Thursday, September 28, 2023

 

Campanilismo

Trevor Dean and Daniel Waley, The Italian City-Republics, 5th ed. (London: Routledge, 2023), pp. 5-6:
The sentiment within the city-state of sharing a common citizenship was not solely the result of having a common place of residence. When, in his fiction of a journey through the afterlife, the poet Dante meets the soul of the unhappy Pia dei Tolomei (Purgatorio V, 134), and she says that 'Siena made me' (Siena mi fe), she is doing more than announcing her place of birth. She is saying that the city-state of Siena provided the physical, social and political environment in which she grew up, that it moulded her outlook and personality. The modern citizen is shaped by varied forces, among which the monstrously powerful energy of the nation-state competes with international mass communications and with the generally diluted and disappearing strength of regional and local patriotism (resurgent though it is in some areas). The local newspaper demonstrates the survival of older loyalties, and in Italy itself the spirit of campanilismo, of the cherished and longed-for city tower, is not yet dead. But the citizen who fought alongside his neighbours against the citizens of the neighbouring cities knew through his way of life a now-vanished patriotism and campanilismo.
Id., p. 6:
And one must add the attachment that almost all people, and especially those of conventional and conservative temperaments, feel to what is familiar, the spectacle of the same daily surroundings and accustomed ways of speech. Only thus can one understand something of the intensity of that emotion which Dante conveys in a passage of the Purgatorio (VI, 70 ff) when Virgil utters the single word 'Mantua' and a figure replies:
'O Mantoano, io son Sordello
De la tua terra;' e l'un l'altro abbracciava.
('O Mantuan, I am Sordello from your town.' And they embraced.)
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# posted by Michael Gilleland @ 5:03 AM


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