The Italian national anthem is called "Il Canto degli Italiani" or "Fratelli d'Italia". The lyrics were written in 1847 and set to music in 1848. It was provisionally adopted as the national anthem in 1946 after Italy became a republic. Previously the royal anthem "Marcia Reale" was used. Verdi's chorus "Va, pensiero" from Nabucco also came to represent Italian independence. The Italian flag, known as the Tricolore, has been a symbol of Italian unity since the late 18th century. Standard Italian is based on Tuscan but regional dialects continue to be spoken throughout Italy.

1. The Italian National Anthem
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A
cI2IdHhEHE

2. A brief history of the anthem
• Il Canto degli Italiani (The Song of the Italians)
is the Italian national anthem. It is best known
among Italians as Inno di Mameli (Mameli's
Hymn), after the author of the lyrics, or
Fratelli d'Italia (Brothers of Italy), from its
opening line.

3. • The words were written in the autumn of 1847
in Genoa, by the then 20-year-old student and
patriot Goffredo Mameli, in a climate of popular
struggle for unification and independence of
Italy which foreshadowed the war against
Austria.

4. Two months later, they
were set to music in Turin
by another Genoese,
Michele Novaro. The hymn
enjoyed widespread
popularity throughout the
period of the Risorgimento
and in the following
decades.

5. • After unification (1861) the official national
anthem was the Marcia Reale, the Royal March
(or Fanfara Reale), anthem of the royal house of
Savoy. “Marcia Reale” remained the Italian
national anthem until Italy became a republic in
1946.

6. • In 1946 Italy became a republic, and on
October 12, 1946, Il Canto degli Italiani was
provisionally chosen as the country's new
national anthem. This choice was made
official only on November 17, 2005, almost 60
years later.

7. Two anthems for one country?
• 5 years before Mameli wrote the words to his
“Canzone deli Italiani”, Giusepper Verdi’s Nabucco
premiered at the Scala theatre in Milano.
• Il Nabucco contained a chorus known as “Va’ pensiero”

8. • In the opera the Jews,
prisoners in Babylon,
sing the chorus.
• The public interpreted
it as a metaphor of the
condition of the Italian
population “prisoner”
of the Austrians.

9. Giuseppe Verdi

10. • The chorus became a revolutionary hymn.
• The Italians of Istria and Dalmazia which fell
under the Austrian control adopted it as their
national Anthem.

11. • Lega Nord an Italian political party wishing to
divide Northern Italy from the South creating
a federation of states, supported the adoption
of the song as the Italian Anthem.
• They stated that Temistocle Solera, who wrote
the words, did not support the republican
solution.
• Documents show that Giuseppe Verdi was a
republican fighting for a united nation under
one state.

12. • Va pensiero is one the the songs representing
the Italian “Risorgimento”.
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1JkhNOc
XGo
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bt9RTM
DvX4

13. The Italian flag

15. Il Tricolore
• The Italian Tricolor was adopted in Reggio Emilia 7 January
1797 as flag of the Cispadan Republic.
• Why these colors?
• The flag was clearly inspired by the French flag of 1790.

16. Red and white were ancient colors of the city of
Milano, and green was the color of its troops.
The rebels of Lombardia and of the army known
as “Italian Legion” used the same colors during
their military campaigns.
Many volunteers from Emilia and Romagna
fought in that army against the Austrians.
This is probably the reason why the Cispadan
Republic chose the same colors for its flag.

17. 1796-1799
• Napoleon between 1796 and1799 crushes the
old monarchs. Jacobin Republics take their
place: la Repubblica Ligure, la Repubblica
Romana, la Repubblica Partenopea, la
Repubblica Anconitana.

18. Italia 1799

19. • The republics represented the ideals of
independence that where the spirit of the
“Risorgimento”.
• During the wars for independence the flag
becomes the symbol of the people, of freedom,
and of the NATION.
• 23 March 1848 Carlo Alberto announces the
war presenting a new flag with the royal arms
on the “tricolore”.

21. • 17 March 1861 the Reign of Italy is
proclaimed. Its flag: the “Tricolore”.
• Only in 1925 a new law officially defined the
colors and proportions of the Italian flag.

22. Italian or Italians?
• The standard Italian
language has a
poetic and literary
origin starting in the
twelfth century, and
the modern standard
of the language was
largely shaped by
relatively recent
events

23. • However, Italian as a language used in the
Italian Peninsula has a longer history. In fact
the earliest surviving texts that can definitely
be called Italian (or more accurately,
vernacular) is a riddle called “Indovinello
Veronese” dating back to IX

24. Other early written examples of
vernacular include liturgical writings
such as commentaries, notes and
instructional guides for the Jewish
festivity of Pesach.
This is an example of a mediaeval
Haggadah coming from the Greek
island of Corfu where a strong Jewish
community coming from the southern
part of Apulia had settled.
Although the alphabet is clearly
Hebrew, the language of the text is a
southern dialect today called Leccese
(from the name of the capital of the
region, Lecce). It’s a vernacular
language vey similar to Sicilian, still
spoken today.

25. Italy has always had a distinctive dialect for
each city.
Those dialects now have considerable
variety.
As Tuscan-derived Italian came to be used
throughout Italy, features of local speech
were naturally adopted, producing various
versions of Regional Italian.

26. • The most characteristic differences, for instance,
between Roman Italian and Milanese Italian are
the gemination of initial consonants and the
pronunciation of stressed "e", and of "s" in some
cases:
• e.g. va bene "all right": is pronounced [va
ˈ ɛne] by a Roman (and by any standard-
bˈ
speaker, like a Florentine), [va ˈbene] by a
Milanese (and by any speaker whose native
dialect lies to the north of La Spezia-Rimini Line);
a casa "at home" is [a ˈ kˈasa for Roman and
]
standard, [a ˈ kaza] for Milanese and generally
northern.

27. • Starting with the Renaissance Italian became
the language used in the courts of every state in
the peninsula. The rediscovery of Dante's De
vulgari eloquentia and a renewed interest in
linguistics in the sixteenth century, sparked a
debate that raged throughout Italy concerning
the criteria that should govern the
establishment of a modern Italian literary and
spoken language

28. Scholars divided into three factions:
1. The purists, headed by
Venetian Pietro Bembo
thought the Divine
Comedy not dignified
enough, because it used
elements from non-lyric
registers of the language.

29. 2. Niccolò Machiavelli and other Florentines
preferred the version spoken by ordinary people
in their own times

30. • 3. The courtiers, like Baldassare Castiglione
and Gian Giorgio Trissino, insisted that each
local vernacular contribute to the new
standard

31. • Bembo's ideas prevailed, and the foundation
of the Accademia della Crusca in Florence
(1582–1583), the official legislative body of
the Italian language, led to publication of the
first Italian dictionary in 1612

32. Napoleon’s conquest turned the Italian language
into a lingua franca used not only among clerks,
nobility and functionaries in the Italian courts but
also in the bourgeoisie.

33. • Italian literature's first modern novel, I Promessi
Sposi, by Alessandro Manzoni further defined the
standard by "rinsing" his Milanese "in the waters
of the Arno”, as he states in the Preface to his
1840 edition.
• After unification a huge number of civil servants
and soldiers recruited from all over the country
introduced many more words and idioms from
their home languages .
• Only 2.5% of Italy’s population could speak the
Italian standardized language properly when the
nation unified in 1861

35. • Many Italian dialects may be considered
historical languages in their own right. These
include recognized language groups such as,
Neapolitan, Sardinian, Sicilian, Ligurian,
Piedmontese, Venetian, and others, and
regional variants of these languages such as
Calabrian.
• Some minorities in Italy still speak Albanian,
Greek, German, Ladin, and Occitan.