About the Italians

Extract

The Italians are used to visitors. Once over the Alps, as the train runs down to Turin or Milan, you are in a country that is vividly different from every other, but which nothing from outside ever seems to surprise. Italy, after all, has been civilized longer than any land to the north or west of her; and though many centuries have passed since Europe was governed from Rome, she has remained in a sense the continent’s centre of gravity, if only as the common focus of historical memories. Is she the world’s most visited country? At any rate the foreigner has been coming here since Rome was Rome: pilgrims, priests and conquerors, students, soldiers and tourists, marching up and down the peninsula, roaming, ravaging, ridiculing and revering it. If countries can be revered, there is only one more reverend than Italy. Yet politically she had no national existence until less than a hundred years ago, and has not had a very secure one since. She achieved national unity too late (apart from other considerations) seriously to rival other western nations in the political field, and the fall of Fascism only confirmed this situation. Obviously, the greatness of Italy has little to do with political or military power: indeed her historical achievement, her culture, is not national in the sense that English, French, Spanish or even German culture is national. It has never been centred in one capital or one court.

In an interesting recent study of Manzoni, Mr Bernard Wall notes this cultural regionalism of Italy, together with another effect of the absence of a strong national focus.