[1559 – 1796] Foreign Domination and Enlightenment

The year is 1559. The cannons have fallen silent across the Italian peninsula, their echoes replaced by the scratching of quills on parchment. The Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis has been signed, a document that does not bring freedom, but rather formalizes its loss. For the next century and a half, the fate of Italy will not be decided in Rome, Florence, or Venice, but in Madrid. The Spanish Habsburgs are the new masters. Imagine the vibrant, chaotic energy of the Renaissance—the fierce competition of city-states, the explosion of art and ideas—suddenly being put under a heavy, gilded lid. This is Italy in the late 16th and 17th centuries. The Spanish viceroys in Naples, Sicily, and Milan rule with an iron hand wrapped in velvet. The new fashion is for stiff, somber black cloth, mimicking the Spanish court. Public life becomes a theater of elaborate etiquette, of bows and titles, a rigid social hierarchy where prestige matters more than productivity. The economy, once the envy of Europe with its powerful banks and textile guilds, begins to slow. Wealthy families pull their capital from risky maritime trade and invest in the one thing that now seems safe: land. They become a landed aristocracy, content to live off the rents of a peasantry that is sinking deeper into poverty. In the vast southern kingdom of Naples, this system is almost feudal, with local barons, or *baroni*, holding immense power over the lives of the people who work their fields. For the average farmer, life is a grim cycle of back-breaking labor, punctuated by the festivals of the saints and the ever-present threat of famine or disease. Yet, this is not an age of total darkness. In the cities, especially in Rome, a new artistic energy erupts, one that seems to defy the political stagnation. This is the age of the Baroque. It is an art of drama, emotion, and spectacle. Walk into a Roman church from this period and you are overwhelmed. Gian Lorenzo Bernini makes marble twist and flow like fabric; his statues seem to be caught in a moment of divine ecstasy or profound grief. Ceilings open up into swirling, painted heavens, an illusion so powerful it feels as though the roof has been torn away. This magnificent, theatrical art is a declaration of power by the Papacy and the aristocracy—a way of saying that even if our political influence has waned, our command over beauty and the sacred remains absolute. But another, more dangerous drama is unfolding. In Padua and Florence, a man named Galileo Galilei points a new invention, the telescope, toward the heavens. What he sees—moons orbiting Jupiter, the craters of our own Moon—shatters a thousand years of established cosmology. He champions the radical idea that the Earth revolves around the Sun. The Inquisition, the powerful arm of the Church tasked with defending orthodoxy, takes notice. In 1633, the aging scientist is brought to trial. Under threat of torture, he is forced to publicly renounce his work. He would spend the rest of his life under house arrest, a symbol of the dangerous clash between a new age of reason and the unyielding power of tradition. The suffering of this era was not just intellectual. The Great Plague of 1629–1631 swept through northern Italy like a specter of death, wiping out an estimated one million people, perhaps a quarter of the population in the affected regions. Milan lost nearly half its citizens. Venice, the once-proud republic, was a ghost of its former self. By the early 1700s, the guard changes. A series of European wars, primarily the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714), sees the power of Spain crumble. The Austrian Habsburgs replace their Spanish cousins as the dominant power in Lombardy and much of the south. For most Italians, it is simply the exchange of one foreign master for another. Yet, this shift lets in a crack of light. From France and Britain, the ideas of the Enlightenment—the *Illuminismo*—begin to filter across the Alps. It is a philosophy that champions reason, human rights, and reform. In the Austrian-controlled city of Milan, these ideas find fertile ground. A group of aristocrats and intellectuals gather around a journal called *Il Caffè* (The Coffee House), debating how to modernize their state. One of them, a nobleman named Cesare Beccaria, writes a short, explosive book in 1764 titled *On Crimes and Punishments*. In its pages, he argues for an end to torture and the death penalty, declaring that the state has no right to take a life. The book becomes an international sensation, influencing reformers from Thomas Jefferson in America to Catherine the Great in Russia. It is a stunning reminder that the Italian intellect, though quieted, was not extinguished. Further south, in the chaotic, beautiful, and desperately poor city of Naples, another kind of awakening occurs. In the 1730s and 40s, workers digging a well stumble upon the ruins of Herculaneum, and later, the larger city of Pompeii, both perfectly preserved under the volcanic ash of Mount Vesuvius’s eruption in 79 AD. Suddenly, the past is unearthed, not as a text, but as a real place. Archaeologists walk through streets frozen in time, finding homes with paintings still on the walls and loaves of bread still in the ovens. This discovery ignites a European fascination with antiquity and fuels the Grand Tour, a rite of passage for wealthy young men from across the continent who come to Italy to absorb its art, its history, and its sunshine, treating the peninsula as a magnificent living museum. But as the 18th century draws to a close, Italy remains a patchwork of realities. There are enlightened dukes in Tuscany and Milan, abolishing trade barriers and reforming tax codes. There is the decadent splendor of Venice, the "pleasure dome" of Europe, with its carnivals and casinos, its lifeblood slowly draining away. And there is the vast, impoverished south, where peasants still live at the mercy of their landlords. The peninsula is a land of brilliant thinkers, peerless musicians like Vivaldi, and breathtaking art, but it is not a nation. It is a geographic expression, a collection of states speaking similar dialects, bound by a shared culture but divided by foreign rulers and ancient rivalries. The old order, a mix of baroque grandeur, enlightened reform, and deep-seated inertia, feels permanent. But in 1796, a new sound is heard from the north, a sound not heard on such a scale for generations: the thunder of cannons and the steady tramp of marching feet. A young, fiercely ambitious French general is leading his army across the Alps. His name is Napoleon Bonaparte. He promises liberation, but what he will bring is a fire that will burn the old world to the ground and forge in its embers the first, painful stirrings of a new idea: the idea of Italy itself.