United Italy was reluctant to honour authentic heroes of its national struggle. Apart from Garibaldi, its squares and street-names — as well as its bronze statues and marble plaques — commemorate incompetent generals, duplicitous statesmen, serial conspirators, an oafish monarch (Victor Emmanuel) and a number of crazy young patriots who dashed off to Calabria (or wherever), shouted ‘Viva Italia!’ at a bemused populace, and were quickly shot.
One neglected figure was Daniele Manin, the protagonist of Jonathan Keates’s skilful and absorbing account of the Venetian Revolution of 1848-9. Manin did not fit the mould of the Risorgimento romantic. A middle-aged lawyer, he was short and bespectacled, rational and pragmatic, an entirely unflamboyant and accidental leader of a revolt. Nor did his priorities coincide with those of later ideologues. As Keates points out, he put Venice before Italy. He considered the restoration of Venetian independence more important than the unification of Italy, which, as it turned out, merely meant the aggrandisement of Piedmont and the imposition of its laws and institutions on other regions.
The Venetian people have also been neglected in a nationalist mythology that focused on first Turin and then Rome and which insisted on seeing the conflict as one between native patriots and foreign oppressors rather than as a series of Italian civil wars within a contest that was ultimately decided by international battles and diplomacy between Austria, France and Prussia.
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