Abstract
Italian literature from the Risorgimento period — the works of D’Azeglio, Guerrazzi or of Verdi’s librettist Solera — portrayed Italian women as the defenders of morality and of the purity of Italian blood. They fulfilled their role as good wives and mothers by bearing future Italians and by holding the nation together. This description of the nation in terms of direct blood relations and kinship influenced a growing audience of patriots in Risorgimento Italy.1 Meanwhile, what divided these patriots were Italy’s future constitutional arrangements. The question of republic versus monarchy was only resolved, at least temporarily, after the revolutions of 1848–49, when the kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia took the lead in the struggle for Italian unification. Piedmont created Italy through a series of wars and the deposition of long-reigning dynasties. There were also annexations of external territories, which as late as the uprisings of 1831 had still been described as ‘foreign’ by the revolutionaries themselves.
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Alberto M. Banti (2000), La nazione del Risorgimento. Parentela, santità e onore alle origini dell’Italia unita, Turin. Marina d’Amelia (2012), ‘Between Two Eras: Challenges Facing Women in the Risorgimento’, in: Silvana Patriarca and Lucy Riall (eds), The Risorgimento Revisited: Nationalism and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Italy, New York, 115–33. On the representation of women in Verdi’s operas see Susan Rutherford (2013), Verdi, Opera, Women, Cambridge.
Linda Colley (1992), Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837, New Haven and London. Although it is important to differentiate between the two queens’ offices, Catherine Brice has argued that Queen Victoria’s emphasis on domesticity served Margherita as a model: Catherine Brice (2006), ‘Queen Margherita (1851–1926): “The Only Man in the House of Savoy”’, in: Regina Schulte (ed.), The Body of the Queen: Gender and Rule in the Courtly World, 1500–2000, New York, 195–215.
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Filippo Mazzonis (2003), La Monarchia e il Risorgimento, Bologna, 169. For a rare personal account of Margherita’s character, though during later years, see the diary of Umberto’s aiutante di campo during the mid-1890s: Paolo Paulucci (1986), Alla corte di Re Umberto. Diario segreto, edited by Giorgio Calcagno, Milan.
Giulia Guazzaloca (2009), Sovrani a metà: monarchia e legittimazione in Europa tra Otto e Novecento, Soveria Mannelli, 89. See also Catherine Brice (2010), Monarchie et identité nationale en Italie (1861–1900), Paris, 25–38. For a more detailed discussion of the monarch’s constitutional position see Mazzonis (2003), 53 sq, in particular 63ff., 107 sq, 118.
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David Cannadine (1983), ‘The Context, Performance and Meaning of Ritual: The British Monarchy and the “Invention of Tradition”, c. 1820–1970’, in: Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge, 101–64, 102. On the connection between symbolic behaviour and the creation of consensus see David Kertzer (1988), Ritual, Politics, and Power, New Haven and London, 8–9, 78. See also Paolo Colombo (1999), Il Re d’Italia. Prerogative costituzionali e potere politico della Corona (1848–1922), Milan, 33–34.
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Körner, A. (2016). Heirs and Their Wives: Setting the Scene for Umbertian Italy. In: Müller, F.L., Mehrkens, H. (eds) Sons and Heirs. Palgrave Studies in Modern Monarchy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-45498-0_3
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