 This celebration commemorates the first official adoption of the tricolor as a national flag by a sovereign Italian state, the Cispadane Republic, which took place in Reggio Emilia on 7 January 1797.The Italian national colors appeared for the first time in Genoa on a tricolor cockade on 21 August 1789, anticipating by seven years the first green, white and red italian military war flag, which was adopted by the Lombard Legion on 11 October 1796.Cispadana Republic supplanted Duchy of Milan after Napoleon's victorious army crossed Italy in 1796.