The great liberal politician Giustino Fortunato used to quote his father’s view that “the unification of Italy was a sin against history and geography.” He believed that the strengths and civilization of the peninsula had always been regional and that a centralized government would never work. Now he looks more prescient by the year. And if Italy has a future as a united nation after this crisis, it must accept the reality of its troubled birth and build a new political model that takes account of its intrinsic, millennial regionalism — if not as a collection of republican communes, hilltop duchies and principalities once more, then at least as a federal state that reflects the essential features of its past.