Nizzardo Italians
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Italian Nizzardos are the Italian and Ligurian speaking populations of the County of Nice (Nizza). They were called with this name by the Irredentism movement of the Kingdom of Italy, when France annexed in 1860 the region of Nice from the Kingdom of Sardinia and consequently they did not participate in the Italian unification.
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[edit] History
The area of the Contea di Nizza (as the area of Nice was called in Italian in medieval times) was populated by Ligurian tribes during the Roman Empire. These tribes were conquered by Augustus and were fully romanized (according to Theodore Mommsen) by the fourth century, when the barbarian invasions began.
The Franks conquered the region only temporarily and the local Romance populations were soon integrated in the growing Republic of Genoa, joining the Ligurian League. In 1388 the commune of Nice placed itself under the protection of the Counts of Savoy. Nice (then called Nizza) continued to be part -directly or indirectly- of Savoy history until 1860.
The maritime strength of Nice now rapidly increased until it was able to cope with the Barbary pirates; the fortifications were largely extended by the rulers of Savoy and the roads of the city and surrounding region improved. Emmanuel Philibert, Duke of Savoy, in 1561 abolished the use of Latin and established the Italian language as the official language of Nice.
Conquered in 1792 by the armies of the First French Republic, the County of Nice was part of France until 1814; but after that date it reverted to the Kingdom of Sardinia.
By a treaty concluded in 1860 between the Sardinian king and Napoleon III, the County of Nice was again ceded to France as a territorial reward for French assistance in the Second Italian War of Independence against Austria, which saw Lombardy unified with Piedmont-Sardinia.
Giuseppe Garibaldi, born in Nice, strongly opposed the cession to France (arguing that was not done with "universal" vote and had many "irregularities") and in 1872 there were even popular riots in the city, promoted by the "Garibaldini" in favor of the unification of Nice with Italy. More than 11,000 Nizzardo Italians, who did not accepted to be French, moved to the Kingdom of Italy (mainly Turin and Genoa) after 1861. The French government closed the Italian newspapers of the Nizzardo Italians: "Diritto di Nizza" and "Voce di Nizza" were closed in 1861 and "Il Pensiero di Nizza" in 1895.
The Italian Irredentists considered Nizza one of their main nationalistic requests and in 1942/3, during the Second World War, the County of Nice was occupied and administered by Italy.
In 1947, because of the Italian defeat in the war, even the remaining areas of the County of Nice, Briga and Tenda, which had remained Italian after 1860, were annexed to France. Consequently, one fourth of the Nizzardo Italians living in that mountainous area moved to Piedmont and Liguria in Italy (mainly from Val di Roia and Tenda).
Currently the area is part of the Alpes-Maritimes Department of the Republic of France.
Since 1861, after a sustained process of Frenchification, only in the coast around Mentone and in the mountains around Tende are there still some Nizzardo Italians.
[edit] Language
Augustus conquered the Nizzardo, populated by Ligurian people, and left a monument (Trophy of the Alps) with the names of the Ligurian tribes: these names are the first evidences of the Italic language spoken in the County of Nice. The Ligurians were fully romanized in the following centuries and their Latin language in the Middle Ages became a romance dialect.
Before the year 1000 the area of Nizza was part of the Ligurian League under the Republic of Genoa and the population spoke the Ligurian dialect. Dante Alighieri wrote in his "Divina Commedia" that the river Var near Nizza was the western limit of the Italian Liguria.
Around the twelfth century Nizza was under the French House of Anjou, who favoured the immigratrion of peasants from Provence with their Occitan language. In those years the mountainous areas of the upper Var river started to lose their fully genoese/ligurian linguistical characteristics and adopted a provenzal component.
From 1388 to 1860 the County of Nice was under the Savoy and so was connected to the Italian language and peninsula. In those centuries the local dialect of Nice was called Nissart and was similar to the Monegasque of the Principality of Monaco, but with more influences from the Occitan.
Until 1860 the County of Nice had a language on the coast (Nissart and Monegasque) that was fully Ligurian, while in the mountainous interior the local Italian dialect had strong influences of the Occitan and even Piedmontese (Tenda).
Everything changed in 1860, when the Kingdom of Savoy ceded the County of Nice to France. Sue Wright wrote that "Nice was not French-speaking before the annexxation but underwent a shift to French in a short space of time...and is surprising that the local Italian dialect, the Nissart, disappeared quickly from the private domain". [1] She even wrote that one of the main reasons of the disappearance of the Italian language in the County was because "Many of the administrative class under Piedmont-Savoy ruler, the soldiers, jurists, civil servants and professionals who used Italian in their working lives, moved after annexxation to Piedmont. Their places and roles were taken by incomers from France". Immediately after 1861, the French government closed all the newspapers in Italian and more than 11,000 Nizzardo Italians moved to the Kingdom of Italy. The dimension of the "exodus" can be deducted by the fact that in the Savoy census of 1858, Nizza had only 44,000 inhabitants.
In twenty years the Nizzardo Italians were reduced to a small minority and even the Nissart was increasingly assimilated by the Occitan, with many French words loanworded (French linguists declare that actually the Niçard is an Occitan dialect).[1]
In 1881 the New York Times wrote [2] that before the French annexation "the Nizzards were quite as much Italians as the Genoese, and their dialect was, if anything, nearer the Tuscan than is the harsch dialect of Genoa".
Giuseppe Garibaldi, born in Nice, defined his "Nizzardo" as an Italian dialect with very strong influences from the Occitan and French languages, and - even for this reason - promoted the union of Nice to the Kingdom of Italy.
Even today some scholars (like the German Werner Forner, the French Jean-Philippe Dalbera and the Italian Giulia Petracco Sicardi) agree that the Niçard has some characteristics (phonetical, lexical and morphological) that are typical of the western Ligurian language. The French scholar Bernard Cerquiglini pinpoints in his Les langues de France the actual existence of a ligurian minority in Tende, Roquebrune and Menton, a remnant of a bigger medioeval "ligurian" area that included Nice and most of the coastal County of Nice.
Another reduction in the number of the Nizzardo Italians happened after WWII, when the defeated Italy was forced to surrender to France the small mountainous area of the County of Nice that had retained in 1860. From the Val di Roia, Tenda and Briga one quarter of the local population moved to Italy in 1947.
In the century of nationalism between 1850 and 1950 the Nizzardo Italians were reduced from the 70% majority [2] of the 125,000 living in the County of Nizza at the time of the French annexation to the actual minority of nearly two thousands (in the area of Tenda and Mentone).
[edit] See also
- Italia irredenta
- Dalmatian Italians
- Giuseppe Garibaldi
- Monegasque
- Mentonasque
- Ligurian language (Romance)
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[edit] External links
- Nizza and the Italian Irredentism (in Italian)
- Map of the Languages of France, with reference to the Nissart and Genoese (in French)
- Magazine about Briga and Tenda (in Italian)
[edit] Bibliography
- Amicucci, Ermanno. Nizza e l’Italia. Ed. Mondadori. Milano, 1939.
- Barelli Hervé, Rocca Roger. Histoire de l'identité niçoise. Serre. Nice, 1995. ISBN 2-84410-223-4
- Bec, Pierre. La Langue Occitane. Presses Universitaires de France. Paris, 1963
- Gray, Ezio. Le terre nostre ritornano... Malta, Corsica, Nizza. De Agostini Editoriale. Novara, 1943
- Holt, Edgar. The Making of Italy 1815–1870, Atheneum. New York, 1971
- Stuart, J. Woolf. Il risorgimento italiano. Einaudi. Torino, 1981
- Université de Nice-Sophia Antipolis, Centre Histoire du droit. Les Alpes Maritimes et la frontière 1860 à nos jours. Actes du colloque de Nice (1990). Ed. Serre. Nice,1992
