Your review of David Gilmour’s The Pursuit of Italy: A History of a Land, Its Regions, and Their People (London: Allen Lane, 2011) does not put it into the wider context of European nationalism, which rose with Napoleon some two centuries ago (”Avanti,” February 26, 2011). The comment made in 1861 by Massimo d’Azeglio, one of the pioneers of Italian unification, that “we have made Italy; now we must make Italians,” should also be appreciated in that wider context. Not only was it the task to make Italians out of, say, Sicilians and Sardinians, but also of many peoples of other ethnic origins along the new country’s borders, say the Germans of Tyrol or Slavs of Istria. Of course, this went as far as Africa. To wit, Italians were made left and right, wherever history supposedly justified it, and with an enormous zeal. Mussolini only continued this process after the fall of the Austro-Hungarian empire, albeit a bit more violently. The unification of Italy, the hundred-fiftieth anniversary of which is about to be celebrated with some confusion, has an entirely different meaning along its troubled borders. As well as parts of Africa.