[Series] The Risorgimento

NOTE: This page is intended as a thematic overview of the meetups in the series, but is not itself a meetup. To RSVP, please see the individual events as they are announced on the Wisdom and Woe calendar. This page will be updated as necessary to reflect changes to the schedule.

After a millennium of existence (697-1797), the Republic of Venice was torn asunder in the war between Napoleon Bonaparte and the Habsburg monarchy. Following Napoleon's fall in 1815, the opposing dynastic regimes reasserted control of the Italian Peninsula, annulled the constitution, and formed the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. The new government enacted severe measures of repression and censorship, driving the republican ideals of the French Revolution underground, and fueling decades of clandestine resistance and eventually open war.

The resistance became known as the Risorgimento: the 19th-century revolution that converted "Italy" from a geographic to a political designation, expelling its foreign occupiers and unifying its disparate city-states into a single modern nation.

Its military success was indebted to general Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807-1882). He attained larger-than-life status not only as an Italian general, but as a global icon of freedom and independence. In the words of Albert Bigelow Paine, he was "the military Sir Galahad of modern times, forever seeking the Golden Grail of freedom": "What Joan of Arc had been to France, so Garibaldi became for Italy." He overthrew the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies with his volunteer forces known as "Redshirts" (due to the colors they wore in lieu of a uniform), aweing soldiers and fashionistas worldwide who emulated the look of the "Redshirt Revolution."

Dennis Berthold traces a distinctively American sympathy for the cause to the (somewhat antithetical) analogues of both the American Revolution (for the sake of independence) and the U.S. Civil War (for the sake of unification). Melville was influenced by Italian art and culture generally, but his engagement with the Risorgimento is most direct in the "Burgundy Club Sketches," a historically complex hybrid of poetry and prose that takes the revolution for its subject.

This series will survey Italian history, literature, life, language, and thought--from the Renaissance to the Ottocento revolution that forged a nation.

Series schedule:

• [1282 A.D.]: Opera night: Sicilian Vespers - Verdi - 7/27
• [1347-1354]: Rienzi: The Last of the Roman Tribunes - Edward Bulwer-Lytton - 7/20, 8/3
• [c. 1337]: The Bell-Tower - 8/7 [Thu]
• [1343-1382]: Joan of Naples - Alexandre Dumas - 8/10
• [1492-1496]: Romola - George Eliot - 8/17, 8/24, 8/31, 9/7
• [1513]: The Prince - Machiavelli - 9/14
• [1519]: Opera night: Lucrezia Borgia - Donizetti - 9/28
• [1628-1630]: The Betrothed - Alessandro Manzoni - 9/21, 10/5, 10/19
• [1647]: Masaniello - Alexandre Dumas - 10/26
• [1797]: Opera night: Billy Budd - Benjamin Britten - 10/12
• [1820-1830]: My Ten Years' Imprisonment - Silvio Pellico - 11/2
• [1835]: Poems - Leopardi - 11/9
• [1844-1858]: The Duties of Man - Giuseppe Mazzini - 11/16
• Young America In Literature [Thu] - 11/20
• [1857]: Journal of a Visit to Italy - 11/23
• [1860-1910]: The Leopard - Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (buy here) - 11/30, 12/7
• Celio - 12/14
• The Burgundy Club Sketches - 12/21
• American Risorgimento: Herman Melville and the Cultural Politics of Italy - Dennis Berthold - 12/28, 1/4, 1/11

Supplemental:

• Italian Unification Explained
• In Our Time, Garibaldi and the Risorgimento BBC Radio 4
• Star Trek Redshirt Death Supercut

Extracts:

• "I dreamed I saw a laurel grove, / Claimed for his by the bird of Jove, / Who, elate with such dominion, / Oft cuffed the boughs with haughty pinion. / ... This dream, it still disturbeth me: / Seer, foreshows it Italy?" ("Epistle to Daniel Shepherd")
• "... the Bay of Naples, though washing the shores of an absolute king, not being deemed a fit place for such an exhibition of American naval law." (White-Jacket, 88)
• "... the great Austrian Empire, Caesarian, heir to overlording Rome, having for the imperial color the same imperial hue..." (Moby-Dick, 42)
• "It was not long after 1848; and, somehow, about that time, all round the world, these kings, they had the casting vote, and voted for themselves." ("The Piazza")
• "In all parts of the world many high-spirited revolts from rascally despotisms had of late been knocked on the head.... All round me were tokens of a divided empire." ("Cock-a-doodle-doo!")