Italians: A Deeply Divided Reputation

The higher a person stood, the farther he could see. But that was not always a good thing. At that moment, for instance, Prince Metternich was overestimating the so-called Italian people as a group.

It was hard not to feel a little wistful. Prince Metternich, who had once sworn he would turn Italy into a mere geographical expression, had grown old after all.

Italians found names like Venetians, Lombards, Tuscans, Parmesans, Lucchese, Modenese, Romans, Sicilians, and Sardinians far more acceptable than the label "Italian."

Separated by geography for thousands of years, they had developed different cultures and customs. Even their languages had diverged.

Historically, the Italian government had begun modernizing the Italian language in 1870, promoting the Tuscan dialect (that is, the Florentine dialect, or Tuscan). It took 120 years to resolve the language problem.

The divide between northern and southern Italy persisted to this day. Still, concentrating these people so heavily in Northern Italy was unwise. No one could know whether, in the end, they might be mixed together like poisonous insects in a jar and produce some new problem.

What Franz had in mind was to relocate them to Tripoli. The region would be important in the future, and its population was desperately small. It could barely manage infrastructure, let alone development.

There was another reason, too: the Karamanli Family had shown far less ability to carry out orders and govern than Franz had expected.

Having them rule the region was so inefficient it was practically a waste. Northern Italy, meanwhile, had sailors and dockworkers aplenty.

Italian city-states had a commercial tradition, after all, so Franz thought the plan feasible. His first step was to prepare to move 30,000 people to the Tripoli region between 1846 and 1850.

There had been plans to encourage migration earlier, but relying