I’ll go through your points one by one. Also because I think I didn’t explain myself very well.
Sicily and Magna Graecia were Greek, of course, but the rest of the peninsula was densely populated by various different peoples. These included the Etruscans, Latins, Umbrians, Samnites, Veneti and Ligurians, to name a few.
That’s all correct.
Rothari issuing laws on a personal/ethnic basis rather than a territorial one, that’s accurate. But “Liutprand unified the law codes so they started to merge” doesn’t hold up. He added to the Lombard legal corpus, sure, but he didn’t merge the Roman and Lombard systems on an ethnic basis. That split seems to have stuck around a lot longer than his reign would suggest.
I think that’s where I expressed myself poorly. Depends what you mean by “Italian” though. I don’t mean a national identity, just generically someone living in Italy, Catholic, no longer speaking Latin, with a shared history. Basically how civs are set up in the game. And that actually holds up reasonably well for the center-north by 900-1000: Longobards had converted back in the 8th century, and the vernacular had already split off from Latin by then. The Placiti Cassinesi (960-963), the earliest written attestations of it, confirm that.
One thing to flag on Dante: in the De Vulgari Eloquentia he doesn’t push Florentine as the unifying language. He criticizes it along with every other city dialect, and argues instead for a “volgare illustre” tied to no single city.
Small correction: it’s not “Byzantine Orthodox”. The Catholic/Orthodox split only dates to 1054, and the south was Latinized from the Norman conquest onward, so “Orthodox” is anachronistic here anyway. Rest checks out.
On the sequence going straight from “Roman/Lombard” to “Venetian/Florentine/Milanese”, with that minimal definition, I don’t think it’s really a contradiction. Being generically “Italian” in that sense and being locally Florentine or Milanese aren’t mutually exclusive, they’re just different levels, same way someone’s Bavarian and German at once. So there’s no real gap to fill. Local identity never went anywhere, it’s just that the broader layer was already there underneath it by 900-1000, at least in the center-north. And the term itself (Italians) wasn’t purely modern retrofit either: Liutprand of Cremona was already using “italico”/“italiense” as an umbrella term around 968, so the label existed alongside the description, even if only in elite/clerical writing at that point.
Actually, the point I was originally making is that around 900-1000 it was hard to tell someone born in Genoa from someone born in Milan, and I think that holds up better than my original Milan/Venice comparison, since Venice had its own institutional trajectory that Genoa didn’t share yet. Genoa at this point was still a minor town under the same bishop-count structure as Milan, both inside the same kingdom, same Latin church, same evolving vernacular family.
As for Garibaldi, he’s not the one either. The idea comes from Massimo D’Azeglio’s memoirs, but the memorable phrase (‘Fatta l’Italia, bisogna fare gli italiani’) that everyone quotes does not actually appear in his writing. Some historians argue that this memorable version was coined in 1886 by Ferdinando Martini, who paraphrased D’Azeglio’s original point. It was then attributed back to D’Azeglio himself.
