City and language in the thought of Carlo Cattaneo

This article takes as its point of departure the publication in Crepuscolo, a Milanese journal edited by Carlo Tenca, of Cattaneo's 1858 essay on the role of cities in Italian history. Among the issues faced by those seeking to forge an Italian nation in the nineteenth century, and thereby to create unity out of diversity, the questione della lingua loomed large. Indeed, the historiographical and political tension between city and nation was reflected in researches into dialect and language dating back to, or even beyond, the literary controversies in Milan between Romantic and Classical camps. Comparison between Cattaneo, a democratic federalist, and Tenca, increasingly aligned with Cavour after 1853, sheds light upon questions of scale in Risorgimento political thought, since both men were deeply interested in correlations between speech communities and political spheres, whether urban or regional, national or supra-national.