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Let me first state that, regarding the subject matter of the book, I am not entirely impartial: both because, due to biographical events related to the military upbringing of myself and my ancestors, I consider the unification of Italy a great historical epic and an unquestionable value; and because, even though I was born, raised, and largely lived in Rome, those same biographical events of mine and my ancestors - as well as relatives - led me to know and meet people from various parts of Italy, from Tarvisio to Marsala, seeing in them the multifaceted part of the same People.
Having made this premise, which aims to be a declaration of honesty towards the reader, I will briefly refer to the book: Aprile's thesis, an intellectual of Apulian origins, aligns with much of southern Italian literature in recent years, which sees Southern Italy as the most advanced and wealthy part of the country until the annexation by the Kingdom of Sardinia carried out by Garibaldi and Vittorio Emanuele II; after that date, the economic balances would have shifted to the full advantage of the aforementioned Kingdom, which would have enriched its coffers - according to the well-known principle of communicating vessels - to the detriment of those of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, while simultaneously depriving the South of all medium and long-term strategic investments that could have encouraged a transition from large estates to small landownership and then to advanced industry, as happened in the North.
The aspect on which Aprile the historian particularly focuses is the mass exterminations that the supposed Garibaldian liberators would have practiced against the populations of southern Italy, confirming that the unification process was dictated more by military needs than by the idealistic drive of the Thousand, and with deteriorated military means. In the book's most vivid pages, I myself - recalling Verga's readings - could not help but startle, capturing in Aprile's narrative an echo of past and recent events, such as the massacres in the former Yugoslavia by Serbian troops, or the massacres by the Slavic army against the Italian-speaking minority of Venezia-Giulia and Istria during World War II.
In Aprile's synthesis, Italy's unification doubly betrayed the South: initially by killing and looting; subsequently by failing to provide economic support to a part weakened by the annexation path initiated by the Savoy; and finally, due to migration flows after the '50s, extracting the best energies from the South, which flowed into the large enterprises of the North and the grand entrepreneurial bourgeoisie of the Genoa-Turin-Milan triangle, whose foundation was provided by low-cost southern labor ("terroni" or "gabibbi-cacirri," in Genovese terms).
However, beyond easy appearances, it is not an anti-unification book: on the contrary, it sounds like a sort of balance against the secessionist ambitions of the advanced part of the country and a veiled criticism of ongoing federalist reforms, which would betray the spirit of a people if not inspired by the need to balance the interests at stake and show solidarity with less fortunate areas of the country.
The whole thing is very stimulating, although, in some ways, it sounds like a "heard it already" to more seasoned readers: instead, one should wonder, as a final reflection, whether Aprile's vision actually corresponds to reality, or if things are more complex than they seem at first glance.
Walking around Rome with some former colleagues and friends still engaged in active service, I wondered, on March 17th, why Italy no longer feels as united as it once did, and what useful remedies could be taken to improve the situation.
Here is where my divergence from the position of Aprile and much southern Italian thought comes in: it perhaps fails to observe how "the Italians," as a people, were born starting from the first Libyan campaign in 1911 and, above all, during World War I, when different people unitedly defended the northeastern front of the peninsula from foreign invasion heroically: I believe nothing symbolizes this integration better than the events of Emilio Lussu in the battles on the Asiago plateau, and more generally the heroism of all southern military personnel (including my great-grandfather, of whom I keep a photo in uniform) stationed at the Piave and Montello, a true line of demarcation against the Austro-Hungarian area and, more broadly, the barbarism of Eastern Europe.
In the subsequent two decades, the veterans of the Great War demonstrated their Unit and Uniqueness as a Single People, in an era - like that of Fascism - which certainly can be judged negatively, but which contributed like few others to unite the Italians, overcoming not only geographical barriers (consider the recovery of Alto Adige or the Pontine Marshes and the deeds sung in the last book of Pennacchi) but also economic and spiritual ones, also due to the intellectual influence of idealists like Giovanni Gentile and the Italian encyclopedic institute.
The break of this koinè and a common destiny can probably be dated to the years following World War II, due to a division induced by a part of the population's adherence to the ideals of the Warsaw Pact, with an attached sort of "double loyalty" to the communist ideal and the Party (even before democracy), which, in curiously analogous but not so different schemes, can also be found in political formations like the Northern League, replacing communism with federalism, and Bossi with Togliatti.
It's perhaps no coincidence if many of the Northern League leaders had youthful backgrounds in the left and if most of the League's electorate in the North consists of workers and small business owners with VAT numbers, or even immigrants or children and grandchildren of immigrants, internalizing the mental schemes of veteran communism towards different goals, such as the secession or independence of one part of the country from another. The scheme is therefore not ethnic - as Aprile's book would suggest - but essentially ideological.
It is obvious then that the remedies to the problem should be sought on a purely ideological-political level, seeking policies aimed at recreating the same intellectual climate and ferment that, a century ago, led Italians to be one people, under one flag.
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