Italian irredentism in Switzerland was a political movement that promoted the unification to

Italy Italy ( it, Italia ), officially the Italian Republic, ) or the Republic of Italy, is a country in Southern Europe. It is located in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, and its territory largely coincides with the homonymous geographical ...

of the Italian-speaking areas of Switzerland during the

Risorgimento The unification of Italy ( it, Unità d'Italia ), also known as the ''Risorgimento'' (, ; ), was the 19th-century political and social movement that resulted in the consolidation of different states of the Italian Peninsula into a single ...

History

The current

Italian Switzerland The Italian language in Switzerland or Swiss Italian ( it, italiano svizzero) is the variety of the Italian language taught in the Italian-speaking area of Switzerland. Italian is spoken natively by about 700,000 people in the canton of Ticin ...

belonged to the Duchy of Milan until the 16th century, when it became part of Switzerland. These territories have maintained their native Italian population speaking the

Italian language Italian (''italiano'' or ) is a Romance language of the Indo-European language family that evolved from the Vulgar Latin of the Roman Empire. Together with Sardinian, Italian is the least divergent language from Latin. Spoken by about ...

and the

Lombard language Lombard (native name: ,Classical Milanese orthography, and . , Ticinese orthography. Modern Western orthography. or , Eastern unified orthography. depending on the orthography; pronunciation: ) is a language, belonging to the Gallo-Italic famil ...

, specifically the

Ticinese dialect The Ticinese dialect is the set of dialects, belonging to the Alpine and Western branch of the Lombard language, spoken in the northern part of the Canton of Ticino ( Sopraceneri); the dialects of the region can generally vary from valley to val ...

. In the early 19th century the ideals of unification in a single Nation of all the territories populated by Italian speaking people created the

Italian irredentism Italian irredentism ( it, irredentismo italiano) was a nationalist movement during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Italy with irredentist goals which promoted the unification of geographic areas in which indigenous peoples ...

. Italian irredentism in Switzerland was based on moderate

ideals, and was promoted by Italian-Ticinese such as Adolfo Carmine. Following the rise to power of Italian Fascism, however, the initial moderate irredentism started to change to one full of aggression: the same Benito Mussolini created in the early 1930s the ''Partito Fascista Ticinese'' (Ticino Fascist Party). The main ideal of this party was to bring the Italian frontier up to the Gottardo Pass (''Catena mediana delle Alpi'') in the Alps through political unrest and possible referendums (supported, in case of need, by the Italian Army). In 1934 the Ticino fascists held the "March on Bellinzona", similar to the

March on Rome The March on Rome ( it, Marcia su Roma) was an organized mass demonstration and a coup d'état in October 1922 which resulted in Benito Mussolini's National Fascist Party (PNF) ascending to power in the Kingdom of Italy. In late October 1922, ...

. However, it was successfully contrasted by socialist organizations, like "Liberi e Svizzeri" of Guglielmo Canevascini, promoted even by the Swiss government. Successively, in the 1935 elections the fascists obtained just 2% of the votes and since then their movement faded away to less than 100 members. Before

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposing ...

the Italian irredentism in Switzerland was reduced to have followers mainly between the descendants of Italians emigrated to Ticino at the end of the 19th century, but was ruled and promoted by a small group of ticino intellectuals with their active newspapers and propaganda. The most important of these intellectuals was Teresina Bontempi, who created the magazine ''L'Adula''. She denounced in her writings, together with Rosetta Colombi, the

germanization Germanisation, or Germanization, is the spread of the German language, people and culture. It was a central idea of German conservative thought in the 19th and the 20th centuries, when conservatism and ethnic nationalism went hand in hand. In ling ...

of Canton Ticino promoted by the Swiss government. Indeed, the German-speaking population in Canton Ticino went from 2.6% in 1837 to 5.34% in 1920 and nearly 10% in 1940. As a consequence of this political activity she was involved in continuous problems with the Swiss government, that finally jailed her in 1936. She was forced to move to Italy as a political refugee after some months. The most renowned fascist born in Canton Ticino was Aurelio Garobbio, who tried to imitate Gabriele D'Annunzio with his organization called ''Giovani Ticinesi''. After 1935 Garobbio was the main responsible of the Italian irredentism in Switzerland and was with Mussolini until his death in spring 1945, when he tried to organize a last fascist area of defense in

Valtellina Valtellina or the Valtelline (occasionally spelled as two words in English: Val Telline; rm, Vuclina (); lmo, Valtelina or ; german: Veltlin; it, Valtellina) is a valley in the Lombardy region of northern Italy, bordering Switzerland. Toda ...

next to Ticino. After World War II, the Italian irridentism movement in Switzerland ceased, replaced by organisations advocating a defense of the Italian language and culture within the Swiss Confederation.

Notes

Bibliography

* Cerutti, Mauro. ''Fra Roma e Berna. La Svizzera nel ventennio fascista''. Edizioni Franco Angeli. Milano, 1986. * Crespi, Ferdinando. ''Ticino irredento. La frontiera contesa. Dalla battaglia culturale dell'"Adula" ai piani d'invasione''. Edizioni Franco Angeli. Milano, 2004. * Dosi, Davide. ''ll cattolicesimo ticinese e i fascismi: la Chiesa e il partito conservatore ticinese nel periodo tra le due guerre mondiali''. Editore Saint-Paul. Lugano, 1999 * Garobbio, Aurelio. ''Gabriele D'Annunzio e i «Giovani Ticinesi»: le vicende de «L'Adula»'', Editore Centro Studi Atesini. Trento, 1988. * Lurati, Ottavio. ''Dialetto e italiano regionale nella Svizzera italiana''. Lugano, 1976. * Schneiderfranken, Ilse. ''Le industrie del Canton Ticino''. Bellinzona, 1937. * sulle quattro valli italofone (Mesolcina, Calanca, di Poschiavo, Bregaglia) e su Bivio, Vignoli, Giulio, ''I territori italofoni non appartenenti alla Repubblica Italiana agraristica''. Giuffrè, Milano, 1995. {{Irredentism Italian irredentism History of Ticino Italy–Switzerland relations Political controversies in Switzerland Political controversies in Italy

History

See also

Notes

Bibliography