Abstract

The article retraces the building and the evolution - in the 150 years of the nation's unity - of the iconography and of the symbolic apparatuses employed to give a face to the Homeland. In particular the traditional and most familiar female allegory of Italy with a «turreted» crown. In the various stages of the building of the nation's identity and according to the changing intents of artists and their commissioners, allegories and symbols have changed often. It is given an account of the historical trajectory of the shaping of the diverse Homeland's portraits, and of the decline - also on the symbolic level - of the sacredness and of the identity itself of the Republican National.