(((Somewhat like the American national anthem, which is all about having the British blow the living dayights out of some American fort in 1812, the Italian national anthem dates back to the 1860s and is full of sanguinary, bayonet-charging 19th-century enthusiasms.)))
(((Mind you, this is a very genuine battle-anthem;
alien troops who heard this sung ran for their lives.)))
BROTHERS OF ITALY
English translation
Brothers of Italy,
Italy has awoken, with Scipio's helmet binding her head.
Where is Victory?
Let her bow down,
For God has made her
Rome's slave.
CHORUS:
Let us join in cohort,
We are ready to die!
We are ready to die!
Italy has called!
(((Certain naifs imagine that Moslems invented martyr-cults, but a study of history is a useful corrective to panics of the moment.)))
Let us join in cohort,
We are ready to die!
We are ready to die!
Italy has called!
We were for centuries
Downtrodden and derided, because we are not one people, because we are divided.
Let one flag, one hope gather us all.
(((You've got to like a national anthem which admits frankly that the local population has been mocked and crushed.)))
The hour has struck for us to join together!
CHORUS
Let us unite and love one another;
Union and love
Show the people
The way of the Lord
Let us swear to free
Our native soil;
United under God,
Who can defeat us?
(((No mere rhetorical question here;
as soon as the Italians united they kicked the asses of foreigners who'd been hanging around Italy for 300 years.)))
CHORUS
From the Alps to Sicily,
Legnano is everywhere;
(((Legnano being the scene of an
Italian victory in the distant 1100s – but if you have to look back 700 years to the last time you really settled somebody's hash, well, in Italy you can do that.)))
Every man has the heart and hand of Ferruccio
(((After heroically attacking the troops of the Pope in the 1500s, the mortally wounded Ferrucio was executed by his captors and his last words were "Cowards, you kill a dead man")))
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francesco_Ferruccio
The children of Italy
Are all called Balilla;
(((Balilla was a rock-throwing
18th-century Genoese street urchin)))
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balilla
Every trumpet blast sounds the Vespers.
(((13th century Sicilian uprising.)))
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Sicilian_Vespers
CHORUS
Mercenary swords, they're feeble reeds.
The Austrian eagle
Has already lost its plumes.
The blood of Italy and the Polish blood
Was drank, along with the Cossack,
But it burned her heart.
(((The nation of Italy's still around; lo, the
Austro-Hungarian Empire is one with the dust.)))
CHORUS
