Italy's New Patriotism.

Italians have never been particularly patriotic. Only 72 percent say they are proud to be Italian, according to a recent survey. More than 40 percent can't identify the colors of their national flag. They consistently confuse it with Mexico's tricolors.

All that may be about to change, if the flag-waving coalition government of Silvio Berlusconi has its way. For too long, the country's leaders seem to feel, Italy has been a largely geographic expression, somehow lacking a certain something in cultural unity. So now comes a slew of new measures to make Italy just a little bit more, well, Italian. For the first time in the country's history, laws have been proposed that would designate Italian as the country's official language. (As opposed to what, one might fairly wonder.) If all goes well, Italy will also soon get a bona fide national anthem, the "Mameli Hymn," long sung at football matches and public events but never quite rising to the status of an Italian "God Bless America" or "La Marseilles".

Parliament is even considering legislation that would make Pinocchio the universal symbol of "Made in Italy." No lie. Alarmed at how knock- offs of famed Italian products have cloned their way around the globe-- from faux Guccis to ersatz mozzarella--the government proposes to stamp the legendary puppet on all good things coming from Italy. He of the Extensible Proboscis, ironically, would mark them as the genuine article.

No one can quite explain this sudden burst of patriotic fervor. Some think it reflects doubts about the newly enlarged European Union, with its homogeneous euro and love of uniformity. Others say it represents just the opposite: a step toward modernity, rather than any backpedaling toward the past. That's clearly the case with the language issue, for instance. For generations, Italians from the country's northern provinces--Lombardy and the Veneto----resisted efforts by Rome to anoint Italian as the nation's lingua franca, so to speak. Reason: they feared it would relegate their own dialects to extinction--never mind that many are protected by UNESCO, or that hardly anybody speaks them outside the home. But now? Having an official language is the way forward, one lawmaker explains, "not just to a unified Europe, but toward our own democracy."

Rome's cultural crusaders are ...