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Wars of Independence and Unity of Italy
Unlike
all the big European countries that reached the
formation of national states during the
middle-ages,
Italy remained fragmented, and in the middle of the
16th
century
definitely lost
its political independence. However, though it didn’t have a
national unit, it preserved a strong cultural identity. The
beginning of the
19th century marked the birth of a national
idea that
eventually fueled the independence wars. Between all the states in
which Italy
was divided, Savoia's Piedmont emerged as the
only one through which the Italian unification was possible
by deleting the Austrian presence on the Lombardo-Veneto area and then Borbonic presence in the South. To
do this Piedmont, allied with Napoleon
III's
France, that was a sort of godmother for Italy, accomplished three
independence wars. Mazzini was against this solution for the Italian unification:
he was the leader of the democratic party and wanted Italy
to be a republic, born from a popular revolution.
 A strong
contribution was given by Garibaldi, a person with ideas marked by Mazzinian
thoughts, but who put aside his dream of a unite and independent
state. He was the one that guided the initiative of
the “campaign
of the thousand”, aiming to free Sicily.
After
these bloody wars, the Italian unification accomplished and
on 17 May,
1861
Italy was proclaimed an independent state, its king being Vittorio
Emanuel
II from Savoia. Roma
(and
the whole Vatican State) was set free from the domination of
the Church immediately after, and it
became the capital of the
Italian
kingdom in 1871; that action brought to the
break of the relationships between the new state and
The
Vatican,
that
was
never mended until the arrival of Fascism. Only Trentino and Trieste
remained uder Austrian domination until the end of the 1st
World
War.
by Fabrizio
Priori / Garibaldi's portrait created by author
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