Ieri e oggi
The boy who wrote Italy
He died at 22, but 60 million people still sing his words.
Every time Gli Azzurri step onto a field, every time a national holiday fills the piazzas, the same melody rises: Fratelli d'Italia, the Italian national anthem. You have probably heard it, but do you know the story behind it?
If you don't know the name Goffredo Mameli, it is time you did.
He was a student from Genoa, just 20 years old, when he wrote the words to what would become Italy's anthem in 1847 — at a moment when Italy didn't even exist yet as a country. It was a dream, a rallying cry, a poem written by a young man who believed so completely in a united Italy that he picked up a rifle and went to fight for it.
He never saw his dream realized. Mameli died in Rome in 1849, at 22, from a wound sustained while defending the Roman Republic against French troops. Italy would not officially unify for another twelve years.
And yet his words survived everything — wars, fascism, a monarchy, a republic — and are still sung today with the kind of feeling that bypasses the brain entirely and goes straight to the chest.
Not bad for a 22-year-old student from Genoa.