The article gives the impression "Italy" was always a nation in the making for all of history, just waiting to "unify". It talks of a "national rebirth".
But it's an invention. It never previously existed. Yes the penisula was referred to as Italy for a long time and the language is shared across the area and there are cultural similarities. But none of that automatically makes a nation - you don't have to think hard of counter examples. History could have panned out differently. It still could.
I think the bourgeoisies have been enormously successful in giving the impression that these nation states, whether it be Italy or Germany, or India, etc, that they're inevitable, they're permanent and anything else is a perversion. And Garibaldi was one such whose brilliance was to forge a nation so quickly from so many disparate states.
Was the language really shared, or is that also a more recent development? I'm not sure what they spoke in Piedmont in 1800 would have been particularly intelligible to a Roman or a Neapolitan, and the Piedmontese dialect still exists today as something pretty distinct from Italian.
1. The concept of nation state is historically very young, few centuries at best in it's modern concept and that's when most modern nation states formed, the very last centuries. That's true anywhere from Asia to the balcans to the Americas and Africa.
2. Italy has been seen by Italian populations as one entity from millennia, essentially since the Roman empire when all the Italian tribes wanted to be elevated to the same status of citizenship as romans. And there's an overabundance of historical proofs of it, you're gonna find for centuries and centuries of Italian literature and diplomacy. Every single major writer in Italian history since middle ages has written openly about Italia, Dante Alighieri dedicated an entire chant in the 13th century to the woes of the Italian people "Ahi serva Italia".
3. You are absolutely right in stating that the major promoters of Italian unifications have been the elites, but that's common to most such historical events.
But it's an invention. It never previously existed. Yes the penisula was referred to as Italy for a long time and the language is shared across the area and there are cultural similarities. But none of that automatically makes a nation - you don't have to think hard of counter examples. History could have panned out differently. It still could.
I think the bourgeoisies have been enormously successful in giving the impression that these nation states, whether it be Italy or Germany, or India, etc, that they're inevitable, they're permanent and anything else is a perversion. And Garibaldi was one such whose brilliance was to forge a nation so quickly from so many disparate states.