Mountains and the Making of Modern Italy

Marco Armiero

LANDSCAPE, POLITICS AND HISTORY: THE ITALIAN MOUNTAINS AS A CRUCIBLE OF NATIONAL AND NATURAL IDENTITY

A Rugged Nation uncovers how Italian identity and mountains have constituted one another. State regimes since unification in 1861 have made mountains into national symbols and resources. The nationalisation of Italian mountains has been a story of military conquest and resistance, ecological and social transformation, expropriating resources and imposing meanings.

World War I permanently transformed mountain landscapes and people, nationalising both. When the Fascists came to power, the process of politicisation of mountains reached its acme; the regime constructed and exploited mountains both rhetorically and materially, on one hand celebrating ruralism and rural people and, on the other, giving mountain natural resources to large hydro-electric corporations. The book ends with two exemplar tales about mountains and their place in the Italian recent history: the Resistance against the Nazi-Fascists, which found its sanctuary up in the mountains, and the 1963 Vajont disaster, which, with 2,000 people killed, represents the tragic epilogue of the hydroelectric modernisation of the Alps. Read more.