Italian irredentism in Corsica
The course of Italian irredentism did not affect Corsica very much, and only during the Fascist rule of Benito Mussolini were the first organizations strongly promoting the unification of the island to the Kingdom of Italy founded.
These included Marco Angeli, Bertino Poli, Marchetti, Luccarotti, Grimaldi, and finally Petru Giovacchini, who was later proposed as a possible governor of Corsica in case Italy had annexed it.
[3] The most renowned was Petru Giovacchini, who considered Pasquale Paoli (the hero of Corsica) as the precursor of Corsican irredentism in favor of the unification of the island to Italy.
[5] In November 1942 the VII Army Corps of the Regio Esercito occupied Corsica as part of the German-led response to the Allied landings in Africa, leaving the island still under the formal sovereignty of Vichy France.
However, a Resistance movement based on local inhabitants loyal to France and boosted by Free French leaders developed, opposing the irredentist propaganda and the Italian occupation, and was repressed by the fascist forces and subsequently by German troops.
While Corsican was spoken at home as a local vernacular, Italian had been the public and literary language on the island until the first half of the 19th century.
The modern varieties of Corsican (corsu) are directly related to the Tuscan dialect of Pisa, an Italian city that dominated the island before Genoa.
[10] The similarity of Corsican to Italian, because of their common Tuscan origin, can be seen in an example phrase: "I was born in Corsica and I spent there the best years of my youth".
Sò natu in Corsica è v'aghju passatu i megli anni di a mio ghjuventù (Corsican);Sono nato in Corsica e vi ho passato i migliori anni della mia gioventù (Italian);Je suis né en Corse et j'y ai passé les meilleurs années de ma jeunesse (French).
Nearly 12% of Corsicans can speak Italian as a foreign language nowadays, while three-quarters understand it thanks to the television programmes from Italy.
In the 15th and 16th centuries there were Ignazio Cardini (1566-1602), Pietro Cirneo (1447-1507), Guiglielmo Guglielmi di Orezza (1644-1728) with A Malannata and Ottave giocose.
Angelo Francesco Colonna wrote Commentario delle glorie e prerogative del Regno e Popoli di Corsica in 1685.
During the first half of the 20th century, the most important Corsican publication in Italian was the literary review A Muvra of Petru Rocca.
The irredentist Marco Angeli published in Milan Gigli di Stagnu and Liriche corse in 1934 and Bertino Poli wrote Il pensiero irredentista corso e le sue polemiche in Florence in 1940.
