Narrare l’Italia. Dal vertice del mondo al Novecento

The characteristics of a territory and its inhabitants are difficult to define. What it means to be Italian and what Italy is, is a question that many have tried to answer: Dante, Petrarca, Guicciardini, Leopardi. Until Giulio Bollati, who spent a long time reflecting on the distinctive character of Italians. Luigi Zoja now tackles this theme with an original and long-considered project. The author draws on history, art and literature, but also on psychoanalysis, tracing the long history of our country, from the Middle Ages to the present day, through the self-representation of those who have inhabited it: a collective narrative that influences the whole of society and its role in the world. Nations are largely a product of the imagination, but Italy is much more so than others, being the destination of an enormous amount of non-Italian fantasies. Since the Renaissance, in fact, the educated classes of Europe have completed their education with a trip to Italy, albeit more to learn about its antiquities than to get to know its inhabitants. In this extraordinary essay, Luigi Zoja traces a parabola that sees clear growth from the Middle Ages to its peak, the Renaissance: here, the arts, but also material wealth, surpassed any country in the West. The Italy of a thousand communes, divided and militarily weak, had reached the “summit” of the world. From there, there was an inexorable decline, and the powerful idea of a united nation and a past greatness to be regained gradually took hold, while almost every primacy left the peninsula. The idea of Italy thus experienced a slow decline, compensated by an increasingly bellicose, rhetorical and empty unconscious narrative, until the fascist myth of the rebirth of the empire. Significantly, it was only after 1945 that Italy truly returned to a creative peak: with cinema, which restored centrality to the anti-heroes, to those humble figures that the Renaissance had already celebrated. But the nostalgic narrative of a supposedly grandiose imperial past has never completely abandoned us and still resonates in the collective unconscious of Italians.