This article considers the figure of Habsburg Emperor Charles V in relation to Italy, first as perceived by Italians in his own time, the sixteenth century, but then especially as evaluated by Italians of the Risorgimento—and notably by Verdi in his operatic work. The article emphasizes opera as a crucial cultural medium of Habsburg engagement with the Italian peninsula and of Italian culture within the Habsburg monarchy. Contemporary Italian evaluations of Charles's role in the domination of Italy were both regretful of his military interventions (including the sack of Rome in 1527) and respectful of his political skills. During the Risorgimento, the conventional Mazzinian perspective was deeply hostile to the Habsburgs and conditioned the wars of Italian unification against the Habsburg monarchy. Italian opera, however, especially Rossini's Guillaume Tell (1829), Verdi's Ernani (1844), and Verdi's Don Carlos (1867) indicate a complex operatic perspective on the Habsburgs in Risorgimento culture. While the Austrian Habsburg representative Gessler is the villain in Rossini's Guillaume Tell, Verdi's Ernani actually places Charles V on stage in a major baritone role with beautiful music and an ambivalent presence. In Don Carlos, the ghost of Charles V hovers over and haunts the whole opera.

In contrast with the distorted and romanticized images reproduced by far-right narratives, we argue in this study that the constructive ideals of “nation” held by Italy’s Giuseppe Mazzini and Turkey’s Ziya Gökalp, from two later examples of European nationalism, could fit into what might be called a “proto-modernism” within nationalism theories. It is proposed that both Mazzini and Gökalp went through ideological transformations that made them firm opponents of German Romanticism and ardent believers of the Enlightenment, as shown in their non-exclusionary approaches to nationalism. They both rejected essentialist (religious, ethnic, racial, etc.) rationales for the backwardness of their respective countries and maintained the necessity of constructing nations that would initially provide civic equality among citizens and then aim at normative equality among nations at the civilizational level. In that sense, our analysis finds four fundamental similarities between Mazzini and Gökalp with regard to their national ideals: loyalty to the principles of the Enlightenment, national self-determination, civic-legal equality among citizens, and normative equality among all nations.