On June 2 of this year, Italy celebrated 80 years of republican government. On that date, in 1946, Italians voted in a nation-wide referendum, to retain the existing monarchy or chart a new course by creating a republic. The vote was close but ultimately the republican side prevailed. The country was divided, with the South opting for the monarchy and the North voting overwhelmingly for the republic. Eighty years on, Giovanni Princigalli speculates on what prompted Italians to vote the way they did and some of the consequences of the choice they made.
Salvatore Martire is 89 years old. He arrived in Montreal in 1972. He still remembers when, in May 1946, at the age of 9, he accompanied a certain Antonio Berardi – a former soldier in World War II, then an anti-fascist partisan, and now a militant for the republican cause – around his native village of Mangone in the province of Cosenza. A few weeks onward, June 2 to be precise, all Italian citizens would be voting in the country’s first-ever constitutional referendum on whether to retain the monarchy or chart a new course by establishing a republic.
Berardi, with a paintbrush in one hand and a roll of posters under his arm, was looking for available wall space. Little Salvatore held in his little hands a heavy bucket filled with water and glue, into which Berardi dipped his brush to paste posters urging people to vote in favour of the republic.
This anecdote, which could be taken from an Italian neorealist film, reflects the reality of so many Italians born under fascism – too young to join the Resistance, yet old enough to remember Italy’s passage into a democracy. An even more important milestone was achieved by Italian women who, for the first time in the country’s history, obtained the right to vote.
In the Calabria of Martire and Berardi, the republican cause garnered only 39.72 percent of the vote, compared to 60.28 percent in favour of the monarchy. The Calabrian vote was in line with the rest of Southern Italy. The vote in favour of the republic won in the central and northern regions, with the exception of the Rome-Viterbo-Latina-Frosinone district, where the monarchy prevailed, albeit by a narrow 51 percent. From Perugia to the Alps, the republic received between 51.93 percent (in the Cuneo and Asti district) and 85 percent (in the Trento district). The only other district that exceeded 80 percent was Emilia.
Why was the North more republican and/or more progressive than the South? Some answers may be found by looking at the Risorgimento, the era of Italian Unification in the 1860s. The leading figures of the political, philosophical, romantic, and eventual armed movement that founded and developed the various trajectories of nationalist and unification sentiment were Northerners. Giuseppe Mazzini was from Genoa, Giuseppe Garibaldi from Nice (which was sold to France by Italy’s future royal family, the Savoys), Silvio Pellico from Piedmont, and Carlo Cattaneo from Milan. The Risorgimento was also an artistic movement whose two leading figures were likewise from the North: namely, Alessandro Manzoni and Giuseppe Verdi. Italy’s tricolour flag was created in Reggio Emilia. The author of the country’s future national anthem was another Genoese, Goffredo Mameli.
And what can we say about the romanticized tale – by another Northern writer, Edmondo De Amici – of the young Lombard sentry atop a tree who was killed by the Austrians, but not before sounding the alarm? His martyrdom for the Italian cause was still taught in my elementary school in Bari more than one hundred years later.
So then, what role did Southerners play in the Risorgimento? Aside from Carlo Pisacane (a Neapolitan), there were virtually no prominent figures. Tragically ironic, Pisacane and his comrades fell to the very same Campanian peasants they sought to liberate from the Bourbon monarchy and class oppression. But with Garibaldi’s landing in Sicily and his unrelenting advance toward Naples, many Southerners finally joined the struggle and the Italian cause.
It should be noted that fascism too was a phenomenon that originated in the North. Benito Mussolini was from Romagna, and most of the early fascist leaders and future oligarchs were predominantly from the North. Ironically, it was also in the North that the Socialist Party and the workers’, peasants’, cooperative, and labour union movements were strongest.
Ballot of Italy’s June 2, 1946 constitutional referendum: republic versus monarchy.
The three martyrs who symbolized anti-fascism were from the North: the socialist Giacomo Matteotti (from Veneto), the priest Don Minzoni (from Ravenna), and the Piedmontese liberal Pietro Gobbetti.
Matteotti’s murderer convinced a very young Sandro Pertini, future President of Italy (from Liguria) and activist Pietro Nenni (from Romagna) to join the Italian Socialist Party, and then the Resistance, alongside other Northerners, among them republican Ferruccio Parri and communists Giancarlo Pajetta and Luigi Longo.
However, Southerners were clearly involved in the anti-fascist movement. First and foremost among them were the Sardinian Antonio Gramsci (the greatest contemporaneous Italian philosopher), the Apulian Gaetano Salvemini, the Neapolitan Giovanni Amendola, and Don Sturzo, a Sicilian priest, founder of the Popular Party (precursor of the Christian Democratic Party), who opposed the alliance between the conservative wing of the party he had founded and Mussolini’s fascists.
Before 1922, the socialists had become the leading party in Central and Northern Italy. In the South, they had strongholds only in Puglia, where, not coincidentally, two giants of Italian trade unionism were based: Giuseppe Di Vittorio and Giuseppe Di Vagno. The latter was the first parliamentarian to be assassinated, in 1921, by fascists – before Matteotti and Amendola, whose murder garnered greater attention.
It was therefore primarily in the North that progressive values were widespread. Figures such as Garibaldi and Mazzini were fervent republicans, so much so that they both died in exile on the orders of the new King of Italy – ungrateful towards and contemptuous of the very man – Garibaldi – who had given him the South. Mazzini and Garibaldi sacrificed the republican and democratic project for the sake of national unity, recognizing (more or less) the King of Piedmont as the first King of Italy.
It was the Resistance to fascism, however, that shifted the North toward even more republican and progressive positions. In fact, in 1943, the king and the head of government, Pietro Badoglio – fearing capture by the Germans who had descended on the peninsula to liberate Mussolini – fled to Brindisi, where the Anglo-Americans (and Canadians) had landed. The king was allowed to govern the South, whose inhabitants and soldiers had courageously driven the Germans and fascists out of major cities such as Naples and Bari in the first weeks of September 1943, even before the arrival of the Allies.
The North, on the other hand, endured German and fascist occupation for an additional two years, which may seem brief, but was interminable for the local populations. From the viewpoint of Northerners, the king – even though he was from the North – had abandoned them to their own fate by fleeing to the South. The North organized itself, giving command to the National Liberation Committee. The King’s authority, from Rome northward, was merely ceremonial – and thus meaningless.
It is true that liberal and monarchist partisan brigades also operated in the centre-north, and that many officers loyal to the King were tortured and massacred. But the bulk of the fighting forces were republican and progressive, with many immigrants or soldiers from the South fighting in their ranks.
I have tried to outline, in broad strokes, possible reasons why the South voted predominantly for the monarchy in the 1946 referendum. Still, there is a paradox here, even a incongruity. The Italian royal house of Savoy was from Piedmont. At court and in official meetings, everyone spoke in the Piedmontese dialect. Camillo Benso Count of Cavour, the leading architect of Italian unification in the 1860s spoke Piedmontese and French as his native languages. His Italian was poor and fragmentary.
I speak of a paradox in the South’s love for the Savoys, partly because King Victor Emmanuel II, Italy’s king during the Risorgimento, had viewed Garibaldi’s Expedition of the Thousand to unite the South with suspicion. Initially, Victor Emmanuel aimed to acquire only Lombardy and Veneto from Austria, and subsequently Florence and Rome, due to their strong symbolic and historical significance. He was by no means certain he wanted the terroni (backward Southerners) – with their illiteracy, proto-mafia elements, and feudal landowners – among his subjects. The Savoys took the South out of fear that Garibaldi might establish a republican and democratic state there, if not a pseudo-socialist one.
2026 postage stamp commemorating Italy’s 80 years of republican government.
That said, we can state with certainty that, over time, the South has lost its fascination with and attraction to the monarchy. Today, 80 years since the constitutional referendum that created Italy’s modern democracy, Republic Day is celebrated and cherished by Italians everywhere.
In that distant spring of 1946, the enthusiasm of young Salvatore and his mentor Berardi, as they wandered through the small town of Mangone, stumping for the Republic, was by no means in vain.
Giovanni Princigalli was born in Bari, Italy, where he earned a Master’s Degree in Political Science. He later moved to Montreal, where he earned a Master’s Degree in Film, and where he works as a filmmaker and researcher in history.
