Italy: The unfinished nation

Despite some precocious developments---specifically in economic, fiscal and linguistic affairs---that are considered the signs of Italian early modernity, Italy did not before World War I develop a national consciousness, which forms the cultural foundation of modernity. Since the fifteenth century there were repeated attempts in different Italian provinces and different social spheres to construct a national consciousness. Invariably, these attempts reflected a sense of dissatisfaction with the social position and level of prestige of various social elites---a dissatisfaction that did not, however, resonate with the sentiments of broader or even provincial populations. Thus the development of Italian national consciousness, although representing a rich cultural tradition manifest in political theory, grammar, literary production and criticism, Church-State relations, regional identities, and the visual arts, was incomplete.;The search for a national consciousness became the defining cultural variable in the 1840s with the articulation of two competing definitions of national identity by Giuseppe Mazzini and Vincenzo Gioberti. After unification in 1860, Italy's mounting military, economic, diplomatic and cultural disappointments exacerbated the bifurcation between these dueling Resurrection era theorizations of national identity. "Being Italian" did not grant a sense of new prestige, leading intellectuals and artists of all political persuasions to formulate new geographic expressions of Italy's failure---on the left, internationalism and the southern question, on the right, the "Unredeemed Lands" movement and the move to re-create the Roman Empire. The surfeit of university graduates in the 1890s, short on opportunities to match their expectations, gave rise to a new generation of intellectuals who rejected the Resurrection mythology and its roots in the French Revolution's political imagination of Left and Right. The new radical liberals and the revolutionary syndicalists would drive the renewed emphasis on nation at the turn of the century and find a synthesis in Futurism's rejection of the past and embrace of perpetual revolution. This unstable national identity would motivate a generation---especially the nation's "geniuses"---to seek redemption for the nation's failures in the Libyan and Great Wars, but the very malleability of the Futurists' national definition would make it unsustainable for the population at large.