Birth of a Nation:Risorgimento

Catalog description

This course encourages a critical approach to the study of Italian unification in its aesthetic, cultural, and political dimensions as well as their repercussions on present-day Italian society and culture. The making of Italians, as Massimo D'Azeglio famously put it, would engage the best Italian minds for the following 150 years. The divisions between North and South, between Church and State, between the government and the people were created or compounded by the making of Italy. The course studies the debate on Italian Unification and the development of an Italian identity in a variety of historical artistic and literary sources, including diaries, letters, treatises, paintings, sculptures, poems and short stories.