[1814 – 1871] The Risorgimento (Italian Unification)

Our story begins not with a bang, but with the scratching of quills on parchment. In 1815, in the gilded halls of Vienna, the great powers of Europe redrew the map after Napoleon's defeat. For the patchwork of kingdoms, duchies, and city-states on the Italian peninsula, it was a sentence of continued division. The Austrian statesman Klemens von Metternich dismissed the idea of a unified country with a contemptuous phrase that would echo for decades: Italy, he declared, was a “mere geographical expression.” And so it was. Austria held the rich northern lands of Lombardy and Venetia directly. Hapsburg relatives ruled Tuscany and Modena. In the south, the Spanish Bourbons were restored to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, a realm of vast estates and crushing poverty. And in the center, straddling the peninsula, were the Papal States, ruled by the Pope not just as a spiritual leader, but as an absolute monarch. For an aspiring Italian patriot, the future looked bleak, a tapestry of foreign masters and local despots.

Yet, in the shadows, a different idea was taking root. It was an idea whispered in the back rooms of cafés, discussed in clandestine meetings held in charcoal burners’ huts, which gave the most famous secret society its name: the Carbonari. These were men—lawyers, doctors, soldiers, poets—bound by secret oaths and elaborate rituals, dreaming of a free, constitutional Italy. Their early revolts in the 1820s and 30s were sporadic, poorly organized, and brutally crushed by Austrian bayonets. But they kept the flame of rebellion alive. From this soil of failed uprisings rose a figure of immense moral power: Giuseppe Mazzini. A brilliant Genoese propagandist and exile, Mazzini argued that revolution was not just a political act, but a sacred duty. His organization, “Young Italy,” founded in 1831, preached a romantic, almost religious nationalism. Its goal was simple and radical: one, independent, free, republican Italy. For Mazzini, “Italia” was not a place, but a mission, a collective soul waiting to be awakened.

The awakening came in 1848, a year of fire and hope that swept across Europe as the “Springtime of Peoples.” In Italy, the explosion was spectacular. It began in Sicily and spread north. In Milan, citizens armed with little more than cobblestones and hunting rifles erected over 1,600 barricades and, in five glorious days of street fighting—the “Cinque Giornate”—expelled the 15,000-strong Austrian garrison. In Venice, Daniele Manin declared the restoration of the ancient Venetian Republic. Most astonishingly, in Rome itself, revolutionaries drove out Pope Pius IX and established a radical Roman Republic. At its defense stood a charismatic, lion-faced guerilla fighter who would become the living symbol of the cause: Giuseppe Garibaldi. For a brief, intoxicating moment, the tricolor flag of green, white, and red flew over cities across the peninsula. It seemed the dream was becoming reality. But the dream was fragile. The Italian states were disunited in their aims, and the old powers were strong. By the summer of 1849, the Austrians had retaken Milan and Venice, French troops had crushed the Roman Republic to restore the Pope, and the kings had reclaimed their thrones. The revolution was over, drowned in blood.

Out of the ashes of 1848, all hopes turned to one small, resilient state in the northwest corner of Italy: the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia. Ruled by the House of Savoy and its king, Victor Emmanuel II, it was the only Italian state to keep the constitutional government won during the uprising. Its future, and Italy's, would be shaped not by a poet, but by a bespectacled, pragmatic, and brilliant nobleman: Count Camillo di Cavour. As Prime Minister from 1852, Cavour was the architect of unification, the “brain” to Mazzini’s “soul.” He despised romantic conspiracies, believing instead in economic power and shrewd diplomacy. He built railways, modernized the army, and fostered industry, making Piedmont a beacon of liberal progress. Cavour understood that Piedmont, with its 5 million people, could not defeat the Austrian Empire alone. It needed a powerful friend. He found one in Napoleon III, the Emperor of France, cleverly drawing him into an alliance by sending Piedmontese troops to fight alongside the French and British in the far-off Crimean War.

In 1859, Cavour’s trap was sprung. He provoked Austria into declaring war, and French armies poured over the Alps to fight alongside the Piedmontese. The war was short and brutal. At the battles of Magenta and Solferino, the combined forces won bloody victories. The fields of Solferino were a scene of unimaginable carnage, with over 40,000 men killed or wounded in a single day, a sight so horrific it inspired the Swiss observer Henri Dunant to establish the International Red Cross. All of Lombardy was liberated. But then, Napoleon III, shocked by the bloodshed and fearing a powerful new state on his border, abruptly made a separate peace with Austria at Villafranca. Piedmont gained Lombardy, but Venetia remained in Austrian hands. Cavour was enraged, feeling utterly betrayed. The first war of unification had ended in a frustrating, partial victory.

Just when the movement seemed stalled, the story took its most dramatic and improbable turn. The hero was Garibaldi, the “sword” of the Risorgimento. In May 1860, furious with Cavour’s cautious diplomacy, he gathered a volunteer force of about a thousand men. They were a motley crew—veterans, students, patriots—whose only uniform was the simple red shirt worn by workers, a color that would become legendary. Sailing from Genoa on two hijacked steamships, they landed at Marsala on the western coast of Sicily, an island seething with hatred for its Bourbon rulers. Garibaldi’s Expedition of the Thousand was a spectacular gamble. They were outnumbered, outgunned, and invading the largest state in Italy. At the Battle of Calatafimi, facing a superior Bourbon force, Garibaldi reportedly rallied his men with the cry, “Here we either make Italy or we die!”

They made Italy. Inspired by Garibaldi’s magnetic leadership and joined by thousands of Sicilian rebels, the Redshirts swept across the island, capturing the capital, Palermo, in a daring urban assault. It was a stunning victory that electrified Italy and all of Europe. Garibaldi, no longer just a guerilla, was now a conqueror. In August, he crossed the Strait of Messina onto the mainland and began a lightning march north. The Bourbon kingdom, rotten to its core, simply disintegrated. Its army melted away, and its king fled. On September 7th, 1860, Garibaldi entered the great city of Naples, not at the head of an army, but sitting in an open carriage, acclaimed by delirious crowds as their liberator. He had conquered a kingdom of 11 million people in less than four months.

This triumph created a new crisis. Garibaldi, a lifelong republican, now stood at the head of a powerful army in the south and dreamed of marching on Rome itself. Cavour, in the north, feared that an attack on Rome would provoke a war with its protector, France, and that Garibaldi’s success might ignite a social revolution. In a bold move, Cavour sent the Piedmontese army south, not to fight Garibaldi, but to intercept him. The unification of Italy hung on the actions of two men. Would it be civil war? The climax came at a rustic bridge near the town of Teano. Garibaldi, in his simple red shirt and poncho, rode out to meet Victor Emmanuel II. In a moment of supreme patriotism, the revolutionary hero sacrificed his personal convictions for the greater good. He raised his hat and hailed Victor Emmanuel as the “first King of Italy,” handing over all of southern Italy to the crown. The dream of a republic was set aside for the reality of a united monarchy.

On March 17, 1861, the Kingdom of Italy was officially proclaimed, with Victor Emmanuel II as its king and Turin as its capital. But the work was far from finished. Two vital pieces were missing: Venetia in the northeast, still held by Austria, and Rome, the historical heart of the peninsula, still ruled by the Pope and garrisoned by French soldiers. The new nation was also deeply fractured. The industrializing North looked with a mixture of contempt and fear at the agrarian, impoverished South (the Mezzogiorno), where a brutal five-year conflict, part civil war and part social protest known as “brigandage,” exposed the vast gulf between the two halves of the country. With nearly 80% of its population illiterate and mired in poverty, the romantic ideal of unification clashed with a harsh reality. As one politician famously put it, “We have made Italy. Now we must make Italians.”

Slowly, the final pieces of the map were put into place through the cynical game of European power politics. In 1866, Italy allied with Prussia in a war against Austria; though the Italian army performed poorly, Prussia’s overwhelming victory forced Austria to cede Venetia. The final prize, Rome, remained elusive, protected by the Catholic might of France. The opportunity came in 1870, when the Franco-Prussian War forced Napoleon III to withdraw his troops from the city for his own defense. On September 20th, Italian artillery breached the ancient Aurelian Walls at Porta Pia and soldiers poured into Rome. For the first time since the fall of the Roman Empire, Italy was a single, unified state with Rome as its capital. Pope Pius IX, refusing to recognize the new kingdom, declared himself a “prisoner in the Vatican,” creating a bitter divide between church and state that would haunt the nation for generations. The Risorgimento, the long, painful, and glorious struggle for rebirth, was complete. The geographical expression was now a nation.