In early 2012, I picked up a book called Storia d’Italia: L’Italia dei Secoli Bui (or History of Italy: The Italy of the Dark Ages). I read it with the goal of improving my Italian first and foremost, but I enjoyed the approach to history that the authors, Indro Montanelli and Roberto Gervaso, applied in writing the book. It was interesting without being too biased, and it presented facts that I largely knew in ways that made me reassess that particular period of history.

As a result, I purchased and read, on and off over the past year and a half, the other 21 volumes in the series. Indro Montanelli was the primary author, with Roberto Gervaso as co-author for the first six volumes and Mario Cervi as the co-author for the last eleven. On balance, I found the series to be enjoyable and informative, even if the space allotted to the various periods of history was a bit off in my opinion. In particular, I believe that the Renaissance should have received one more full book than it did, and the two centuries of stagnation under Spanish and Austrian rule could have been condensed to one book from two. Additionally, several of the later books were failures in my opinion, as they did not provide any social or cultural history but instead focused on every single one of Italy’s ephemeral cabinets, which seemed to have the lifespan of a mayfly. I really didn’t care who was assigned to the various ministries in a cabinet that lasted for less than 50 days. The most outrageous book in the entire series was probably L’Italia dei due Giovanni (Italy of the two Giovannis), where neither Giovanni (Pope John XXIII and Giovanni Gronchi, President of the Republic) received more than a few pages of space in what was an endlessly boring litany of names and political maneuverings that sprawled over several hundred pages. That was, most likely, the low point of the series, and the books which followed largely restored my confidence in the entire endeavor.

To attempt a linear review of twenty two books would be not only tedious, but also useless to any would-be reader. I think that perhaps the better sort of review would be to highlight a few things that I learned from my readings, which allows me to highlight various ideas thematically rather than chronologically, as well as provide a bit of my own analysis in the process.

1. Regionalism has always been an issue in Italy. Most people tend to think of Italy as a nation with a strong sense of identity and unity. To a certain extent, the mythology surrounding the Risorgimento has helped to further this idea, and the strong presence of Italian cultural groups outside Italy which gravitate to a single sense of Italian identity help to foster this sense of social cohesion. In reality, however, the dominant theme of the post-Roman Italy has been one of fragmentation and regionalism. The violence that accompanied the decline of Roman power saw the larger cities of Italy begin to fortify themselves against all potential enemies, from barbarian invaders to mutinying Roman armies. As the walls went up, the concerns of the inhabitants diminished to local ones. Although some invaders, such as the Lombards, were able to create the illusion of unity in their portion of Italy, after Charlemagne’s Franks destroyed their empire and seized their Iron Crown, Italians reverted to type, with communi and local lords resisting attempts by the Holy Roman Empire to exert control over what was, admittedly, a portion of the Empire cut off from the rest of Europe by the Alps. With the total collapse of Imperial power, the era of the city-states and the princes saw the development of a multitude of small countries, each with its own linguistic peculiarities and vendettas against traditional enemies. While these sometimes split along the old Guelph-Ghibelline lines, alliances shifted over time and finally became meaningless. Foreign domination helped to create a thin veneer of unity that ultimately grew into an Italian national consciousness, but following the collapse of both fascism and the monarchy, the sense of national unity began to unravel again, with North-South tensions increasing and varied political parties espousing separatist or regional notions, from Giannini’s L’uomo Qualunque movement immediately following World War II to the Lega of Umberto Bossi that plays a major role in Italian politics. While most regionalists aren’t as radical as the deluded youths who seized St. Mark’s Campanile in Venice in 1997 with the aim of re-establishing the Serenissima, complete with a Doge, many Italians still speak their local dialects and a considerable number support parties that seek greater regional autonomy.

2. The Popes have complicated things. The Papacy’s relationship with Italy has been a troubled one because, for most of Italy’s history, the Pope was the head of a secular nation (the Papal States) and acted in much the same way as his secular counterparts in enforcing his own secular prerogatives. At times, of course, the papal authority was reduced to the spiritual status that it has today, but for most of the period prior to 1870, when the Kingdom of Italy broke down the Porta Pia and finally captured Rome (taking advantage of the preoccupation of the rest of Europe with the Franco-Prussian War), the Popes caused more trouble than anything else, at least from the political point of view. Although the secular concerns of the Papacy existed at all times, they reached a pinnacle under Alexander VI (Borgia) and his successor, Julius II (della Rovere). First and foremost, they attempted to recognize or withhold recognition of secular rulers, thus upending succession agreements and interposing themselves in nasty familial disputes, usually in exchange for substantial “donations” to the Church (a less kind characterization would be that the payments were bribes). In addition, they sought to aggrandize their own holdings, expanding the size of the Papal States over time. Worst of all, however, they directly inhibited any attempts at Italian unity, both in a political sense and in a very physical sense. The Papal States lay in the center of the Italian peninsula and helped to separate the poorer, agricultural South from the more advanced artisans and flourishing city-states in the North. With an incompetent and corrupt bureaucracy run from the Curia in Rome, the Popes helped to inhibit any sovereign who might seek to expand his kingdom. They also, more often than not, invited foreigners into Italy to help resolve disputes or to “save the Papacy” from the latest threat. These intrigues pitted Angevins against Normans, the French against the Spaniards, and all of them against the Italians. Of course, this policy came back to haunt the Popes, particularly when Emperor Charles V occupied and sacked Rome.

3. The Germans have not been good to the Italians. Mussolini’s alliance with Hitler was an aberration in Italian politics for many reasons, but the strongest one was clearly that it went against every historical alliance that Italy ever had. It made about as much historical and cultural sense as a Chinese-Japanese alliance would. Italy’s first experience with the Germans were as invaders, as waves of Goths and Lombards overran Italy. The invasion was far from pleasant, as can be imagined. When the Pope begged for help from the Franks, feeling that a more distant German tribe might be less intrusive, it only created a pretext for Charlemagne to annex northern Italy into his own empire, which set off a series of wars with Germans similar to the Hundred Years’ War between England and France. The Italians rarely won the battles, but because the Germans didn’t have the resources to keep the Italians in check, the punishing expedition of a Frederick Barbarossa had little lasting impact on Italian attitudes. Although the Emperors eventually abandoned Italy, they still occasionally took part in expeditions to Italy as part of a greater European power game. Finally, the Austrian Habsburg Empire ended up conquering a significant portion of Italy, such that most of northern Italy was either under its direct control or, as principalities like those of Modena showed, under the despotic rule of local tyrants who could rely on Austrian troops to march in and quell any unrest. It was resentment of this policing of Italy that helped lead to the Risorgimento, which ended with Austria losing most of its claims in Italy (but not all). Italy fought Austria and Germany in World War I in order to recover the Alto Adige and other historically Italian regions from the Austrian Empire. After World War I, Mussolini proclaimed himself the protector of the rump state that remained of the Austrian Empire in what one can only assume was a bit of underhanded revenge, an attempt to show that now the master was the servant. His alliance with Hitler was thus, one might say, doomed to fail under the crushing weight of historical antagonisms. Indeed, the alliance only lasted a few years and ended with the Italians deposing Mussolini and attempting to surrender to the Allies, which of course led to more reasons for the Italians to hate the Germans in the reprisals that followed what can only be called a “Surrender, Italian Style” (more on that below).

4. The Risorgimento is largely a lie. The heroes of Italy’s political rebirth and reunification, from the military leader, Garibaldi, to the king of the house of Savoy, Vittorio Emanuele II, to the statesman, the able Conte di Cavour, to the idealists, like Mazzini, are household names in Italy. Of all of them, Cavour probably did the most and acted with the most competency, and does not receive enough recognition, whereas all the others receive too much recognition (especially Garibaldi). This is because much of the story of the Risorgimento is a lie. It was not a popular uprising – most Italians were illiterate, concerned with their regionalist prerogatives and didn’t care about unification. The movement was directed and implemented by a small section of society, perhaps 5% at most, who actually cared about the idea. The rest of the Italians had been beaten down by a Counter-Reformation that preferred to see them passive and ignorant, reinforced by foreign rulers that kept them occupied in the best Roman traditions of panes et circenses. Furthermore, it wasn’t won with hard-fought battles. Rather, it wasn’t won with hard-fought battles by Italians. The House of Savoy and its army lost most of the battles they fought. The carbonari secret societies were uncovered and their leaders executed. The few popular uprisings that occurred were easily crushed. The “quadrilateral” of Austrian fortresses was never broken. Instead, the House of Savoy chose its allies well, so that with each defeat it somehow ended up gaining land. Yes, Garibaldi did undertake a bold invasion of Sicily to help overthrow the corrupt and unpopular Bourbon kings of Naples, but he and his troops almost got killed by the Sicilians on several occasions because of the way they behaved to the local populations and power centers. It’s also worth remembering that Garibaldi tried, and failed, to take Rome. The King of Savoy (and later, Sardinia), Vittorio Emanuele II, was pushed on by his brilliant adviser and statesman, Cavour, to keep up the expansion of his realm, such that in 1861, a unified Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed. Almost immediately after it was proclaimed, Savoyards were complaining that money would be sucked into the South, the Southerners continued banditry and popular uprisings as a means of making money and other cities that were used to being seats of power saw their raison d’être vanish. Rather than seeing all of Italy link hands and sing “Va, Pensiero” together, the Italian experiment almost collapsed as soon as it started.

5. The Italian Army is an oxymoron. In the United States, there is a popular form of entertainment that consists of belittling the fighting abilities of the French. The roots of this sort of humor seem to lie more in an occasional mutual resentment between the two nations than in any serious assessment of previous military ability. If the Americans were to take a moment to review Italy’s military exploits, it becomes clear that everything said half in jest about the French can be said with total seriousness about the Italians. When the vaunted Roman legions disappeared from this world, they seem to have taken Italy’s military tradition with them. Although the Italians seem to have fought appreciably well in the Middle Ages, by the Renaissance the princes of the city-states were resorting to war on the condottiere system, which was fought by mercenaries, mostly foreign, in show battles that often had the goal of seeing as few people killed as possible, for as little real political gain as possible, in order to keep the whole system well-financed into the foreseeable future. These armies were singularly unsuited to stopping any real military force, as became obvious when states that had reached a level of national unity, such as France, Spain and Austria, invaded Italy. Once under foreign domination, the Italians were discouraged from exhibiting any martial skills above the level of the blood-feud or fencing duel, and it showed, as they largely submitted to foreign rule. At times, the Genoese asserted independence, as a minor incident blown out of all proportion showed (a boy named Balilla threw a stone at some Austrian cannon crews and it started a popular uprising that led to a temporary independence for the city; his name was later used ad nauseam by the Fascists as a symbol of Italian resistance). The Italians, as I noted, lost most of the battles they fought during the Risorgimento, and in World War I they entered the war woefully unprepared. The human cost was incredible, and the massive defeat of the Italian Army at Caporetto, though stopped at the Piave, showed how illusory any Italian fighting prowess was. There were exceptions, of course, in the arditi who wore black shirts and volunteered for dangerous assignments, and some groups of bersaglieri and alpini, largely drawn from the mountainous north of the country, showed real skill. However, this skill was not something that the majority of Italians shared, and even though Mussolini adopted many of the insignia of these elite units, from the black shirt to their song, “Giovinezza”, the Italian army under Fascism was only capable of defeating the Negus of Ethiopia or the Senussi of Libya, because in both cases Italy’s opponent had no modern arms or hard currency with which to buy them. As soon as Italy started a real war, it lost. Its invasion of Greece saw Italian forces pushed back into Albania and suffering horrible defeats with terrific loss of life, with total defeat only staved off by Hitler’s intervention in the Balkans. In North Africa, the Italians surrendered in the hundreds of thousands, and the Italian fleet was even bombed by its own air force by mistake in one of a series of ignominious defeats. The Italian Army couldn’t even surrender properly. On September 8, 1943, General Badoglio, the Royal Family and the other high ranking officials of the post-Mussolini government (Mussolini had been deposed in July but Italy didn’t change sides until September 8) fled to the South, leaving generals in Italy, southern France, Yugoslavia, Greece and the Greek Islands completely unaware of what was to be done. In most cases, the Italians were thrown into POW camps or worse, killed in mass executions, by their former allies. Many were killed by Yugoslav partisans. And, although Mussolini established a new Fascist government at Salò, the Germans never trusted the Italians enough to supply them with troops, nor did they trust the ability of the Italians to fight enough to bother.

6. Even so, Mussolini wasn’t that bad. It is telling that both Gianfranco Fini and Silvio Berlusconi have said good things about Mussolini. Prior to 1938, most Italians had a uniformly positive impression of him. He only sent a few hundred enemies to jail, and even people who attempted to assassinate him were frequently pardoned, such that few people were executed in his state, which was as corrupt and venal as previous Italian regimes had been. As a result, while there was some occasional violence, most people were content with the social order. Fascism grew, not out of a “response to Marxism” as is frequently stated, but out of irredentism, the Italian desire to recover the portions of the historical Italy that remained under Austrian control as of the outbreak of World War I: The Trentino, Alto Adige, and the Dalmatian and Istrian coastline, including the cities of Pola, Fiume and Zara. Veterans in the arditi, who wore the black shirt and sang “Giovinezza”, were driven by a nationalist desire to see the unification of Italy completed. Italy had entered World War I in order to recover these territories, and England and France had promised them to Italy to entice it to enter the war. At the end of the war, Woodrow Wilson, in his sanctimonious priggishness, refused to honor this promise, favoring the Yugoslavs. The veterans who returned home, then, had seen an unprecedented level of blood shed for the unification of Italy. They had actually won the war, despite Italy’s military tradition. Even so, the territories they had been promised were robbed from them at the last moment. When they came home, they formed fasci di combattimento and declared themselves ready to liberate Fiume in particular, such that Fiume eventually ended up in Italian hands. Moreover, they were angry with the largely socialist factory workers who had all the good-paying jobs. The factory workers had been exempted from the draft because they were needed for war industries, but to the veterans they were imboscati, draft dodgers (the word literally refers to hiding in the forest to avoid conscription). It should be noted that almost all of these workers were socialist in the anarchist and syndicalist traditions, with almost no Marxists. The natural violence that broke out everywhere in Italy as a result of these social tensions was not something that Mussolini started, but rather, something he manipulated in order to come to power. Once in power, he disbanded these groups and created a personal dictatorship that reduced Fascism to little more than window dressing. He had no cohesive strategy or plan, and he was mostly a posturing buffoon. Until he threw his lot in with Hitler, largely because he was afraid Hitler would become master of Europe no matter what Mussolini did, Italy was just another conservative, Catholic nation that had a corrupt authoritarian government. The inability of the Italians to conduct a war was matched only by their distaste for it in the first place. Had he not made the decision to stand with Hitler, Mussolini would likely have led Italy in much the same way Franco led Spain. Even taking into account his terrible miscalculation, his regime was both too incompetent and too unwilling to engage in any real atrocities.

7. The Left was always more dangerous than the Right. Much of postwar Italy saw a complete and total unwillingness to act decisively against Leftist extremists, such as the Red Brigades, even though they kidnapped and murdered a Prime Minister of Italy, Aldo Moro. Syndicalist strikes were allowed to paralyze the country, intellectuals spoke openly about overthrowing the state, and even notables such as Umberto Eco signed a manifesto that professed to support the Italian student actions against their professors, inspired by the French student protests but going much farther to justify violence as part of a necessary “class struggle”. When the Red Brigades acted, planting bombs and shooting politicians, the knee-jerk reaction was to blame Fascist groups, usually poorly described and without any real form. When the Left marched and threw Molotov cocktails, they denounced the police who tried to keep order as part of the “Fascist plots”. A CIA-sponsored plan approved by NATO that was to hide weapons caches in Northeastern Italy to allow for partisan warfare against a Soviet invasion was denounced, after its existence was discovered, as just a Rightist plot to set up a coup and crush “democracy”. The press seemed one-sided and Italy was spiraling out of control. It was only after the Red Brigades blatantly refuted the Fascist explanations for many of their own terrorist deeds that the pendulum began to swing and people began to see how damaging and destabilizing the extremist Left really was. It wasn’t until the mid-1980s that the Italian state began to calm down. Even then, Italy continued to be rocked by violence, this time at the hands of Middle Eastern terrorists, mostly affiliated with the PLO, who disregarded Italy’s Leftists foreign policy stance. Indeed, the Italian Communist Party (PCI), which was led by Palmiro Togliatti in its heyday, sought to draw a parallel between US naval bases in the Mediterranean and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The sense of moral equivalency remains to this day, and this unrepentant, unreformed Left, with its anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism and utopian considerations, continues to threaten the economic and social stability of Italy in a way that Mussolini and the right never could. This vocal and militant Left is probably partially the reason that Fini and Berlusconi have praised Mussolini.

8. Modern Italian history can make one slightly paranoid. Although the Left is certainly a greater threat to Italy than the Right, it is politicians of all sorts that seem to pose the greatest threat of all. When all of Italy’s scandals began to come to light in the early 1980s, the initial reaction was to downplay the extent of the corruption sitting at the heart of the Italian state. However, it soon became clear that there were dozens of different arrangements, from payments to politicians by Cosa Nostra, ‘Ndrangheta, Camorra and Sacra Corona Unita (the four primary mafia groups in Italy), to payments from Moscow to the PCI. These became intertwined with affairs involving bribes to secure purchases by the Italian government of military hardware from the US, the scandal regarding the partisan arms caches approved by NATO (Codename: Gladio), the secretive Masonic lodge P2 (Propaganda Due), investigations into judges and businessmen by so-called mani pulite (clean hands) prosecutors, and allegations of bribery from Berlusconi’s media empire, from Agnelli at FIAT, and so on. The problem with this entire culture of crimination and recrimination is that much of the “evidence” comes from people who, having been caught themselves, decided to turn “state’s evidence”. Their honesty was in question from the very beginning, and at a certain point the truth becomes obscured in layer after layer of counter-allegations that makes the entire matter too confusing. This is, perhaps, what the truly guilty like to see. In an atmosphere where the truth is almost impossible to discern, the lies of the corrupt become indistinguishable from the honest protestations of innocence by the wrongly accused. At times, I found myself wondering if certain informants had let themselves get caught, so as to level false accusations at people to help settle political scores. The possibilities for deep plotting at times seem to be out of the realm of crazy conspiracy theories. At the same time, I then found myself questioning the authors’ impartiality. After all, how can I trust Montanelli when he tells me that P2 was not really an all-powerful organization running Italy as a shadow government, when Berlusconi said he was admitted to the lodge by Montanelli’s co-author, Roberto Gervaso? Clearly, political and social connections in modern Italy are far more incestuous than they at first appear, and following all of the endless trials that have started in “anti-corruption” and “anti-mafia” campaigns is almost impossible without huge flowcharts. It’s enough to make one consider buying a tinfoil hat.

In summary, the series was well worth the read. Anyone interested in Italian history should consider it. I’m not sure if it has been translated into English, but it probably will be at some point sooner or later. I found myself liking Berlusconi despite (or perhaps, perversely, precisely because of) everything that’s been written about him and everything he’s been accused of. It’s fitting that he was finally convicted, without appeal, for the first time, despite having over 30 lawsuits initiated against him, the same week that I finished this 22-book monster series on Italy’s history. I expect that he will find a way to minimize the impact of the verdict; in fact, I expect no less of him. He is a quintessential Italian, in the best traditions of the history of his country. As they say, lasciatemi cantare...