Storia d'Italia (History of Italy) is a monumental work of the journalist and historian Indro Montanelli, written in collaboration with Roberto Gervaso and Mario Cervi from 1965 to 1997.
I walk this insight in reverse: we Italians, not having the Reformation, missed the train of modern civilization.A judgment evident in the following description: «The Calvinist, grew in the atmosphere of democratic 'congregation' and under the sign of an egalitarian God, rejects hierarchies of Renaissance society... [Calvinist] sees money as a sign of Grace», «this religion labor and savings that initiates, providing a moral foundation, to capitalism in the modern sense of the word».
Then the author saw in the triumph of the Counter-Reformation the watershed that marks the loss of national autonomy, which took place at the peak of Humanism and the Renaissance Italian art and literature, and the rapid economic decline of the United Peninsula; Philip II of Spain, King of the Counter Reformation, especially in his war against the Dutch reformed of Flanders, «didn't understand, couldn't understand that his struggle against heresy was the fight against the modern world... all his efforts and those of the Church were only able to steal this revolution their feud: Spain, Italy and the Latin American continent.
From Girolamo Savonarola to the House of Borgia's rise, the drama of the Christian conscience to the Protestant schism, theologians and heretics, the historical impact of the Reformation to the reaction of the Catholic Council of Trent, the art boom of the Renaissance and its protagonists: Michelangelo Buonarroti, Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, Niccolò Machiavelli, Francesco Guicciardini, Torquato Tasso, Ludovico Ariosto, Pietro Aretino, Benvenuto Cellini.
Montanelli symbolically closes the work, evoking the image of the Giordano Bruno's stake, because «it illuminates a light more relevant the Italian bleak landscape in the Italy of Counter-Reformation: a priest and a gendarme intent to roast a rebel without even the consolation of a because who lug his sacrifice».
Italy is described as a colony of the great powers of this century: it's far from Calvinist capitalism emerging in the regions of Northern Europe; it's immobilized in latifundium and charges noble.
History of Italy from the Constitutional referendum (June 2, 1946) to the Christian Democracy's victory (April 18, 1948) who coerced the Country to the Western bloc and the election of Luigi Einaudi at the President of the Italian Republic (May 11, 1948).
Between the attempt on Palmiro Togliatti that sparked riots in the Country (July 14, 1948) and the death of Alcide De Gasperi (August 19, 1954) who had led Italy in the reconstruction, born the basis for the «economic miracle» just following.
From the years preceding the protests of 1968 in Italy, the long period of terrorism, through the assassination of Aldo Moro until the election of Sandro Pertini as President of the Italian Republic.
For us, the years from the Piazza Fontana bombing to Aldo Moro's murder are not «formidable» as are paint by some commentators and memoirs of left to justify their past to support the terrorism.
For us those «formidable» years were those of abuse of a minority drunk of fashions and models of import (Marcuse, Mao, Che Guevara) on a majority succubus also because without a voice that represented it.
They do not are left behind that grief, galleys, and the so-called «culture of suspicion» that followed to pollute our public life, constantly shaken by scandals more or less pretentious that in those «formidable» years have their origin and root.
[1][2][3]Since the election of Pope John Paul II through the P2 scandal, the end of terrorism period, the first socialist government led by Bettino Craxi, the Lega Nord's birth to Tangentopoli and the collapse of the political system born after the War.