I hold in my hands an Italian flag. The first Italian flag, even before they sewed the Savoy shield in the centre. I like to feel it between my fingers because I think it is something more than a symbol. All flags are symbols, symbols with which people identify. But this flag is not just a symbol, an object whose function is to represent the nation’s unity. I like to keep in mind, especially as someone who comes from the South, that this flag also represents the idea of a nation engendered by a dream. It is the sign of a dream. Behind the bloodshed, the insurrections, the protagonists and other names, the dates, we Italians have a legacy: unlike what took place in Spain, France and Germany, the unification of Italy was a dream, not simply a plan, not just a pact among aristocrats. In the mind of Giuseppe Mazzini, in the work of Carlo Pisacane, in the dream of hundreds and thousands of republican thinkers, of unitaristi, those who supported unification, a united Italy was not simply the union of geographically related regions, nor, as in the case of other countries, an accord among the aristocracy or other power groups. In the minds of those men, the unification of Italy was the only way to free the Italian people from injustice, after three centuries of foreign domination. The tactic could only be that of unity, which is why for them that flag came to symbolize the possibility of being emancipated from suffering, poverty and injustice. That was their dream.

It is obvious that the idiotic nonsense we’ve been listening to in recent years, which contends that splitting the country would be a way to make it stronger, is not only short-sighted but also historically unsustainable. If we look at a map of Italy before unification, the Kingdom of Sardinia, the Savoy realm, would be a small sovereignty bordering France. And what else would Lombardy-Veneto be, if not an appendage of Austria? And the Papal State at the centre? A symbolic state. Without the unification of Italy we would go back to being someone’s marginal accessory, even today. The centrality and unity of the nation had a different aspiration, a different design: ‘We will determine our own destiny.’ Those who now think they can split the country up are only going backwards, weakening us, destroying what had been a magnificent dream: the possibility of shaping a different destiny, the dream of being able to see Friuli and Calabria united through a single language, a single blood, a single homeland.