Italy from without: An introduction

There is no doubt that current debates on Italian national identity, and on the meaning of Italian history, are very lively; of late, these discussions have been very effective in questioning the many cliches and established paradigms concerning nationalism and nation-building. But it is equally true that reflections on Italian national identity have, over time, been mired in a narrow internalist perspective that has neglected the larger historical and geopolitical processes which shaped the emergence of the nation before and during the first 150 years of its existence. It is only recently that scholars interested in the many aspects of Italian nationalism have begun to account for the international dimensions of Italy’s creation. Indeed, if our idea of the Italian nation is ‘a cultural artifact of a particular kind,’ as Benedict Anderson defines it (encouraging us to look at the concept of national identity not as an inherited or inevitable happenstance, but as a deliberate and artificial creation linked to the emergence of a new ruling elite), we need to expand our critical field to ask how such a cultural artifact has been created from both inside and outside the geographical and conceptual borders of the nation. However, attention to the European – indeed global – aspects of the Italian nation has not always been central to nationalist expressions, celebrations, histories and historical reconstructions of the Risorgimento, which have generally focused on the fight for unification and the figure of proverbial and quintessentially Italian heroes, Garibaldi above all. This is perhaps hardly surprising, since the process of Italian unification was, in significant part, a battle against attempts by competing external interests to intervene in and control the peninsula. The history of the Italian Risorgimento has consequently been constructed as fundamentally a history from within, one founded on a myth of an essential Italianita, that binds together the diverse communities of the region to produce an integral national whole. This belief in the existence of an ancient Italianita, understood as a historical entity shaped by the native populations of the peninsula through successive generations, was the presupposition shared by all the patriots of the Risorgimento; it served to affirm the right of Italians to a unified state that was independent, sovereign