What is the Risorgimento, and what is its significance today?
Desired, cheered, feared, sanctified, even downsized in that post-war period that understandably condemned patriotisms, the Italian Risorgimento remains a powerful, original, and brilliant historical phenomenon. In just over a century and a half since that clamorous and confused 1848, a clumsy prologue to the mythologized new Europe of nations, and begun in Palermo, that new post-Napoleonic order seemed to arise, and make all of Europe, but especially Italy, "resurge." A successful and brilliant operation, although not elaborated from the base, was quickly absorbed and accepted by a large part of the citizens, for atavistic reasons of social redemption that were skillfully colored by political geniuses, converging in a yearning for liberation from the foreigner. The true unity, it would later be said, between subjects of the even good Habsburg administration, the Romans, for centuries papal, and the Piedmontese, the only ones to have an almost home dynasty, would only take place after the First World War, where in the trenches they lived together and died all together.
It was fascism, which tried to insinuate itself into the widespread love of country with imperial delusions, that for decades made people distrust the use of the word homeland, which only recently, stripped of all rhetoric, has been returned to the new generations, in its logic of shared community, also thanks to the popular resistance struggles against the war wanted by fascism. Today the schoolchildren, but also families and ordinary citizens, seem to be reappropriating this extraordinary "all home" narration. Garibaldi, Cavour, Mazzini, the good King Vittorio, each for his part, still have stories to tell us, thank God.
Why is the object granted for exhibition representative of the Risorgimento today? What is its evocative and testimonial power today?
From Palermo travels to Turin a display case containing unusual and very colorful slippers donated to Garibaldi – presumably on his last visit in 1882 – on which the coats of arms of the Italian provinces are embroidered. Legend has it that they were actually used by the General, which would seem to be confirmed by the state of wear and tear in which they were maintained before the perfect restoration by specialized centers, on the occasion of the reopening of the Palermo Museum, for the 150th anniversary of Unity, in the presence of the President of the Republic Napolitano.
And as, in the various Museums of the Risorgimento, the focus is concentrated on figures, events, and myths of the territories, in Sicily that simple, popular, intimate object tells of the affection that the people of the South showed for their General, whom they loved to imagine tired of the continuous fighting with his poncho, his skullcap, the sticks for climbing among the stony ground, as well as they protected and preserved his personal objects, the photos (one, very rare, of Anita) together with the cigar that the King would have lit and that was collected by someone, or that sealed envelope containing locks of his hair. A whole series of minor stories and finds that can be traced back to the theme of the relics of a new secular religion, flanking or replacing those of the saints that were collected in the late nineteenth century, as Tomasi di Lampedusa recounts. And just as the new Theaters, the Pantheons, the Altars of the Fatherland were placed alongside the Christian ones, with strong indignation from clerical circles, in the same way the cult of the memorabilia of the Hero, including the crutches of Aspromonte and his swords, represent that conflict between the anticlerical world and the Religion of the Fathers. A debate that has been overcome, certainly, which leaves to the memorabilia, even the funny and private ones, the task of accompanying the narration of one of the (not many) original and generous pages of history that this curious country has managed to invent.
Salvatore Savoia, General Secretary | Sicilian Society for National History-Museum of the Risorgimento, Palermo
