Ilse’s Reviews > Modern Italy: A Political History > Status Update
Ilse
is on page 64 of 522
The Italy resulting from the plebiscites seemed artificial &deficient in national character.Italian culture still lacked a distinct identity of its own: the intellectual classes looked to France for their lead &other liberal politicians to England.Regional self-suffiency could not be broken down & there had been no social revolution to convince the peasants that they were participants in,not victims of,the new order.
— Jul 25, 2026 05:08AM
31 likes · Like flag
Ilse’s Previous Updates
Ilse
is on page 95 of 522
Attempts to make Rome a capital in the style of Paris were to fail. Rome remained a city of the past - ancient, medieval or baroque. It was not a town of theaters and banks, but of churches, palaces and monuments. Some people called it too southern, others too international, others too corrupt, and it soon became fashionable to lament that the capital was not somewhere else.
— Aug 12, 2026 03:55AM
Ilse
is on page 95 of 522
Successive governments tried hard to catch the imagination and sympathy of the common people in the capital. The results were not always in good taste. Palazzi were converted into government departments, the flora of the Colosseum was stripped off, excavations began on the site of the forums. Hare was later to write that a few years of Italian rule had done more to destroy Rome than the Goths and Vandals together.
— Aug 09, 2026 11:55PM
Ilse
is on page 78 of 522
Sicily had to endure large-scale military operations.Govone cut off water from villages in the middle of the Sicilian heat& used torture to exact information, burning people alive in their houses.Northeners had little idea of the social and economic derangement which unification had brought to the South, &when feelings of revolt became more intense,this was treated as simple lawlessness calling for police repression.
— Aug 08, 2026 05:51AM
Ilse
is on page 28 of 522
Vittorio Emanuele became King of Italy in 1861.Because of the challenge of republicanism and the need to overshadow Garibaldi in popular esteem, an official apologetic and panegyric was developed to inflate his reputation.The true picture hidden behind clouds of incense is of a usually insignificant man,good-natured and shrewd,but superstitious and ill-educated, possessing little of the luster and aureole of majesty.
— Jul 24, 2026 08:27AM
Comments Showing 1-4 of 4 (4 new)
date
newest »
newest »
message 1:
by
Jan-Maat
(new)
Jul 25, 2026 05:52AM
Implicitly this suggests the extent to which the united Italy was an imposition , artifical, unwanted by the majority of its inhabitants? ( I imagine this is the subtext to the creation of many of the nation states that we see in the world today)
reply
|
flag
Such is indeed what the author implies - quoting contempoaries lamenting that unification was improvised and only skin-deep, going against both history and geography - wasn't that the case with the unification of Germany as well?
The old story: "This was another of the vices of Italy, that the greatest beneficiaries of the risorgimento were unwilling to pay for it. The rich who monopolized politics found it easy to put the greater burden of taxation on the poor who had gained least from the national revolution. Italy could boast almost the lowest wages in Europe, along with about the highest indirect dues payable on food. Even the conservatives confessed that the less a man owned the more he seemed to pay and that the tax collector and the policeman were the only contact the brutish peasantry had with the state, whereas the rich could bribe impoverished revenue officers and rely on an inefficient system of checking tax returns'.
Ilse wrote: "Such is indeed what the author implies - quoting contempoaries lamenting that unification was improvised and only skin-deep, going against both history and geography - wasn't that the case with the..."Er, it's the usual story I think, thus books like peasants into Frenchmen, I am sure an equivalent could be written about more or less any country in the world