ABSTRACT
At this stage, in order to understand the complexity of the cultural transformation described in the last section of the previous chapter, we need to consider the literary and cultural background of the new national awareness. Apparently it was only in the second half of the eighteenth century that the word patria (fatherland) began to be applied to Italy as a whole, rather than to the city states and regional kingdoms. The change was first propounded in the pages of one of the most prestigious Enlightenment periodicals, the Milanese Il Caffé, edited by the Verri brothers. The most complete discussion of this new understanding of the notion of an Italian patria was published in 1765 by G.R. Carli (1720–95). In his essay ‘Della patria degli italiani’, the author claimed that Italians had a right to feel at home anywhere in the peninsula ‘as much as an Englishman in England, a Dutchman in Holland, and so on’. He argued that ‘the ‘Italian nation’ had first been created by the ancient Romans, who unified the country and moulded the municipalities first into an empire, and then into a country in which all Italians enjoyed the rights of Roman citizenship. Later the barbarian invasions destroyed the unity of the state, which was further divided in the following centuries. Yet in the eighteenth century — he claimed — modern Italians shared a collective identity, which consisted of their ‘genius’, origin and common condition. However, national unification was unnecessary: Carli maintained that a shared national identity was compatible with continued loyalty to the various ruling dynasties and republics, and that Italian patriotism and regional or city patriotisms were not mutually exclusive. 1
