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• Italy between history and historiography. In search of national identity

  62-76

  Marco Trotta

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  24

  Starting from the fundamental studies of the historian Giuseppe Galasso and in the context of a close confrontation with the most experienced European historiography on these topics, the essay reconstructs some issues of the italian national identity through the different guidelines of the historiographical debate from the nineteenth century to today in a comparative and historical setting of european modernity. The centuries-old duration of the events related to the process of formation of the Italian identity, from the tradition of the Roman Empire to the Risorgimento and national independence, passing through the long domination of foreign powers, finally ended with the unification of the peninsula and the state-building in 1861. The most significant terms of the identity discourse are thus affirmed: territory and nation, whose underlying grounds, however, still struggle to find shared reasons for a unitary understanding of the national historical framework. In this respect the category of national identity starts its construction at the time of the Romantic ferments and remains intimately linked to those anthropological traits that would have provided to found in the mid-nineteenth century the community of Italians, finally rejoined under the frame of a new State. Not a single identity, therefore, but a multiplicity of references to the rich, centuries-old Italian cultural heritage, rethought in the light of a decisive season for national destinies.

• The novel Libertà by Verga and the demythologization of Risorgimento rhetoric

  30-38

  Mario Cimini

  Views:

  305

  Giovanni Verga’s tale Libertà has often been object of multifaceted – and frequently discording –critical interpretations, being the most common readings those of who saw in it a clear bias for the Italian Risorgimento (despite its violent development), and those who read it as an expression of resilient skepticism by the author towards the same historic event. Leonardo Sciascia, for example, uses the term “mystification” to describe Verga’s attitude towards Bronte’s insurrection, at a time – 1860 – when Garibaldi was carrying out his well-known Expedition of the Thousand.

  The essay goes through all the noteworthy moments of this critical tradition, eventually deducting that it is by no means possible to draw firm assertions about Verga’s political ideology with the sole literary work as a point of reference. It argues instead that the author’s literary eminence must be seen in his outstanding ability to raise such a vast array of multilayered interpretations in the readers.