Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations (72 page)

The symbols of the Italian Republic are displayed everywhere. The national flag, the green-white-red tricolour, dates from the Cispadane Republic of 1797. The Republic’s emblem consists of a five-pointed red star surmounting the toothed wheel of labour, encircled by garlands of oak and olive. It rests on the gold letters of ‘REPUBBLICA ITALIANA’ on a red field. The national anthem, ‘
Il Canto degli Italiani
’, is popularly known after its author as ‘Mamalli’s Song’. Composed in Genoa in 1847, it was always sung by republicans in defiance of their monarchist rivals:

Fratelli d’Italia!

L’Italia s’è desta;

Dell’elmo di Scipio

S’è cinta la testa.

Dov’è la Vittoria?

Le porga la chioma,

Ché schiava di Roma;

Iddio la creò.

Stringiamci a coorte

Siam pronti alla morte

L’Italia chiamò.

(‘Brothers of Italy! / Our land has awoken. / Her head is ringed / by Scipio’s Helmet. / Where’s our Victory? / The roll-call summons you, / once the slave of Rome. / God has created Her. / Let’s line up in our cohorts, / we’re ready for death. / Italy has called.’)
⁵

The foul weather of 2008 matched a tense political situation. The leaders of the
Lega Nord
, the ‘Northern League’, Italy’s most bumptious party, were boycotting the parades; they do not believe in the permanence of the present political order. When pressed by a reporter, the president issued a stark warning: ‘
Basta ribellioni contro lo stato
’, ‘Enough rebellions against the state!’ Before the parade finished, an incident occurred on the Fori Imperiali. The president’s open-topped limousine had already passed. When Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s car appeared, a girl ran forward calling ‘
Presidente, presidente, una foto…
’ (In Italian usage, as president of the council of ministers, the premier enjoys the same form of address as the president of the Republic.) The cavalcade halted. The crowd started chanting: ‘Silvio! Silvio!’ Berlusconi obliged. Leaping out of his car, he strolled the full length of the Fori surrounded by his admirers. A voice in the crush shouted ‘
Silvio santo subito
’
*
in mock blasphemy; ‘
Ci proverò
,’ he promised, ‘I’ll show you; I’ll solve all the problems.’ The press reported widely on the ‘Berlusconi show’ and the
bagno di follia
, ‘the forty minutes of delirium’. The Day of the Republic, ran the headline, ‘has been turned into the
Festa di Silvio
’.
⁶

*

The annual
Festa della Repubblica
is staged to remember one of the closest-run political events in Italy’s history. On 2 June 1946 Italians were asked to vote in an ‘institutional referendum’ to decide whether their country should remain a kingdom or become a republic. The result was announced next day. The monarchy received 10,719,284 valid votes – 46 per cent; the republic 12,717,923 – a victorious 54 per cent. The country was geographically divided. The north supported the republic; the poor, less populous Mezzogiorno favoured the monarchy. Ravenna voted 91.2 per cent for the republic; Messina 85.4 per cent for the king.
⁷

The last king of Italy, Umberto II (1904–83) was forty-two years old when, from his point of view, the referendum was lost. Having mounted the throne a month earlier as a result of his father’s abdication, he had reigned for only thirty-three days, and thereby earned the unkind sobriquet of
Il re di maggio
, ‘The king of May’. In the three preceding years he had served with some acumen as ‘royal lieutenant’, putting his compromised father into the background and easing the country’s transition from Mussolini’s Fascism. In this respect, his role was not dissimilar to that of his Spanish relative, Juan Carlos, during the aftermath of Franco.
⁸

Post-war Italy, however, was less forgiving than post-Franco Spain. Italy’s royals had worked with Mussolini over two decades, and the wounds of dictatorship, defeat, foreign occupation and civil war were still festering. The anti-clerical and anti-monarchist Left, urged on by the Communists, was rampant. Umberto’s father had been slow to adapt. By clinging to his throne for as long as he did, he had lessened the chances of the monarchy’s survival.

The consequences of the referendum were swift and stark. The constituent assembly resolved that the monarchy was abolished, that the monarchy’s symbols were illegal, that the royal family’s property was to be confiscated and that the king and his close male relatives were to be banished. The king’s home, the Quirinale Palace, was to be handed to an acting head of state, Alcide de Gasperi. The royal standard, with its eagle and four crowns, was to be hauled down, and the shield of the House of Savoy was to be torn from the central section of the national tricolour. The anthem of the ‘
Marcia Reale
’, the ‘Royal March’, already suspended, was to be permanently silenced. All the signs and symbols associated with the Italian state since its birth in 1861 were to disappear. The kingdom was ordered to dissolve; the date was set for 18 June.

The king hesitated for over a week, ceasing only when riots in Naples were suppressed by bloody violence and civil war loomed. He formally put an end to his brief reign on 12 June 1946, setting aside the royal insignia, consigning the royal jewels to the Banca d’Italia and signing away his birthright. The next day he drove to Ciampino Airport, whence he flew into exile f0r life. His first port of call was his elderly father, who had left after the abdication a month earlier and had taken up residence in Egyptian Alexandria under the name of the count of Pollenzo. At the invitation of King Farouk, his Belgian-born queen, Marie-José, and their four children would shortly arrive to join him. As his plane soared out over the Tyrrhenian Sea, the last Umberto and his kingdom vanished over the horizon. He took with him the legacy of the first Umberto, nearly a thousand years old.

II

Humbertus or Hupertus I (
c
. 980–1047), otherwise Humbert of the Whitehand, was the first count of Sabaudia. Since he lived at a time when all written sources were in Latin, the vernacular versions of his name and his county can only be guessed. But later records refer to him either as ‘
Humbert aux Mains Blanches
’ (in French) or as ‘
Umberto Biancamano
’ (in Italian), and to his county either as
Savoie
or
Savoia
. His possessions in the upper reaches of the Two Burgundies (see pp. 115ff) stretched from the shores of Lake Leman to the Alpine fastnesses round Mont Blanc. He and his court would have spoken an old form of Franco-Provençal, a predecessor of the language now known as
Savoyard
. He was a direct progenitor of the king of Italy who was dethroned by the referendum of June 1946.

Like all self-respecting medieval rulers, Humbertus boasted a very long genealogical tree. Copied uncritically on numerous modern websites, it starts in AD 390 with a Roman senator called Ferreolus. Verifiable accuracy is never a characteristic of such productions. Any such claims made on behalf of Humbertus by his descendants were certainly not taken up by a historically minded Victorian travel-writer who visited the region at a time when it was achieving international fame and who confined himself to its medieval connections:

Next day I reached St Jean de Maurienne. We seem to know nothing of [its] early history except that it was governed by bishops before… Humbert of the White Hands… obtained his investiture from the Emperor Conrad the Salic, towards the commencement of the eleventh century. The Christian world had just recovered from the abject fears of the year 1000… and its princes had [returned to] fighting and murdering one another…

The Bishops of Savoy… [had] declared themselves independent… Humbert, who… had raised himself by his personal merit to be a Marquis, or Lieutenant of the Emperor… fought the Bishop, defeated him, razed his city to the ground; and thus caused himself to be named Sovereign Count of that wild district.
⁹

The intrepid author of these words, Bayle St John, walked the length and breadth of that ‘wild district’ in 1856, when it was fast becoming one of Europe’s most unstable trouble spots. He was a well-read Francophile, fascinated by political developments in the region, and it would have been out of character if he had not been familiar with a learned history of Savoy recently published in Annecy. Its author, like St John, gave no credence to any rumours of Humbert’s exotic ancestry, but provided more details of the county’s rise to prominence:

In 1033, the Emperor Conrad the Salic was absent in Hungary, and Eudes, Count of Champagne, benefited from his absence to take possession of Cisjuran Burgundy… The Emperor then returned… and marched against the rebels. One of his lieutenants, meanwhile, a descendant of Boso… laid siege to [the episcopal town of  ] St Jean de Maurienne, leaving the Emperor to deal with Geneva. The siege was long: the sorties numerous and bloody: the Bishop sought every means to free himself… In the end, taken by storm and razed, the town of St Jean was left completely deserted… The lieutenant of whom we have spoken, was called Humbert, commander of the March of Maurienne. Conrad created a sovereign county for him –
comes in agro Savojense
.
¹⁰

Henceforth, the counts of Sabaudia were both subjects of the Holy Roman Empire and for practical purposes lords of all they surveyed. They flourished by the usual medieval strategies of exploiting their vassals, fighting their neighbours, expanding their territories and marrying well. Since their immediate neighbours to the west, the counts of Vienne, were increasingly drawn into the growing French sphere, they themselves concentrated their efforts on control of the Alpine passes, and on links with the eastern (Italian) side of the Alps in the
Piemonte
, the ‘Foot of the Mountains’. As a result, the heartland of Sabaudia soon consisted of a clutch of ‘provinces’ which surrounded the meeting point of the modern frontiers of France, Switzerland and Italy: namely, Savoy proper (its
chef-lieu
Chambéry), the Genevois (Annecy), the Chablais (Thonon), Faucigny (Bonneville), the Tarentaise (Moûtiers), the Maurienne (St Jean) and the Val d’Aosta (Courmayeur). The administrative centre was moved from St Jean to Camberiaco (Chambéry) in 1232, but the counts’ favourite residences were at Avigliana (Viana, Veillane) near Susa, and later at Aiguebelle (Acqua, Aigue) in the Maurienne. Their prize assets, however, were the mountain trails leading across the high ridge of the western Alps, namely the Great St Bernard, the Little St Bernard, the Mont Cenis and, further south, the Col de Maddalena (Largentières). The counts adopted the sobriquet of
gardien des cols
, ‘guardian of the Alpine passes’.

The list of the early Sabaudian counts is filled with colourful characters. Otto/Oddon I (r. 1051–60), by marrying Adalina da Susa, carried the family’s fortunes into Piedmont. Amadeus III (r. 1103–48) died in Rhodes during the Second Crusade. Pierre II (r. 1263–8), known as ‘the little Charlemagne’, was a warrior who greatly expanded his territories. Amadeus VI (r. 1343–83), the Green Count, died of the plague at the end of a long military career.
¹¹
His son, Amadeus VII (r. 1383–91), the Red Count, died from poison, but not before gaining control of the
Paese Nizzardo
(Pays de Nice) to the south. Almost all of them were buried beside the Lac du Bourget in the crypt of the Abbey of Hautecombe, whose chantries would not be silenced until the arrival of French revolutionary troops in 1796.

The rise of the medieval counts is known in some considerable detail thanks to a French chronicle compiled in the early fifteenth century by Jean d’Orville, also known by his surname of ‘Cabaret’. The text, which exists in thirty copies but which has only been recently translated from Latin into French, is full of adventures, curiosities and, as might be expected, obsequious flattery. Much space is devoted to the conquests of the ninth count, Pierre II, who led his knights over the Great St Bernard pass in 1263 to confront the duke of Zähringen. Having captured the castle of Chillon on Lake Leman by surprise attack, Count Pierre took the duke prisoner, and set out to conquer the whole of the Pays de Vaud: