The Italian peninsula has
twice been the apex of human civilization – in two different eras and cultures,
over a thousand years apart.
First the Roman
Empire, and then the Renaissance.
We think the
pace of change in our modern world would be incomprehensible to anyone born
before 1900, but imagine being a young Florentine coming of age in 1490. Lorenzo de Medici was still in power. Italy was still the center of the western
world, largely because everyone in Europe – including Spain, which was just
completing its liberation from 700 years of Muslim Moorish rule – was Catholic,
and owed allegiance to the Pope in
Rome.
Thanks to Marco Polo two centuries
earlier, Italy controlled Europe’s trade with the Orient. In science (Galileo, da Vinci), art
(Michaelangelo, Rafael, etc.), and politics, (the de Medicis, the Borgias,
Macchiavelli), the leaders of the age came from Italy. If
anything, the fact that Constantinople had finally fallen to the Turks fifty
years earlier, after seven centuries of keeping Islam out of southeastern
Europe while carrying on the legacy of the Roman Empire, only made Italy’s role
as the final heir to Rome more obvious.
Most educated people understood by then that the world was
round, but it wasn’t until an Italian, Christopher Columbus, convinced the
Spanish king and queen to fund an expedition that it was proven feasible to
cross the ocean and return. That voyage and those that followed proved
that there were two whole new continents in the world – but it was the Spanish,
Portuguese, English, French, and Dutch that explored and colonized them. Maybe none of the Italian city-states of the
period could have mustered the resources to build, maintain and leverage an
overseas empire – but who would have figured Portugal could? Perhaps Italy was still too preoccupied with
maintaining its pre-eminence in Europe.
But in 1520, up in the northern regions of what had been
known for a thousand years as the Holy Roman Empire, a German priest named
Martin Luther, began to protest many of the positions of the church in
Rome. A German inventor named
Guttenberg invented the printing press and within a very few years people were
translating and distributing copies of The Holy Bible from Latin into local
languages. By 1540 – within one adult
lifetime – many of the German principalities and most of
England had left the orbit of the Vatican, and Holland, Switzerland, and
Scandinavia were well on the way to following.
At least Spain, the early leader in the European effort to colonize the
world, was still Catholic.
Who would have guessed that Spain’s time as a world power
was a mere 50 years away from peaking?
Despite spreading the Spanish language and the Catholic faith to half of the New World, Spain’s
influence on the continent started declining shortly after the loss of the
Spanish Armada. Italy’s decline was a
century underway by then. I wonder if
anyone was aware of it?
One could argue that the Florentine who was born in 1470 and
reached his 70s by 1540 saw the world change in more fundamental ways than
anyone born in 1890 who saw the automobile, the airplane, radio and television,
and nuclear power come into existence.
I wonder who was more conscious of the change?
How intentionally did Italy resist or ignore the changes in the world? As the
rest of feudal Europe coalesced into modern nation-states, did the Italian
leadership – or even public – intentionally refuse to adopt such changes? And was a sense of “Italian Exceptionalism”
a reason why?
I’m sure there has been a great deal of scholarship on this
question, and I’ll probably look some of it up.
It was just interesting being in Italy, amidst such epic six-century-old
grandeur, and wondering about it.
I’m
sure some national sense of “catching up” (modern Italy wasn’t united until
1871) and “reclaiming our rightful place as a leading power” explains Mussolini
– although our guide spoke with embarrassment about that era; very little
fascist architecture remains; and Rome still quietly marks the “liberation” by the Allies from the Axis (the 70th
anniversary occurred while we there). When I think of modern Italy, I think of food,
film, fashion, sports cars, and the Azzurri national soccer team. It’s still the ninth largest economy in the world. Not bad things to be known for.
