The Lombard Connection

Abstract

In this chapter, I discuss the works and networks of a group of scholars whose thought was paramount in informing federalism and early socialism in Italy, including famous names such as Cattaneo, Ferrari and Cernuschi. Extending notions discussed in the previous chapter, I highlight the importance of places such as Milan and Lombardy in providing them with both case studies and material grounds for networking and of the historical context of the 1848 insurrections. Amazingly, some Lombard centrality lasted also during these authors’ exile after 1848 as Cattaneo was based in Canton Ticino, which is for several aspects a cultural and linguistic part of the Lombard area, and which became a central place for international and transnational subversive networking also thanks to the Cattaneo-inspired Capolago presses. My key assumption is that starting from this regional perspective, Risorgimento federalism took undeletable internationalist and cosmopolitan features, far from being limited to the issue of just one nation but explicitly prefigurating European federalism. That is, the fact of being rooted in a certain place and a certain culture does not impede cosmopolitanism and open-mindedness towards different cultures. Most importantly, in opposing the organisation of newly unified Italian nation after 1860, Lombard federalists laid the grounds for anticolonial thought (both internal and external), arguing that the Monarchy did not have the right to incorporate by force the other regions. In the same vein, they contended that the new Italian nation/state would have been in contradiction with its own liberation struggle if it wanted to join the main European imperialist powers in their run to overseas colonial conquests, what unluckily happened.