Italian Lake District: Historical Markers

Introduction

I would like to make some observations as a result of a tour to the Italian Lakes region from 29 September to 8 October 2012, sponsored by the Harvard Alumni Association (HAA), in which I was in the role of the study group leader. Though I had been in and out of Italy many times in the course of my career, I had never been to that region. Somehow, I hadn't pictured that the lakes were formed in the midst of mountains, the pre-Alps. Lake Como, in its southern part, at which we were based, at Cernobbio, is cut out of gorges. The scenery is incredibly beautiful.

Perched on the hillsides, as we made our way northward up the lake by boat the first day, were innumerable villas and palaces, a testimony to the immense amount of private wealth in Italy—a notion which it somewhat at variance with the economic difficulties the Italian state is facing, including the emblematic southern highway which in twenty years has yet to make its ultimate destination, Reggio Calabria. Rome, thought to be falling apart for centuries, somehow defies all predictions and survives. As does Italy.

Notably that first day, we looked in at the sumptuous Villa d'Este, with its canopied verandah restaurant, its linen covered tables, and a ground cover of fine white gravel leading out to the lake—the scene somehow redolent of the pointillism of painter Georges Seurat. Farther on, perched on a hill, is the villa of actor George Clooney, which in season looks out on a swarm of waterborne paparazzi waiting for a coveted long-distance shot of the goings-on inside. Still farther on is Bellagio, with its boutiques, its restaurants, and its magnificent scarves and other manufactures from the Italian silk industry.

During the tour, I gave three talks on behalf of the HAA. The first was on the period of the high Renaissance and the Italian city-states, a period in which Italy held the cultural and intellectual primacy in Europe. But gradually, as the major European powers sought to exploit Italy's richness and cultural treasures, Italy fell under foreign domination, from approximately 1500 until 1860, as France, Spain, and Austria successively held sway over the peninsula, and Italy lost its cultural primacy to France.

The second of my talks was on the period of the Italian resurgence (Risorgimento) in the 19th Century and the unification of the peninsula. Italian nationalism had begun to take hold after the Napoleonic wars, which caused some Italians to seek to emulate the aims of the French Revolution by establishing republican governments in place of the monarchical regimes in the various Italian states. Jacobin clubs, in imitation of those of the French Revolution, sprang up here and there, as well as branches of a secret society, the Carbonari, which had a patriotic and liberal focus.

In 1848, revolutions broke out all over Europe, including in France, where the Orleanist monarchy was succeeded briefly by the French Second Republic. The Constituent Assembly of this new French Republic announced as one of its aims the freeing of Italy from foreign domination. However, the independence of Italy had to await another decade, until 1861. It was the work largely of Count Cavour of the monarchy of Savoy/Piedmont, a sort of Italian version of Germany's Otto von Bismarck, as both unified their respective countries around the same time—the middle of the 19th Century. Cavour was helped by the dynamic guerrilla leader Giuseppe Garibaldi, and the inspirational though not militarily successful propagandist, Giuseppe Mazzini. On a European scale, Cavour was in league with the new emperor of France, Napoleon III,  as they tricked Austria into war and defeat in Italy. Later, in 1870, Bismarck tricked Napoleon III into war with Prussia, with disastrous results for France, at the time and on into the future.

My third talk was on U.S.-Italian relations in World War II and the aftermath, with a particular focus on Anglo-American differences on how to handle Italy's defection from the war in 1943—the British considering that they had done "four-fifths of the fighting," in British Prime Minister Winston Churchill's words, against the Italians, and were therefore entitled to have the lead in handling Italy's surrender. The Americans, partly because of the large Italian-origin population in the United States, were inclined toward a less vindictive attitude toward the former enemy. (Eventually, the United States, with its superior resources and money, was to become the leading foreign influence in postwar Italy).

Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini was deposed almost from the moment of the Anglo-American-Canadian invasion of Italy in the middle of 1943. The action was taken by the Grand Council of Fascism in Rome, under the leadership of Marshall Pietro Badoglio, who signed an armistice with the Allies in September 1943. But in the meantime an SS commando unit under Otto Skorzeny had snatched Mussolini from prison and taken him northward to set up a short-lived and rather pathetic rival government of Italy.

It was the route along the Lake Como shore by which Mussolini sought to escape into Switzerland at the end of the war. He was travelling in a German vehicle, dressed as a German soldier, accompanied by some of his fascist followers and by German soldiers. The Partisans knew in advance that he was to go through Dongo, on the shore of Lake Como, where he was caught and imprisoned. Two days later, on April 28, 1945, he was executed near Cadenabbia, on Lake Como. His body was then brought to Milan, were it was hung upside down alongside his mistress and some of his followers, in the Piazzale Loreto square.

We also visited Stresa, with its string of luxury hotels, on Lake Maggiore, where ten years earlier, in 1935, on a nearby island known as Isola Bella, the three Western leaders, Ramsay McDonald of Britain, Pierre Laval of France, and Mussolini, signed a pact known as the "Front of Stresa," in opposition to a threatened anchluss (absorption) of Austria by Germany, in opposition to changes in the Versailles Treaty, and in support of the pact of Locarno (farther north in the Swiss part of Lake Maggiore) where in 1925, France, Germany, Belgium, Britain, and Italy came to a series of agreements. The first three pledged not to go to war, and the latter two acted as guarantors. But by the mid-1930s, Adolf Hitler had come to power in Germany and much of Europe had begun to run after him as the most powerful leader on the Continent. Mussolini was to follow suit.

In this month of October, we have the 90th anniversary of Mussolini's march on Rome in 1922 and his being named by King Victor Emmanuel to form a government. Many in the Italian political class looked upon it at the time as a piece of opéra bouffe—but what it meant was the shutting down of Italian democracy—and what it led to was the disastrous alliance with Hitler.

Statements and views expressed in this op-ed are solely those of the author and do not imply endorsement by Harvard University, Harvard Kennedy School, or the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.