Ensaios sobre a Cegueira com que partimos para um Mundo fora de Portugal
Identità Nazionale - a zest of history or it is not all only about football
Published 2006/07/23 by Princess Sissi | E-mail this post
Two weeks ago I was in Rome and the city was a big traffic jam because of the world championship. One of my friend said "we have to go to Circo Massimo to party! This is the only time when we really feel Italians!" I felt a bit disappointed and answered back that, leaving abroad since 16 years, I feel Italian every single day and didn't need "La Nazionale" to make me deeply feel my roots.
This can be one of the explanations... Italians don't really go abroad, they like to stay home...and they are right somehow. Isn't it our country SOOOOO beautiful? And the food SOOOO good? And the girls and guys SOOOO attractive? etc etc. I could write pages about it of course!
Nevertheless Italians don't have or bearly have a National Identity. Why so? Just discovered some of the answers in this website from the RAI, the National TV.
http://www.emsf.rai.it/grillo/trasmissioni.asp?d=184
- first we are a young Nation (unity of Italy was in 1861). We were before fragmented in different regions and kingdoms (Regno delle due sicilie, Regno di Piemonte e Sardegna, Savoia was French and part of the friuli was Austrian-Hungaric). That is also why the dialects are still so alive and spoken in the different regions, dialects that are sometimes completely different languages that I can not even understand!)
-second il Duce has not been tender with the opponents to the fascism. Whoever was not fascist was basically not Italian and some "rebels" had their citizenship withdrawn!
-finally since the big crisis of the '60s a lot of people confused the government with Italy...meaning we pay taxes and get bad services in return (trains, buses etc.) or we can not find work and we have to emigrate...well it is the fault of Italy and not the fault of its governors %-/
Hope that the history will not bear too long upon our identity and that my compatriots will feel how good is to feel Italian everyday!
PS: please note that there is no nationalism in my topic, which is different from national identity and would be the feeling to belong to a superior nation when compared to the others!
It's funny (curiously funny)...
Portuguese maybe aren't the right example about national identity. We share a similiar history with italians - country divided until late,... a dictator that sent to prison and killed the opponents,... bad economy and misinformed population,... a great country with lots of potential that the portuguese just trow away, blaming on the politicians that they elected...
But even so, I don't think we have a stronger feeling of national identity.
That's why I envy so much the spanish.
You want national identity? Try to say somenthing bad about their country - They will defend it with death if needed!
But looking back to you post, what you wrote, the history you described about Italy and the reasons for the lack of identity, could be exactly the same for Spain - changing the names of course!
Everything you said about Italy, could be said about Spain. A small difference: Spanish have a really strong "Identidad Nacional"- They like to stay home because they love their country, but they go abroad, learning and teaching. They celebrate the football but also the politics. Well, they're teaching the lazy latins from Italy, Portugal and Greece how to do something for their name and country!
não tinha pensado no paralelismo com espanha... pensei, obviamente no paralelismo com portugal. Mas qual será o porquê desta diferença?
Para mim a diferenca é lógica e curiosamente comecou com o "caudillo". O sr. Franco recusou a entrada da Fiat no país, caso esta nao aceitasse a mudanca para "Seat" e ser uma marca espanhola. Desde há muito tempo que Espanha faz uma defesa acérrima da identidade nacional - tudo é dobrado, em vez de legendado, procuram sempre criar uma alternativa nacional aos produtos estrangeiros (Zaras, Bershkas, Mangos e afins sao disso exemplo). Enfim, valendo tanto como nós, sempre se souberam vender muito bem, sem nunca abdicarem da identidade nacional. Acho que ai reside a diferenca. Para Espanha, o que é nacional é MESMO bom, enquanto para nós nao passa de um slogan...
My knowledge about Spanish history is quite limited but I am not sure that is really close to the Italian history. First Spain is quite an older Nation compared to Italy. Since Medieval times Spain had a politic of Conquistadores. At that time Italy was not a Nation but a puzzle of different independent kingdoms, with some explorers and a lot of merchants but no conquistadores. So I think that Spanish may have had more reasons to acquire a sense of pride compared to Italians.
Spain acquired a mixed cultural background especially with Arab and Jewish influences in Andalusia and has been able to completely integrate these different cultures in its identity (what a beautiful example is la Mezquita de Cordoba). Italians on the other hand have always experienced invasions as agressions and fought against them. I thought that these invasions could have increased the National identity but it seems that this was always the case for only a short period of time and never long-lasting.
Finally Italians, like Portugueses, have emigrate a lot at the end of XIX century and during the XX century because of economical difficulties. Maybe this is also a difference with Spanish which have never been, as far as I know, a large population of emigrants recently.
When I will have more time I will try to read this more exrensively...
http://www.almendron.com/historia/historia.htm
Spain, still today is dealing with regions - Catalonia and Basque Country are fighting for independence for long, long time. Spain is a whole country, but since long time has to deal internally with several of its regions fighting for independence, acquiring a own language, a own flag, a own anthem, a own culture, but even so, in this regions the sense of identity is quite strong. No matter where you live, no matter how spanish you feel, the sense of identity (national or regional) is one of the strongest I know. Maybe spanish didn't move abroad as much as portuguese or italians, but they're living everywhere - specially in South America, where they can feel closer to home.