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The Italian Nationality Problem of the Austrian Empire1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 February 2009

Kent Roberts Greenfield
Kent Roberts Greenfield
Affiliation:
Baltimore, Maryland
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Extract

In 1713 Austria acquired the duchy of Milan, even then the richest part of Italy, and after 1748 it extended its ascendancy over all the states of the Italian peninsula. Not only did they accept Austrian hegemony without resistance, but the Italians played a part in the administration of the empire. At the court of Maria Theresa Italians did not find themselves in an alien environment. The Vienna of that age, to use Franco Valsecchi's happy phrase, delighted in “the melodious culture of Italy.” Viennese operas were composed to Italian libretti. Mozart was hardly less an Italian than a Germanic composer. The empire drew on its Italian-speaking subjects to fill important posts in the administrative and diplomatic services and courts of law. During the later years of Maria Theresa's reign, sons of the conservative Milanese patriciate, imbued with the ideas of the Enlightenment and led by Pietro Verri, Cesare Beccaria, and their associates of the Accademia dei Pugni, cooperated willingly and fruitfully in planning the reforms that Maria Theresa carried out, even though those reforms were undermining the autonomy of their country. The Enlightenment developed simultaneously in Italy and Austria, and for a period the leaders of that movement in Italy looked to Vienna rather than Paris as the citadel of their intellectual and reformist conceptions.

Type
The Slovaks, Ukrainians (Ruthenians), Rumanians, and Italians
Information
Austrian History Yearbook , Volume 3 , Issue 2 , January 1967 , pp. 491 - 526
Copyright
Copyright © Center for Austrian Studies, University of Minnesota 1967

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References

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