As with most quippy quotes about history, it has enough kernel of truth to get stuck between your teeth, but not enough to become food for thought.

On the surface, the statement makes a little bit of sense. The image of a French nation and its various cultural, linguistic and historical trappings come mainly from a group of people who lived in the area called Île-de-France centred around the city of Paris. Italy, whose wars of unification are much later and were based on 19th century ideas of national unification, left much more particularism and idiosyncrasy to the component regions of the new country. However, if you look closer at the nations' histories, it all starts to get a bit fuzzy.

First of all, riddle me this: what is a France? Most people, went prompted to describe France, would have a roughly similar, holistic concept of France. It's that region of land roughly between the Atlantic, the Pyrenees and the Rhine inhabited by people who speak a Latin-derived language with blatant disregard for Rs and the last letter of each word, and has a penchant for snails and cheese. If one were to ask when this unfortunate conglomeration of circumstances began, most would point to some time in the Before Age of knights, kings and dying of the Plague. That's not untrue, but it's also frankly not very useful for the purpose of historical accuracy. Neither is the legal definition though. The Fifth French Republic is a semi-presidential Republic occupying that strip of land (plus Corsica and a chunk of Guianas and some islands close to Madagascar) which was established since 1958, which clearly does not line up with the wine-loving, bath-hating culture we call France.

If we trace the lineage of the French government, we will reach many breakpoints that we might call the beginning of France. The reunification after WWII, the Third Republic, The Second Empire, The Napoleonic Empire, the French Revolution and the beginning of the Ancien Regime, which has no official date but we could point towards the end of the Hundred Years' War as a rough starting point, but we can go further to the establishment of West Francia, or even the Charlemagne, King of Francia's crowning as Holy Roman Emperor in Christmas Day 800 AD. In fact, if we go even further and talk about the first time France was ever unified as a polity, it would be as Roman province of Gallia, where it was unified in language and government for the first time under a Latin-speaking Julius Caesar from, ironically, Italy. At none of these breakpoints can we definitively say that an unbroken evolutionary lineage with modern conceptions of France can be made; At the beginning of the French Revolution in 1792, less than 50% of country spoke Francien French, for example. And while the Île-de-France has remained the political and cultural centre of the dominant power in the region through most of the history of "France", that was not always true. There were periods of history were Lyon (Gallia), Aachen (Francia), Dijon (Burgundy), and even Bordeaux (WWI) and Vichy (WWII) were possibly more important than the City of Light. At no point was a leader reduced to ruling only the Île-de-France who then warred his way across the hedgerows to become King of France. There was always some continuity of power and borders with past Frances which included way more than Paris.

In fact, if we were to use the strictest definition of France and Italy, it was Italy that started as a city state which conquered its way to safety, in that giant period of history dominated by the Roman Empire, which actually did start on the seven hills of the Eternal City and at one point ended up unifying the geographic expression that is Italy. Modern perceptions of nations having come from the 19th Century, the fiction of Italy that we know today: spaghetti, pizza, wild gesticulations and loving one's own mother too much were elements of Italian culture that was exported with the Italian diaspora which was mostly Sicilian or Neapolitan, not Roman, Milanese, Venetian or Genoan etc. Italian Unification (which is a more defined but not definitive moment of Italian founding) was also not a union of city states, but a combination of conquests, rebellions and unions. The fact that modern Italy is perceived as being more disunited than France is not because of the specific events which led to their unification (whatever that meant); the actual reason has to do with the age of the unification and the efforts at homogenization and suppression of particularism that occurred in the 19th Century.