An alternate history of consciousness- no Italian national identity

I'm not proposing one particular POD, more like a different process of 'national awakening' in Italy.

Is it really inevitable for regions with such strong local identities as Veneto, Tuscany or Sicily to acquire an 'Italian' identity too? Or was this always the case? I can't really find much info on this subject, usually the existence of an 'Italian' identity is just treated as a given; which maybe was the case- but is it really that obvious it has to be this way?

I mean the traditional languages of many regions are not even mutually intelligible. How did Tuscan become accepted so easily as a prestige language? The usual explanation is the power of Renaissance Tuscany, Dante-Petrarca-Boccaccio etc. But it seems so weird to me. Why wouldn't Sicily or Venetia make an effort to standardize its own language? It's not like there is a France-style centralised state opressing diversity...

So what does it take for Italy to be "just a geographic expression'?
 
I'm not proposing one particular POD, more like a different process of 'national awakening' in Italy.

Is it really inevitable for regions with such strong local identities as Veneto, Tuscany or Sicily to acquire an 'Italian' identity too? Or was this always the case? I can't really find much info on this subject, usually the existence of an 'Italian' identity is just treated as a given; which maybe was the case- but is it really that obvious it has to be this way?

I mean the traditional languages of many regions are not even mutually intelligible. How did Tuscan become accepted so easily as a prestige language? The usual explanation is the power of Renaissance Tuscany, Dante-Petrarca-Boccaccio etc. But it seems so weird to me. Why wouldn't Sicily or Venetia make an effort to standardize its own language? It's not like there is a France-style centralised state opressing diversity...

So what does it take for Italy to be "just a geographic expression'?

Well, it's quite complicated. You can have a situation where an Italian national consciousness does not develop significantly with a POD as late as 1796, maybe later.
For the language, however, Italian (i.e. Tuscan) had entreched itself as the language of the whole peninsula (with even noticeable partial exceptions, Venice being probably the most important) since around 1500 and was meant to become such by Dante already. Some notion of Italy as a somewhat culturally unified area existed among the cultivated elites since the middle ages and harked back to Roman times, so it would be hard to uproot completely. It has not, however, to become necessarily political or to stop the development of regional languages; Venetian and Ligurian for example had and have quite a standardized form and were used for both official and literary purposes. The point is that readership in this languages would be much more limited. There was little in the way of literate people in any single region, so unified languages on larger areas made things easier.
The relatively limited number of people involved and their social standing probably made also prestige much more of an issue.
 
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