Italy's Birthday

Last month Italy celebrated the 150th anniversary of Unification with a national holiday. The history of the unification of Italy is long and complicated, but in an attempt to summarise the story for readers, here it is in a nutshell! The official birth of il Regno d’Italia (the Italian Kingdom) took place on the 17th of March 1861, and Vittorio Emanuele II Re (King of Sardinia) was chosen as Re d’Italia (King of Italy). Only two years beforehand, Italy was still divided into seven different States: Regno di Sardegna, which included the north-west of Italy and the island of Sardinia, and was ruled by the Savoia family; Regno Lombardo-Veneto, which included the north-east of Italy, and was part of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire; Ducato di Parma, ruled by the Spanish Borbone family; Ducato di Modena, under Austrian control; Granducato di Toscana, under Austrian control; Stato Pontificio, which included part of the north and all of the centre of Italy, and was ruled by the Church; Regno di Sicilia, which included Naples and all the south of Italy plus the island of Sicily, and was under Spanish dominion. In 1860 il Ducato di Parma, il Ducato di Modena, and il Granducato di Toscana voted to be unified with il Regno di Sardegna, the only one of the seven states that had been truly independent for centuries, ruled by its own native royal family, the Savoia. In the same year the Piedmontese troops, with the help of Garibaldi’s Spedizione dei Mille (expedition of the Thousand), conquered il Regno di Sicilia and part of the Papal States, officially uniting them with il Regno di Sardegna following a popular vote. However the new Regno d’Italia, created on the 17th of March 1861, did not yet cover the whole of the Italian peninsula. In fact the north-east was still under Austrian rule (Veneto was conquered in 1866, while Trentino and Friuli became Italian only after the First World War), and Rome and part of the centre were still part of the Papal States.. Nevertheless this was the first time since the Roman Empire that most of the Italian peninsula had been united as a single entity. Despite never having had political unity, the Italian peninsula had shared a strong cultural identity for many centuries. For centuries scholars had been discussing the possibility of una lingua italiana, a common language for the whole of the peninsula. However, at the time of the unification of Italy in 1861 neither King Vittorio Emanuele II nor the Prime Minister,Cavour, spoke Italian, their mother tongue being Piedmontese, an Italian dialect heavily influenced by French. In 1865, to reinforce the transition from il Regno di Sardegna to il Regno d’Italia Florence took over the title of capital city from Turin. This was due to two main factors: 1. its geographical location in the centre of Italy, and 2. its long standing cultural supremacy. However, the national aspiration to incorporate Rome as part of Italy had never died, and after a failed attempt in 1867 by Garibaldi, Rome was finally conquered on the 20th of September 1870 by the Bersaglieri (a specialized corps of the Piedmontese army), who succeeded in breaching the city walls, through the so called Breccia di Porta Pia (the Breach of the Pian Gate). Rome was proclaimed capital city of Italy on the 1st of July 1871. This article first appeared in the website www.transparent.com/italian