The unification of Italy (Italian: Unità d'Italia [uniˈta ddiˈtaːlja]), also known as the Risorgimento (Italian: [risordʒiˈmento]; lit. 'Resurgence'), was the 19th century political and social movement that in 1861 ended in the annexation of various states of the Italian Peninsula and its outlying isles to the Kingdom of Sardinia, resulting in the creation of the Kingdom of Italy. Inspired by the rebellions in the 1820s and 1830s against the outcome of the Congress of Vienna, the unification process was precipitated by the Revolutions of 1848, and reached completion in 1871 with the official designation of Rome as capital of Italy, following the capture of Rome in 1870.
Individuals who played a major part in the struggle for unification and liberation from foreign domination included King Victor Emmanuel II; politician, economist and statesman Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour; general Giuseppe Garibaldi; and journalist and politician Giuseppe Mazzini. Borrowing from the old Latin title Pater Patriae of the Roman emperors, the Italians gave to King Victor Emmanuel II the epithet of Father of the Fatherland (Italian: Padre della Patria). Even after 1871, many ethnic Italian speakers, most notably those living in Trentino and Venezia Giulia, remained outside of the borders of the Kingdom of Italy, planting the seeds of Italian irredentism. The annexation of Trento and Trieste in 1918, at the end of World War I, is often considered the culmination of the Italian unification movement.
Italy celebrates the anniversary of the unification on 17 March (the date of proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy). Some of the states that had been envisaged as part of the unification process (terre irredente) did not join the Kingdom until after Italy defeated Austria-Hungary in World War I, culminating in the Treaty of Rapallo in 1920. Some historians see the Risorgimento as continuing to that time, which is the view presented at the Central Museum of the Risorgimento at Altare della Patria in Rome.
From ancient times to early modern era
Italy was unified by the Roman Republic in the latter part of the third century BCE. For 700 years, it was a de facto territorial extension of the capital of the Roman Republic and Empire, and for a long time experienced a privileged status but was not converted into a province. Under Augustus, the previous differences in municipal and political rights were abolished and Roman Italy was subdivided into administrative regions ruled directly by the Roman Senate.
After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Italy remained united under the Ostrogothic Kingdom and after 568 was disputed between the Kingdom of the Lombards and the Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Empire, losing its unity for centuries. Following conquest by the Frankish Empire, the title of King of Italy merged with the office of Holy Roman Emperor; however, the emperor was an absentee German-speaking foreigner who had little interest in governing Italy and indeed never controlled the entire peninsula. As a result, Italy gradually developed into a system of city-states. Southern Italy was governed by the long-lasting Kingdom of Sicily or Kingdom of Naples, which had been established by the Normans. Central Italy was governed by the pope as a temporal kingdom known as the Papal States.
This situation persisted through the Renaissance but began to deteriorate with the rise of modern nation-states in the early modern period. Italy, including the Papal States, then became the site of proxy wars between the major powers, notably the Holy Roman Empire (including Austria), Spain, and France. Harbingers of national unity appeared in the treaty of the Italic League, in 1454, and the 15th century foreign policy of Cosimo de' Medici and Lorenzo de' Medici. Leading Renaissance Italian writers Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Machiavelli and Guicciardini expressed a desire to see Italy become a unified nation. Petrarch stated that the "ancient valour in Italian hearts is not yet dead" in Italia Mia. Machiavelli later quoted four verses from Italia Mia in The Prince, which looked forward to a political leader who would unite Italy "to free her from the barbarians".
The Italian Wars saw 65 years of French attacks on some of the Italian states, starting with Charles VIII's invasion of Naples in 1494. However, the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis (1559) saw parts of Italy fall under the direct or indirect control of the Spanish Habsburgs. The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 formally ended the rule of the Holy Roman Emperors in Italy. However, the Spanish branch of the House of Habsburg, which ruled the Spanish Empire, continued to rule southern Italy and the Duchy of Milan until the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14). Following this war the Austrian Habsburgs struggled for dominance with the Spanish Bourbons until the end of the War of the Austrian Succession.
A sense of Italian national identity was reflected in Gian Rinaldo Carli's Della Patria degli Italiani, written in 1764. It told how a stranger entered a café in Milan and puzzled its occupants by saying that he was neither a foreigner nor a Milanese. "'Then what are you?' they asked. 'I am an Italian', he explained."
French Revolution and Napoleonic era
The Habsburg rule in Italy came to an end with the campaigns of the French Revolutionary Wars in 1792–97 when a series of client republics were set up. In 1806, the Holy Roman Empire was dissolved by the last Roman-German Emperor, Francis II, after its defeat by Napoleon at the Battle of Austerlitz. French rule destroyed the old structures of feudalism in Italy and introduced modern ideas and efficient legal authority; it provided much of the intellectual force and social capital that fueled unification movements for decades after the First French Empire collapsed in 1814.
The French Republic spread republican principles, and the institutions of republican governments promoted citizenship over the rule of the Bourbons and Habsburgs and other dynasties. The reaction against any outside control challenged Napoleon Bonaparte's choice of rulers. As Napoleon's reign began to fail, the rulers he had installed tried to keep their thrones (among them Eugène de Beauharnais, Viceroy of Italy, and Joachim Murat, King of Naples) further feeding nationalistic sentiments. Beauharnais tried to get Austrian approval for his succession to Napoleon's Kingdom of Italy, and on 30 March 1815, Murat issued the Rimini Proclamation, which called on Italians to revolt against their Austrian occupiers.
During the Napoleonic era, in 1797, the first official adoption of the Italian tricolour as a national flag by a sovereign Italian state, the Cispadane Republic, a Napoleonic sister republic of Revolutionary France, took place, on the basis of the events following the French Revolution (1789–1799) which, among its ideals, advocated the national self-determination. This event is celebrated by the Tricolour Day. The Italian national colours appeared for the first time on a tricolour cockade in 1789, anticipating by seven years the first green, white and red Italian military war flag, which was adopted by the Lombard Legion in 1796.
After Napoleon fell (1814), the Congress of Vienna (1814–15) restored the pre-Napoleonic patchwork of independent governments. Italy was again controlled largely by the Austrian Empire, as they directly controlled the Kingdom of Lombardy–Venetia and indirectly the duchies of Parma, Modena and Tuscany.
With the fall of Napoleon and the restoration of the absolutist monarchical regimes, the Italian tricolour went underground, becoming the symbol of the patriotic ferments that began to spread in Italy and the symbol which united all the efforts of the Italian people towards freedom and independence. The Italian tricolour waved for the first time in the history of the Risorgimento on 11 March 1821 in the Cittadella of Alessandria, during the revolutions of 1820s, after the oblivion caused by the restoration of the absolutist monarchical regimes.