Italian reactions to German reunification - Prejudice and reciprocal misunderstandings

In one of the annotations accompanying the third edition of Teoria e storia della storiografia (1927), to the question “what is a people’s character?”, Benedetto Croce answers that it consists essentially in its history, in all of its history and in nothing but its history. There is, as the Italian philosopher explains further, not only a perfect coincidence, but a veritable identity. As regards the temptation of mechanically deducing the peculiar traits of a nation from the analysis of this ...