Search results for "Italian Unity"

From Dialects to a Language. Cesare Caravaglios and the Melodies in the World War I Trenches as Songs of the Italian Nation

2019

After the territorial unity of Italy in 1861, romanists, ethnographers and musicologists addressed their efforts in collecting poems and folk music, aiming to demonstrate the interconnection among different regions. At the end of the nineteenth century, the impulse to identify the unity of the country through dialects became a dogma, in order to consolidate the unachieved “Italianness”. Alongside to this presumed linguistic similarity, an obsessive mix of nationalism and irredentism provoked the political campaign, which brought to the war in 1915. Cesare Caravaglios (1893-1937), a band conductor and a scholar, devoted his research on Neapolitan songs and cries of street vendors. Influenced…