What is the Risorgimento, and what is its significance today?
The Risorgimento is much more than a chapter of history: it represents the process of building our national identity. It was a moment of great courage, in which extraordinary figures of its protagonists such as Mazzini, Garibaldi and Cavour imagined a united and democratic Italy, a dream that then seemed almost unattainable. It was a moment that involved a large number of ordinary people, especially young people, who did not hesitate to sacrifice their lives, sometimes comfortable and affluent, for an ideal to be pursued and a project to be realized. Today, re-reading the Risorgimento means not only honoring the past, but also reflecting on how much those ideals are still relevant and fundamental for our social cohesion and for facing the challenges of the present. Re-reading the Risorgimento means looking at it with a critical eye, recognizing not only its successes, but also the many unresolved issues, and understanding how those dynamics continue to influence our current reality.
Andreana Serra, Head | City History and Memory Center, Mazzinian Institute-Museum of the Risorgimento, Genoa
Why are the objects on display representative of the Risorgimento today? What is their evocative and testimonial power today?
The plaid that covered Carlo Cattaneo (1869) and Giuseppe Mazzini (1872) at the time of their death – but, inaccurately, it has been handed down that it also wrapped the body of Maurizio Quadrio (1876) – is the protagonist of a symbolic, singular and still current 'career', during which an object of daily use – a simple plaid, in fact – has become a relic, then a secular relic 'by contact' with the body of the two greatest theorists of the Republican Risorgimento, up to the hyperbole of Pietro Barbera who on the 'Marzocco', in 1915, will come to define it flag and to compare it, no less, to the Tricolore. Typical maud in wool from the Scottish Lowlands, the shawl after the death of Cattaneo passed, probably through Sara Nathan, to Mazzini; then, it was collected and preserved by Agostino Bertani – who had the inscription still clearly legible today embroidered in silk – and from these left to Adriano Lemmi, whose heirs, in 1928, donated it to the Municipality of Genoa which, since 1934, has kept it at the Mazzinian Institute – Museum of the Risorgimento.
Massimo Angelini, Curator | Mazzinian Institute – Museum of the Risorgimento, Genoa
