Eight Million Bayonets

Alexander Stille

• Modern Italy: A Political History by Denis Mack Smith
  Yale, 534 pp, £35.00, October 1997, ISBN 0 300 07377 1

Originally published in 1959 and revised ten years later, Denis Mack Smith’s Modern Italy: A Political History has been the standard work in its field for nearly two generations. Mack Smith has chosen to update it at a propitious moment, now that the Cold War is over and the political parties that governed Italy for the last half-century have been swept from power. As a result, it is possible to see the broad outlines of the postwar period as a distinct historical epoch and to think about contemporary Italy in the broader arc of its 136-year history. Given that the very idea of Italian national unity is currently being challenged by the Northern League, which seeks to divide the prosperous North from the bureaucratic capital in Rome and the poorer regions of the South, it is useful to reread Mack Smith’s account of the Risorgimento and the origins of Italian unification.