That, for exemple, money-lenders were popularily called Lombards in France, is a way to point that Lombards aren't Italians isn't really making sense to me.
We could argue that, because Cahorsin was used in the exact same way, it points how much Cahors wasn't in a occitan-speaking region.
At the very least, there's something missing there to me : if you allow me to illustrate my problem in an humourous way.
1) Lombards/Cahorsins is a generic name for money-lenders
2) ????
3) Lombards/Cahorsins aren't real Italians/southern French
Well, I can understand but frankly, it's just a colour : Vichy France is collated with Aquitaine, Francoist Spain with Asturias.
Heck, IIRC, I was one of the first to argue we could recycle Aquitaine into Vichy France, and you'd agree I'd be the least to make an equation between medieval Occitan principalties and Petainism.
Furthermore, as I said above, I'd rather favour Italy being coloured in Savoy Green and Fascist Italy in Roman brown (which is barely used past early Middle-Ages), than using a sub-national colour for it.
You are right, there's a whole chunk of the matter that's missing, and that's due mostly to my ignorance: I know fairly well the history of the Alpine and Subalpine Region on the basis of living there, and reasonably well the British Islands on the basis of having been there, but I know next to nothing on France and especially Occitania (in fact, if it wasn't for you, I guess I wouldn't even know what Occitania
is). That means that I miss not only pieces of the puzzle, but whole sections of it and my reasoning may be severely impaired because of that.
fwiw, I use Tuscany as a double for radical political (eg fascist) Italy. This is because a) a lot of Italian political thought originated in the region, notably including Machiavelli b) Benito Mussolini was from the region (well, just outside it, but Emilio-Romagna doesn't have a colour), c) Mazzini ended his days there; he was fundamental in forming a unified Italian state, and d) Giovannia Gentile, another notable Italian fascist, died there.
I use Roman brown as the unified Italy colour post-1861, when Rome was declared capital of the newly-unified peninsula. Prior to that, I use the Piedmont colour for the to-be-unified state.
That is a possibility, since Tuscans have a fame of being radicals and extremists even by other Italian's standards; in fact, and I know it may be controversial, I'd add even Dante to the list.
There is however a problem with the "Fascist Tuscany" theory, that is yes, Tuscany and Emilia are indeed lands of extremists, but they lean more into the other direction, i.e. Marxism (we call them the Redlands, though it's more common as RED-[city name]). Extreme right-wingers, as well as Catholics, have more of a basis in the center-south, which is the more conservative.
Oh, and I know I'm pedantic, but it's Emili
a-Romagna, and it's actually two historical regions forming a single administrative one, like Baden-Wuttenberg in Germany or Alsace-Lorraine.
Mussolini was from Romagna, that is more or less the slice of the region that used to be part of the Papal States, while Emilia corresponds very broadly to the Duchies of Parma and Modena.
And the correct spelling for the name is Giovanni (assuming it's a man; Giovanna is the female form).
Sorry to nitpick.
