For many contemporaries, the formation of an Italian nation-state tied nationalism in Italy forever to a heroic sense of collective revival and resurrection (‘Risorgimento’). Thereafter, the story of Italy’s national revival became a foundation myth for the new state designed to give Italians the sense of a common past and present identity. The nation-building process relied on, and promoted, a view of the recent past which conditioned the work of historians for around a 100 years after the events which it celebrated. Although this view was never accepted uncritically by the left, the thrust of official historiography was to glorify and defend the achievements of the Risorgimento, and to confirm its status as a kind of modern morality tale in which good (the nation) triumphed over evil (its ‘enemies’, Austria and Papal Rome).

It was only after the emergence during the 1950s and 1960s of a Marxist (or Gramscian) interpretation of the Risorgimento, and again with the rise of the new social and ‘revisionist’ history in subsequent decades,that historians began to construct an alternative narrative of Italian unification. They came to associate the Risorgimento and national unification with a process of flawed modernisation and, as historical revisionism gathered pace, with a series of destabilising, structural transformations which owed little or nothing to the appeal of nationalism or the work of nationalist movements. In this process, nationalism in an ideological sense was largely written out of Italy’s nineteenth century. Historians emphasised instead social and economic factors as the basis for Italian unification. Rather than seeking to understand, contextualise the older, heroic nationalist narrative, revisionist historians challenged it by neglecting its significance entirely.

Yet, this very different picture of an Italy unaffected by any notion of the national, ignores the rise of nationalism as a movement of political opposition, and it proves unable to provide answers to the question why did national unification take place? It is in this respect that the new history of Risorgimento nationalism is so significant. Breaking with both the hagiographical and revisionist traditions of previous research, the approach attempts directly to confront the narrative of ‘Risorgimento’, to identify the images, metaphors and tropes of Italian nationalist discourse and, by so doing, to explain its capacity to capture popular emotions and encourage political mobilisation.

Unlike more traditional approaches to the Risorgimento, which tended to focus either on political conflict or on social and economic structures, the new history focuses on the creation and diffusion of an idea of Italy through literature, music and art. Historians have looked again at the nineteenth-century Italian literary scene, analysing both the work of writers and publishers and the response of readers, and have found considerable evidence for the spread and popularity of italianita` (‘Italian-ness’) in novels, memoirs, poetry and histories. The roots of this new approach are partly to be found outside Risorgimento historiography, in the new cultural history and ‘linguistic turn’ of the late 1980s and 1990s. The emphasis on meaning, emotion and lived experience, as opposed to class, interests and structural change, has involved a re-assessment of the scope and impact of Italian nationalism.