Say it isn’t so, Giorgia. Prime Minister Meloni has given her assent to a bill in the Italian Senate that could disrupt the premier’s agenda for 2024 — as well as fracture national unity. The Chamber of Deputies is expected to vote on it before the European parliamentary elections of June 9.

This legislation would enable 15 of the Italian Republic’s 20 regions to request a broader devolution of powers now managed by the central government. The bill is the handiwork of the Minister for Regional Affairs and Autonomies of Italy, the Lega’s Roberto Calderoli.

Regions that did so would gain greater decision-making over healthcare, education, energy, and transportation sans a central government-mandated expenditure level. Yet that would unduly reward the wealthier northern regions, which already reap greater tax revenue — exacerbating the socio-economic divide between the north and the Mezzogiorno and central Italy.

According to the president of the southern region of Puglia, Michele Emiliano, such a devolution could turn Italy into a “Babel in which an Italian citizen moving around the national territory could encounter different legal systems, determined by the regions instead of the national state.”

The proposed law originated with the deputy prime minister, Matteo Salvini, who sees it as a way to revive his Lega’s dwindling electoral fortunes. Yet the bill comes at precisely the wrong moment.

Italy holds the presidency of the Group of Seven Industrialized Nations this year. And Signora Meloni has charted a most ambitious course on Ukraine, Africa, migration, and Artificial Intelligence. Partaking in Mr. Salvini’s Metternichian scheme runs contrary to the national interest.

Italy’s Mason-Dixon divide stems from centuries of foreign domination. Indeed, this legacy of occupation continues to bedevil what otherwise constitutes one of the world’s wealthiest economies.

Prior to the Risorgimento, Spanish Bourbon rule in the Mezzogiorno created a culture of administrative mismanagement, economic exploitation, and endemic corruption — not to mention an oppressively superstitious religiosity. 

This regional divide has led some to contend “that the Italian nation never existed before the 19th century,” as Jerry Brotton sums up the view of David Gilmour in his book “The Pursuit of Italy.” John Hooper made a similar claim in his book, “The Italians.” Both authors are factually in error, however.

The Kingdom of Italy that came into being in 1861 constituted the rebirth of a united Italy first forged by the Romans on March 1, 222 years before the common era, when “protective colonies were established at Placentia and Cremona — and from the Alps to Sicily, Italy was one.”

Moreover, a retinue of distinguished historians — including Theodor Mommsen, Donald R. Dudley, and Michael Grant — reaffirmed that a unified Italy existed in antiquity. In fact, Grant extolled the “pro-Italian, pro-Roman” worldview of Caesar Augustus.

Centuries later, Niccolò Machiavelli was “a misunderstood forerunner of the Italian Risorgimento,” Michael Ignatieff has observed in the Atlantic, pointing to work by Maurizio Viroli and Corrado Vivanti. 

The philosopher whose name has become a byword for cynicism actually called “for the redemption of Italian republicanism four centuries before the final reunification of the Italian states,” the article explains.

“There is this consciousness of a long and at times glorious past,” journalist and author Simon Worrall writes of the underlying unity bonding the Italian people across the centuries: “They know that their ancestors created the Roman Empire and the Renaissance, which changed Western civilization for good, and that there was a glorious and immensely courageous independence struggle in the 19th century.”

Though she has given her blessing to Signor Salvini’s devolutionary bill, it’s telling that Signora Meloni chose Puglia, in Italy’s south, for the annual gathering of the G-7 leaders in July of this year.  Plus, the G-7 trade meeting will also be held in the Mezzogiorno — at Calabria’s Villa San Giovanni (Reggio Calabria).

Prior to that meeting of world powers, Signora Meloni should remind both Messrs. Salvini and Calderoli that Italy owes its very name to the south. Indeed, the region now known as Calabria was called Italia in antiquity.

In 2023, one of the world’s foremost experts in artificial intelligence and information technology, Georg Gottlob, left his professorship at Oxford University to move to the University of Calabria, which he views as the ideal academic center to pursue AI research. The move defies the reputation of Italy’s south as a technological and economic backwater — and highlights its potential for reinvention.

What the Lega calls autonomia differenziata, or “differentiated autonomy,” amounts to nothing more than an Articles of Confederation-like scheme that could spark a constitutional crisis. Devolution can lead to dissolution. Indeed, Spain’s perennial Catalonian quandary and the United Kingdom’s Scottish dilemma, both of which threaten the unity of two longstanding political unions, should serve as cautionary tales.

It’s high time for Messrs. Salvini and Calderoli to wake up and smell the cappuccino.