The anthem “Fratelli d’Italia”, written by Goffredo Mameli, with music of Michele Novaro, was played and sung the first time on 20th December 1847, when over 30,000 patriots from all over Italy were in Genoa to commemorate the expulsion of the Austrians from Genova in 1746; it was the first public demonstration of the italian Risorgimento.

The authors:

Goffredo Mameli (verses) and Michele Novaro (music)

Goffredo Mameli was born in Genoa in 1827; he died at only 21 years of age, combating in the defence of the Roman Republic, on July 1849.
Poet-writer-patriot-soldier: Mazzini preferred him from among all of his followers because his personality included the perfect synthesis of thought and action.
He descends from an aristocratic family: his mother, the marquess Zoagli Lomellini, childhood friend of Mazzini, understood his sensitivity and the aspirations; his father, of Sardinian origins, was instead loyal to the Savoia family and had made his career in the marine military.
Goffredo wrote political pamphlets, founded a newspaper, was the spirit of all of the demonstrations which until 1846 were aimed at obtaining constitutional reforms from Charles Albert. He ran to the help of the Milanese rising up against the Austrians, he participated in the first war for independence; after the defeat he was among the first to rush to Rome, where, the Pope having fled, on February, 1849 the Republic was declared.

Michele Novaro was born in Genoa on December 23, 1818. From when he was a child he frequented a theatrical and musical environment. His father was a scenery technician at the Carlo Felice Theatre, his mother, Giuseppina Canzio, was the sister of Michele, famous artist and author of numerous theatrical scene paintings. Novaro was culturally formed at the school of song and composing annexed to the Carlo Felice Theatre.
When he added music to the verses of Mameli he was working in Turin as a second tenor to the maestro of the Chorus of the theatres Regio and Carignano.
He later returned to Genoa where he founded a music school where he gave free lessons to the poorest youths. He was a fertile composer and most of all an excellent maestro and organiser of concerts, almost always for charity or to support the movement for political unity. Patriot and altruist, at last he lived on a miserable subsidy, almost forgotten. He died in Genoa on October 20, 1885.

The verses and the melody

The first autographic drafting of “Fratelli d’Italia” is inside a personal notebook of the poet with notes, considerations, poetry, various writings.
The frenzy with which the pen of Mameli pours out concepts and rhymes can be seen; the incomplete words are explained in this way (he writes “llia” for “Italia”), the forgotten accents, the errors with double consonants and other misprints.
The second manuscript of the anthem is preserved in the Museum of the Risorgimento of Turin, it is the copy which Mameli sent to Novaro so he would compose music adapted to the words.

Anton Giulio Barrili, writer and journalist, collected the direct testimony of Michele Novaro of the particular patriot atmosphere in which Michele Novaro composed the music of the anthem of Mameli: “during the evening of mid-September in the home of Lorenzo Valerio music and politics were made together. In fact, to put them together, many hymns which popped up in that year in every part of Italy were read at the pianoforte. In this way a new guest entered the salon, Ulisse Borzino, the excellent painter who all Genovese remember; he himself came from Genoa and, turned to Novaro with a piece of paper he had drawn from his pocket at that moment: ‘Here’, he said, ‘Goffredo sends this to you’. Novaro opened and read it, he was moved. Everyone asked him what it was. They crowded around him. ‘Something stupendous!’, exclaimed the Maestro and read it out loud, and stirred the enthusiasm of all of the audience.