Since the founding of the unified Italian state between 1860 and 1870, its territorial integrity has never been seriously challenged and, until very recently, separatist movements have been both marginal and easily accommodated. Until recently, Italy has also repeatedly adopted highly centralized forms of administration and political power, resisting any form of federalism (even though in Carlo Cattaneo and Altiero Spinelli Italy can claim two of Europe's foremost federalist thinkers). Indeed, the unity that emerged from the Risorgimento functioned as the primary founding myth that legitimized Italy's liberal constitutional monarchy but proved insufficient to prevent severe internal conflict. However, that did not prevent the successor to the Liberal State born of the Risorgimento – Mussolini's fascist dictatorship – asserting its claim to be the true heir of the Risorgimento. In the same pattern, anti-Fascist Resistance movements that spread through central and northern Italy after the fall of Mussolini and the Nazi occupation of Italy in September 1943 also invoked the Risorgimento as their political model and the founding of Italy's post-war democratic Republic in 1946–47 was widely acclaimed as Italy's second Risorgimento.

Each of these events illustrates the ways in which the rhetoric and memory of the Risorgimento have served as a critical instrument of internal reconciliation and rapprochement at critical junctures in Italian history. With degrees of success that remain to be tested, the image of the Risorgimento was invoked both to legitimize new forms of power and appease former enemies (or simply drown them in oblivion?).Reference Tobias¹ Yet the efficacy of the language of reconciliation must be questioned. Since unification, Italy's political history has by any standard been stormy and is marked by at least three – perhaps four – moments of civil war.

The first came immediately after unification, when for four years the newly annexed southern provinces became the theatre for violent rural revolts that resulted in the suspension of civil liberties and the imposition of martial law. More troops were involved in repressing the rural revolts than in all the wars of independence and a greater number of lives were lost than in all the Risorgimento conflicts combined.Reference Davis² Although the casualties were much lower, something very similar occurred in the final decade of the century when rural revolts in Sicily (the Fasci siciliani) gave rise to military occupation and the imposition again of martial law. But this time the centre of the unrest moved northwards, first to Tuscany and then to Milan – Italy's leading commercial city – which in 1898 was subject to military occupation and martial law.

On the eve of the Great War, much of Italy was in the grip of disturbances that, while serious and violent, fell short of civil war, although a case can be made that Italy went to war in May 1915 (without the king and the government seeking or acquiring a parliamentary vote of approval) primarily to avoid civil war. The divisions between those who favored and those who opposed Italy's engagement in the European war that followed the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in August 1914 ran deep, but hopes that the war would heal internal divisions proved illusory. No sooner had the war ended than Italy faced a genuine civil war that, for the first time, ignited simultaneously in different parts of the peninsula – from the rural Po Valley in the North to the great latifundist estates of Apulia in the South and in the leading industrial and commercial cities of the North – Milan, Turin, Florence, Bologna.Reference Vivarelli³

Italy's post-war civil wars created the opportunity for Mussolini's fascists to seize power, with the result that for nearly two decades the centrifugal force of Italian discontents was contained within the repressive apparatus of the totalitarian state. But subsequent events suggest that the imprint of the Fascist state had not reversed these trends, and when Mussolini's disastrous war brought the regime down in 1943, the geography of anti-fascism in central and northern Italy (the South was liberated before the Nazi occupation) closely reflected the topographies of the pre-1922 civil war. For two years after Italy's surrender to the allies on 8 September 1943, much of northern and central Italy remained in the hands of the Nazi force of occupation and their Fascist allies. Hitler had reinstated Mussolini in the puppet Republic of Saló, whose volunteer militias were enthusiastic emissaries for a reinvigorated and more violent brand of fascism and collaborated fully with their murderous Nazi partners.Reference Pavone⁴ In opposition to the violence and brutality of the Nazi-Fascist alliance, the political forces that led the anti-Fascist Resistance – the Christian Democrats, the Communists, the Socialists, the Action Party and others – and that played a key role in the reconstruction after 1945 found a common platform in the broader democratic ideals associated with the Risorgimento – ideals that were broad enough in 1945 to unite democrats of the left, centre and right just as the Risorgimento had brought together the Piedmontese monarchy, the moderate Cavour and the radical democrat Garibaldi.

Nonetheless, post-war Italy remained deeply divided and those divisions were exacerbated by the presence of the PCI and Italy's international situation in the Cold War era.Reference McCarthy⁵ Italy's new Republic was a Cold War construct, in which the Communist Party was excluded from government but carefully eschewed any strategy of revolutionary change. As Palmiro Togliatti had declared when he returned from Moscow in 1944, the task of the PCI was to assist in consolidating Italy's as yet incomplete bourgeois revolution. Like Mazzini and his followers in the nineteenth century, the post-Second World War Left could denounce the democratic deficits of the political parties that dominated the new Republic, while still retaining faith in the Republic's capacity for developing into a fuller democratic institution. But the meanings of ‘anti-Communist’ and ‘anti-fascist’ were elusive and gave rise to forms of ‘dual identity’.Reference Orsina⁶

In the wake of the 1968–69 student and trade union protests it was the denial by the extreme Right and Left that the Republic had the capacity to reform that led to the escalation of political terrorism in Italy, in response to which Enrico Berlinguer's PCI rallied to the centre in support of the Republic. The ‘historic compromise’ between the PCI and the centrist coalition led by the DC enabled Italy's republican institutions to weather the storm of the ‘anni di piombo’ and the kidnapping and assassination of Aldo Moro. But it seems now that the costs were heavier than was at first apparent, and they became more visible in the decade of prosperity and economic growth that followed, which was associated with the rise of the remodeled Socialist Party led by Bettino Craxi. As well as prosperity, the decade witnessed an unprecedented growth in systematic corruption, as well as the not unconnected rise of organized crime in the South and in Sicily over which the government in Rome seemed to have lost control. Still, it took the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War to precipitate the crisis of the political parties that had dominated the life of Republican Italy since 1946: by 1992 it was clear that Italy's political crisis had been deferred but not resolved.Reference McCarthy⁷

In the decade and a half since the Milan magistrates began their inquiries into the political corruption (‘tangentopoli’) that discredited the political parties that had dominated Italy's post-war Republic, the language of political reconciliation in Italy has been strained to the point that many observers now fear for the future integrity of the Italian state. At the heart of the current crisis of the Italian state is the question of the historical and the actual relationship between the nation and its political system, issues that have been debated around the two historical symbols that had previously been synonyms for an Italian sense of unity and nationhood: the Risorgimento and the Resistance.

The attacks on the ‘myth’ of the Risorgimento that gathered momentum in the early 1990s – and the responses of those who came to the defense of the Risorgimento – were new only in kind. There has always been a critical counter-official reading of the Risorgimento that challenged its ‘official’ appropriation, much of it Mazzinian in inspiration. But the critique that took shape in the early 1990s broke with this older democratic counter-culture in important ways by challenging the central achievement of the Risorgimento (unification) and its validity as the founding and legitimizing myth of the Italian nation.

The denunciation of the Risorgimento – and by extension as we shall see the Resistance – brought together the often discordant voices of the heterogeneous political forces that had been excluded from the post-1946 republican consensus and were now contending for the first time the right to enter the arena of national politics. Although they had little else in common, they all shared a common interest in destroying the political ideals that had formerly ensured their marginalization in Italian politics. They included most obviously the former neo-fascist party, now renamed the Alleanza Nazionale led by Gianfranco Fini, the newly founded separatist Northern Leagues (now the Lega), and another new political creation, Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia (now the Party of Liberty).Reference McCarthy⁸

Each of these political forces had clear reasons for challenging the memory of the Risorgimento, and to a degree they were provided with material by an earlier Marxist critique of the Risorgimento as a failed bourgeois revolution that had never engaged or represented the masses. Borrowing eclectically and even incongruously from the Marxist writings of both Antonio Gramsci, on one hand, and on the other from the campaign against the Risorgimento mounted in the nineteenth century by the papacy of Pius IX and by the Vatican press – notably the Jesuit Civiltà Cattolica Reference Davis⁹ – the representatives of the new political forces that were contending for the spaces vacated by the parties that had dominated Italian politics during the era of the Cold War could claim that the Risorgimento had never truly represented the Italian people as a whole. It was depicted instead as a minority and elitist movement, from which the great majority of Italians had been excluded and whose histories had subsequently been written out of the official memory.

These attacks went hand in hand with similar attacks on the Resistance and its memories. The inspiration and motives were similar and in this case drew heavily on the revisionist historiography of Italian fascism associated with the work of Mussolini's biographer, Renzo de Felice.Reference De Felice and Ledeen¹⁰ De Felice had not only underlined the extent to which Mussolini's regime had relied on popular support (‘consensus’) in the 1930s, but he had also carefully distinguished it from Hitler's National Socialism. The importance of these conclusions for members of political parties that had formerly been identified as neo-fascists or fellow travelers does not need to be labored. Nor is it surprising that they sought to popularize the image of Italy's ‘Fascism-lite’: Silvio Berlusconi, not famed for his cultural accomplishments, still likes to quip that Mussolini was a benevolent dictator who sent his enemies to the same beach resorts where Italians today enjoy their summer vacations.Reference Arthurs¹¹

The main target, though, was the Resistance. In 1992 the distinguished left-wing historian Claudio Pavone had published a remarkable book which acknowledged that the struggle against the Nazi occupation and its Fascist allies from 1943–45 had at times taken on the features of a civil war in which Italians fought against one another.Reference Pavone¹² Without condoning their choices, Pavone also acknowledged that some of those Italians who rallied to the Republic of Salò had done so for patriotic motives. One of those who participated as a young volunteer in the Salò militias was the socialist historian Roberto Vivarelli, who in a personal reflection acknowledged the youthful sense of patriotism that led him in the autumn of 1943 to make the journey northwards to fight for what he considered at the time to be the national cause.Reference Vivarelli¹³

Pavone's book marked the first serious and deeply researched attempt to confront the untidy truths of the Resistance years. The timing of its publication meant, however, that it was quickly seized on by those whose objective was to discredit the political parties whose claim to legitimacy lay in their ties with the Resistance – the PCI, the Christian Democrats and the Socialists in particular. In a widely publicized essay on ‘la morte della patria’ (‘the death of the nation’) the historian Ernesto Galli della Loggia argued that the collapse of Mussolini's regime and Italy's surrender to the Allies on 8 September 1943, when the king and his government ignominiously fled from Rome leaving the armed forces with only the barest instructions and abandoning Italian citizens to their fate, had stripped Italians of a sense of national identity. The political forces that had come to dominate the Resistance by 1945 had represented a part of the nation, but not the whole nation. Many of those who fought to defend Mussolini's Republic of Saló – however misguided – were also motivated by a genuine sense of patriotism, yet they found themselves excluded from the new national community. Just as had occurred at the time of unification, the parties that dominated Italy's new Republic represented important social interests, but della Loggia insisted that their claims to represent the nation were false.Reference Galli della Loggia¹⁴

The wider implications were clear – if Italians had by the end of the twentieth century a ‘weak’ sense of national identity, this was because they could not identity with the political parties that claimed to represent the nation.Reference Bollati¹⁵ This in turn offered the political parties, which in the aftermath of the Cold War were lining up to take their place on the national political stage with a new sense of legitimacy, the task of restoring a nation that hitherto had been under-represented.

But in these calls to restore a sense of national identity, purpose and unity there was a deeply discordant voice – that of the secessionist Northern League led by Umberto Bossi, whose most popular and successful political targets were Rome and the South. ‘Roma ladrona’ – ‘thieving Rome’ – proved to be an extremely effective battle-cry for a movement that in its attack on big government suggests many similarities with the later American Tea Party. Like the Tea Party militants, the Northern League peddles self-serving – but highly successful – pastiches of historical memory, and plays on a variety of local preoccupations and insecurities, among which most obviously is xenophobia. But if the anti-immigrant rhetoric of the League is directed primarily against Balkan and non-European immigrants in northern Italy, its point of departure was – and remains – Italians from the South.Reference Avanza¹⁶

Neither the attacks on southerners nor the racist coloring they took in the late 1980s and early 1990s were new. What is referred to simply as Italy's ‘Southern Problem’ first took shape in the years immediately after Unification, when Italians from the North and the Center first came into contact with the South. The cultural and social differences that separate the two Italies became a constant theme in the political literature of the decades that followed when positivists such as the criminologist Cesare Lombroso depicted southerners as biologically and racially different.

Recent studies have emphasized how the negative representation of the South in these years was also an instrument of cultural integration, in which the South provided an ‘Other’ that served to define the features and attributes of the true Italian – a means for defining the national identities of the newly unified Italians and establishing norms to which southerners were expected to conform.Reference Dickie¹⁷ These studies illustrate the complexities that are buried in Italy's ‘North-South’ dichotomy, and they illustrate that the ‘Southern Problem’ is not one that can be defined simply in terms of the economic disparities between the North and the South. The economic disparities are real and continue to be so, but the ways in which the Southern Problem has been perceived and interpreted since Unification must also be understood as cultural issues: in terms of perceptions there is and never has been any single ‘Southern Problem’, rather a series of problematic challenges that have faced the Italian state since its formation, but in terms that have changed from generation to generation.

Why then has the ‘Southern Problem’ once again become a central issue in the political crisis and transition that has been in progress in Italy for nearly two decades now? There is no simple answer, even though the polemics of the Northern League suggest that there is. Their campaigns against the South began in the 1980s, and coincided with what was almost certainly the most difficult decade in the history of the South since unification – a decade of violence and collusion between political parties and organized crime that culminated in the assassinations of the anti-Mafia judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in Palermo in 1992.Reference Allum and Allum¹⁸

This is not the place to embark on a detailed account of the reasons for this – suffice it to say that the situation that developed in the South in the 1980s was very closely linked to the broader crisis of Italian politics as revealed through the inquiries of the Italian magistrates after 1992. If ‘tangentopoli’ began in Milan, the collusion between organized crime and political parties that was at the heart of the crisis in the South had the same roots. In the South that crisis took a particular form and scale thanks above all to the massive transfers of public funds – first for reconstruction after the devastating earthquakes in Irpinia in 1980 and then more generally in the form of family income support to limit unemployment in the South.

By the end of the 1980s the situation in the South was disastrous and for many – including many southerners – seemed to demonstrate the critical political failing of the Italian state. Organized crime arrogantly demonstrated its capacity to openly challenge the authority of the Republic, as is evident from the series of unchecked violence and murders, amongst them the ‘illustrious corpses’ of General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa (assassinated with his wife in the center of Palermo in 1982) and the judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino who suffered the same fate a decade later (in May and July 1992). At the same time, the southern regions were registering the highest levels of unemployment and the lowest levels of industrial production in the European Union, while thanks to government transfers living standards had risen to around the national average, placing them well above EU averages. Without producing wealth or creating employment, the South had come to enjoy all the benefits of a wealthy consumer society.

When the Northern Leagues attacked the South they were motivated not only by residual anti-Southern anti-immigrant sentiments that dated back to the years of the massive post-war emigration from the South (immortalized in Visconti's 1960 film, Rocco and his Brothers) but above all because the ‘Southern Problem’ became the prime example of the presence of Roma ladrona and the ‘big state’. Rome not only imposed unjustifiable taxes on hard-working and entrepreneurial northerners, but added insult to injury by siphoning money off to support organized crime and luxurious life-styles in the feckless South. ‘Forza Etna’ – (‘come on Etna, do your work’) – was a cry that echoed around the terraces of northern football stadiums when southern teams were playing.

That connection is critical, otherwise it would make little sense for the Lega to revive its anti-southern polemics at a moment when its principal targets – as far as immigrants were concerned – were now former Yugoslavs and non-EC immigrants, especially but not only Muslims. In fact, the political language of the Lega has not changed significantly over the last two decades and its concerns are addressed primarily at the integrity of the Italian nation state. The Lega's initial political project was secession and the creation of an autonomous state of Padania figured large, even though the attempts to define how in practice this might be achieved defied even the fertile imaginations of its proponents. From secession the party's strategies have now moved to the surer ground of federalism, even though commentators continue to puzzle over what this term actually means in the forms in which it is used in current political debate in Italy.Reference Roux¹⁹ But whatever doubts there may be, recent electoral results chart the apparently unstoppable rise of political support for the Lega, which to the surprise of many has emerged as the most powerful of the forces within the uneasy and insecure political coalition, until recently headed by an aging and error-prone Berlusconi. In response to the barrage of insults and invectives originating from the northern League and its spokesmen, federalism and separatism are finding growing support in many parts of southern Italy as well, including the South. As a result, many informed observers fear that Italy's national unity is more at risk now than at any time since Unification.

Whether or not those fears are justified would take us beyond the bounds of this paper, whose purpose has been to survey in very general terms the ways in which the memory of the Risorgimento has been a key element in the political discourse of national unity and reconciliation in Italy. What makes the Italian discourse striking and distinctive is the juxtaposition of the unifying symbolism of the Risorgimento and the apparently divisive presence of the North-South divide. Just how problematic these symbols have become is evident from the controversies and unease that have accompanied preparations in Italy to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Italian unification – a project for which the government has made no attempt to conceal its distaste, despite appeals from the President of the Republic who has repeatedly called on Italians to respect the memory and ideals of the Risorgimento. But only a few years ago, a special meeting of the International Relations Committee of the Chamber of Deputies to celebrate the anniversary of the birth of Giuseppe Garibaldi was the target for a demonstration by a group of deputies from the Lega who distributed literature denouncing Garibaldi as a pirate, a horse thief, a freemason, and an agent of the British secret services who was guilty of war crimes. His greatest crime, for these gentlemen, was to have brought Sicily and the South into the unified Italian state in 1860. In numerous websites throughout the South, however, Garibaldi is no longer hailed as a hero but is instead denigrated and scorned as an agent of Piedmontese expansionism who invaded and conquered the South at the behest of King Victor Emanuel II.

Italy's political battles today continue to draw on the culture wars of yesterday, which gives them particular relevance to our common project, which seeks to examine more closely and critically how languages of reconciliation evolve and function. In the case of Italy from unification to the present, this means exploring the uneasy partnership between Risorgimento memories (which focus on the theme of unity) and the ‘Southern Problem’ (which highlights the persistence of ‘disunity’ within the national project). By exploring these symbolic forms of language at key moments in Italy's political history – the crisis that followed unification; the civil war after 1918; the founding of the anti-Fascist Republic in 1946 – we may expect to acquire not only a better understanding of the reasons for the persistence of these formulae, but also of their limits as well as strengths as terms of reconciliation.