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CHAPTER 2

Making Italians, Making Southerners

“Fatta l’ltalia, bisogna fare gl’italiani.” “We have made Italy; now we must make Italians.” The most famous maxim in the mythology of Italian unification (1860) bears repeating and observing from close-up so that we are able to grasp its subversive ambiguity. It turns the cultural theory of nation-building on its head: the constitutive subject of the nation (a lin- guistic and cultural community) is first posited as being absent and is then proposed as an objective that must be attained through a retroactive, and yet obligatory (bisogna), act of legitimation. One might, therefore, inter- pret it as simultaneously challenging and reinforcing the doxa that nation- states are the expression of “imagined communities” united by common languages, customs, history, or racial fantasies.1 Following the first read- ing, the last European nation to be created in the second half of the nine- teenth century could be seen as having reversed the natural order of things by being born as a state before it ever existed as an imagined community. Considering its makers, instead, one could take notice of how quickly and collectively they hastened to reassure the world that they intended to restore the natural order immediately by working on creating the national community post facto. Both readings, however, contribute to give the  Italian  adage the status of making explicit the cultural norm of all nation-building: national communities are a perennial work in progress, and they never cease to be made and remade well after the nation-state has

1 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).

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been formed. The Italian case, however, does present an anomaly. Donna Gabaccia notes that at the time of unification, Italians had been made abroad rather than at home for centuries, by both themselves and others.2 The geographical, linguistic, cultural, and political fragmentation that had been a feature of the history of the Italian peninsula and islands since the early modern period had not prevented the formation of diasporic com- munities that imagined themselves—and were imagined by those around them—as the embodiment of a civiltà italiana (Italian civilization) com- prising “Italian art, music, science, architecture, humanist scholarship, and urban pleasures.”3 The cultural bricks for the making of Italians were therefore readily available in the aftermath of unification, as they had been used for centuries. Furthermore, the adage’s rhetorical emphasis on the act of poiesis (fatta/bisogna fare) successfully transfigured the implicit referent of the civiltà italiana: creativity and artistry. Yet, its very longevity, and its continued inspiration for generations of Italian scholars, intellectuals, art- ists, and politicians, does not attest to a rapid normalization or resolution of the poiesis gap between a “made” nation- state and the creative national- ization of Italians; rather, it points to a far darker side of Italian nation- building, which the highly discursive history of the adage itself elicits.

The maxim in question is nowhere to be found in the writings (Ricordi, 1867) published after the death of its alleged author, Massimo D’Azeglio, who was one of the “moderate” fathers of the Italian nation, nor was it reported anywhere in the immediate aftermath of unification. It was con- structed and turned into a trope by Ferdinando Martini, a friend of D’Azeglio, several decades after the publication of its reputed source, fol- lowing the defeat of the Italian army by the Ethiopians at Adwa in 1896, and it only became a true national dictum during Fascism.4 As Stephanie Malia Hom starkly puts it, the motto’s “rhetoric of poiesis […] culminated not only in making Italy, but also in the making of ‘greater Italy,’ that is, in sustaining colonial expansion and the Fascist Empire.”5 The making of Italians, in other words, belongs to the history of state- and empire- making rather than nation-building. In this respect, the longevity of the adage

2 Donna Gabaccia, Italy’s Many Diasporas (New York: Routledge, 2000). 3 Ibid., 16. 4 Stephanie Malia Hom, “On the Origins of Making Italy: Massimo D’Azeglio and “Fatta

l’Italia bisogna fare gl’italiani,” Italian Culture 31, 1 (2013): 1–16. The defeat at Adwa took place during a military campaign to expand the territories occupied by the Italians in Eritrea in the late 1880s and early 1890s. It was the first defeat of a white colonizer by an African army.

5 Ibid., 11. The Greek term poiesis is used here to emphasize the common semantic root of poetry and making.

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captures a discursive sphere of imaginings and reimaginings of the Italian community that has connected generations of post-unification writers, intellectuals, artists, and politicians, in spite of the political caesura between Liberal and Fascist Italy.6 In addition, if one reads the poietic overflow of the maxim against the grain of its discursive history, one also recognizes the false premises projected by its first stanza: fatta l’Italia. The Italian nation-state was not “made” either in 1861, when it was declared, or in 1866, when the Italian army “freed” Venice, or in 1870 when it finally conquered its soon-to-be capital Rome. Like the making of Italians, the making of Italy was dominated by the colonial logic of achieving a Grande Italia (Greater Italy) that included both entering the Great War under an agreement to annex the Austrian territories south of the Alps and create a protectorate over Albania, and the colonial wars that led to the occupation of Eritrea (1882), Somalia (1890), Libya (1911), Ethiopia (1936), and Albania (1939). The dual poiesis of making Italy and Italians not only anticipated Fascism, it also presupposed a logic of colonial expansion that went hand-in-hand with the territorialization of the national community and concealed the violence that was implicit in both processes.

Making northerners, Making southerners

At its most basic level, territorialization refers to the act of organizing a territory, as in the case of a state organizing a nation into administrative departments, regions, provinces, etc. In their seminal works of the 1970s, the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari developed a more constructivist notion of territorialization in which a “territory” is not a given, but is created by invoking the nation-state, which likewise involves the organization of the individuals within it. Deleuze and Guattari used the notion of territorialization primarily to develop the twin concepts of de-territorialization and re-territorialization, which they used to ana- lyze capitalist processes of libidinal investment, divestment, and reinvest- ment.7 Their analysis did not directly refer to nation-building, and yet it had everything to do with the question of national identity, especially in

6 Hom, “On the Origins,” 3. Scores of influential commentators still deny that Italians have ever been truly made, and countless scholars and members of the public have lamented the fact that the original deficit in the nationalization of Italians has never been overcome, even during the Fascist ventennio.

7 Eugene Holland, “Deterritorializing ‘Deterritorialization’: From the Anti-Oedipus to A Thousand Plateaus,” SubStance 20, 3 (1991): 55–65.

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the case of making Italy and Italians. According to Deleuze and Guattari, territorialization defines the trait d’union between a nation that assembles its territory and an identity that organizes itself by territorializing: that is, by marking its social space of interaction as a national territory.8 The “making of Italy” was therefore, from the very beginning, the “making of Italians.”

It is a well-known fact that even the first act in the making of Italy and Italians was anything but a unified or unifying effort. Politically, it was the work of (at least) two diametrically opposed agents that found themselves working together in 1859–1860, when Monarchist and Republican patri- ots led a two-pronged military campaign. One army—led on land by the Piedmontese Monarchy of Savoy—moved against the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the north east, while the other—the celebrated Spedizione dei mille (Expedition of the Thousand)—led by the popular “Hero of the Two Worlds,” General Giuseppe Garibaldi, and inspired by the writings and actions of the Republican ideologist Giuseppe Mazzini, moved by sea, landed in Sicily, and proceeded to “liberate” the south of the peninsula from the Bourbon monarchy that ruled the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. The fact that this haphazard process of national formation was actually given a specific name, and that this name—Risorgimento—referred in the most emphatic, most Catholic terms to a sacred political body that resurges or is resurrected, still stands as a reminder of the deep fractures that unifica- tion not only swept under the carpet, but actually created, and that name sought to exorcise. On the one hand, the sacralizing figure of a resurgent national body did away with the history of cultural, political, and territo- rial fragmentation that had characterized the peninsula and its surround- ing islands from Medieval times on, and on the other, it glossed over the gap between the committed minority of middle- to upper-class patriots and the vast majority of the population of the peninsula who had remained passive and suspicious of, if not outright hostile to unification. In so doing, it further denied the depth and historical rootedness of separatist and republican expectations alike, which were widespread in the “liberated” regions that had belonged to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Above all, it sacralized the violence employed by the newly formed state to repress the insurrections that flared up in these regions even before the ink on the new monarchical constitution was dry. The term brigantaggio (banditry), which was used by military officers and civilian commentators of the time

8 Ibid., 56.

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to refer to the civil war that was waged in the south of the peninsula between 1860 and 1865, complemented the sacralization of state violence in the name of the Risorgimento with the criminalization of the savage law of nature. Never properly defined, and eternally amorphous and swathed in mystery, brigantaggio figured ubiquitously in law and discourse as the opposite of civilization. In brigantaggio, writes John Dickie, “civilized vio- lence and barbarism” were mutually constituted,9 and this process took place through a further act of territorialization.

The repression of the first Italian civil war went hand-in-hand with the creation of a far deeper division and polarization than any associated with the making of Italy. This was the geographical division and cultural-social- economic polarization between an Italian “North” and an Italian “South” (which was also known as the mezzogiorno, or meridione), or rather, as Dickie so perceptively explains it, between “Italy” itself and “the South” as “Italy’s Other.”10 The day after Garibaldi met with Victor Emanuel II in Teano and uttered his famous “Saluto il primo Re d’Italia!” (I salute the first King of Italy), Count Cavour’s envoy Carlo Farini would write these words to his leader, which would later be echoed in description after description of brigantaggio: “What barbarism! Some Italy! This is Africa: the Bedouins are a flower of civilization compared to these peasants.”11 Farini’s sentiments were immediately echoed and made specific in a Piedmontese saying that spread widely in the aftermath of unification: “Garibaldi did not unify Italy; he separated Africa!” The geocultural cre- ation of a divided image of “Italy-North” and “non-Italy-South,” was therefore the most immediate, consequential, and long-lasting result of the territorial expansion and transformation of the Kingdom of Piedmont into the Kingdom of Italy. It was also the constitutive act of making Italians.

Traditional historiography on liberal Italy has generally viewed the dis- cursive field of “making Italians” as being separate from the so-called ques- tione meridionale (the Southern Question) and meridionalismo (southernism): that is, the discourse revolving around the causes of, and the remedies for, the backwardness of the South compared with the rest of

9 John Dickie, “Stereotypes of the Italian South: 1860–1900,” in Robert Lumley and Jonathan Morris, eds., The New History of the Italian South. The Mezzogiorno Revisited (Exeter, UK: University of Exeter Press), 125.

10 Ibid., 119. 11 Farini, cited in Claudia Petraccone, Le due italie. La questione meridionale tra realtà e

rappresentazione (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2005), 6.

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the country. To the poiesis of making Italians—which was largely the prov- ince of public intellectuals, poets, and other literary figures—meridional- isti responded with the pragmatics of facts and statistics. The two groups have rarely encountered one another in the same monograph. More recently, scholars such as Jane Schneider, John Dickie, and Nelson Moe have challenged this fictitious separation by showing how widespread the formation of stereotypes of the “South” was, far beyond the discourse on the Southern Question, and how the cultural bricks upon which meridio- nalismo rested had been laid across Europe long before the unification of Italy.12 As Dickie puts it, “the South” was constituted as an “imaginatively charged synecdoche of the problem of nation-building,” and meridional- ismo effectively “transposed on to a geographical axis” the fundamental question of the “relations between elites and masses.”13 This revisionist perspective has, however, remained closely tied to the writings of Pasquale Villari, Leopoldo Franchetti, and Sidney Sonnino in 1875–1876 as the “origin” of the Southern Question. Moe and Dickie, therefore, have reaf- firmed the poietic premises of nation-building rather than problematizing them, and showed little concern for the territorializing logic that under- pins the discursive construction of the Italian South. This study considers the connection between making Italians and the Southern Question from the standpoint of a growing body of postcolonial critical literature, and specifically from the perspective that Luigi Carmine Cazzato has aptly named “Meridionism.”14

Meridionism, which is seen as being parallel and analogous to Orientalism, stands for the discursive construction of “Souths” in moder- nity, beginning with Southern Europe in the early eighteenth century all the way through to Africa as the world’s perennial South at the end of the nineteenth century.15 Italy’s South arose precisely at the mid-point

12 Jane Schneider, ed., Italy’s “Southern Question”: Orientalism in One Country (Oxford and New York: Berg, 1998); John Dickey, Darkest Italy. The Nation and Stereotypes of the Mezzogiorno, 1860–1900 (London: Macmillan, 1999); Nelson Moe, The View from Vesuvius. Italian Culture and the Southern Question (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006).

13 Dickie, “Stereotypes,” 128. 14 Luigi Carmine Cazzato, “Fractured Mediterranean and Imperial difference:

Mediterraneanism, Meridionism, and John Ruskin,” Journal of Mediterranean Studies 26, 1 (2017): 69–78.

15 Orientalism, the imaginary-ideological construction of the Orient, famously described by Edward Said is also at the center of the authors’ reflections in Jane Schneider’s Orientalism in One Country.

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between these two, and was informed by what Anibal Quijano pertinently calls the logic of “coloniality.”16 In contrast to early modern New World colonialism, coloniality is specific to post-French Revolution modernity, in that it bases relations of territorial domination on the exercise of epistemo- logical power: that is, on the hierarchizing of difference.17 The first episte- mological movement of coloniality consisted in the temporalization of the “imperial space of differentiation,” which resulted in the twin ideas of Progress and History and the related hierarchies of “advanced” and “back- ward.” The second movement involved the simultaneous racialization and hierarchizing of the relations between “dominant” (colonizer) powers and “dominated” (colonized) subjects, which resulted in a “relationship of biologically and structurally superiors and inferiors.”18 Variety was reduced to dichotomy, and dichotomy to hierarchy, while spatial differentiation gave way to the normative temporalization of North as progress and South as backwardness. It was not just one dichotomy that emerged from this process, therefore, but two: while coloniality constructed the Orient as Europe’s external and inferior Other, it also defined Southern Europe as the “internal antithesis” of Northern Europe, and in so doing affected both the making of Italy and Italians.19 To put it in stark terms, far from being parallel to and separate from the discourse on “making Italians,” the Southern Question preceded and pre-constituted it as to both its modali- ties and finalities.

The earliest and most cogent exemplification of the Meridionist frame- work connecting the Southern Question to making Italians is Giacomo Leopardi’s poem La Ginestra (The Broom, 1836), which is as much an ode to the vanishing wisdom of Neapolitans as it is a diatribe against the “proud and foolish century” whose intellectual sons “praise” its “bub- bling” of progress. With delicious irony, the Recanati native apostrophized the men of progress, and challenged them to visit the desolate slopes of Vesuvius to ascertain “the ‘magnificent and progressive fate’ of the human

16 Anibal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,” Nepantia: Vies from the South 1.3 (2000): 533–580, and “Coloniality and modernity/rationality,” Cultural Studies 21, 2–3 (March/May 2007): 168–178. See also, in the same journal’s vol- ume, Walter D. Mignolo, “Introduction: Coloniality of power and de-colonial thinking,” 155–167, and “Delinking: The rhetoric of modernity, the logic of coloniality and the gram- mar of de-coloniality,” 449–514.

17 Cazzato, “Fructured Mediterranean,” 28. 18 Ibid., 29. 19 Ibid., 39.

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race” and see “how carefully our race is nurtured by loving Nature.”20 While ridiculing naïve positivism, the poem identified the Vesuvian fields with a mental horizon in which human nature was still understood as sub- ject to the Laws of Nature, rather than belonging to History and its Law of Progress. The Broom thus recorded the transformation of Naples from a metonymy of eighteenth-century cosmopolitanism to a synecdoche for the fateful subordination of Nature to History in modern times. It also captured a moment in time when the signification of Naples as Italy’s South began to collapse into that of Italy as Europe’s South. The eighteenth- century acclaim of the Italian South as a “liminal” space in which Europe, Africa, and Asia met and coexisted began to give way to the Meridionist image of southern backwardness and savagery.21

During the course of the eighteenth century, the idea of civiltà itali- ana, which had been developed over the centuries by diasporic would-be Italians, began to be obfuscated by a far more vibrant Northern European image of Italy as Europe’s South.22 Initially, this image was fairly benign in its liminality, and was aligned with the Grand Tour’s passion for the pic- turesque and the Enlightenment’s search for a harmonious balance between the forces of nature and man. By the end of the first quarter of the nineteenth century, however, polarizing images of northern and southern European-ness began to circulate widely in popular novels like Madame De Stael’s Corinne, or Italy (1824) or Victor de Bonstetten’s treatise, serendipitously entitled The Man of the North and the Man of the South (1825), in which the latter is firmly—and exclusively—associated with depictions of Italy. In particular, Italy’s southern-ness started to be associated with the transformation of the celebrated otium Romanum and dolce far niente (sweet idleness) into the vice of “indolence.”23 This moral degradation was also commonly gendered and engendered in the Italian cicisbeo, who was a ubiquitous presence in late eighteenth-century litera- ture and theater. Identified as a young male lover of a married lady who

20 Translated quotations from the poem are from a translation that can be accessed at: https://www.poetr yintranslation.com/PITBR/Italian/Leopardi.php#anchor_ Toc38684164 (accessed December 14, 2019); see also Moe, The View, 50–52.

21 Ibid., 40. 22 See Silvana Patriarca, Italian Vices: Nation and Character from the Risorgimento to the

Republic (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), and Nelson Moe, The View from Vesuvius.

23 Ibid. and Robert Casillo, The Empire of Stereotypes. Germaine de Staël and the Idea of Italy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).

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accompanied her in public, feigning effeminate (homosexual or unthreat- ening) traits in order to hide the affair and allow the cuckolded husband to save face, the figure of the cicisbeo projected the image of an emascu- lated, morally deprived, and sexually permissive people: “Italians,” con- cluded a non-Italian observer of the age, “had ceased to be men.”24 Italian patriots could not agree more: while spurring his countrymen toward uni- fication and the reclamation of their moral and cultural primacy, Vincenzo Gioberti ended his Del primato morale e civile degli italiani (1843) with a scathing critique of his countrymen’s “principal vice” of indolence. Cesare Balbo said much the same thing, albeit insisting that this was only a “tem- porary condition” and that unification would “regenerate Italians.”25 In Della nazionalità italiana (On Italian Nationality, 1843), moreover, Giacomo Durango claimed that Italians had lost their taste for industri- ousness due to an “intentionally emasculating” education.26 Finally, Giuseppe Mazzini, the putative ideological father of Italian nation- building, sealed the connection between work, the elimination of vice through the sacrifice of one’s indolence, and the regeneration of Italians’ multiple “personalities” into a single people “of character” in a direct appeal to “working men” in his Dei doveri dell’uomo (On the Duties of Man, 1860).27

Mazzini’s discourse on character was both the basis and the target of the writings that D’Azeglio himself dedicated to the topic in his Memoir, and which lay at the origin of the famous maxim about making Italians.28 D’Azeglio echoed Mazzini when he advocated that “the most immediate need” after unification was “to form Italians who would know how to do their duty; in other words, to form men of high, strong character.”29 By suggesting that this task had not been accomplished by the making-of- Italy process, and re-proposing it as the very content of making Italians, D’Azeglio and his followers entered an entirely new and different discur- sive arena from the one inhabited by Mazzini. For Mazzini, blood and selfless dedication to the cause was the only adequate path toward the re- masculinization of Italians and their acquisition of character. For D’Azeglio, the goal was specifically identified with forming Italians of “Piedmontese

24 Patriarca, Italian Vices, 36–45. 25 Ibid., 32. 26 Ibid., 30–33. 27 Giuseppe Mazzini, Dei doveri dell’uomo (1860) (Milan: RCS, 2010), 67–76. 28 Hom, “On the Origins,” 13. 29 Massimo D’Azeglio, I miei ricordi (Florence: G. Barbèra, 1866), 8–9 (my translation).

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character” by endorsing the British ideal of the “self-made” man.30 In fact, the formulation in D’Azeglio’s Ricordi (1867) that comes closest to the famous maxim can be found in a passage in which he criticizes Mazzini’s all-too-Catholic and sacrificial conception of character with these words: “If we want to have Italy we first need to make Italians; and once they have been made, Italy will do it on its own!”31

As Silvana Patriarca has shown, D’Azeglio placed the emphasis on self- reliance and the self-made man, which were the pillars of the doctrine of “self-helpism” authored by Charles Smiles, whose Self-Help had recently been published in 1865 and immediately translated into Italian. The book sold 75,000 copies in Italy, spurring a plethora of publications on the lives of Italian self-made men, including edifying fiction and textbooks addressed specifically at children.32 So prominent was this literature on the self-making of Italians that it led to the Italianized term self-helpisti being coined to define devotees of Smiles’s ideas. On the surface, the self-helpist movement advocated the moral virtues of work in general as a privileged, if not the only, milieu for constructing Italian character, but this discourse actually applied only to the public sphere and was conceptualized in purely masculine terms. Its rapid spread was predicated on, and in turn rein- forced by, the long-standing connotation between effeminacy and indo- lence that had been codified by the association of Italians with dolce far niente. As Susan Stewart-Steinberg has argued, even the two classics of the Italian literature of the time—Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio (1883) and Cuore by Edmondo de Amicis (1886)—which were acknowledged to be the principal literary agents for turning Italian children into men of character, bore the marks of self-helpist solutions for the submerged but widespread anxieties about Italian masculinity.33

The overarching logic behind the earliest post-Risorgimento phase of making Italians was therefore one of gendering; however, the polarization of a female pre-unitary polity and a male unified nation made for a cross- gendering image of the Risorgimento that attached itself easily to the par- allel logic of Meridionism. As Patriarca has again perceptively argued, the very tendency to reiterate the same stereotype of female laziness over and

30 Ibid., 60–65. 31 Cited in Hom, “On the Origins,” 4. 32 Patriarca, Italian Vices, 60–65. 33 Ibid., 73; and Susan Stewart-Steinberg, The Pinocchio Effect. On Making Italians,

1860–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

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over again in literature, the popular press, and political discourse was both the most unifying trait among Italian cultural elites and the clearest sign of their remarkable dependency on a view of Italy-making that arrived “from the Thames.”34 Not only had Great Britain greatly influenced the political and military process of unification, but from the London-exiled Mazzini to D’Azeglio and the self-helpisti, an ideal cultural identification with Europe’s North had also come to be the principal common denominator across a politically divided patriotic front. No wonder the last term in the series of associations in post-unification discourse associating Italian-ness with effeminacy and indolence was that of the now reified “South.”

Both Gioberti and Balbo had explicitly transfigured Bonstetten’s polar- ization of northern and southern Europeans in their patriotic classics.35 Gioberti had  literally replaced Paris with Rome as projecting a happy fusion of North and South in an ideal center. Yet, when commenting on the spread of indolence among the populations of the Italian peninsula, Del primato did not reify a North vs. South dichotomy but still referred to specific regional differences. It was therefore the consolidation of Europe’s South into a unitary nation-state that allowed the geocultural polarization of Europe to be grafted on to the territorialized body of the new nation. Territorial differences that had hitherto been attached to Tuscans, Piedmontese, Venetians, Neapolitans, Sicilians, etc., each with their own specificities, were reorganized and schematized into “Northerners” versus “Southerners,” and “Southerners” were invariably identified as being idle and effeminate.36 With indolence placed squarely at the feet of the South, the normative content of making Italians found its definitive discursive realization in meridionalismo and the questione meridionale.

The public conversation between southern and northern intellectuals around the causes of and remedies for the backwardness of the South developed in the mid-1870s, and was therefore built on the cultural bricks that had been laid by the Europe-wide Meridionist discourse, but with a key added component: the medicalized discourse of biopolitics. As Moe has shown, both the Neapolitan Villari and the Tuscan duo of Franchetti and Sonnino made liberal use of medical metaphors with which to treat the criminal trinity of brigantaggio, camorra, and mafia in biological terms, and by which to identify the South as a potentially fatal illness for

34 Ibid., 72. 35 Moe, The View, 113–120. 36 Ibid., 13–36.

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the resurgent nation.37 For Villari, the ruling political class that had tack- led the “plague” of southern criminality had been composed of “excellent surgeons, but awful doctors,” and had done nothing to alleviate the social root of the criminal illness: that is, poverty, or rather “miseria,” a word that in Italian emphasizes the moral abjection induced by poverty.38 While not directly related to discussions on camorra, Villari’s association of Naples with cholera epidemics reinforced the marriage of moralist and organicist language in meridionalismo by highlighting the foundational opposition between Italian civilization and a South that remained domi- nated by the laws of nature. It is no wonder then that Villari would literally posit the mafia as being “born of spontaneous generation.”39 Even more openly and explicitly than Villari, Franchetti and Sonnino admitted that as members of the first ruling political elite (the so-called Destra storica, i.e., the monarchist and moderate liberal right), they had been bad doctors. For “fifteen years” they had not taken care of the “sores” and “wounds” of the south, and had therefore allowed them to “become gangrenous” and to “threaten to infect Italy.”40 Yet, implicit in these conclusions was the fact that, alas, more acts of surgical violence were needed, because “in a weak- ened organism” such as Italy had become, “those same causes that would produce barely noticeable effects in a healthy body lead to a complete breakdown.”41 Just as Villari had commented at one point that “the enslavement of the Negroes [had] harmed the slaves’ masters most of all,” so Franchetti and Sonnino also concluded in similarly paternalistic terms that “the first to suffer cruelly” from a lack of surgical violence would be the members of the ruling class themselves.42 Whether surgical (Franchetti and Sonnino) or homeopathic (Villari), the solution to the Southern Question was autoimmunization by the ruling class.

Any exhaustive consideration of the writings of Villari, Franchetti, and Sonnino should contextualize the words quoted above within the political scope of their concerns for the recent electoral defeat of their political side, and the moral compass of their times.43 Similarly, no evaluation of their writings can be divorced from the role they played in buttressing

37 Ibid., 224–249. 38 Pasquale Villari, quoted in Moe, The View, 228. 39 Ibid., 79. 40 Ibid., 247. 41 Ibid., 248. 42 Ibid. 43 Petraccone, Le due italie, 7–12.

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positivism and combatting the ascendency of idealism in the cultural wars of fin- de- siècle Italy.44 Finally, the influence they exercised over the genera- tions of meridionalisti who followed in their footsteps, and who continued to quote them in their texts, attests to their success in building an extremely cohesive and stable discursive field that is still alive today.45 Pasquale Turiello, Napoleone Colajanni, Ettore Ciccotti, Giustino Fortunato, Francesco Saverio Nitti, Alfredo Niceforo, Gaetano Salvemini, and Antonio Gramsci, to cite only the most prominent of them, each brought new political and disciplinary insights to the Southern Question, but they did not dramatically change the relationship between meridionalismo and making Italians that had been set in motion by Villari, Franchetti, and Sonnino. By the same token, it must be acknowledged that quite apart from the often conflicting diagnoses and prognoses they offered, partici- pation in the discourse initiated by Villari, Franchetti, and Sonnino on its own served the key purpose of nationalizing southern Italian elites to the logic of Meridionism.46 Quite literally, the making of Italians into men of character identified its appropriate subject in the very southern intellectu- als who were discussing the Southern Question. In other words, the first goal of making Italians was achieved by having southern intellectuals accept, if not actually welcome, the surgical violence of the newly formed state and simultaneously divorce themselves from the southern populace by identifying themselves with the northern power of “facts.” Here, the discursive development of meridionalismo confirms the postcolonial insight that coloniality operates not merely by subordination, but princi- pally via “colonization of the imagination of the dominated,” so that northern “cultural Europeanization was transformed into an aspiration” for most southern intellectuals.47 As Moe’s work documents, the precise intersection between the logic of Meridionism and the construction of the Italian nation-state can therefore be located in the mid-1870s when the task of making Italians shifted quite effortlessly from the general brief of making “men of character” to the very specific one of making “Southerners into Northerners.” To conclude, rather than providing solutions, fostering nationalization, or welding the nation-state to the imagined community,

44 Ibid., 224–249. 45 See, for example, Pasquale Verdicchio, Bound by Distance. Rethinking Nationalism

through the Italian Diaspora (London: Associated University Presses, 1997). 46 Moe, The View, 224–249. 47 Quijano, “Coloniality and Modernity,” 169.

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meridionalismo inscribed the whole project of making Italians within the logic of Meridionism and coloniality as theorized by Cazzato and Quijano and documented ante litteram by Moe and Dickey. Yet, while Dickey’s post- colonial reading of the Southern Question restores the violent edge to the poiesis of making Italians, and Moe’s point of view “from Vesuvius” inserts the voices of Southern intellectuals into the process, neither fully account for another territorializing dimension of Meridionism- meridionalismo: the creation of the Italian “South” implied the separation and isolation of its lands and islands from the waters to which they had always belonged, and the active suppression of the entire peninsula’s projection into the Mediterranean Sea. This geophysical aspect of territorialization is the cen- tral concern of this book.

the Mediterranean Question

The criminalization of southern opposition to the Italian state was accom- panied by the establishment of a new prison system that was expressly devoted to locking up briganti, camorristi, and mafiosi, often for life. These prisons were built on various Mediterranean islands located all around the peninsula: the Tremiti (Puglia), the Giglio (Tuscany), Lipari, Ustica, and Lampedusa (Sicily), Ponza and Ventotene (Lazio), and Procida (Campania—the only one that had existed previously). This extensive use of islands to imprison the enemies of the newly formed nation-state reflected and implemented an imaginary of Mediterranean encirclement and insecurity that was widespread in the political and military establish- ment of the Italian State, especially after the disastrous defeat inflicted on the Italian Navy by the Austrian fleet at the battle of Lissa in 1866.48 The fact that this first military wound to national pride came from the sea not only reinforced the profound diffidence of the ruling elites toward any- thing maritime, but also reached deeply into the imaginary of those few people who already saw themselves as Italians and were fighting to make others feel as they did. The leading journal of the Italian Navy, Marina Militare did not print a single article on the Mediterranean Sea—except for a few on the Suez Canal—in its first ten years of publication (1868–1878). In 1872, on the other hand, a dystopian novel-reportage written by an anonymous naval officer captured the imagination of many Italians in a manner not unlike the impression that Orson Welles would

48 See Ezio Ferrante, Il mediterraneo nella coscienza nazionale (Rome: Rivista Marittima, 1987).

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make on American radio listeners in 1938. Il racconto del guardiano di spiaggia (The Tale of the Beachside Guardian) imagined an Italy that had lost a naval war with France, had had its cities bombed and sacked, and was first invaded and then reduced to a colony with no opportunity for economic development.49 This popular novel clearly projected on to the whole nation what had recently taken place in the southern regions of the peninsula, while at the same time buttressing the image of a “fortress Italy” that needed to separate itself as far as possible from the sea that sur- rounded it. The dystopic displacement of the South on to the colonized body of the nation was therefore conjoined with the suppression of the Mediterranean Sea as a constitutive element of its history, geography, and cultural heritage. In fact, this suppression had started long before the defeat of Lissa. It had been there all along during the very process of national territorialization.

From political thought and action to literature and poetry, the Mediterranean as a sea—and also as a seafaring space and maritime world, including its islands, its coastlines, its ports, and its economies of trade— was either ignored in Risorgimento writings or appeared as an enemy, an obstacle, and a place of tragedy. In the minds and words of the agrarian elites who led the Risorgimento and the unified nation into modernity, the sea was primarily associated with the ever-present threat of cholera epi- demics, which had reached the peninsula through its ports in 1835–1836, 1849, 1854–1855 during the pre-unification era, and would do so again, following unification, in 1865–1867, 1884–1886, and 1893.50 Additionally, Italy’s Mediterranean coastline had been the place where the majority of attempted insurrections had foundered, from the Bandiera brothers in 1844 to Carlo Pisacane’s trecento (300) at Sapri in 1857. Most signifi- cantly, not even the epic and successful spedizione dei mille (Expedition of the Thousand) would give the resurrected Italian nation a maritime imagi- nary: despite being raised as a sailor, spending most of his military life as a ship’s captain, and achieving fame as “the Hero of the Two Worlds” thanks to his daring maritime exploits, Garibaldi is represented as a General on a horse or standing on ground in almost all of the paintings and monuments that immortalize him in Italian villages and cities, rather than as a

49 Anonymous, Il racconto del guardiano di spiaggia (1872). Cited in Ferrante, Il mediter- raneo, 18.

50 Paolo Frascani, Il mare (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2008).

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commander at sea.51 Even the Friulian-born Pacifico Valussi, perhaps the most Mediterranean of thinkers in the patriotic canon, would all but reverse his original seapolitan ideas in the aftermath of unification.

As the editor of La Favilla (The Spark) in the 1840s, Valussi had taken the porto franco status of Trieste, with its multilingual, multireligious, and cosmopolitan community, as a model for theorizing a quintessentially antinationalist creed. He explicitly identified “borderlands” as “centers” of a cosmopolitan form of nationhood in which the pernicious tendencies of nationalism to highlight and weaponize differences could be diffused and counteracted.52 His bordertopia expressed the Mediterranean status of Austrian-ruled Trieste, the newest port city to assume a prominent posi- tion in the Adriatic trade system in the nineteenth century, in unique ways. “Owing to their position and traffic,” Valussi argued, “Venice, Trieste, and the Adriatic were destined to develop into a ring between various nations,” and thereby represent a Mediterranean vision of nationhood in which port cities were the physical centers of ideal nations whose liquid extensions touched and interacted with one another’s.53 Within a decade, unfortunately, we find Valussi in Milan among the most rabid and renowned irredentists, “pushing with hyperbole and national chauvinism for the incorporation of the Veneto, Friuli, and Istria into Italy.”54

Valussi’s turnabout highlights the connection between Meridionism and the suppression of a Mediterranean imaginary in the patriots charged with making the nation. The repression of this Mediterranean horizon in the Risorgimental imagination becomes most significant, however, when it is seen in the context of the connotations attached to the Mediterranean Sea in the literature charged with making Italians in the aftermath of uni- fication. In 1881, the most popular and world-renowned character in Italian literature, Pinocchio, sprung out of the imagination of the Florentine writer Carlo Collodi. In the adventures of the wooden puppet turned boy, commentators then and now have recognized the enduring icon of the relentless and never-ending process of making Italians.55 A self-reflexive

51 Ibid., 29. See also Erika Garibaldi ed., Qui sostò Garibaldi. Itinerari garibaldini in Italia (Fasano: Schena Editore, 1982).

52 Dominique Kirchner Reill, “Bordertopia: Pacifico Valussi and the Challenge of Borderlands in the mid-nineteenth century,” California Italian Studies 2, 2 (2011). Retrieved from: http://escholarship.org/uc/item/4r76c785.

53 Ibid., 19. 54 Ibid., 20. 55 See Stewart-Steinberg, The Pinocchio Effect, 10–12.

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story of divided limbs that needed to be “educated” into the young body of a boy (nation) in flesh, blood, and bones constituted a perfect invitation for Italians to educate themselves into Italian-ness.56 That this brilliant tale of transformation should be born out of a pastiche of universal stories (Jonah) and popular cultural motifs (the money tree) is unsurprising, given its almost universal appeal, with translations into 200 languages and multiple art forms. It is, however, remarkable that the otherwise faithful depiction of the Tuscan landscape that can be recognized in the puppet’s adventures on land was not replicated in the sea off Versilia, which the author knew so well.

The sea in Pinocchio immediately becomes an ocean populated by mon- strous pescecani (sharks), which in several versions of the tale become whales or, more precisely capodogli (sperm whales): that is, species of oce- anic fish that are not typically found off the coast of Tuscany. The image of Geppetto taking a small wooden boat to go looking for his son “di là dal mare” (beyond the sea) evokes both the “emigrant nation” that would lead a third of the male population of the newly born Italy to settle in distant lands within the space of three decades, and the absence of the Mediterranean Sea from the making of Italians at home.57 This notion of “beyond the sea” was echoed two years later in Giovanni Verga’s novella Di là dal mare (1883). In this short story, the Tyrrhenian Sea between Naples and Palermo is depicted as the site of the illusory survival of a van- ished picturesque vision of the social and natural balance, in which the clandestine love between the two protagonists is accompanied by the mel- odies of Sicilian songs at the bow of the ship and Neapolitan songs at the stern.58 Whereas the ocean obliterated the Mediterranean Sea in Collodi’s di là dal mare, in Verga’s the sea is cast as a long-gone space of authentic- ity that disappears instantly under the weight of social roles and conven- tions on land. Verga’s sea has the same status as a horizon of illusory expectations in the many short stories and novels written by the Sicilian author in the 1870s and 1880s, from Storia di una capinera (1871) to Rosso malpelo (1879), in which the sea is either the site of a fatal escape or appears as a luminous corpse. This negative status would reach epic pro- portions in his masterpiece, I Malavoglia (1881), in which the tragic

56 Ibid., 12. 57 Marc Choate, Emigrant Nation. The Making of Italy Abroad (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 2008). 58 Moe, The View, 289–296.

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image of the sea as a cruel and inescapable destiny passed on from father to son is given its most iconic expression.

What makes the absence of any positive connotation attached to mari- time life in Verga’s extensive oeuvre particularly relevant is not only the fact that he was responsible for fathering the first truly national Italian literary movement, verismo, but also that he was a southerner, just like most of verismo’s leading figures, from the young Luigi Pirandello and Luigi Capuana, who were both Sicilian, to the Neapolitans Federico De Roberto and (Greek-born) Matilde Serao, to the Sardinian Grazia Deledda. The Mediterranean is absent from most of their writings, except as a marker of social inequalities, as in Serao’s Ventre di Napoli (1884), in which she remarks on the difference between the crystalline waters of the rich neigh- borhood of Posillipo and the “melmose acque” (murky waters) of the Marinella neighborhood.59 Even when verism finally delivered an epic tale that takes place entirely at sea with the romanzo-inchiesta (novel- reportage) Sull’Oceano (On the Ocean, 1889), by Edmondo De Amicis, the nation- in- the-making was offered a first, and most shocking, representation of fin-de-siècle Italian emigration, while at the same time witnessing the sea sinking under the symbolic weight of the ocean.

The emigrant nation we encounter in De Amicis’s novel-reportage is a rural one as described by the author—who travelled with the migrants— during the 22-day voyage between leaving from Genoa and arriving in Montevideo (Argentina). In the first seven chapters of the book—while the boat is still in the Mediterranean before reaching Gibraltar—the nar- rative focuses on the social microcosm of the boat, on its chaotic swarm- ing, crawling humanity. It is only when we reach the Atlantic Ocean in chapter 8 that “the sea” makes its first appearance. De Amicis’s use of the words “sea” and “ocean” is revealing. As Roberto Fedi has noted, despite the much longer time spent on the actual ocean compared with that spent on the sea, the word “sea” occurs 158 times, while the word “ocean” only appears on 44 occasions.60 The two words are not used interchangeably, however, but rather to connote very different aspects of the “liquid conti- nent.” In a book that is virtually devoid of metaphors—a literary trade- mark of verism—De Amicis consistently associates the ocean with the

59 Matilde Serao, “On Naples: Six Translations,” translated by Jon Snyder, California Italian Studies 3, 1 (2012). Retrieved at http://escholarship.org/uc/item/7492w5hs.

60 Roberto Fedi, “Mare crudele,” in La letteratura del mare (Rome: Salerno Editrice, 2006), 245–310.

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symbolic horizon of the emigrants’ hopes and their unique experience of loss of self before its awe-inspiring vastness. In other words, the “ocean” captures the psychological fuel of the emigrant body, but not so the “sea.” The ocean is labeled as a “sea” whenever it is depicted as a physical entity that leaves the peasants sick, fearful, or crying like babies, or when it pounds the vessel for days at a time—as in the tempest De Amicis describes at length in chapter 17.61 The ocean therefore becomes an intellectual sublimation of the physical sea, which in turn seems to be a rebellious adolescent, a minor disruption of the reader’s contemplation of the for- mer’s gravitas.

From De Amicis’s drowning of the sea in oceanic poetics of infinitude it is just a small step to the exoticization of the ocean we find in the most popular and prolific Italian writer of the age, Emilio Salgari. An avid reader of travel literature who never traveled abroad himself, Salgari produced a staggering number of adventure novels, which may constitute the single- most extensive corpus of exotic colonial literature anywhere.62 Set for the most part in the colonial age—prevalently in the nineteenth century—the Salgari’s heroes’ adventures take place on every continent, but especially on the oceans and their archipelagos, from Sandokan’s Malaysia to the Antilles of the Black Corsair. Mediterranean islands or shores are notably absent. Only two of Salgari’s novels, Le figlie dei faraoni (1906) and Cartagine in fiamme (1906), do take place in the Mediterranean, but both are unchar- acteristically set in ancient times. The “sea”, quite clearly belonged to the imagination of the past. The present was associated with an exoticized ocean, which provided a very welcome escape from both the dreary peda- gogy of nation-making and the all-too-real anxieties of emigration.

Both literally and literarily, the Mediterranean Sea did not just disap- pear from the space between the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and North Africa, as in the epigraphic anonymous Turinese adage that had Garibaldi separating them rather than uniting Italy: it was removed from all around the peninsula. This, however, was not limited to the literature aimed at making Italians. In perfect Meridionist fashion, the most consequential erasure of the Mediterranean Sea from the making of Italians came about in the discursive construction of the Southern Question itself. Besides the

61 Ibid., 309. 62 Vittorio Sarti, Nuova bibliografia salgariana (Milan: Sangottardo, 1994). On Salgari,

see Ann Lawson Lucas, Emilio Salgari. Una mitologia moderna tra letteratura, politica, soci- età, 4 vols. (Florence: Leo Olschki, 2017).

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criminalization of all dissent and insurrection in the triad of brigantaggio, camorra, and mafia, the most enduring and ubiquitous marker of Southern-ness in meridionalismo was the image of the unproductive lati- fondo (large agricultural estate).63 The latifondo offered an iconic meeting point between the twin figures of southern indolence and archaism. It also linked all types of criminal activity with the “agrarian question,” namely, the combination of unproductive agriculture and abject poverty.64 Between Villari’s Lettere (1875) and Gramsci’s Note (1926), the identification of the South with agriculture, land, and rural values remained constant and unchallenged, despite the wildly different analyses and solutions suggested by each commentator, and while the fact that Tuscan landowners such as Franchetti and Sonnino would not dedicate a single page of their famous Inchiesta in Sicilia (1876) to the importance of the Mediterranean Sea in the history, society, and cultural imaginary of Sicilians cannot come as a complete surprise, the same absence in southern meridionalismo assumes far greater significance. From Colajanni’s Settentrionali e meridionali (1889) to Fortunato’s Il mezzogiorno e lo stato italiano (1926), we find not one word on maritime life, culture, and economy in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, nor about its foreign policy toward the Mediterranean basin, in any of the classics of Southernism. Even when the maritime history of Naples before 1860 was given some consideration, as in Nitti’s Napoli e la questione meridionale (1903), it was done in purely dismissive terms to affirm that Naples “never played any important role in Mediterranean commerce.”65

The persistent absence of the Mediterranean Sea from the writings and consciousness of meridionalisti highlights conclusively the intersection between the territorialization of the Italian “South” and the poiesis of making Italy/Italians. Seen in connection with the parallel suppression of the Mediterranean Sea in the literature tasked with the making of Italians, and Verismo in particular, the phenomenon acquires greater specificity. The Risorgimental consolidation of the Italian nation and its subjects made it necessary to repress Mediterranean imaginaries and forms of belonging, precisely because these had for centuries characterized the lives

63 Pasquale Villari, Lettere meridionali ed altri scritti sulla questione sociale in Italia (Torino: F.lli Bocca, 1885), 27.

64 Ibid. 65 Francesco Saverio Nitti and Domenico De Masi, Napoli e la questione meridionale

(1903–2005) (Napoli: Guida, 2005), 69.

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of those who were being “made” into southerners. Italian nation- building, in other words, not only construed the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies as Italy’s “South,” but did so by suppressing its long-standing status as a Mediterranean “middle ground.” It cut off the making of Italians from the Mediterranean imaginaries that had nourished the collective identity of the people who had inhabited that middle ground for centuries.66 These imaginaries, in fact, had not merely existed in Roman antiquity, when the Italian south was terrritorialized under the magniloquent name of Magna Graecia: they dated from far earlier, and as we shall see in the next chapter, they had permeated social relations and processes of identity-formation in the Italian mezzogiorno from the Archaic era to the formation of the Italian nation and beyond.

66 For the notion of “middle ground” see the discussion of Irad Malkin’s A Small Greek World in Chap. 3.

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