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northwestern Sardinia, where about ten thousand people regard it as their mother tongue.
    Other countries also have substantial minorities who speak a foreign language. But what really sets Italy apart are the vast numbers of Italians who speak a dialect. Exactly where a dialect begins and a language ends is a matter for fine, and inevitably controversial, judgment. Sardinian, or Sardu, is generally regarded as a separate language, its dissimilarity a product of the island’s separateness from the rest of Italy for much of its history. In fact, Italian has fewer words in common with Sardinian than it does with French. And the two languages look very different when written down. For example, the Italian proverb Il sangue non è acqua (the equivalent of “Blood is thicker than water”) in Sardu becomes Su sambene no est abba . The overwhelming majority of Sardinians—about a million people—speak Sardu, which has three dialects of its own.
    Piedmontese and Sicilian, spoken by 1.6 million and 4.7 million Italians respectively, are also sufficiently distinct to be considered languages. Others would add Venetian, Lombard and Neapolitan. But then there is an almost infinite variation in the way that Italians speak among themselves at home and with others from the same city or region. The dialect term for an object, creature or activity in one place can be utterly different from the word used to mean the same thing just a few miles away. A coat hanger, for example, is known to some Italians as an ometto, to others as a stampella and to yet others as an angioletto . But it can also be a gruccia, attaccapanni, croce, appendiabiti, cruccia, stanfella, crocetta, crociera, appendino or croce. 2
    While eager to stress the reasons why their city or region is unique, Italians tend to be less aware of their similarities. But the fact is that, while generating diversity, their history has also given them things in common. The knowledge that their forebears conquered the Roman Empire and gave the world the Renaissance engenders in Italians an inner self-confidence that is soon noticeable to anyone who lives among them and that can sometimes show up in a readiness—almost wholly lacking among their Spanish “cousins”—to be individualistic. The sociologist Giuseppe De Rita has argued that their past has endowed Italians, like many Greeks, with something rather more than just self-confidence: an  innate belief in their superiority.
    “I’ve never thought Italians were racist in the classical sense of the term,” he once told an interviewer. “They are, on the other hand, convinced of being superior because of a superego linked to the history they have behind them. At all events, they feel themselves to be more intelligent, brighter and better.” 3
    I can imagine there are many Italians who would scoff at some of that. If you live in some benighted village in the wilds of Basilicata, or in a public housing project in one of the industrial wastelands of the Po Valley, I don’t suppose you think of yourself as heir to the traditions of Augustus and Leonardo. But the sense of pride that De Rita described can certainly be detected among the Tuscans, the Venetians, the Romans and many others. What he said about Italians believing themselves to be smarter—more sveglio (“awake” or “aware”), more in gamba (“bright”)—than others is unquestionably true.
    At the same time, there is a consciousness that Italians have repeatedly been the victims of invasion and oppression—and, what is worse, by their fellow Europeans. It accounts for a feeling of mixed resentment and vulnerability that coexists in the national psyche along with the pride. Take the Italian national anthem, “Il Canto degli Italiani,” better known as “L’Inno di Mameli” after the writer of the lyrics. * National anthems are mostly about boasting and threatening, about telling the rest of the world of the beauty and other supposed merits of your country