This recent book by Massimo Baioni provides an effective analysis of the history of museums of the Risorgimento in united Italy. Throughout its short history as a nation, Italy has experienced major changes, turning from a Liberal monarchy to a Fascist dictatorship and finally to a democratic republic: whatever its institutional and political form, the nation's relationship with the Risorgimento has always been an integral part of historical debate, political struggle, and public memory. Baioni therefore chooses the museum as the arena in which to explore the different ways of relating to the nation's struggles for independence, the conflict over memories and national symbols, and the strategies and languages of patriotic pedagogy over time.
The results of Baioni's many inquiries into the museums of the Risorgimento formed the background of this book: from La ‘Religione della Patria’. Musei e istituti del culto risorgimentale (1884-1918) (1994) to Risorgimento in camicia nera. Studi, istituzioni, musei nell'Italia fascista (2006), the author has been working on these issues for some time. In his current work, Baioni expands the idea of the ‘Risorgimento on stage’, following how in different periods it was linked with different combinations – the First World War, Liberal and Fascist colonialism, the Resistance – and highlighting the caesuras and continuities, the different ways of staging the national myth, and the process by which the public use of history can legitimate the present.
Baioni's research focuses on the period from the 1884 Exposition in Turin to the 1961 centenary of unification. The first chapter deals with Garibaldi's death (1882), which the author interprets as a watershed (p. 24), and with the first reworkings in a ‘conciliatory’ sense of the recent past of the struggle for national unity. In fact, Baioni notes how the inclusion in the Turin exhibition of the first ‘secular relics’ belonging to leading men in the struggle for independence included figures as diverse as Garibaldi, Mazzini, and Manin (the latter gradually forgotten in the national pantheon). The analysis takes into account exhibitions and museum projects (26 in 1906) coinciding with the Crispi era, highlighting the polycentrism of the museum phenomenon, even though it was relegated to the northern part of Italy.
The second chapter follows the history of the National Museum of the Risorgimento in Turin, the only one (even today) with this title; the Museum of the Risorgimento in Milan; and the first congress on the history of the Italian Risorgimento held in Milan in 1906.
Chapter three discusses 1911 as a periodising date for the museums of the Risorgimento: the Kingdom of Italy was celebrating its first 50 years with major exhibitions, and at the same time invading Libya, grafting colonialism on to the legacy of the Risorgimento. This took the form of relics from the Italian-Turkish war being included in the museums of the Risorgimento in Bologna, Ferrara, and Modena. A similar process took place in 1918, when the narrative of the First World War entered the museums of the Risorgimento, where the war was presented as the definitive fulfilment of national unity. The inauguration of museums of the Risorgimento in Trento and Trieste set the seal on this operation.
The fourth chapter deals with the advent of Fascism. Particular emphasis is given to the museology of Antonio Monti, director of the Museum of the Risorgimento in Milan from 1925 until the fall of Fascism, and the imprint that Cesare Maria De Vecchi made on the Turin museum. In the latter, the Risorgimento was included in a narrative that ran from the Battle of Turin in 1706 to the capture of Addis Ababa in 1936.
Finally, there follows a consideration of the Resistance as a ‘second Risorgimento’ (p. 201) and its progressive musealisation within the already existing museums of the Risorgimento in Bologna, Vicenza, Bergamo, and Trento, which often changed their names to include the Resistance.
By offering a clear overview, Baioni is able to deal with the local specificities of the museums he considers, effectively underlining the tension between ‘piccola patria’ and ‘grande patria’ (p. 35), the attempts to reconcile, through the museum, elitist experiences such as those of the Risorgimento with the new mass dimension of the Great War and Fascism, and the construction of a patriotic sentiment through exhibition. An important contribution to the growing field of studies on the concept of display as creation of national identity between the Liberal and Fascist eras (see Tomasella Reference Tomasella2017; Carli Reference Carli2020), the book in its conclusions opens up some reflections on present-day institutions, raising fundamental questions for contemporary history museums.
Vedere per credere is a useful and rich book that offers a clear picture of a period in Italy's relationship with the idea of nationhood – a relationship that would enter a deep crisis in 1968, but whose languages and material legacies are still visible today.
