Does it make sense to talk about Italian identity?

Is there an Italian identity? If so, what are its characteristic features?

Many have tried to answer it; among them Ernesto Galli della Loggia, historian, professor and editorialist of the Corriere della Sera, who in 1998 dedicated a short study to it, republished last year for Il Mulino (Italian identity, pages 199).

A great text, which is still striking today for the depth of the analysis and the sobriety of the prose.

Addressing the issue of the identity of a nation necessarily leads to a historical reinterpretation of the events that have shaped its character.

One more reason to re-propose today the reading of a text like this, in a historical moment in which a rare pandemic emergency and the need to reconstruct the country's economic fabric, once again pose the Italians, 75 years later, before the perception of being part of the same community anyway.

A choice that is far from obvious in a group of people who, despite being the one that most of all shaped the civilization and history of the continent, was the last to become (or be made) a state.

In the logical thread of the author, in order to search for the origins of our identity one cannot but start from the legacy of Roma and from the profound and revolutionary one of Christianity, from which it drew heavily.

First of all in the main stretch that unites us most, the centrality of the family, very often conjugated in the form of "familism" which also embraces the widest sphere of friendship and professional relationships (It is no coincidence that the most recent example of national success, our entrepreneurial ability, is mostly of a family type, with a global champion like FCA, which after more than a century from its foundation is still firmly in the hands of the Agnelli family).

But the legacy of Rome is also an urban legacy, detectable in the columns and arches of our cities, and in the rigid centuriation of the countryside, still observable after so many centuries.

It is a legacy of forms, of aesthetic canons that we find in the subsequent Italian architectural styles, which will characterize the very identity of our urban creations, with which the Others see us.

It will be a bond, that with Rome, which will further strengthen in the thirteenth century with the rediscovery, by the glossators of the University of Bologna, of Roman law (Justinian's corpus iuris), which from that point on will become throughout Europe the main tool with which the imperial and royal authority will exercise its prerogatives.

A rediscovery that also had the singular result of producing in the inhabitants of the peninsula some reserve, still widespread from north to south, and therefore also from the identity trait, not so much towards the lawas regards the guarantees that it should have.

It is probably in those years that the belief, still widely present today, that the law is a matter for insiders, the subject of a small circle of subjects dedicated to its much necessary as well as vague "interpretation" (hence the saying existing today: lhe law applies to enemies and is interpreted for friends), carried out in the context of a forensic practice which, in the common sense, pertains more to the category of arts than to that of crafts.

It is true that the legal function became the prerogative of a notability of a corporate nature having family-based training and management criteria, which was added to the other oligarchic powers present in society.

Even Christianity, according to Galli della Loggia, occupies a prominent role in the construction of our identity: as a founding part of literary and artistic culture, and for its profound influence in the domination of those values, such as solidarity and brotherhood, which like no other are been able to dominate the heads and hearts of the people.

Without forgetting, on one side the counterweight role of the Church towards other civil powers and its being the "political" institution (think of the role of bishops) which for 8 centuries, from the XNUMXth to the XNUMXth century, represented the only form of endogenous authority on the peninsula, and therefore typically Italian; on the other, having always constituted an obstacle to any attempt at political unification of the peninsula.

When this happened, the north-south divide broke onto the national scene with all its tragedy.

Before then, our fragile national identity had developed on the east-west axis determined by the longitudinal development of the peninsula which sees our south being essentially a south-east, an offshoot of the European East (Greece) and Asia ( Byzantium).

For about a millennium, the history of the peninsula had developed independently on both sides, with Venice stretched to the east, and therefore to the Balkans and Asia; and Genoa projected towards France, Spain and the main commercial routes of the continent.

And it was certainly not by chance that the Romans themselves considered Italy only its Tyrrhenian part, calling the inhabitants of the Adriatic coast with the name of Greeks and Celts.

The gap between the north and the south of the country was socio-political rather than economic.

If the southern society had gone over time consolidating around the trinomial "ruling dynasty - landowners - notified”, Without any kind of bourgeoisie coming to claim its own role, and in the total insignificance of the popular component, in the center north, the era of the municipalities had led to the rise of numerous municipalities in which the local oligarchies were intent on pursuing their own commercial and economic interests in close coordination with professional corporations.

This cooperation in the shadow of the Arenghi laid the foundations for a deep-rooted and shared civic sense, made up of public rituals, symbolisms such as the effigy of the Municipality often bearing the Latin word. Libertas, the veneration of local saints, and, last but not least, the political function performed by the local bishop.

In those city contexts of the center and north an important part of our identity was created, which was certainly "communal", but at the same time "common" to an important part of Italy, which Pliny the Elder, not surprisingly loved to define as: a cunctarum gentium patria (a homeland of many people).

The newly established Kingdom of Italy was therefore endowed with two different types of society, having few elements in common (also constituting identity traits): such as the povertya innate cunning and recurrent individualism, all originated from a not very generous agricultural landscape, but also from the succession of the numerous reigning foreign powers that never had at heart the fate of the Italian subjects and of the local oligarchies who managed their power.

These are just some of the traits that according to the author make up the identity of us Italians, but many others could be added to them.

How to the inability of culture to play a proactive role in the unraveling of historical processes leaving the task of determining times and ways to politics alone (national unity was the result of political initiative and not of a cultural process involving the masses).

But also the absence of a ruling class that had the sense of the state as the sum dimension to inspire one's work.

In fact, we still feel a desperate need for the latter.