ABSTRACT
many italians used to live under the illusion that their country was more or less the one described by pocket encyclopedias, atlases, and geography textbooks. Wasn't there a Kingdom with its borders marked out on the map, wasn't there a King whose profile appeared on stamps and coins? Weren't there uniform laws, an army, a navy, a flag, just as in Europe's other great nations? In the days before the First World War, only the older Italians with good memories read the official descriptions with a certain skepticism. They still remembered how Italy had been hastily put together, under exceptional circumstances, by a courageous minority; how defects and shortcomings had been hidden or disguised for long; how old traditions and virtues had been discarded hurriedly for more modern and foreign ones—and, therefore, this minority feared that the construction was too flimsy to withstand a really hard test. But the younger Italians (who are today's old men) had learned their history in school and not by listening to family gossip, a history prettified and polished up like a popular illustration; and they regarded every expression of doubt as a betrayal. It was this generation's patriotic and optimistic zeal, in polemic with the older men and with reality, that gave Italy twenty years of dictatorship and a "strong" foreign policy. They governed Italy with absurd bravado, as though it were the Great Power of their imagination and the official rhetoric, and not what it was in reality.
