Flag of Italy
The flag of Italy, often referred to as the Tricolour, is a flag featuring three equally sized vertical pales of green, white and red, with the green at the hoist side, as defined by Article 12 of the Constitution of the Italian Republic. The Italian law regulates its use and display, protecting its defence and providing for the crime of insulting it; it also prescribes its teaching in Italian schools together with other national symbols of Italy.
The Italian Flag Day named Tricolour Day was established by law n. 671 of 31 December 1996, and is held every year on 7 January. This celebration commemorates the first official adoption of the tricolour as a national flag by a sovereign Italian state, the Cispadane Republic, a Napoleonic sister republic of Revolutionary France, which took place in Reggio Emilia on 7 January 1797, on the basis of the events following the French Revolution which, among its ideals, advocated national self-determination. The Italian national colours appeared for the first time in Genoa on a tricolour cockade on 21 August 1789, anticipating by seven years the first green, white and red Italian military war flag, which was adopted by the Lombard Legion in Milan on 11 October 1796.
After 7 January 1797, popular support for the Italian flag grew steadily, until it became one of the most important symbols of Italian unification, which culminated on 17 March 1861 with the proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy, of which the tricolour became the national flag. Following its adoption, the tricolour became one of the most recognisable and defining features of united Italian statehood in the following two centuries of the history of Italy.
History
The French Revolution
The Italian tricolour, like other tricolour flags, is inspired by the French one, introduced by the revolution in 1790 on French Navy warships, and is symbolic of the renewal perpetrated by the origins of Jacobinism. Shortly after the French revolutionary events, the ideals of social innovation began to spread widely on the basis of the advocacy of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789, including in Italy, and subsequently political innovation with the first patriotic ferments addressed to the national self-determination that later led to the Italian unification on the Italian peninsula. For this reason, the French blue, white and red flag became the first reference of the Italian Jacobins and subsequently a source of inspiration for the creation of an Italian identity flag.On 12 July 1789, two days before the storming of the Bastille, the revolutionary journalist Camille Desmoulins, while hailing the Parisian crowd to revolt, asked the protesters what colour to adopt as a symbol of the French Revolution, proposing green, a symbol of hope or the blue of the American Revolution, a symbol of freedom and democracy. The protesters replied "The green! The green! We want green cockades!" Desmoulins then seized a green leaf from the ground and pointed it to the hat as a distinctive sign of the revolutionaries. The green, in the primitive French cockade, was immediately abandoned in favour of blue and red, the ancient colours of Paris, because it was also the colour of the king's brother, Count of Artois, who became monarch after the First Restoration with the name of Charles X of France. The French tricolour cockade was then completed on 17 July 1789 with the addition of white, the colour of the House of Bourbon, in deference to King Louis XVI of France, who still ruled despite the violent revolts that raged in the country; the French monarchy was abolished on 10 August 1792.
File:Coccarda ITALIA.svg|thumb|The cockade of Italy, on which the national colours of Italy were based in 1789
The first documented use of Italian national colours is dated 21 August 1789. In the historical archives of the Republic of Genoa it is reported that eyewitnesses had seen some demonstrators hanging a red, white and green cockade on their clothes. The Italian gazettes of the time had created confusion about the facts of French Revolution, especially on the replacement of green with blue, reporting that the French tricolour was green, white and red. When the correct information on the chromatic composition of the French tricolour arrived in Italy, the Italian Jacobins decided to keep green instead of blue, because it represented nature and therefore metaphorically, also natural rights, or social equality and freedom, both principles dear to them.
The red, white and green cockade then reappeared several years later on 13–14 November 1794 worn by a group of students of the University of Bologna, led by Luigi Zamboni and Giovanni Battista De Rolandis who attempted to plot a popular riot to topple the Catholic government of Bologna, a city which was part of the Papal States at the time. Zamboni and De Rolandis defined themselves as "patriots" and wore tricolour cockades to signal they were inspired by Jacobin revolutionary ideals, but modified them also to distinguish themselves from the French cockade.
The red, white and green cockade appeared, after the events of Bologna, during Napoleon's entry into Milan, which took place on 15 May 1796. These cockades, having the typical circular shape, possessed red on the outside, green on an intermediate position, and white on the centre. These ornaments were worn by the rioters even during the religious ceremonies officiated inside the Milan Cathedral as thanks for the arrival of Napoleon, who was seen, at least initially, as a liberator. The tricolour cockades then became one of the official symbols of the Milanese National Guard, which was founded on 20 November 1796, and then spread elsewhere along the Italian peninsula. Later the green, white and red cockade spread to a greater extent, gradually becoming the only ornament used in Italy by the rioters. The patriots began to call it "Italian cockade" making it become one of the symbols of the country. The green, white and red tricolour thus acquired a strong patriotic value, becoming one of the symbols of national awareness, a change that gradually led it to enter the collective imagination of the Italians.
The Napoleonic era
The oldest documented mention of the Italian tricolour flag is linked to Napoleon Bonaparte's first descent into the Italian peninsula. The first territory to be conquered by Napoleon was Piedmont; in the historical archive of the Piedmontese municipality of Cherasco is preserved a document attesting, on 13 May 1796, on the occasion of the Armistice of Cherasco between Napoleon and the Austro-Piedmontese troops, the first mention of the Italian tricolour, referring to municipal banners hoisted on three towers in the historic centre. On the document the term "green" was subsequently crossed and replaced by "blue", the colour that forms – together with white and red – the French flag.With the start of the first campaign in Italy, in many places the Jacobins of the Italian peninsula rose up, contributing, together with the Italian soldiers framed in the Napoleonic army, to the French victories. This renewal was accepted by the Italians despite being linked to the conveniences of Napoleonic France, which had strong imperialist tendencies because the new political situation was seen as better than the previous one. This double-threaded link with France was more acceptable than the previous centuries of absolutism.
On 11 October 1796, Napoleon communicated to the Directorate the birth of the Lombard Legion, a military unit constituted by the General Administration of Lombardy, a government that was headed by the Transpadane Republic. On this document, with reference to its war flag, which followed the French tricolour and which was proposed to Napoleon by the Milanese patriots, it is reported that this military unit would have had a red, white and green banner, colours formerly used by Milanese National Guard as well as on the cockades. In a ceremony at the Piazza del Duomo on 16 November 1796, a military flag was presented to the Lombard Legion. The Lombard Legion was therefore the first Italian military department to equip itself, as a banner, with a tricolour flag. The first official approval of the Italian flag by the authorities was therefore as a military insignia of the Lombard— Legion and not yet as the national flag of a sovereign Italian state.
With the succession of Napoleon's military victories and the consequent founding of republics favourable to revolutionary ideals, red, white and green were adopted on military banners as a symbol of social and political innovation in many Italian cities. On 19 June 1796, Bologna was occupied by Napoleon's troops. On 18 October 1796, together with the establishment of the Italian Legion, the wire Napoleonic congregation of magistrates, and deputies of Bologna, decided to create a civic banner of red, white and green, this time released from military use. Following the adoption by the Bolognese congregation, the Italian flag became a political symbol of the struggle for the independence of Italy from foreign powers, supported by its use also in the civil sphere.
The first red, white and green national flag of a sovereign Italian state was adopted on 7 January 1797, when the Fourteenth Parliament of the Cispadane Republic, on the proposal of deputy Giuseppe Compagnoni, decreed "to make universal the... standard or flag of three colours, green, white, and red...":
For having proposed the green, white and red tricolour flag, Giuseppe Compagnoni is considered the "father of the Italian flag". The congress decision to adopt a green, white and red tricolour flag was then greeted by a jubilant atmosphere, such was the enthusiasm of the delegates, and by a peal of applause. The adoption of the Italian flag by a sovereign Italian state, the Cispadane Republic, was inspired by this Bolognese banner, linked to a municipal reality and therefore still having a purely local scope, and to the previous military banners of the Lombard Legion and Italian Legion. In particular, the Italian Legion was formed by soldiers coming from Emilia and Romagna. The flag of the Cispadane Republic was a horizontal square with red uppermost and, at the heart of the white fess, an emblem composed of a garland of laurel decorated with a trophy of arms and four arrows, representing the four provinces that formed the Republic. In France, due to the Revolution, the flag went from having a "dynastic" and "military" meaning to a "national" one, and this concept, still unknown in Italy, was transmitted by the French to the Italians.
File:Sala tricolore reggio.jpg|thumb|The Sala del Tricolore, which later became the council hall of the municipality of Reggio Emilia, where the Italian flag was born on 7 January 1797
The Cispadane Republic and the Transpadane Republic merged in 1797 into the Cisalpine Republic and adopted the vertical square tricolour without badge in 1798. Originally the colours of the flag of the Cisalpine Republic were arranged horizontally, with green at the top, but on 11 May 1798, the Grand Council of the newborn State chose, as the national banner, an Italian tricolour with the colours arranged vertically. At the formal celebration of the birth in the new republic, which took place on 9 July in Milan, 300,000 people took part, including ordinary citizens, French soldiers and representatives of the major municipalities of the republic. The event was characterised by a riot of tricolour flags and cockades. On this occasion, Napoleon solemnly gave to the military units of the newborn republic, after having reviewed them, their tricolour banners.
The flag of the Cisalpine Republic was maintained until 1802, when it was renamed the Napoleonic Italian Republic, and a new flag was adopted, this time with a red field carrying a green square within a white lozenge; the presidential standard of Italy in use since 14 October 2000 was inspired by this flag.
It was during this period that the green, white and red tricolour predominantly penetrated the collective imagination of the Italians, becoming an unequivocal symbol of Italianness. In less than 20 years, the red, white and green flag had acquired its own peculiarity from a simple flag derived from the French one, becoming very famous and known.
In 1799, the independent Republic of Lucca came under French influence and horizontally adopted the vertical green, white and red flag, with green at the top; this lasted until 1801. In 1805, Napoleon installed his sister, Elisa Bonaparte Baciocchi, as Princess of Lucca and Piombino. This affair is commemorated in the opening of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace.
In the same year, after Napoleon had crowned himself as the first French Emperor, the Italian Republic was transformed into the first Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy, or Italico, under his direct rule. The flag of the Kingdom of Italy was that of the Republic in rectangular form, charged with the golden Napoleonic eagle. This remained in use until the fall of Napoleon in 1814.