What it is to be Italian today

The Pursuit of Italy:

Giuseppe Garibaldi, who gave his name to the biscuit as well as to a fashionable red blouse, was Italy's favourite independence hero. After unification in 1861, every Italian town had its Piazza Garibaldi. As an apostle of "free nationality", Garibaldi had helped to free the Italian peninsula from Hapsburg and Bourbon domination. By the time he visited London in 1864, the cult of garibaldismo had reached a peak. Crowds flocked to greet the Risorgimento patriot as he alighted from the train at Nine Elms; a new football club, Nottingham Forest, adopted Garibaldi-red as its colour.

A century and a half on, however, many Italians could not give two biscuits for national unification. The idealists and patriots who struggled for independence were mostly from the north; annexation with the impoverished south was tantamount (in the words of one Turinese grandee) to "getting into bed with a smallpox victim". So Turin - not Rome - became the first capital of united Italy. The northern city's arcaded piazzas and geometric avenues were reckoned a salubrious alternative to Rome's dark, malarial backstreets.

Prejudice existed on both sides, says the biographer and historian David Gilmour, but it was more pronounced in the prosperous north. Milanese still talk of the Mezzogiorno (the hot "midday" of Italy) as a quasi-African outpost where Europe finally ends. How many have been there is another matter: to look out across the Bay of Naples is a visual education in the grand style; and Palermo, the ragamuffin capital of Sicily, is an Arabo-Norman jewel.

In this superb history of Italy and the Italian people, Gilmour celebrates a nation of bewilderingly mixed bloods and ethnicities.

Albanians, Normans, Saracens, Greeks and Germanic langobardi ("long-beards", later Lombards) have all intermarried to form an indecipherable blend of loose-knit Italic kin. However, "there is no Italian race and there never has been one," Gilmour declares; those who claim otherwise (invariably fascists or Northern League separatists) are simply "ludicrous".

With Italy's hodge-podge of peoples, foodstuffs and dialects, the struggle towards nationhood in the mid-19th century was bound to be problematic.

What do Neapolitans have in common with the mercantile Florentines? Not much. North-south antagonisms have been woven into the nation's social, political and cultural fabric since Garibaldi inflicted his "red-shirted bogeymen" (as Giuseppe di Lampedusa referred to them in The Leopard) on Sicily, says Gilmour. Perhaps Italy would be better off today as a federal union of different states. Perhaps there were just too many Italies for a successful unity?

The question runs through this absorbing book like the black line in a lobster. More than 60 years have passed since Italy's pro-Fascist royal family abdicated and the Italian Republic was founded in 1946. Since then, the so-called values of the Risorgimento - unity and liberalism - have not been realised. They were dealt a blow by the "sleek and smarmy" Silvio Berlusconi, according to Gilmour, who now dominates Italy more effectively than Mussolini ever did. Through his television channels he spreads propaganda for his
Forza Italia party and has built a "videocracy" such as the world had never seen.

However, Berlusconi may soon fall into disfavour, as Italians do not like being dictated to for very long. Who does?

Published to coincide with the 150th anniversary of Italian unification in 1861, The Pursuit of Italy offers an enduring tribute to a various and wonderful people. Along the way, Gilmour exalts Italian wines and foodstuffs, among them Marsala sherry (from the Arabic Mars-al-Allah, "Harbour of God") and Genoa pesto sauce. He is too harsh on polenta maize porridge, though, calling it "dismal and unhealthy". Try it piping hot with game, Giuseppe Garibaldi's favourite. Delizioso.