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If you want to do something for St.Patrick, you might, if you have the time, read my four chapters about the Saint - http://www.facesofarthur.org.uk/fabio/book4.htm . I like to think they are rather good.
Tomorrow is also going to be the first Italian Unity Day. Italy already has a number of patriotic holidays or at least fixed days of commemoration: April 25, Liberation Day - for the defeat of the Nazis in 1945; June 2, Republic Day - for the proclamation of the Italian Republic, 1946, and traditionally the day of army parades; September 20, when in 1870 the Italians took Rome and completed the country's unification; and Victory Day, November 4, for the end of World War One on the Italian front. However, none of these were exactly right to celebrate Italian unity as such - a celebration that has become more and more important in the face of loud, though ignorant, polemics against the very idea of Italian national identity. April 25 and June 2 were bound with political developments in an already united Italy; November 4 was too connected with the horrible realities and unfortunate results of the Great War; and the taking of Rome was not only in the nature of a not very impressive footnote to the terrible struggles that had brought about the main steps of independence. March 17, on the other hand, is extraordinarily well chosen. It was, first, the day on which, in 1805, Napoleon had been the first man in modern history to claim the title of King of Italy and the ancient Iron Crown; second, the day in 1848 in which the first shots of the First War of Independence were fired, in Venice; and, third (and the reason for the choice) the day on which the first Italian Parliament of modern times was convened in Turin, and invested Victor Emmanuel II, king of Sardinia, as King of Italy. (The Iron Crown of Italy was returned by Austria after the war of 1866. It is now in the possession of the Cathedral of Monza, who hold it in trust for the nation since 1883.)
I intend to celebrate this day by starting on my long-delayed history of Italian unity. It will be, in true Italian fashion, a history against everybody: against the national-masochists who pretend that Italian unity was irrelevant if not negative, against the twits from both north and south who each claim to have been robbed and humiliated by their brothers, against the Catholic integralists (there is no such thing as a "Catholic fundamentalist", but these come close) who furiously inveigh against the Freemasons and the liberals whom they claim to have made Italy against the people with the purpose to destroy Holy Mother Church, and against the brain-dead anticlericals who manage to believe that everything that is wrong with Italy is the Vatican's fault; against the Fascists who, not having managed to master Italy, now despise her, and against the Communists, who, having come pretty damn close, now discover a patriotism that they had damned in the days of their struggle. But it will be in favour of all those real men (and a few women) who fought, as often against each other as against foreign occupiers and would-be occupiers, against terrible abysses of poverty and ignorance, against positively wicked or merely incompetent governments, built, against all odds, a great power, out of the decayed remains of what has been, and still can claim to be, the most beautiful country in the world.
As for the rightly beloved Patrick the Illuminator, his Italian colleagues are St.Francis of Assisi (October 4) and Catherine of Siena (April 29). In typically topsy-turvy fashion, Italy is protected by the humblest of all friars and the bossiest (I mean this in the nicest way possible) of all nuns.
Tomorrow is also going to be the first Italian Unity Day. Italy already has a number of patriotic holidays or at least fixed days of commemoration: April 25, Liberation Day - for the defeat of the Nazis in 1945; June 2, Republic Day - for the proclamation of the Italian Republic, 1946, and traditionally the day of army parades; September 20, when in 1870 the Italians took Rome and completed the country's unification; and Victory Day, November 4, for the end of World War One on the Italian front. However, none of these were exactly right to celebrate Italian unity as such - a celebration that has become more and more important in the face of loud, though ignorant, polemics against the very idea of Italian national identity. April 25 and June 2 were bound with political developments in an already united Italy; November 4 was too connected with the horrible realities and unfortunate results of the Great War; and the taking of Rome was not only in the nature of a not very impressive footnote to the terrible struggles that had brought about the main steps of independence. March 17, on the other hand, is extraordinarily well chosen. It was, first, the day on which, in 1805, Napoleon had been the first man in modern history to claim the title of King of Italy and the ancient Iron Crown; second, the day in 1848 in which the first shots of the First War of Independence were fired, in Venice; and, third (and the reason for the choice) the day on which the first Italian Parliament of modern times was convened in Turin, and invested Victor Emmanuel II, king of Sardinia, as King of Italy. (The Iron Crown of Italy was returned by Austria after the war of 1866. It is now in the possession of the Cathedral of Monza, who hold it in trust for the nation since 1883.)
I intend to celebrate this day by starting on my long-delayed history of Italian unity. It will be, in true Italian fashion, a history against everybody: against the national-masochists who pretend that Italian unity was irrelevant if not negative, against the twits from both north and south who each claim to have been robbed and humiliated by their brothers, against the Catholic integralists (there is no such thing as a "Catholic fundamentalist", but these come close) who furiously inveigh against the Freemasons and the liberals whom they claim to have made Italy against the people with the purpose to destroy Holy Mother Church, and against the brain-dead anticlericals who manage to believe that everything that is wrong with Italy is the Vatican's fault; against the Fascists who, not having managed to master Italy, now despise her, and against the Communists, who, having come pretty damn close, now discover a patriotism that they had damned in the days of their struggle. But it will be in favour of all those real men (and a few women) who fought, as often against each other as against foreign occupiers and would-be occupiers, against terrible abysses of poverty and ignorance, against positively wicked or merely incompetent governments, built, against all odds, a great power, out of the decayed remains of what has been, and still can claim to be, the most beautiful country in the world.
As for the rightly beloved Patrick the Illuminator, his Italian colleagues are St.Francis of Assisi (October 4) and Catherine of Siena (April 29). In typically topsy-turvy fashion, Italy is protected by the humblest of all friars and the bossiest (I mean this in the nicest way possible) of all nuns.
