The shrewd, worldly Austrian statesman Prince Klemens von Metternich notoriously asserted in 1849 that Italy is only “a geographical expression” — that is, that it had never been a single nation and never would be one. (At the time, the Austrian empire occupied a large part of it.)

Seventy-five years earlier, the great Samuel Johnson argued that a person “who has not been in Italy is always conscious of an inferiority, from his not having seen” what a person should see to be cultured. (Johnson never got there.) We might well say that centuries of foreign conquerors — and of domestic tyrants, high and petty — wanted too much to be in Italy, wanted to own and exploit it to the detriment of the vast majority of its residents, from Sicily to the Alps.