#The fascists tried to get people to stop eating pasta and eat rice because they were low on wheat due to sanctions and stuff

[quantomeno]

Italy as a unified nation has had a long and complicated history.

The state currently known as Italy has only existed for about 160 years. I like to contextualise this by pointing out the British had already landed in Australia about 70 years earlier (which is relevant given it is the anniversary of that date today) (also I'm often explaining this stuff to Australians).

One could argue that Italy as a political identity never really existed until 1861: the Roman Empire is probably the closest thing to a united nation on the Italic peninsula, but even in its early stages it controlled areas currently not part of Italy (or when it didn't control them it also lacked other parts of modern day Italy). However, Italy as an idea has existed before the nation. Napoleon was King of Italy, for example, but the area again doesn't match modern definitions.

This same issue, however, affects most modern nation states. Borders are defined somewhat arbitrarily (at best people of the border areas chose to join one country over another, at worst someone just draws a line on a map and calls it a day).

Italy during most of the middle ages and up until its unification was a chessboard of small nation states, some of which were ruled by foreign powers (e.g. Spain and Austria), 'Italians' (e.g. city-states like Florence) or the Pope.

There was, however, a sense of Italian identity before the nation existed. Even Dante (14th century) believed Italy should be united. It was more of an intellectual concern, however. Even post-unification most peasant-types didn't really have a proper understanding of what 'Italy' was since from town to town everyone was often quite isolated (the 'dialects' mentioned above are almost innumerable since they vary not just by region (and there are 20 regions of Italy) but also from place to place within the regions).

Part of the desire for unification was a sort of desire to free Italy from foreign dominion. In a way, perhaps Italianeità can be defined as a 'not-French-German-Austrian-Spanish-etc-etc-etc'-ness. While it has roots in the Roman Empire and the Middle Ages, the Unification of Italy took off in the Romantic period, a time of strong nationalism throughout Europe.

Essentially, a bunch of pro-unification people got the king of a kingdom in northern Italy (close to the French border) to support them and with a bunch of fellow idealists they headed south and got rid of the Spanish and French and Austrian etc rulers and united the country under one king. OK technically two: the Pope wasn't happy with the idea of giving up Rome and it took until World War II for a proper settlement to be resolved (for a while the Catholic Church essentially refused to accept Italy as a nation and told Catholics to boycott elections).

Italian as a language has technically existed since the Middle Ages: the Italian dialect of Florence (the language of the poets Dante and Petrarch who had dreamed of unification back then) is the basis of modern-day Italian. To claim that Italian as a language does not exist is rather specious. Italian is a descendant of Latin, like any of the Italian dialects, and thus it has as significant a tie to the land as any other widely-spoken Italian dialect (except perhaps Latin itself, since the Papacy kept it going for a long time so in a way it still hung around, but even then Latin would have existed with other Latin/Italic dialects). Italian is so similar to medieval Tuscan dialects that with a good knowledge of Italian you can (with a bit of work) read works by those old poets. It's more similar to modern Italian than Old English is to English (even Latin is more similar to Italian than Old English and modern English).

While I enjoy being self-deprecating about Italy's awkward history, it is no less weird than any other country. Germany didn't unite properly until after Italy, although it had been the main part of the Holy Roman Empire not too long before so it had some degree of unity in a way Italy didn't.

But, Italy did have a problem of Italian identity in that it did have to be 'manufactured'. There was a bit of a morale problem in WWI since farmers from the south were fighting in battlefields in the north with no idea why they should care about these 'Italians'. Poor literacy rates also prevented the adoption of Italian as a language for quite a while, so I do concede that dialects of Italian were much more widely spoken than Italian for a long time. So much so that I think my nonni's generation might be the last to have really grown up speaking it from birth and only learning Italian as a second language (i.e. it took that long for it to become commonly used). Mussolini and Fascism helped instil a sense of national identity in the country (as one would expect) and so by WWII Italy was well and truly 'Italy', but even then, Italians still have a strong parochialism and the North and South have often been at odds with each other (there was even a party that advocated for the North to secede from the rest). Also the world wars caused some border-shifting (e.g. Trieste which if you look at it on a map doesn't even look like it's in Italy. There area around there has shifted a lot).

All country borders are arbitrary and ill-defined. All nations are equally made-up and to suggest Italy is any less legitimate is mean. Also I feel like the point of the original post was just to point out that history is weird, so I'm not annoyed about the post. It's just I studied this stuff at Uni and now whenever I get the chance I go into a long-winded spiel about the history of Italy. I wrote this for my own fun.

There isn’t some day in history when Rome started being medieval Italy. In fact, what is an Italy? Why is an Italy? When is an Italy? What am Italy? Does Italy really exist? All questions you end up asking yourself when you stare at history for so long that you go cross-eyed.