BASIC BACKGROUND

• Italy was first united by Rome in the third century B.C. It remained for over 700 years the de facto extension of the capital of the Roman Republic and Empire.
• Even with the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Italy remained united under the Ostrogothic Kingdom but later disputed between the Kingdom of the Lombards and the Eastern Roman Empire.
• Following the conquest of the Frankish Empire, the title of King of Italy merged with the office of Holy Roman Emperor.
• The emperors that followed had little concern for the governance of Italy as a state. This led Italy to gradually devolve into a system of city-states.
• Southern Italy was governed by the Kingdom of Sicily or Kingdom of Naples, initially established by the Normans.
• Central Italy was governed by the Pope as a temporal kingdom known as the Papal States.
• It remained as such through the Renaissance but began to deteriorate with the rise of modern nation-states.
• Italy, including the Papal States, became the site of proxy wars between the major powers: The Holy Roman Empire including Austria, Spain, and France.
• The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 formally ended the rule of the Holy Roman Emperors in Italy but the Spanish branch of the Habsburg dynasty continued to rule most of Italy down to the War of the Spanish Succession in 1701-1714.
• After this war, Spain ceded Naples, Milan and Sardinia to the Austrian Empire and Sicily to Savoy.
• Italy was thus divided into many small principalities, and it would remain that way until the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789.
• During the French Revolution, Napoleon Bonaparte rose to power and proceeded to conquer the Italian states.
• This conquest was a success and it brought the small principalities under a single administrative unit.
• Italy became part of the French Empire and thus imbibed the ideals of the French Revolution which promoted liberty, equality, fraternity and strengthened the people’s participation in the political process.
• Napoleon thus implemented a wide array of liberal reforms in France and across Continental Europe, especially in Italy and Germany.
• Napoleon also added a rational and efficient local administration, an end to rural banditry, the encouragement of science and the arts, the abolition of feudalism and the greatest codification of laws since the fall of the Roman Empire.
• During the Napoleonic era, people of Italy got the taste of nationalism and unity.
• With the downfall of Napoleon in 1814 and the redistribution of territory by the Congress of Vienna (1814-15), most of the Italian states were reconstituted.
• The Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia (often referred to as Sardinia), the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, the Duchy of Parma, the Papal States, and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies (fused together from the old Kingdom of Naples and Kingdom of Sicily) were reformed.
• Italian unification was a political and social movement that consolidated different states of the Italian peninsula into the single state of the Kingdom of Italy in the 19th century.
• There was a growing discontent towards the foreign rulers and then the Italians had come together in a war against Austria to get back the provinces she had taken in a previous war.
• French revolutions of 1830 and 1848 sparked feelings of liberation, but the smaller states couldn’t coordinate and Austria again suppressed movements and movement was divided into moderates and revolutionaries (under Mazzini).
• In the 1820s, secret revolutionary societies called Carbonari became active. The members of these Carbonari supported the initial failed revolutionary activities for Italian Reunification.
• People revolted twice in 1830 and 1848 under the leadership of Mazzini.
• Mazzini was an ardent advocate of the necessity for Italian unification through the desires and actions of the Italian people.
• The revolutions of 1848 ignited nationalist sentiment throughout the Italian peninsula. There were widespread uprisings in several Italian cities.
• But the Italian uprisings of 1848 were unsuccessful and by 1849 the old regimes were once again in place.
• After 1848, Prime Minister Count Cavour, took the initiative of uniting Italy under the leadership of Sardinia.
• Hoping to gain the support of Britain and France, he entered the Crimean war in 1853-56 against Russia.
• In 1859, Cavour entered into an alliance with Louis Bonaparte and went to war with Austria in which Austria was ousted from Lombardy.
• The other states like the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies were still to be united with Sardinia.
• An uprising at the end of November 1860 under the leadership of Garibaldi led to liberation of the Two Sicilies.
• Rome was still outside the kingdom of Italy. When the war between France and Prussia broke out in 1870, Bonaparte was forced to withdraw his troops from Rome.
• Italian soldiers occupied the city of Rome in 1870, and in July 1871, Rome became the capital of united Italy.