Since I last spoke in October last year, I've made the mistake of starting to read a brilliant book called 'The Force of Destiny - A History of Italy Since 1796' by a fella called Christopher Duggan. It's a superb book. Easy to read too. I'm the sort of anorak who can read history text books anyway but this one really is easy to read.
I bought it because I wanted to put Nicola's story into some sort of historical context. I've managed that alright but it's also raised all sorts of questions that I never knew existed.
Nicola was born into a state that had only been created fifteen years earlier - minus Veneto and Lazio which joined in (for want of a better word) in 1866 and 1870 respectively.
The country that Nicola left was, as it seems to me, an artificial construct. Italy had only ever been a geographical reference ... like the British Isles, and a few intellectuals had taken it into their heads to turn that geographical reference into a nation state. It's sort of like creating a nation state called Africa - albeit on a very much smaller scale.
It was the aggregation of a number of petty statelets each with its own language united only by a profound distrust of each other. The language chosen as the lingua franca of this new creation (it would be an extreme exaggeration to call it a nation) was the language of Tuscany, of Dante, Botticelli, Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Galilei, Puccini and Vespucci. To the vast majority of population it was a foreign language - an awful lot of the older generation in Italy still can't speak it.
All of a sudden, the languages of the peninsula - Emiliàn-Rumagnòl, Furlane, Ligure, Lumbard, Napulitana, Piemontèisa, Sardo, Sicilianu, Tarandine, Vèneto, etc. - were downgraded to dialects. You can't have more than one language in a nation state. If you have a look at these language versions of Wikipedia, you'll see what I mean. Go to the Italian version and you'll find the links at the bottom of the front page.
It was an accidental construct too. Cavour had only wanted an Italy north of Rome. He had no desire at all to include the south. A horribly distasteful place full of horribly distasteful people. The Bourbons could keep it ... and would've done if Garibaldi hadn't poked his nose in with his 'thousand' volunteers.
In the years after 1860, there had been any number of risings in the south against what they saw as occupation by the Piedmontese army in the name of a Piedmontese King (Vittorio Emmanuele II of Piemonte and of Italy who refused to style himself Vittorio Emmanuele I of Italy). These risings were crushed ... with a capital CRUSH. Hey. What's a few peasants between friends?
It was against that background that Nicola and Rafaella took ship in Naples bound for London early in 1900. They were just two people in a seemingly endless stream of people leaving Italy for America, Argentina, England ... and the Lord knows where else. Millions of them, as Christopher Duggan put it, voting with their feet.
So if that's the context in which they left Italy, why would they harbour any loyalty to the country they had left? Why was grampa so concerned to ensure that I didn't forget that I'm Italian? Why was his loyalty to Italy and not to its southern predecessor (the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies)? When Nicola left, Italy was barely one generation old. He was born Italian but did he feel it? Was it just a case of distance lending enchantment to the view? For hundreds of years the English have had a love affair with Italy. Were their memories of Italy coloured ... tinted ... tainted by the English?
I don't have answers to these questions and wish that I could put them to the people with the answers. What does all this make me? Does it make any difference? Does it matter? The answer to the first question is, of course, Marco Criscuolo and the answers to the others ought to be 'no' and 'no' but I can't help feeling a profound indignation at the inexcusable injustices that were heaped on Nicola's people in the name of the idea that was Italy.
