There are manhole covers in Copenhagen that make reference to H.C. Andersen but he didn't actually have anything to do with them, it was more in the form of a thing to make tourists feel they were somewhere cool.

I might accept some continuity from now back to the time of Garibaldi for Italy as a whole (but then we have to write some notable periods off as aberrations) - As for Florence I would accept going back to Napoleonic times but from there the continuity of government was surely broken.

I was disappointed to learn the title of pontifex maximus wasn’t continuous from the Roman era. I mean, if we need an intercalary month, I can’t think of anyone better than Pope Francis to decide that.

>Italy has a lot of historical continuity.

It doesn't. Italy was one of the most ravaged parts of the Western Roman Empire, it has less historical continuity than Spain or France. Only Britain does worse.

>If you go to Rome, the manhole covers read SPQR (Senatus Populusque Romanus).

That's propaganda. The link between the Roman state and Italy was something pushed by the fascists and it stayed behind in the popular mindset (since it's a more pleasant to think of yourself as the True Descendants of the Romans than a playground for the French, Germans, Arabs and Greeks). But go a few centuries back and people made as much a connection between Roman ruins and Italians as they do now between the Pyramids and modern Egyptians.

Realistically continuity goes back to the Renaissance, which saw the birth of an indigenous Italian culture as well as its mass export (favoured by the fact that albeit constantly invaded, Italy wasn't torn apart by the religious wars that destroyed the rest of the continent).

> Italy has a lot of historical continuity. If you go to Rome, the manhole covers read SPQR (Senatus Populusque Romanus).

That is... not an example of historical continuity. That's like calling the architecture of the US Supreme Court building "historical continuity" from classical Greece.

> Symbolically, sure. Not like it makes any practical difference.

It's a risky precedent. Pardoning and convicting dead people makes for great political theatre. You can get your side riled up and energized over something with zero practical effect. It's easy politicking. That creates a perverse incentive for leaders to focus on the distracting and useless over the difficult but important.