Il Canto degli italiani

The story

Goffredo Mameli, a young patriot from Genoa with republican and Jacobin sympathies, wrote the words in September 1847 (sources give the 8th or the 10th), inspired by the mass mobilisations that would lead to the revolutions of 1848 and the First Italian War of Independence. On 10 November he sent the text to the Genoese composer Michele Novaro in Turin, who set it to music on 24 November. The text drew on "La Marseillaise", and Mameli changed its original opening, probably at Novaro's suggestion; a verse addressed to Italian women was dropped before the debut. Italians also call it the "Inno di Mameli" after its author, or "Fratelli d'Italia".

Its first known public performance was on 10 December 1847, at a demonstration before the sanctuary of Our Lady of Loreto in Oregina, Genoa. Officially it marked the 101st anniversary of the Portoria quarter's revolt that drove the Austrians from the city; in fact it was a protest against foreign occupation and a call on Charles Albert of Sardinia to take up the Italian cause. The municipal band of Sestri Ponente played the song for some 30,000 patriots, and an earlier performance on 9 November may have taken place. Because Mameli was a known follower of Mazzini, the Piedmontese police banned the song until March 1848, and the Austrian police treated singing it as a political crime until the end of their empire.

In 1848 the song spread by word of mouth across the peninsula. It was sung in the Five Days of Milan, by soldiers and military bands in the war against Austria (King Charles Albert had to withdraw his censorship of its fifth strophe), and by the volunteers of the Roman Republic; Giuseppe Garibaldi hummed it during the defence of Rome. Garibaldi's volunteers sang it in the Expedition of the Thousand in 1860, and Giuseppe Verdi chose it to stand for Italy in his "Hymn of the Nations" for the London International Exhibition of 1862. When the Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed in 1861, however, its republican content did not suit the monarchy, which kept the House of Savoy's "Marcia Reale". The song returned to favour in the Italo-Turkish War and the trenches of World War I.

Under fascism it was discouraged and kept out of official ceremonies, though tolerated on some occasions. After the armistice of 8 September 1943 it was sung in the liberated south and in partisan areas, and it was popular in anti-fascist circles; Mussolini's Social Republic also played it, so it was sung by partisans and fascists alike. On 12 October 1946, on the proposal of War Minister Cipriano Facchinetti, the government of the new Republic adopted it as the provisional national anthem. Attempts to make this permanent stalled for decades, until President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi revived it as a national symbol (1999–2006) and a law of 4 December 2017 made it the official anthem.

On official occasions the first two stanzas are sung without the introduction; the sixth stanza is almost never performed. In 2025 President Sergio Mattarella signed a decree that the shout of assent Novaro had added at the end of the refrain, which was not in Mameli's text, is no longer to be sung. Novaro took no payment for the music, asking that a publisher's fee go to a subscription for Garibaldi.

What it says

A call to the Italians, divided for centuries, to unite and rise to fight for their freedom, as Rome once did. Its strophes appeal to God to protect their union, recall heroes and moments of past struggles against foreign rule, and name Habsburg Austria as the enemy; the mood is urgent and martial, quickening to a rousing refrain.

The words