Chapters (17)
It’s the opposite of the load of bullshit the Lega Nord spouts when it claims that the South is a burden on the North. Or when, for example, it names a research institution after one of the leading thinkers and patriots of the Risorgimento, Carlo Cattaneo. The charge of the Friends of Carlo Cattaneo Foundation – founded in Besozzo, in the province of Varese, whose honorary president is Senator Umberto Bossi, former leader of the Lega Nord – is to re-examine the unpublished documents produced by Cattaneo during his exile in the Swiss village of Castagnola, on the northern shore of Lake Lugano, between 1848 and 1869. However, the Italian federalist tradition that Cattaneo began is quite the opposite of the self-interested federalism of the Lega Nord. Cattaneo’s federalism was one of solidarity, which established an association between the citizens’ welfare and self-government. His models were the Swiss Confederation and the United States: for him, small town councils and autonomous local government were the ‘backbone’ of the nation and constituted ‘the nation in the innermost bastion of its freedom’. Not even when Italy was born in 1861, monarchist and centralist, not even at that time did the republican and federalist Cattaneo dream of talking about secession.
I am perhaps privileged since I am the son of a Neapolitan father and a mother of Ligurian origin. I have the blood of the South and the blood of the North in me. I grew up with my grandfather Carlo’s memories of Mazzini and my grandfather Stefano’s stories of brigands. Often my ancestors paid for those ideals of theirs. But handed down to me from my family’s oral tradition, like a lullaby, was the oath that young men took when they became members of Young Italy. I like to remember it because the words contain the commitment, the dream and the sacrifice of the young people who created Italy, whose names cannot be obliterated by cries for secession, by ostentation, by the concept of Padania and green shirts. And by the egotism of those who believe that Unity is a detriment rather than a benefit to all:
I give my name to Young Italy, an association of men holding the same faith … This I do swear, invoking upon my head the wrath of God, the abhorrence of man, and the infamy of the perjurer, if I ever betray the whole or a part of this my oath.
I swear to obey all the instructions, in conformity with the spirit of Young Italy, given me by those who represent with me the union of my Italian brothers; and to keep secret these instructions, even at the cost of my life. I swear to dedicate myself wholly and forever to endeavour with them to constitute Italy as a single, free, independent, republican nation.
