Italian national unity rested on a weak 1300-1700 cultural tradition rather than political history

Evidence

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: Central to the imagined-community and nation-building toolkit the reader is assembling — cultural unity as a weak substrate for political nationalism.