The Swedish legacy (of Italy)

When tourists come to see my country (Italy) they are astonished by the beauty and the history of it.

When Italians go abroad and find themselves together, they are surprised on how people relate in such a different way than their homeland.

But…when you do study the history of Italy… you see a lot of different armies, cities and cultures clashing together… but you keep missing where the Italians really come from!

And, is there such thing as an “Italian” in the end?

I kept asking myself all those questions when I realized that the answer is “no”, but instead of being somehow put down by this answer I did realize that the beauty and the amazing culture you can still feel in Italy today comes from chaos more than order.

Just to make a quick example: a few years ago we had the first ett hundra femtio år (150 years) of the unity of Italy.

150 years sound like a very long time… but if you think about it and make a comparison, you find that, for example, the USA came together on the 4rth of July of 1776 and even though we consider it a “young country” it’s more than 200 years!

Just to make another comparison, the Reign of Naples which covered a long area in the center-south of Italy lasted from 1302 to 1816… and that’s almost 500 years!

And since we had such a variety of cultures way before becoming united and having a republic, I questioned myself if any of the old reigns of Italy had, somewhere and somehow, a Swedish legacy…

And to my surprise the answer is… YES.

I was doing some small research on the crusades when I came across to a population that lived in the center-south side of Italy and took also part in the crusades: they were called the “Normanni” in Italian.

When I heard that name I realized that it was too close to the italianization of “North men” to be just a coincidence, and my research went deeper:

The Normanni were a population that also included some vikings and came from scandinavia (including Sweden!) and conquered part of the old UK and the north-west side of France that was then called as you know “Normandie” (North men, again!).

But how you can see from this picture the men of the north did not stop here… they came to my country!

 

 

I always wondered how some south-italian people I know have blonde hair and blue eyes, just like most scandinavians, and now I know the answer.

The Normanni came to Naples and they putted themselves at the service of the Duke of Naples Sergio IV around 1030.

He decided to let them have an outpost and they founded the city of Aversa (which is BTW a beautiful place to see), just 20 chilometers north of Naples.

In the following years a scandinavian family called Hauteville, “Altavilla” italianized, come from the north to change the history of Italy.

At the time Sicily was under the Arabian dominion and being an island it was almost invincible… until Ruggero d’Altavilla, taking advantage of an inner dispute between arabians in sicily, stormed the island and conquered it, expanding also to the tunisian border.

And for the first time in centuries the center-south of Italy was finally united!

The scandinavian dominion of the new reign was something never seen in the history of Italy, it was fair and peaceful….

Even if they had to live between the pressure of the pope, the arabians and Bisantium, there was so much harmony that the muslims living in Sicily lived in peace with the cristians for a very long time. (Which was such a strange thing during the time of the crusades!)

Tancredi, the last king of the Normanni, was the Count of Lecce, the Duke of Athens and the King of Sicily.

At his death, Herny IV of Germany would reclaim the throne of the reign of Sicily because of his marriage with Costanza d’Altavilla, and that put to an end the scandinavian dynasty of Italy.