Italian internationalism was really a weak populism built on cultural rather than political unity

Evidence

A further element to examine is the so-called “internationalism” of the Italian people, which is linked to the concept of “subversivism”. 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. I have noted elsewhere 342 that there has existed, and still exists, a particular form of Italian chauvinism, more widespread than might at first appear. The two observations are not contradictory. In Italy, political, territorial and national unity enjoy a scanty tradition (or perhaps no tradition at all, since before 1870 Italy was never a unified entity, and even the name Italy, which in Roman times meant Southern and Central Italy up to the Magra and the Rubicon, during the Middle Ages lost ground to the name of Longobardia: see the study by C. Cipolla on the name “Italia”, published in the Atti del-l’Accademia di Torino ). However, Italy did have, and preserve, a cultural tradition going back to the period 1300-1700—not, however, to classical antiquity, although humanism and renaissance both claimed a continuity with the classical era. This cultural unity was the basis, and a very weak one at that, of the Risorgimento and of national unity; it served to group the most active and intelligent strata of the population around the bourgeoisie, and it is still the substratum of popular nationalism. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1016

Categorization

• XREF: This is a pre-theory sketch of what Benedict Anderson later systematizes as the ‘imagined community’ — how a cultural substrate rather than political history underwrites national consciousness. Directly feeds the reader’s toolkit item on nation and national identity.
• QUESTION: Gramsci’s claim that pre-1870 Italy lacked politico-military tradition while retaining cultural unity invites testing against other national cases (Germany, Egypt, India) where culture also preceded the state.