Contested symbols

Anyone who has stood in front of the Mona Lisa at the Louvre knows it: in that crush of raised phones, how many remember it was painted by an Italian? Many, of course. But for plenty of tourists the picture is simply a Paris thing, like the Eiffel Tower or croissants. Leonardo died at Amboise in 1519, a guest of Francis I, and France had the elegance, and the cunning, to build a story on it: the universal genius welcomed by the patron king. Nothing scandalous, mind you. It is cultural marketing done well, and in that game we have the genius while the others have the story to tell.

With Columbus it went worse. In 2024 Spanish public television broadcast a documentary which, on the basis of genetic analysis, claimed the navigator was a Sephardic Jew of Spanish origin. Many scholars disputed its methods and conclusions, and the documents that say he was Genoese are all still there, but the news went around the world and the Italian response was timid, to say the least. Then again, alternative Columbuses have long been popping up all over the place, in Galicia, in Catalonia, in Portugal, and on the island of Korčula, in Croatia, they claim Marco Polo's birthplace, complete with a house museum. They are weak theories, nearly all of them. But someone believed in them enough to tell them, and that is enough.

The real trouble begins when, by not telling our stories, we lose even the symbols nobody could dispute. Antonio Meucci, a Florentine who emigrated to New York, worked for years on a device to transmit the voice, but could not afford to renew his provisional patent, and the telephone, as far as the world is concerned, became Alexander Graham Bell's. It took a resolution of the US House of Representatives, in 2002, to recognise his merit. In Italy, meanwhile, few remember him, and truth be told not only in Italy. In The Godfather Part III, during the party in Michael Corleone's honour, someone announces that the Meucci Association has named him Italian American of the year. "Who's Meucci?" someone asks. "The Italian American who invented the telephone, a year before Bell," comes the reply. Coppola tosses it in almost as a joke, but the scene runs deeper than it seems: even in a room full of people who have made their Italianness an identity, Meucci's name means nothing to anyone. The story broke off on both sides of the ocean.

What is stolen there is not just a label, it is a way of sitting at the table.

Amerigo Vespucci gave his name to an entire continent; try asking around who he was. Not to mention food: according to the farmers' association Coldiretti, products imitating Italian ones are worth more than a hundred billion euros a year worldwide, between "parmesan", mozzarellas with improbable names and prosecco in a can. What is stolen there is not just a label, it is a way of sitting at the table.

Why don't we protest? Partly out of character. Italians are not very nationalistic, which on the whole is a virtue, and we have so many symbols that we feel we can give a few away without noticing. Partly out of history: we became a state late, and our geniuses belong to Florence, Genoa and Venice even before they belong to Italy, so we are bad at telling them as a common heritage. And then there is a reason that closely concerns those who live abroad. For more than a century these symbols were defended above all by emigrants, Italian Americans with Columbus Day, Italian Argentines with their societies, the Italians of Australia with their festivals, almost always on their own and without anyone in Rome noticing.

It is not about starting nationalist rows or quarrelling with the French over the Mona Lisa, which will stay where it is anyway. It is about telling the story, documents in hand and with a little irony, every time someone appropriates a piece of Italy. That is also why Italiade has a section called Ethos italico: to remind the world, and ourselves first of all, how much Italy there is outside Italy.