Philhellenism in Italy: political friendship and the Italian volunteers in the Mediterranean in the nineteenth century

Philhellenism in Italy: political friendship and the Italian volunteers in the Mediterranean in the nineteenth century

Gilles Pécout

2004-12-01T00:00:00///

Journal Article

Gilles Pécout

Journal Article

10.1080/1354571042000296380

Italy offers a particularly important vantage point for understanding the force of philhellenism in nineteenth-century Europe. Tracing the contribution of Italians to the struggles for Greek independence from the war of 1820 - 21 to the war between Greece and Turkey in 1897, this article shows how Italian support for the philhellenist cause illustrates the internationalist context of Risorgimento nationalism. After Unification the philhellenist cause offered the opportunity to continue the tradition of volunteers enlisting to fight against tyranny and oppression abroad. This culminated in the volunteer expedition to fight with the Greeks against the Turks in 1897 led by Ricciotti Garibaldi - son of the hero of Italian Unification. But that expedition also marked the end of the nineteenth-century international volunteer movement. In Italy many socialists and nationalists were opposed to it, in part because it was seen as a diversion from political struggles that needed to be fought at home and in part because the project of the nation in arms was less and less realistic in the context of late nineteenth-century geopolitics. But at its height, the international volunteer movement - to which Italy made a major contribution - was an act of political idealism that drew on appeals to the unity of Greco-Latin civilization.

2004-12-01T00:00:00///

4

Journal of Modern Italian Studies

IngentaConnect

405-427

Journal of Modern Italian Studies

Philhellenism in Italy

Philhellenism in Italy: political friendship and the Italian volunteers in the Mediterranean in the nineteenth century

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