Read The Italians for Free Online Page B

and taking advantage of the opportunity to let other states know that yours is powerful and not to be trifled with. Americans proclaim theirs to be “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” Britons call on God to save their queen:
Scatter her enemies,
And make them fall!
Confound their knavish tricks,
Confuse their politics
    So what do Italians do? Well, in the second verse, they proclaim to the world that
Noi fummo da secoli
calpesti, derisi,
perchè non siam popolo,
perché siam divisi.
We were for centuries
downtrodden, derided,
because we are not a people,
because we are divided.
    Now, it can be objected that “L’Inno di Mameli” is a creature of its time—that between 1847, when it was written, and the day in 1870 on which the Bersaglieri burst through the Aurelian Walls, twenty-three years were to elapse, and throughout that period Italians were still divided and downtrodden (though certainly not derided: the bravery of Italy’s nationalists, and that of Giuseppe Garibaldi in particular, was widely admired and praised in the rest of Europe). It is also the case that the words quoted above are rarely heard. In military parades and at international football matches, it is customary to sing only the first verse and the chorus.
    But it is still remarkable, I think, that any nation should retain as part of its anthem a verse that is so searingly candid about its own past humiliations, let alone one that declares that “we are not a people, because we are divided.” All the more so since “L’Inno di Mameli” was not adopted immediately after unification. Italy was at first a monarchy, and for as long as it remained one the national anthem was the House of Savoy’s “Marcia Reale.” It was not until 1946 that the Italian Republic chose Mameli’s verses and not until 2005, in fact, that its status as national anthem was confirmed in law.
    A people with a history like that of the Italians cannot but have a somewhat ambiguous view of foreigners. Whereas the British, the Spanish and the Turks have invariably come into contact with strangers in the role of conquerors and later governors, the reverse has been true of the Italians since the age of the Barbarian invasions. It helps, I think, to explain the instinctive protectionism that you encounter in Italy, but also a fatalistic acceptance of the idea that it is quite normal for crucial decisions on the future of the country to be taken by foreigners.
    There is even a term—perhaps “euphemism” is a better word—for the non-Italian considerations that need to be taken into account when framing government or party policy.They are referred to generically as the vincolo esterno, or “external constraint.” For Italy’s Christian Democrat–dominated governments during the Cold War, this was the view of any particular issue taken in the U.S. government and particularly the CIA. For their opponents in the Italian Communist Party it was the latest doctrine adopted by the Kremlin. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the principal vincolo esterno for Italian policy makers has been represented by the European Commission in Brussels and, since the adoption of the euro, by the European Central Bank in Frankfurt. It is a nuisance, but it can also be a boon: Italian politicians, hemmed in on all sides by domestic pressures, often find that the only way they can impose necessary but unpopular measures is by justifying them to the electorate in terms of the vincolo esterno.
    The ambiguity toward foreigners is particularly acute in the case of German speakers who, as has been seen, have been the most persistent interferers in the affairs of the peninsula. It is only very recently that Italians have begun to pose the sorts of questions that have been asked in Britain for years about whether the European Union in general, and the euro in particular, holds the potential for establishing German hegemony over the rest of the continent. Yet the suspicion and resentment