Nous ne sommes pas l'Italie, grâce à Dieu : note sull'idea di decadenza nel discorso nazionale italiano

Autore: Marcello Verga
In: Storica. 43-44-45 • anno XV, 2009
doi:10.1400/143230
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Abstract

«Nous ne sommes pas l’Italie, grâce à Dieu». On the idea of decadence in Italian national discourse
Italy is the only national community that narrates its story, from the fall of the Roman Empire and the barbarian invasions, as a line that goes up and down, following a logic that highlights two «highs»: the Renaissance and the Risorgimento. The Italian nation state has codified this interpretive canon giving a place of honor in school programs to these two moments and instituting in many Italian universities chairs in Renaissance History and History of the Risorgimento. This essay dwells on the construction of the central category of decadence in Italian culture from the 18th century onwards and its persistence in Italian historiography and national discourse until this day. The focus will be the historiography on the 17th century, since, if according to the national narrative Italy has gone through more than one decadence – a long one, from the end of the Roman Empire to the 14th-15th centuries, and a short one, lasting little more than one century from the mid-sixteenth to the end of the seventeenth centuries –, it is on the latter that any history of modern Italy, confined between decadence and Risorgimento, hinges. The Risorgimento is mainly intended, starting from the late 18th century, as a reform of the letters and culture. Thus it is the late eighteenth- century debates on Italian culture that it is necessary to examine in order to understand the role of the crucial pair decadence/Risorgimento in the construction of Ital- ian national discourse and Italian representations and self-representations until today.