ABSTRACT
The voice of the petitioners who spoke to the Pope of their brothers in the patria had its echo in the metaphor of the monarch as a father, who imagined his subjects as his many children, in a style that was also to be intensively employed in subsequent decades in order to include the Savoy monarchy in the national picture. When national regeneration once again seemed within reach, in 1859–60, the female, maternal, and kinship symbolism of the nation had a strong presence. Theoretical writing on the theme of nationality by Pasquale Stanislao Mancini and Terenzio Mamiani, in the 1850s, helped to give this dual way of imagining the nation greater conceptual weight. The essential supposition of his thinking was that international law needed to be re-established on the basis of the principle of nationality, because every nationality in existence should be matched by a state that was consistent with its specific characteristics.
