Il Tricolore

Lore & Background

The first documented use of Italian national colours is dated 21 August 1789, when eyewitnesses in Genoa saw demonstrators hanging a red, white and green cockade on their clothes. The Italian Jacobins decided to keep green instead of blue, because it represented nature and therefore metaphorically, also natural rights, or social equality and freedom. The red, white and green cockade reappeared on 13–14 November 1794 worn by a group of students of the University of Bologna, led by Luigi Zamboni and Giovanni Battista De Rolandis, who attempted to plot a popular riot to topple the Catholic government of Bologna. The first official approval of the Italian flag by the authorities was as a military insignia of the Lombard Legion on 11 October 1796, when Napoleon communicated to the Directorate that this military unit would have had a red, white and green banner. The first red, white and green national flag of a sovereign Italian state was adopted on 7 January 1797, when the Fourteenth Parliament of the Cispadane Republic decreed 'to make universal the ... standard or flag of three colours, green, white, and red'.

In Their Own Story

On 7 January 1797, at 11 am in the Patriotic Hall of Reggio Emilia, the Fourteenth Parliament of the Cispadane Republic convened with 100 deputies of the populations of Bologna, Ferrara, Modena and Reggio Emilia. Deputy Giuseppe Compagnoni motioned that the standard or Cispadan Flag of three colours, Green, White and Red, should be rendered Universal. This celebration commemorates the first official adoption of the tricolour as a national flag by a sovereign Italian state, the Cispadane Republic, a Napoleonic sister republic of Revolutionary France. After this date, popular support for the Italian flag grew steadily, until it became one of the most important symbols of Italian unification, which culminated on 17 March 1861 with the proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy, of which the tricolour became the national flag.

Reader's Guide

The Italian tricolour is inspired by the French one, introduced by the revolution in 1790 on French Navy warships. On 12 July 1789, two days before the storming of the Bastille, the revolutionary journalist Camille Desmoulins asked the protesters what colour to adopt, proposing green, a symbol of hope or the blue of the American Revolution. The protesters replied 'The green! The green! We want green cockades!' The green was immediately abandoned in favour of blue and red because it was also the colour of the king's brother, Count of Artois. The French tricolour cockade was completed on 17 July 1789 with the addition of white, the colour of the House of Bourbon. The Italian national colours appeared for the first time in Genoa on a tricolour cockade on 21 August 1789, anticipating by seven years the first green, white and red Italian military war flag, which was adopted by the Lombard Legion in Milan on 11 October 1796.

Did You Know?

• The Italian Flag Day named Tricolour Day was established by law n. 671 of 31 December 1996, and is held every year on 7 January.
• The first documented use of Italian national colours is dated 21 August 1789 in Genoa, where eyewitnesses saw demonstrators hanging a red, white and green cockade on their clothes.
• The first official approval of the Italian flag by the authorities was as a military insignia of the Lombard Legion on 11 October 1796.
• The first red, white and green national flag of a sovereign Italian state was adopted on 7 January 1797 by the Fourteenth Parliament of the Cispadane Republic.
• The Italian tricolour is inspired by the French one, introduced by the revolution in 1790 on French Navy warships.