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What is the place of the classical past and its study in Italy, a classical country whose roots reach back to antiquity but which has existed as an independent nation only since 1860? This essay explores this question through analysis of a historical novel set in ancient Greek south Italy and written by a founder of Italian Risorgimento. Aimed explicitly at building Italian national identity, Cuoco's turn to the past shows the investment in classical antiquity balanced between engaging wider European Hellenism and alternative ancient pasts of Italy. Moreover, as Cuoco co‐opted Italian scholarship to bestow authority on his vision, a new relationship between classical scholars and the national past emerged, one of lasting influence. Scholars study, shape and preserve the nation's antiquity, but become at the same time, to an extent, themselves cultural patrimony, while tensions build at the boundary between popular and academic culture.

This chapter narrates the emergence of a self-consciously construed Italian philosophical tradition from the time of the Risorgimento, the nineteenth-century political and cultural unification movement, to the early twentieth century. Among the protagonists of this transgenerational conversation are: Vincenzo Cuoco (1770-1823), who was the first to turn to the philosophy of Giambattista Vico programmatically in reaction to the French Revolution; Vincenzo Gioberti (1801-1852), the champion of Italy’s intellectual and cultural “primato” (or preeminence) and of a renewed political Guelphism; Bertrando Spaventa (1817-1883) and Francesco De Sanctis (1817-1883), who together introduced and “naturalized” Hegel in Italy; and their self-avowed heirs, Benedetto Croce (1866-1952) and Giovanni Gentile (1875-1944), the sponsors and guardians of the so-called idealist “hegemony.” Through a parallel investigation of these thinkers’ work, this chapter shows Italian philosophy to be a Vichianism, that is, an enduring application of Vico’s humanism as it sustains the Italian modern or Risorgimento intellectual’s self-defining confrontation with his Renaissance prototype. Indeed, this chapter argues that Italian intellectual identity (or lack thereof) was founded on a Renaissance “shame,” the Renaissance moment, with its enduring political failures, being the specter that Italy must chase out in order to achieve the “modernity” it heralded but never itself enjoyed.

This chapter is devoted to the first explicitly nationalizing reading of the myth of antiquity developed in 1806 by Vincenzo Cuoco, who, in his novel Platone in Italia, recalled the existence at the dawn of humanity of a civilizing people, the Etruscans. In this way, Cuoco, aiming to establish antecedents for the new Italian nation as it measured itself against the French cultural model, could propose the ethnic-cultural unity of the peninsula’s inhabitants since ancient times. At the end of the 19th century, Italian nationalists rediscovered Cuoco’s thesis and saw it as the basis of modern Italian political identity. However, the chapter underlines how this can be regarded as a predatory operation, which overvalued the actual significance of Cuoco’s novel in the cultural context of Italy. It also shows how Cuoco’s novel remained known mainly for emphasizing the cultural primacy of the Italians rather than its assertion of their ethnic uniformity.

This chapter underlines how Vincenzo Cuoco’s interpretation of Italian antiquity did not hold up against Giuseppe Micali’s Italy before the dominion of Rome. Published in 1810, this work responded to Cuoco’s view, suggesting that cultural unity should not lead one to believe that the country’s peoples necessarily shared common origins. The chapter shows how it was Micali’s opus rather than Cuoco’s that came to dominate the patriotic culture of the Italians. The significant impact that the work had is shown by the fact that, in the first half of the 19th century, Micali’s book became a subject of great interest throughout the country, accompanying the national movement (the so-called Risorgimento) on its progress towards the events of the 1848 revolution.

The second major distortion of the Neapolitan Republic derived from the long-standing association with the popular counter-revolutionary Santafede. The counter-revolution against Naples was real enough, but popular counter-revolutionary insurrections in the South were only one amongst the many popular risings against the French that took place throughout Italy between 1796 and 1799. Nor did Santafede conform to later images of a spontaneous popular reaction driven by religious fanaticism and ignorance. Although differing from region to region, the popular anti-republican insurrections in the South were driven not be religious enthusiasm, but by local conflicts generated by the monarchy's earlier campaigns against feudalism. The counter-revolution brought about the collapse of the Republic, although a more decisive role was played by Admiral Nelson's warships. The brief and bloody Royalist restoration contributed no less than the Republic to making the crisis of the Bourbon monarchy irreversible.