‘Che l’Inse?’: Two Words That Started an Uprising

Genoa, 5 December 1746: the city is under Austrian occupation; a mortar sits stuck in the mud in the Portoria district, and the soldiers demand that the Genoese help push it out. From the crowd a boy hurls a stone and – so the tradition goes – shouts in Genoese: “Che l’inse?”, “Shall I start i?”, from the verb insâ, to begin.

Five days of revolt later, the Genoese have driven the occupiers out. The boy would become “Balilla”, claimed by every rhetoric, from the Risorgimento to Fascism; but the spark remains a two-word Genoese sentence.