Italian ‘internationalism’ was actually medieval Catholic cosmopolitanism without national consciousness

Evidence

In reality, this is a kind of vague “cosmopolitanism”, related to certain easily identifiable historical phenomena: to the cosmopolitanism and the universalism of the Catholic Middle Ages, centred on Italy and preserved through the absence of any Italian “political and national history”. Little national or State consciousness in the modern sense. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1016

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the specific historical sources of the Italian people’s ‘internationalism’ — Catholic medieval universalism rather than modern international solidarity.
• XREF: Directly useful to the imagined-community toolkit (Anderson-style nation-ness) the reader is assembling; also prefigures how supranational identities (umma, Catholicism) complicate nationalist history.