What is the Risorgimento, and what is its significance today?
On the pediment of the Vittoriano, one can read the dedication of what remains today the most important and significant public monument of united Italy: PATRIAE UNITATI and CIVIUM LIBERTATI. To the Unity of the Fatherland and the Liberty of the Citizens.
In this dual dedication is condensed the meaning of the Risorgimento: the Italian declension and one of the world's peaks of that age of revolutions that led to the construction of the modern State, founded on the dual national popular sovereignty. A State founded on the self-determination of peoples and characterized by a Constitution, which ensures individual freedoms and representative institutions capable of guaranteeing respect for the popular will.
This is the meaning of the Risorgimento still today: one of the apical moments of that extraordinary global revolution – democratic and national – that has characterized the entire contemporary era.
Why are the objects on display representative of the Risorgimento today? What is their evocative and testimonial power today?
The proposed objects, which reflect the museum project of the Domus Mazziniana, tell of a young Mazzini, in love, a lover of music, so much so that he would "play the guitar accompanying himself with his voice," as Aurelio Saffi tells us. A Mazzini who sings playing the guitar, far from the "face that never laughed" which, starting from Carducci's verses, has been imprinted in the Italian collective imagination where the Risorgimento is populated by mythical characters, suspended in a timeless space, and that when they take shape it is inevitably that of an elderly gentleman preferably with a beard and mustache.
On the contrary, the proposed objects – the seal, the guitar, the sheet music – tell us of a very different Risorgimento, made of protagonists, often young, often from popular backgrounds, often women, but – above all – always men and women of flesh and blood.
Pietro Finelli, Scientific Director | Domus Mazziniana, Pisa
