van Hout, M.

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UvA-DARE is a service provided by the library of the University of Amsterdam (https://dare.uva.nl)UvA-DARE (Digital Academic Repository)[Italian:] History-writingvan Hout, M.Publication date2018Document VersionAuthor accepted manuscriptPublished inEncyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in EuropeLicenseCC BY-NC-SALink to publicationCitation for published version (APA):van Hout, M. (2018). [Italian:] History-writing. In J. Leerssen (Ed.), Encyclopedia of RomanticNationalism in Europe (Vol. 2, pp. 1139-1141). Amsterdam University Press.http://ernie.uva.nl/viewer.p/21/56/object/122-160028General rightsIt is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s)and/or copyright holder(s), other than for strictly personal, individual use, unless the work is under an opencontent license (like Creative Commons).Disclaimer/Complaints regulationsIf you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, pleaselet the Library know, stating your reasons. In case of a legitimate complaint, the Library will make the materialinaccessible and/or remove it from the website. Please Ask the Library: https://uba.uva.nl/en/contact, or a letterto: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Youwill be contacted as soon as possible.Download date:26 Jul 2022http://ernie.uva.nl/viewer.p/21//object/122-160028Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in EuropeHistory-writing : ItalianAuthor: Hout, Milou vanThe peninsula that aimed to become the nation-state Italy was in the 19th century a plurally divided map of severalautonomous states, and history-writing was a key field in which the retrospective and present national unificationwas to be achieved. Until today, Italian national history-writing, and its entanglement with the Risorgimento project,has been the subject of continuous scholarly debates.Given the peninsula’s territorial diffraction, Italian pre-1800 historiography was mainly dominated by urban andregional histories and the observations of European travel-writers foregrounding the classical artistic andmonumental heritage. With the emergence of Romantic-Nationalist sentiment in the early 19th century, literary andcultural hero-figures from the past were written into a nationally Italian history, creating a literary and historicalRisorgimento canon. The historians’ canon thus formed reached back to Virgil, Dante, but included more modernwriters and thinkers such as Simonde de Sismondi, Vincenzo Cuoco, Cesare Balbo (Storia d’Italia sotto i Barbari,1830; Vita di Dante, 1839;  Pensieri sulla Storia d’Italia, 1858), and Cesare Cantù (Storia degli Italiani, 1855).Given the fact that the Risorgimento was facing both the imperial power of the Habsburgs and the temporal powerof the Pope, the historical treatment of the medieval period, which in Italy was dominated by the Guelph-Ghibellinestruggle between Pope and Emperor, directly reflected present-day political concerns. Historians were divided inneo-Guelph and neo-Ghibelline camps, and the medieval struggles of municipalities and city-states, and theirleagues against foreign domination, was often seen as a prefiguration of the 19th-century war of liberation.Sismondi’s 16-volume Histoire des républiques italiennes du Moyen-Âge (1808), on the medieval city-republics,was followed by his more political digest Histoire de la renaissance de la liberté en Italie, de ses progrès, de sadécadence et de sa chute (1832), translated in the same year into Italian (Storia della rinascita della libertà inItalia), and inspiring Carlo Cattaneo’s La città considerata come principio ideale delle istorie italiane (1858). A“neo-Guelph”, pro-Papal account of the medieval cities’ federated revolt against the Empire was penned by theBenedictine Luigi Tosti (1811–1897): Storia della Lega Lombarda (1848); it was dedicated to Pius IX. At the sametime, however, the Lombard League was evoked in Verdi’s opera La battaglia di Legnano, which had its premierein the short-lived “Roman Republic” in 1849, from where the beleaguered Pius IX had just retreated. Not only doesthis show the contradictory political agendas for which Italian history could be invoked, it also demonstrates howthis intense political historicism (symbolized in the communication with the voices of the dead generations inFoscolo’s Dei sepolcri, 1809) spilled over into artistic production: opera and history painting, among other genres.In turn, the Risorgimento events themselves were immediately invested with historical significance (Cuoco,Saggio storico sulla rivoluzione Napoletana del 1799, 1801; Cattaneo, Dell’insurrezione di Milano nel 1848 e dellasuccessiva guerra, 1849).As a result, national historiography was strongly finalistic, presenting the Risorgimento and the establishment ofthe independent state as the inevitable outcome of history, and the drive towards unification in the face of foreignhegemony as a dominant historical force. Although an original new tone was struck by the liberal Benedetto Croce(1866–1952), who was inspired by his rediscovery of Gianbattista Vico, there was little space for counter-narratives. The plea for a multi-national nation-state written by the eminent Risorgimento figure Niccolò Tommaseo(1802–1874) was excluded from the national historiography, while Alfredo Oriani’s La lotta politica in Italia (1882),which represented the accession of the Italian south as a Piedmontese military conquest, received only belatedinterest. As this example shows, the dynamics of regionalism, the Southern Question and the multinationalism ofItaly’s borderlands posed an ongoing challenge concerning the foundations and extent of the nation-state.These debates, which also included a sense that the state of 1861 had failed to deliver a true modernizationimpetus and should be considered a “failed revolution”, continued in the 20th century and played into theEncyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe | Public Interface | ... http://ernie.uva.nl/viewer.p/21/56/object-print/122-1600281 of 2 9-5-2018 15:34emergence of Fascism. Under the Fascist regime, historians drew a teleological line from the Romantic-heroicorigins, by way of the “failed revolution”, to the Fascist state as the true fulfilment of the Risorgimento struggle.Inspired by Hegelian thinking, philosophers and historians like Giovanni Gentile and Gioacchino Volpe identifiedthe idea of an Italian nation with the ideal of the Fascist state. In contrast, Benedetto Croce argued that ItalianFascism was the result of a post-1918 crisis without proper roots in Italian politics and society.A shift in the thinking about national historiography was generated by Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937). In hisQuaderni del carcere (1926), written during his Fascist imprisonment and receiving a wide audience after theSecond World War, Gramsci argued that the Risorgimento had been a “passive revolution”, since it had lackedclass consciousness. His theory on cultural hegemony found a wide audience in socialist Italy and beyond.Banti, Alberto Mario, Paul Ginsborg; 2007. Il Risorgimento (Turin: Einaudi) [“The Risorgimento”]Banti, Alberto Mario; 2000. La nazione del Risorgimento: Parentela, santità e onore alle origini dell’Italia unita (Turin: Einaudi) [“The nationof the Risorgimento: Kinship, sanctity and honour at the foundation of a united Italy”]Banti, Alberto Mario; 2004. Il Risorgimento italiano (Rome: Laterza) [“The Italian Risorgimento”]Bouchard, Norma; 2005. Risorgimento in modern Italian culture: Revisiting the nineteenth-century past in history, narrative, and cinema(Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson UP)Croce, Benedetto; 1921. Storia della storiografia italiana nel secolo decimonono (2 vols. Bari: G. Laterza & figli)Gentile, Emilio; 2009. La grande Italia: The myth of the nation in the twentieth century (transl. Suzanne Dingee, Jennifer Pudney London:U of Wisconsin P)Manselli, Raoul; 1979. La nazione italiana nel suo sviluppo storico e nella discussione storiografica (Torino: Giappichelli) [“The Italiannation in historical development and historiographical debate”]Maturi, Walter; 1962. Interpretazioni del Risorgimento: Lezioni di storia della storiografia (Torino: Einaudi) [“Interpretations of theRisorgimento: Lessons from the history of historiography”]Patriarca, Silvana, Lucy Riall (ed.); 2012. The Risorgimento revisited: Nationalism and culture in nineteenth-century Italy (New York, NY:Palgrave Macmillan)Valsecchi, Franco; 1973. Caratteri e aspetti della storiografia italiana: La storiografia del Romanticismo (Roma: Ricerche) [“Characters andaspects of Italian historiography: The historiography of Romanticism”]All articles in the Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe edited by Joep Leerssen are licensed under a Creative CommonsAttribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.spinnet.eu.© the author and SPIN. Cite as follows (or as adapted to your stylesheet of choice): Hout, Milou van, 2017. “History-writing : Italian”,Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe, ed. Joep Leerssen (electronic version; Amsterdam: Study Platform on InterlockingNationalisms, www.romanticnationalism.net), article version 1.1.2.1/a, last changed 23-11-2017, consulted 09-05-2018.Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe | Public Interface | ... http://ernie.uva.nl/viewer.p/21/56/object-print/122-1600282 of 2 9-5-2018 15:34

Italian. 4: Texts and stories: Literary and historical culture.:§8: History-writing

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[Italian:] History-writing

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