I think that is a widespread myth among all nationalisms looking back at remembewred periods of hisotircal division and foreign and/or autocratic domination, though with differing weight.

By the way, Umberto Eco, the way I read Baudolino, thinks that it was just these divisions that prevented Barbarossa from truly subduing Northern Italy: it made the territory ungovernable.

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}