of ferocious
horsemen. The Huns went on to attack the Visigoths ,
70,000 of whom crossed the border and settled inside the
empire. When the Roman aristocracy saw that the empire
was no longer a shield against barbarian raids, they
were less inclined to pay for its support, seeing that a
more comfortable future lay in being on good terms with
the barbarian successor states.
By the fifth century, many legions were made up of
troops from conquered territories, and several posts of
high command were held by outsiders. With little will or
loyalty behind it, the empire floundered , and on New
Year's Eve of 406, Vandals, Alans and Sueves crossed the
frozen Rhine into Gaul, chased by the Huns from their
kingdoms in what are now Hungary and Austria. Once this
had happened, there was no effective frontier. A
contemporary writer lamented that "the whole of Gaul is
smoking like an enormous funeral pyre". Despite this
shock, worse was to come. By 408, the imperial
government in Ravenna could no longer hold off Alaric (commander
of Illyricum - now Croatia), and he went on to sack Rome
in 410, causing a crisis of morale in the west. "When
the whole world perished in one city," wrote Saint
Jerome, "then I was dumb with silence."
The bitter end of the Roman Empire in the west came
after Valentinian III 's assassination in 455. His eight
successors over the next twenty years were finally
ignored by the Germanic troops in the army, who elected
their general Odoacer as king. The remaining Roman
aristocracy hated him, and the eastern emperor, Zeno ,
who in theory now ruled the whole empire, refused to
recognize him. In 488, Zeno rid himself of the Ostrogoth
leader Theodoric by persuading him to march on Odoacer
in Italy. By 493, Theodoric had succeeded, becoming
ruler of the western territories.
A lull followed. The Senate in Rome and the civil
service continued to function, and the remains of the
empire were still administered under Roman law.
Ostrogothic rule of the west continued after Theodoric's
death, but in the 530s the eastern emperor, Justinian ,
began to plan the reunification of the Roman Empire "up
to the two oceans". In 536 his general Belisarius landed
in Sicily and moved north through Rome to Ravenna;
complete reconquest of the Italian peninsula was
achieved in 552, after which the Byzantines retained a
presence in the south and in Sardinia for 500 years.
During this time the Christian Church developed as a
more or less independent authority, since the emperor
was at a safe distance in Constantinople. Continual
invasions had led to an uncertain political scene in
which the bishops of Rome emerged with the strongest
voice - justification of their primacy having already
been given by Pope Leo I (440-461), who spoke of his
right to "rule all who are ruled in the first instance
by Christ". A confused period of rule followed, as
armies from northern Europe tried to take more territory
from the old empire.
Lombards and Franks
During the chaotic sixth century, the Lombards , a
Germanic tribe, were driven southwest into Italy. Rome
was successfully defended against them, but by the
eighth century the Lombards were extending their power
throughout the peninsula. In the middle of that century
the Franks arrived from Gaul. They were orthodox
Christians, and therefore acceptable to Gallo-Roman
nobility, integrating quickly and taking over much of
the provincial administration. The Franks were ruled by
the Merovingian royal family, but the mayors of the
palace - the Carolingians - began to take power in real
terms. Led by Pepin the Short , they saw an advantage in
supporting the papacy, giving Rome large endowments and
forcibly converting pagans in areas they conquered. When
Pepin wanted to oust the Merovingians, and become King
of the Franks, he appealed to the pope in Rome for his
blessing, who was happy to agree, anointing the new
Frankish king with holy oil.
This alliance was useful to both parties. In 755 the
pope called on the Frankish army to confront the
Lombards. The Franks forced them to hand over treasure
and 22 cities and castles, which then became the
northern part of the Papal States . Pepin died in 768,
with the Church indebted to him. According to custom, he
divided the kingdom between his two sons, one of whom
died within three years. The other was Charles the
Great, or Charlemagne .
An intelligent and innovative leader, Charlemagne was
proclaimed King of the Franks and of the Lombards, and
patrician of the Romans, after a decisive war against
the Lombards in 774. On Christmas Day of the year 800,
Pope Leo III expressed his gratitude for Charlemagne's
political support by crowning him Emperor of the Holy
Roman Empire , an investiture that forged an enduring
link between the fortunes of Italy and those of northern
Europe. By the time Charlemagne died, all of Italy from
south of Rome to Lombardy, including Sardinia, was part
of the huge Carolingian Empire . The parts which didn't
come under his domain were Sicily and the southern
coast, which were gradually being reconquered by Arabs
from Tunisia; and Puglia and Calabria, colonized by
Byzantines and Greeks.
The task of holding these gains was beyond Charlemagne's
successors, and by the beginning of the tenth century
the family was extinct and the rival Italian states had
become prizes for which the western (French) and eastern
(German) Frankish kingdoms competed. Power switched in
936 to Otto , king of the eastern Franks. Political
disunity in Italy invited him to intervene, and in 962
he was crowned emperor; Otto's son and grandson (Ottos
II and III) set the seal on the renewal of the Holy
Roman Empire.
Popes and emperors
On the death of Otto III in 1002, Italy was again
without a recognized ruler. In the north, noblemen
jockeyed for power, and the papacy was manipulated by
rival Roman families. The most decisive events were in
the south, where Sicily, Calabria and Puglia were
captured by the Normans , who proved effective
administrators and synthesized their own culture with
the existing half-Arabic, half-Italian south. In Palermo
in the eleventh century they created the most dynamic
culture of the Mediterranean world.
Meanwhile in Rome, a series of reforming popes began to
strengthen the church. Gregory VII , elected in 1073,
was the most radical, demanding the right to depose
emperors if he so wished . Emperor Henry IV was equally
determined for this not to happen. The inevitable
quarrel broke out, over a key appointment to the
archbishopric of Milan. Henry denounced Gregory as "now
not pope, but false monk"; the pope responded by
excommunicating him, thereby freeing his subjects from
their allegiance. By 1077 Henry was aware of his
tactical error and tried to make amends by visiting the
pope at Canossa , where the emperor, barefoot and
penitent, was kept waiting outside for three days. The
formal reconciliation thus did nothing to heal the rift,
and Henry's son, Henry V , continued the feud,
eventually coming to a compromise in which the emperor
kept control of bishops' land ownership, while giving up
rights over their investiture.
After this symbolic victory, the papacy developed into
the most comprehensive and advanced centralized
government in Europe in the realms of law and finance,
but it wasn't long before unity again came under attack.
This time, the threat came from Emperor Frederick I (Barbarossa),
who besieged many northern Italian cities from his base
in Germany from 1154. Pope Alexander III responded with
ambiguous pronouncements about the imperial crown being
a "benefice" which the pope conferred, implying that the
emperor was the pope's vassal. The issue of papal or
imperial supremacy was to polarize the country for the
next two hundred years, almost every part of Italy being
torn by struggles between Guelphs (supporting the pope)
and Ghibellines (supporting the emperor).
Henry's son, Frederick II , assumed the imperial throne
at the age of three and a half, inheriting the Norman
Kingdom of Sicily . Later linked by marriage to the
great Hohenstaufen dynasty in Germany, he inevitably
turned his attentions to northern Italy. However, his
power base was small, and opposition from Italian comune
and the papacy snowballed into civil war. His sudden
death in 1250 marked a major downturn in imperial
fortunes.
The emergence of city states
Charles of Anjou , brother of King Louis IX of France,
defeated Frederick II's heirs in southern Italy, and
received Naples and Sicily as a reward from the pope.
His oppressive government finally provoked an uprising
on Easter Monday 1282, a revolt that came to be known as
the Sicilian Vespers , as some two thousand occupying
soldiers were murdered in Palermo at the sound of the
bell for vespers. For the next twenty years the French
were at war with Peter of Aragon , who took Sicily and
then tried for the southern mainland.
If imperial power was on the defensive, the papacy was
in even worse shape. Knowing that the pontiff had little
military backing or financial strength left, Philip of
France sent his men to the pope's summer residence in
1303, subjecting the old man to a degrading attack.
Boniface died within a few weeks; his French successor,
Clement V, promptly moved the papacy to Avignon .
The declining political power of the major rulers was
countered by the growing autonomy of the cities. By
1300, a broad belt of some three hundred virtually
independent city states stretched from central Italy to
the northernmost edge of the peninsula. In the middle of
the century the population of Europe was savagely
depleted by the Black Death - brought into Europe by a
Genoese ship returning from the Black Sea - but the city
states survived, developing a concept of citizenship
quite different from the feudal lord-and-vassal
relationship. By the end of the fourteenth century the
richer and more influential states had swallowed up the
smaller comune , leaving four as clear political front
runners. These were Genoa (controlling the Ligurian
coast), Florence (ruling Tuscany), Milan , whose sphere
of influence included Lombardy and much of central Italy,
and Venice . Smaller principalities, such as Mantua and
Ferrara, supported armies of mercenaries, ensuring their
security by building impregnable fortress-palaces.
Perpetual vendettas between the propertied classes often
induced the citizens to accept the overall rule of one
signore in preference to the bloodshed of warring clans.
A despotic form of government evolved, sanctioned by
official titles from the emperor or pope, and by the
fifteenth century most city states were under princely
rather than republican rule. In the south of the
fragmented peninsula was the Kingdom of Naples ; the
States of the Church stretched up from Rome through
modern-day Marche, Umbria and the Romagna; Siena,
Florence, Modena, Mantua and Ferrara were independent
states, as were the Duchy of Milan , and the maritime
republics of Venice and Genoa , with a few odd pockets
of independence like Lucca, for example, and Rimini.
The commercial and secular city states of late medieval
times were the seed bed for the Renaissance , when urban
entrepreneurs (such as the Medici) and autocratic rulers
(such as Federico da Montefeltro) enhanced their status
through the financing of architectural projects,
paintings and sculpture. It was also at this time that
the Tuscan dialect - the language of Dante, Petrarch and
Boccaccio - became established as Italy's literary
language; it later became the nation's official spoken
language.
By the mid-fifteenth century the five most powerful
states - Naples, the papacy, Milan, and the republics of
Venice and Florence - reached a tacit agreement to
maintain the new balance of power. Yet though there was
a balance of power at home, the history of each of the
independent Italian states became inextricably bound up
with the power politics of other European countries
French and Spanish intervention
The inevitable finally happened when an Italian state
invited a larger power in to defeat one of its rivals.
In 1494, at the request of the Duke of Milan, Charles
VIII of France marched south to renew the Angevin claim
to the Kingdom of Naples. After the accomplishment of
his mission, Charles stayed for three months in Naples,
before heading back to France; the kingdom was then
acquired by Ferdinand II of Aragon , subsequently ruler
of all Spain.
The person who really established the Spanish in Italy
was the Habsburg Charles V (1500-1558), who within three
years of inheriting both the Austrian and Spanish
thrones bribed his way to being elected Holy Roman
Emperor. In 1527 the imperial troops sacked Rome , a
calamity widely interpreted at the time as God's
punishment to the disorganized and dissolute Italians.
The French remained troublesome opposition, but they
were defeated at Pavia in 1526 and Naples in 1529. With
the treaty of Cateau-Cambresis in 1559, Spain held
Sicily, Naples, Sardinia, the Duchy of Milan and some
Tuscan fortresses, and they were to exert a stranglehold
on Italian political life for the next 150 years. The
remaining smaller states became satellites of either
Spanish or French rule; only the papacy and Venice
remained independent.
Social and economic troubles were as severe as the
political upheavals. While the papacy combatted the
spread of the Reformation in northern Europe, the major
manufacturing and trading centres were coming to terms
with the opening up of the Atlantic and Indian Ocean
trade routes - discoveries which meant that northern
Italy would increasingly be bypassed. Mid-sixteenth-century
economic recession prompted wealthy Venetian and
Florentine merchants to invest in land rather than
business, while in the south high taxes and repressive
feudal regimes produced an upsurge of banditry and even
the raising of peasant militias - resistance that was
ultimately suppressed brutally by the Spanish.
The seventeenth century was a low point in Italian
political life, with little room for manoeuvre between
the papacy and colonial powers. The Spanish eventually
lost control of Italy at the start of the eighteenth
century when, as a result of the War of the Spanish
Succession, Lombardy, Mantua, Naples and Sardinia all
came under Austrian control. The machinations of the
major powers led to frequent realignments in the first
half of the century. Piemonte, ruled by the Duke of
Savoy, Victor Amadeus II, was forced in 1720 to
surrender Sicily to the Austrians in return for Sardinia.
In 1734 Naples and Sicily passed to the Spanish
Bourbons, and three years later the House of Lorraine
acquired Tuscany on the extinction of the Medici.
Relatively enlightened Bourbon rule in the south did
little to arrest the economic polarization of society,
but the northern states advanced under the intelligent
if autocratic rule of Austria's Maria Theresa (1740-80)
and her son Joseph II (1780-92) who prepared the way for
early industrialization. Lightning changes came in April
1796, when the French armies of Napoleon invaded
northern Italy. Within a few years the French had been
driven out again, but by 1810 Napoleon was in command of
the whole peninsula, and his puppet regimes remained in
charge until Waterloo. Napoleonic rule had profound
effects, reducing the power of the papacy, reforming
feudal land rights and introducing representative
government to Italy. Elected assemblies were provided on
the French model, giving the emerging middle class a
chance for political discussion and action.
Unification
The fall of Napoleon led to the Vienna Settlement of
1815, by which the Austrians effectively restored the
old ruling class. Metternich , the Austrian Chancellor,
did all he could to foster any local loyalties that
might weaken the appeal of unity, yet the years between
1820 and 1849 became years of revolution. Uprisings
began in Sicily, Naples and Piemonte, when King
Ferdinand introduced measures that restricted personal
freedom and destroyed many farmers' livelihoods. A
makeshift army quickly gained popular support in Sicily,
and forced some concessions, before Ferdinand invited
the Austrians in to help him crush the revolution. In
the north, the oppressive laws enacted by Vittorio
Emanuele I in the Kingdom of Piemont sparked off student
protests and army mutinies in Turin. Vittorio Emanuele
abdicated in favour of his brother, Carlo Felice, and
his son, Carlo Alberto ; the latter initially gave some
support to the radicals, but Carlo Felice then called in
the Austrians, and thousands of revolutionaries were
forced into exile. Carlo Alberto became King of Piemont
in 1831. A secretive, excessively devout and devious
character, he did a major volte-face when he assumed the
throne by forming an alliance with the Austrians.
In 1831 further uprisings occurred in Parma, Modena, the
Papal States, Sicily and Naples. Their lack of co-ordination,
and the readiness with which Austrian and papal troops
intervened, ensured that revolution was short-lived. But
even if these actions were unsustained, their influence
grew.
One person profoundly influenced by these insurgencies
was Giuseppe Mazzini. Arrested as Secretary of the
Genoese branch of the Carbonari (a secret radical
society) in 1827 and jailed for three months in 1830, he
formulated his political ideology and set up " Young
Italy " on his release. Among the many to whom the
ideals of "Young Italy" appealed was Giuseppe Garibaldi
, soon to play a central role in the Risorgimento , as
the movement to reform and unite the country was known.
Crop failures in 1846 and 1847 produced widespread
famine and cholera outbreaks . In Sicily an army of
peasants marched on the capital, burning debt collection
records, destroying property and freeing prisoners.
Middle- and upper-class moderates were worried, and
formed a government to control the uprising, but
Sicilian separatist aims were realized in 1848. Fighting
spread to Naples, where Ferdinand II made some temporary
concessions, but nonetheless he retook Sicily the
following year. At the same time as the southern
revolution, serious disturbances took place in Tuscany,
Piemonte and the Papal States. Rulers fled their duchies,
and Carlo Alberto altered course again, prompted by
Metternich's fall from power in Vienna: he granted his
subjects a constitution and declared war on Austria. In
Rome, the pope fled from rioting and Mazzini became a
member of the city's republican triumvirate in 1849,
with Garibaldi organizing the defences.
None of the uprisings lasted long. Twenty thousand
revolutionaries were expelled from Rome, Carlo Alberto
abdicated in favour of his son Vittorio Emanuele II
after military defeats at the hands of the Austrians,
and the dukes returned to Tuscany, Modena and Parma. One
thing which did survive was Piemonte's constitution,
which throughout the 1850s attracted political refugees
to this cosmopolitan state
The World Wars
After the Risorgimento, some things still hadn't changed.
The ruling class were slow to move towards a broader
based political system, while living standards actually
worsened in some areas, particularly in Sicily. When
Sicilian peasant farmers organized into fasci -
forerunners of trade unions - the prime minister sent in
30,000 soldiers, closed down newspapers and interned
suspected troublemakers without trial. In the 1890s
capitalist methods and modern machinery in the Po Valley
created a new social structure, with rich agrari at the
top of the pile, a mass of farm labourers at the bottom,
and an intervening layer of estate managers.
In the 1880s Italy's colonial expansion began, initially
concentrated in bloody - and ultimately disastrous -
campaigns in Abyssinia and Eritrea in 1886. In 1912
Italy wrested the Dodecanese islands and Libya from
Turkey, a development deplored by many, including Benito
Mussolini , who during this war was the radical
secretary of the PSI (Partito Socialista Italiano) in
Forlì.
The postwar years
A popular mandate declared Italy a republic in 1946, and
Alcide de Gasperi's Democrazia Cristiana (DC) party
formed a government. He remained in power until 1953,
sustained by a succession of coalitions. Ever since then,
the regular formation and disintegration of governments
has been the norm, a political volatility that reflects
the sharp divisions between rural and urban Italy, and
between the north and the south of the country. A strong
manufacturing base and large-scale agriculture have
given most people in the north a better material
standard of living than previous generations, but the
south still lags far behind, despite such measures as
the establishment in 1950 of the Cassa del Mezzogiorno
development agency, which has pumped much-needed funds
into the region.
During the 1950s Italy became a front-rank industrial
nation, massive firms such as Fiat and Olivetti helping
to double the Gross Domestic Product and triple
industrial production. American financial aid - the
Marshall Plan - was an important factor in this
expansion, as was the availability of a large and
compliant workforce, a substantial proportion of which
was drawn from the villages of the south.
The DC at first operated in alliance with other right-wing
parties, but in 1963, in a move precipitated by the
increased politicization of the blue-collar workers,
they were obliged to share power for the first time with
the Partito Socialista Italiano (PSI). The DC politician
who was largely responsible for sounding out the
socialists was Aldo Moro , the dominant figure of
Italian politics in the 1960s. Moro was prime minister
from 1963 to 1968, a period in which the economy was
disturbed by inflation and the removal of vast sums of
money by wealthy citizens alarmed by the arrival in
power of the PSI. The decade ended with the " autunno
caldo " ("hot autumn") of 1969, when strikes,
occupations and demonstrations paralysed the country.
The 1970s and 1980s
In the 1970s the situation worsened: bankruptcies
increased, inflation hit twenty percent, and
unemployment rocketed. More extreme forms of unrest
broke out, instigated in the first instance by the far
right, who were almost certainly behind a bomb which
killed sixteen people in Piazza Fontana, Milan in 1969,
and the Piazza della Loggia bombing in Brescia five
years later. Neo-fascist terrorism continued throughout
the next decade, reaching its hideous climax in 1980,
when 84 people were killed and 200 wounded in a bomb
blast at Bologna train station. At the same time, a
plethora of left-wing terrorist groups sprang up, many
of them led by disaffected intellectuals at the northern
universities. The most active of these were the Brigate
Rosse (Red Brigades). Founded in Milan in 1970, they
reached the peak of their notoriety eight years later,
when a Red Brigade group kidnapped and killed Aldo Moro
himself. A major police offensive in the early 1980s
nullified most of the Brigate Rosse, but a number of
hardline splinter groups from the various terrorist
organizations - especially right-wing ones - are still
in existence, as was proved in 1988 by the murder of an
aide of the prime minister.
Inconsistencies and secrecy beset those trying to
discover who was really responsible for the terrorist
activity of the Seventies. One Red Brigade member who
served 18 years in jail for his part in the
assassination of Aldo Moro recently asserted that it was
spies working for the Italian secret services and not
bona fide members of the group who masterminded the
operation. Alberto Franceschini told a parliamentary
commission on terrorism in March 1999 that he believed
that Brigade members Mario Moretti and Giovanni Senzani
were both secret service plants who had infiltrated the
group. Their involvement coincided with a particularly
bloody phase of activity at a time when Renato Curcio ,
the orginal leader of the Red Brigades was betrayed to
the authorities; the details of the kidnapping implied
that certain privileged information was available; and
both Moretti and Senzani were exceptional in being
allowed to travel to the US when it was the usual US
policy to refuse Italian Communists visas.
A recent report prepared by the PDS (Italy's party of
the democratic left) for the same parliamentary
commission stirred up controversy again in summer 2000.
The report referred to the Establishment's " strategy of
tension " in the 1970s and early 1980s in which it was
said that indiscriminate bombing of the public and the
threat of a right-wing coup were devices to stabilize
centre-right political control of the country. The
perpetrators of bombing campaigns were rarely caught,
said the report, because "those massacres, those bombs,
those military actions had been organized or promoted or
supported by men inside Italian state institutions and,
as has been discovered more recently, by men linked to
the structures of United States intelligence". "Other
bombing campaigns were attributed to the left to prevent
the Communist Party from achieving power by democratic
means" said Valter Bielli, PDS MP, and one of the
report's authors. The report drew furious rebuttals from
centre-right groups and the US embassy in Rome.
Yet the DC government survived, sustained by the so-called
"historic compromise" negotiated in 1976 with Enrico
Berlinguer , leader of the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI).
By this arrangement the PCI - polling 34 percent of the
national vote, just three points less than the DC -
agreed to abstain from voting in parliament in order to
maintain a government of national unity. The pact was
rescinded in 1979, and after Berlinguer's death in 1984
the PCI's share of the vote dropped to around 27 percent.
The combination of this withdrawal of popular support
and the collapse of the Communist bloc led to a
realignment of the PCI under the leadership of Achille
Occhetto , who turned the party into a democratic
socialist grouping along the lines of left-leaning
parties in Germany or Sweden - a transformation
encapsulated by the party's new name - the Partito
Democratico della Sinistra ("Democratic Party of the
Left").
In its efforts to exclude the left wing from power, the
DC had been obliged to accede to demands from minor
parties such as the Radical Party , which gained
eighteen seats in the 1987 election, one of them going
to the porn star Ilona Staller, better known as La
Cicciolina . Furthermore, the DC's reputation was
severely damaged in the early 1980s by a series of
scandals, notably the furore surrounding the activities
of the P2 Masonic lodge, when links were discovered
between corrupt bankers, senior DC members, and
fanatical right-wing groups. As its popularity fell, the
DC was forced to offer the premiership to politicians
from other parties. In 1981 Giovanni Spadolini of the
Republicans became the first non-DC prime minister since
the war, and in 1983 Bettino Craxi was installed as the
first premier from the PSI, a position he held for four
years.
Even through the upheavals of the 1970s the national
income of Italy continued to grow, and there developed a
national obsession with Il Sorpasso , a term signifying
the country's overtaking of France and Britain in the
economic league table. Experts disagreed as to whether
Il Sorpasso actually happened (most thought it hadn't),
and calculations were complicated by the huge scale of
tax evasion and other illicit financial dealings in
Italy. All strata of society were involved in the
withholding of money from central government, but the
ruling power in this economia sommersa (submerged
economy) was, and to a certain extent still is, the
Mafia , whose contacts penetrate to the highest levels
in Rome. The most traumatic proof of the Mafia's
infiltration of the political hierarchy came in May
1992, with the murders of anti-Mafia judges Giovanni
Falcone and Paolo Borsellino , whose killers could only
have penetrated the judges' security with the help of
inside information.
To the present day
The murders of the immensely respected Falcone and
Borsellino might well come to be seen as marking a fault-line
in the political history of modern Italy, and the late
1980s and early 1990s saw the rise of a number of new
political parties, as people become disillusioned with
the old DC-led consensus. One, Leoluca Orlando's La Rete
("Network"), was founded specifically to counter the
Mafia in Sicily, but rapidly evolved into a coalition of
groups opposed to the vested interests in the country's
town halls and businesses. More successful has been the
right-wing Lega Nord (Northern League), whose autocratic
leader, Umberto Bossi , capitalized on northern
frustration with the state, which they see as supporting
a corrupt south on the back of the hard-working, law-abiding
north. The Northern League's official aim is now a
federation, with Italy divided into two or three parts;
they have already dubbed the north "Padania" and minted
a separate, unofficial currency (worthless in reality,
but a powerful symbol of intent). Formerly a
marginalized firebrand, Bossi is now one of the most
feared men in Italian politics. The newer Alleanza
Democratica , or Democratic Alliance, led by the more
circumspect Mario Segni , offers a less divisive
alternative to middle-of-the road voters, while the
fascist MSI, renamed the Alleanza Nazionale (AN), or
National Alliance and now a wide coalition of right-wingers
led by the persuasive Gianfranco Tini (who calls himself
a post-fascist), has gained ground in recent years.
In 1992 the new government of Giuliano Amato - a
politician untainted by any hint of corruption -
instigated the biggest round-up of Mafia members in
nearly a decade, issuing 241 arrest warrants in
Operation Leopard. However, this was nothing compared to
the arrest in Palermo, at the beginning of 1993, of
Salvatore "Toto" Riina, the Mafia capo di tutti capi (boss
of bosses) and the man widely believed to have been
behind the Falcone and Borsellino killings. The arrest
of Riina followed the testimony of numerous supergrasses;
the result of the trials was that key members of the
establishment began to be openly implicated in Mafia
activities. For example, it was exposed that a murdered
associate of the former prime minister Giulio Andreotti
was the Mafia's man in Rome, a top-level fixer who would
arrange acquittals from the Supreme Court in exchange
for support. (Bettino Craxi once called Andreotti a fox,
adding "sooner or later all foxes end up as fur coats.")
However, it was Craxi himself who was one of the first
to fall from grace, at the beginning of the postwar
Italian state's most turbulent period - 1992-96. Craxi
was at the centre of the powerful Socialist
establishment that ran the key city of Milan, when in
February 1992, a minor party official, Mario Chiesa,
head of a Milan old people's home, was arrested on
corruption charges. It was realized before very long
that Chiesa represented just the tip of a long-established
culture of kickbacks and bribes that went right to the
top of the Italian political establishment, not just in
Milan, nicknamed tangentopoli ("bribesville"), but
across the entire country. By the end of that year
thousands in the city were under arrest and the net was
spreading. What came to be known as the Mani Pulite or
Clean Hands investigation, led by the crusading Milan
judge, Antonio di Pietro, was under way.
The mood of the country changed almost overnight.
Suddenly people wanted the politicians, the party
officials, all those who had been taking their slice of
tangentopoli , out of office. The established Italian
parties, most notably the Christian Democrats and the
Socialists, were almost entirely wiped out in the
municipal elections of 1993. Di Pietro's zeal in
tracking down the villains, and in asserting the power
of the judiciary over the political establishment,
captured the imaginations of the nation in a series of
televised trials, and it seemed that no one who had been
part of the old order was safe.
The establishment wasn't finished yet, however, and the
national elections of 1994 saw yet another political
force emerge to fill the power vacuum: the centre-right
Forza Italia or "Come On Italy", led by the media mogul
Silvio Berlusconi , who used the power of his TV
stations to build support, and swept to power as prime
minister in a populist alliance - his "Freedom Pole"
coalition - with Bossi's Lega Nord and the fascist
National Alliance. The fact that Berlusconi was not a
politician was perhaps his greatest asset, and most
Italians, albeit briefly, saw this as a new beginning -
the end of the old, corrupt regime, and the birth of a
truly modern Italian state. However, as one of the
country's top northern industrialists, and a former
crony of Craxi, Berlusconi was as bound up with the old
ways as anyone. Not only did he resist all attempts to
reduce the scope of his media business, with which, as
prime minister, there was a clear conflict of interest,
but in time it also emerged that he himself was to be
investigated, in a series of inquiries into the tax
dealings of his Fininvest group.
Despite the resignation of di Pietro at the end of 1994,
Berlusconi was himself forced to resign after the
withdrawal of Bossi's Lega Nord from the coalition, and
the government collapsed. For once elections were not
seen as a solution; instead President Scalfaro leaned on
some of the less political, and therefore less
corruptible, members of the leadership to form a new,
relatively non-partisan government that would institute
the necessary economic and political reforms. Led by the
relatively colourless finance man Lamberto Dini , this
administration managed to stagger on into 1995, if only
because of the ongoing political crisis, but by the time
1996 arrived things had once again descended into chaos,
with none of a number of compromise candidates able to
put together a government. In an attempt to break the
deadlock, Scalfaro called elections for April 1996.
Meanwhile, the trial of Giulio Andreotti, perhaps the
most potent symbol of the sleazy postwar years, at last
went ahead in Palermo and he had to answer charges of a
long-term conspiracy with the Mafia. Andreotti, seven
times Prime Minister of Italy and a senator for life,
denied any association, and was acquitted in October
1999 aged 80 after a trial that lasted 5 years, with
prosecution evidence depending on the testimony of Mafia
informants. In January 1999, Craxi was convicted with
twenty others of corruption in connection with kickbacks
involving ENEL, the state electrical company. He was
sentenced to five years in prison, but died a year later
in exile in Tunisia.
Antonio Maccanico succeded Dini but was unable to form a
convincing government. For the first time in Italy's
history a broad centre-left alliance was formed; known
as the ulivo (the "olive tree"), and led by Romano Prodi
, head of the small Partito Popolare Italiano (the PPI,
or Italian Peoples' Party), it suceeded Maccanico's
government. In terms of numbers, ulivo was made up
mostly of the PDS (the Democratic Party of the Left),
though in order to gain a majority in the Chamber of
Deputies the government formed alliances with most of
the other parties, including the Lega Nord and the newly
created Italian Communist Party, split from the
Rifondazione Communista (the Marxist residue of the
former PCI) in October 1998.
Compared with the turmoil of the early 1990s, the
political situation had reached a fairly even plateau.
The Christian Democratic party had dissolved; the shift
from proportional representation to a first-past-the-post
system had begun; and a trend towards two large
coalitions - one to the centre-left and the other to the
centre-right - indicated a major break from the
fragmented, multiparty political landscape of the
postwar era. In the mid- to late-1990s attention shifted
to the economy. A series of austerity measures to bring
down inflation and reduce public spending began as a
prelude to the entry of the lira into the ERM (Exchange
Rate Mechanism of the European Union). Italians were
keen to join, in preparation for the single currency,
the euro , and full economic and monetary union (EMU).
They perceived huge benefits; if the euro was strong
then interest rates would be low and they would be able
to pay off their vast national debt. In addition, the
federalism that other Europeans often fear is seen as a
positive advantage in Italy - in 1998, La Repubblica
noted how dissatisfied Italians were with rule by their
own politicians, and how they would be much happier if
decisions were made in Brussels. Austerity measures,
including cuts in pensions and healthcare benefits (to
facilitate Italy's qualification to join EMU in January
1999) provoked demonstrations in Rome and elsewhere.
In October 1998, the relatively prolonged period of
stability ended when the Prodi government was defeated
in a parliamentary vote of no confidence, carried by a
majority of one. The implications of another round of
political upheaval were too serious to ignore: with less
than three months to the launch of a common European
currency, the threat of global recession, and imminent
NATO strikes against Serbia, Italy needed a credible
government. President Scalfaro acted quickly and
appointed the former leader of the Communist PDS,
Massimo D'Alema , as Prime Minister designate. The
government lasted for eighteen months before he quit
after overwhelming defeat in regional elections in April
2000. President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi appointed Italy's
finance minister and former PM, Giuliano Amato , to head
up a weak centre-left coalition dominated by the
Democratic Party of the Left (PDS).
Meanwhile, the popularity of the Alleanza Nazionale,
with its anti-immigration policies, reflects a residual
racism in present-day Italy. When a black woman was
chosen as Miss Italy in 1996, she was criticized for
being "unrepresentative of Italian beauty". And a
clampdown on prostitution in 1998, which caused
passionate national debate, was as much about
disapproval of the thousands of immigrant African women
making a living this way as it was about "cleaning up
the streets".
The untangling of the corrupt systems of party favours
and organized crime continues apace. Even di Pietro, the
architect of Operation Clean Hands, came under
investigation in 1997, though many regarded this as a
political move to discredit him. The most influential
public figure to have been tried in the late nineties,
however, was Berlusconi , who was convicted and
sentenced in August 1998 to two years and nine months in
jail; Perhaps not surprisingly, Berlusconi has since
been acquitted of a number of the charges against him,
and, although further offences have come to light (bribing
the judiciary among them), the ongoing proceedings have
served more as a background to his resurgent politial
career than anything else, with Forza Italia triumphing
in the European elections of 1999, and doing well, too,
in Italy's regional elections of April 2000.
These polls were a disaster for the ruling left
coalition, and the prime minister Massimo d'Alema
decided to call it a day immediately afterwards,
bringing back Giuliano Amato, a long-established
political fixer of the left, as the country's 58th prime
minister since World War II.
In this way, Italian politics are perhaps much the same
as they ever were, with one coalition quickly succeeding
another. However, there is a feeling that the
investigations of the early 1990s lanced a boil and that
the country is moving on. The public sector now appears
to operate slightly more for the benefit of its users
than for state employees and cultural and artistic
institutions have been renovated and injected with new
funds.
In the Church's Holy Year , damaging evidence emerged of
the extent to which the Catholic Church, motivated by
anti-Communist ideology, helped the Nazis during World
War II by laundering money and supplying intelligence
about allied invasion plans. It seems that the Vatican
may soon face the same scrutiny that the political
system has undergone during the last decade.
On an everyday level Italians are concerned to improve
their quality of life and are ready to try out new
measures, among them car-free days in Rome, Florence,
Milan and 143 other towns and cities, where for several
consecutive Sundays at the beginning of 2000, cars and
lorries were banned between the hours of 10am to 6pm (a
central government fund of £300m paid for improved,
subsidised transport on these days and free entry to
museums and galleries). A Slow Cities movement is
carrying the idea of a more tranquil, less stressed
urban way of life forward, campaigning on a variety of
issues including better food (less fast food) and a
healthier environment.
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