Italy’s national anthem carries a story of youth, patriotic fervour, and historical accident.
Known formally as Il Canto degli Italiani but commonly called Fratelli d’Italia after its opening words, it was written in the autumn of 1847 by the then 20-year-old student and patriot Goffredo Mameli, and set to music shortly afterwards in Turin by a fellow Genoese, Michele Novaro.
The anthem is indelibly linked to the city of Genoa, and its creation belongs to the charged atmosphere of the years immediately preceding the Italian wars of independence against Austria.
Who was Goffredo Mameli
Mameli was born in Genoa on 5 September 1827. A precocious student and poet with liberal and republican convictions, he joined the Mazzinian movement in 1847 – the same year he composed the anthem – having taken part actively in the great patriotic demonstrations in Genoa calling for political reform. He was equally a man of action: in March 1848, at the head of 300 volunteers, he reached the uprising in Milan, where he fought the Austrians on the Mincio with the rank of captain of the Bersaglieri.
After the armistice, he made his way to Rome, where he was present for the proclamation of the Roman Republic on 9 February 1849, always in the front line of the city’s defence against the besieging French, until on 3 June he was wounded in the left leg, which subsequently required amputation due to gangrene. He died of infection on 6 July, aged just 22. His remains rest in the Mausoleum on the Janiculum Hill.
Who was Michele Novaro
The composer, Michele Novaro, was born in Genoa on 23 October 1818 and studied composition and singing there. By 1847 he was working in Turin as a second tenor and chorus master at the Teatro Regio and Teatro Carignano. A committed liberal, he put his compositional talent at the service of the independence movement, setting dozens of patriotic songs to music and organising performances to raise funds for Garibaldi’s campaigns.
His own end was considerably less dramatic than Mameli’s but no less melancholy: he died in poverty on 20 October 1885, the final years of his life marked by financial hardship and ill health. Thanks to the initiative of his former pupils, a funerary monument was erected to him in the cemetery of Staglieno, where he rests close to the tomb of Mazzini.
The circumstances in which Novaro composed the melody have been handed down through the account of the patriot and poet Anton Giulio Barrili, a friend and biographer of Mameli. The scene was a gathering at the Turin home of the patriot Lorenzo Valerio, where music and politics were being discussed together, when a new guest arrived carrying a note from Mameli – the text of the anthem, not yet set to music.
Novaro read it, was deeply moved, and left immediately for home. There, without even removing his hat, he sat at the piano. He recalled later how he had overturned the oil lamp onto the keyboard in his agitation, soaking the sheet of paper on which he was scribbling down melodic phrases – and that this stained page was the original manuscript of Fratelli d’Italia.
Debut and journey
The anthem was sung publicly for the first time in Genoa during a popular festival, but was immediately banned by the police. After the uprisings of 1848, however, it was taken up by military bands and by soldiers departing for the Lombard campaign. Its directness and melodic drive made it the most beloved song of the Risorgimento. So closely did it come to be identified with Italy that Giuseppe Verdi, in his Hymn of the Nations of 1862, chose Il Canto degli Italiani – rather than the official Royal March – to represent the country, placing it alongside God Save the King and the Marseillaise.
Despite this prestige, the anthem had no formal legal standing for much of Italy’s republican era. The Council of Ministers of 12 October 1946, chaired by Alcide De Gasperi, agreed provisionally to adopt the Inno di Mameli as the national anthem of the Italian Republic, announcing the decision in the context of the planned oath of the armed forces to the new Republic. The word “provisionally” proved long-lived: it was not until 2017 that Italy formally and definitively recognised Il Canto degli Italiani as its national anthem.
In 2025, Italy modified the lyrics of the anthem to remove an emphatic final “Sì!”, following a presidential decree adopted at the suggestion of prime minister Giorgia Meloni.
Historical reference of text
From its opening verse invoking Scipio Africanus – the Roman general who defeated Hannibal – as a symbol of martial glory, to its catalogue of struggles against foreign domination, including the Battle of Legnano in 1176 and the Sicilian Vespers of 1282, the anthem is the work of a Mazzinian republican steeped in both classical learning and the political ideals of the Risorgimento.
Its six strophes, each ending with the refrain calling Italians to stand together and ready themselves for sacrifice, addressed a peninsula then still divided into seven separate states. That message of unity, forged in the urgency of 1847, has accompanied Italy’s public life ever since.
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