Kingdom of Italy

• 1. A Handshake at Teano

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  On the 26th of October 1860, at the town of Teano, the revolutionary general Giuseppe Garibaldi shook the hand of Victor Emmanuel II and hailed him as King of Italy. Garibaldi was a republican. With that gesture he gave up his hopes for an Italian republic so the peninsula could be united under a crown. That crown became the Kingdom of Italy, a unitary state proclaimed on the 17th of March 1861. It lasted until the 18th of June 1946. The country it ruled began as a patchwork of rival states, each proud of its own traditions. It ended up fighting wars on three continents, living under a dictator, and splitting into civil war. How did so many different places become one country, and what held them together? Why did poverty drive millions of its people across the oceans? And how did a monarchy born in a moment of reconciliation end in a vote?

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• 2. The Four Fathers

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  Giuseppe Mazzini, a journalist and member of the secret society of the Carbonari, founded the movement Young Italy in the early 1830s. The Risorgimento, the push to unite the peninsula and free it from foreign control, had grown out of the settlement reached at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Mazzini wanted a unitary republic. His steady stream of propaganda spread the idea, and his most famous follower was Garibaldi, who led the republican drive in the south and was known for his fiercely loyal followers.

  The monarchy of Savoy in the Kingdom of Sardinia had its own plan. Its government was led by Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour. After an unsuccessful war on Austria under King Charles Albert during the liberal revolutions of 1848, Sardinia joined Britain and France in the Crimean War in 1855. That gave Cavour's diplomacy standing with the great powers. In the Second Italian War of Independence in 1859, French aid helped Sardinia liberate Lombardy. The price was set in the secret Plombieres Agreement of the 21st of July 1858, under which Savoy and Nice went to France. About a quarter of the Italians of Nice left for Italy as a result.

  In 1860-1861 Garibaldi led the Expedition of the Thousand into Naples and Sicily, while Savoy troops occupied the central lands except Rome. Cavour accepted the south into the union, and the kingdom was declared. Victor Emmanuel II became its first king, and the capital moved from Turin to Florence. The title King of Italy had lain unused since Napoleon I abdicated on the 6th of April 1814.

  Unity did not bring calm. In April 1861 Garibaldi entered parliament and accused Cavour of dividing the country, even threatening civil war between the northern kingdom and his own southern forces. Cavour died on the 6th of June 1861. Garibaldi's arrest in 1862 set off controversy around the world.

  Two gaps remained. In 1866 Otto von Bismarck offered an alliance against Austria, and Prussia's victory brought Italy the Veneto, though Italy's own army fought badly. Rome came in 1870. When war broke out between Prussia and France, France pulled its protecting troops from Rome. Italian forces then took the city after battles with papal soldiers, including the Papal Zouaves. The capital moved again, this time to Rome. Victor Emmanuel, Garibaldi, Cavour and Mazzini are still remembered together as the four Fathers of the Fatherland.

  Garibaldi's own story had a sour coda. Elected in 1871 in his home city of Nice to the French National Assembly, he tried to argue for handing the city to Italy. He was prevented from speaking. His followers rioted in the episode called the Nicard Vespers, and fifteen of the rebels were tried and sentenced.

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• 3. Stitching a State

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  For about sixty years after 1870, the popes described themselves as prisoners in the Vatican. The Catholic Church in Italy protested the anti-clerical measures of the secular governments. It refused to receive envoys from the king, and it urged Catholics not to vote in Italian elections. This quarrel, known as the Roman question, would be settled only in 1929, with the Lateran Pacts.

  Inside the new state, the prime ministers faced a puzzle of seven major components that had to be fitted under one set of policies. Each region cherished its own habits and would not slot easily into the Sardinian model. Cavour began planning the merger, and the strain is thought to have hastened his death. Some parts went smoothly. The regional bureaucracies already followed the Napoleonic pattern, so harmonizing them was fairly simple. The liberals admired the British system, and it became the model for the new parliament.

  The armed forces were harder. Recruiting soldiers and promoting officers worked differently in each tradition, and exceptions to the general rules lasted for decades. This confusion helps explain the dismal showing of the navy in the 1866 war. Veneto in 1866 and Rome in 1870 added fresh complications.

  Money needed the same treatment. Before unification, most Italian coinage rested on silver, while Sardinia and the major European nations used gold. The government chose bimetallism on the French franc model, with a gold-to-silver rate of 1 to 15.50. Coins were stamped as 900 parts per thousand silver but actually held 835, to bring the rate closer to the market's roughly 1 to 14.38. A royal decree of the 17th of July 1861 introduced the lira, exactly four months after the kingdom was proclaimed. Local coins stayed legal tender in their home provinces.

  Schools were a third front. Shortly before his death, Cavour named Francesco De Sanctis, an eminent scholar from the University of Naples, as minister of education. The Casati Act of 1859 had made primary school compulsory and split control among towns, provinces and the state. Even so, children in rural and southern areas often stayed home. Illiteracy stood near 80% in 1861 and took more than 50 years to halve. Enrollment in primary school reached 90% only after 70 years.

  A second great school law came in 1923, under Mussolini. Giovanni Gentile raised the compulsory age to 14 and created a ladder of tracks, including quick work training for the lower rungs of the workforce. Gentile called the Catholic religion the "foundation and crowning" of education.

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• 4. Crown and Corruption

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  The Statuto Albertino, the constitution of the Kingdom of Sardinia, stayed in force as the constitution of the whole kingdom. On paper, power belonged to the king, who governed through ministers he appointed. Parliament had two chambers, an appointed Senate and an elected Chamber of Deputies. In practice, a king could no longer pick a government of his choice or keep it against the will of Parliament.

  The rules for winning a seat were strict. A candidate needed half of the votes and a quarter of all registered voters in the first round. Otherwise a runoff followed shortly after. Only a small wealthy elite could vote at all.

  The crown carried real formal weight. The throne passed through the male line of the House of Savoy under the Salic Law. The king commanded the land, sea and air forces, declared wars and concluded treaties. Only treaties that cost money or changed borders needed the approval of the chambers. His title read "By the grace of God and by the will of the nation, King of Italy." Later kings added Albania and Ethiopia to the list. Victor Emmanuel II was known as Father of the Fatherland, his successor Umberto I as the Good, and Victor Emmanuel III as the Soldier King.

  Parliament itself was dominated by deal-making. Agostino Depretis took office in 1876 and began a long Liberal Period with a practice called trasformismo. Cabinets would gather moderates from every side rather than govern through parties. In practice, Depretis pressured districts to vote for his candidates in return for favours. He also banned public meetings and sent "dangerous" individuals into internal exile on remote penal islands. Yet the same government abolished arrest for debt and made elementary school free and compulsory, ending compulsory religious teaching there.

  Francesco Crispi took power in 1887, serving a total of six years across two terms. He pushed through the Public Health Act of 1888, but he also mused about martial law to ban opposition parties.

  On the 7th of May 1898, crowds in Milan protested rising bread prices. General Fiorenzo Bava-Beccaris, under a declared state of siege, fired artillery and rifles into the crowd. Estimates of the dead run from 82 to 300. King Umberto I sent the general a congratulatory telegram and awarded him a medal. In 1900 the king was shot in Monza by the anarchist Gaetano Bresci.

  Giovanni Giolitti then dominated politics so thoroughly that the years are called the Giolitti era. He served as interior minister from 1901 to 1903 and as prime minister from 1903, with interruptions, until 1914. He mastered trasformismo through coercion and bribery, and fraud marked his elections. He admitted that there were places "where the law does not operate at all." Even so, he introduced state social insurance in 1912, on the German model. He also removed property limits on voting, raising the electorate to 8 million men. Unemployment insurance followed in 1919, eight years before Germany had it.

  In March 1905 Giolitti stepped down with an illness, and Victor Emmanuel III appointed Alessandro Fortis on the 28th of March. Fortis became the first Jewish head of government anywhere in the world. His government nationalized the railways and the telephone system. After the 1913 elections, Giolitti's coalition held its majority, but he resigned in March 1914. He would return only briefly, in 1920.

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• 5. Land and Exodus

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  Italy counted just over 22 million people in 1861, and 45.38 million by 1946. Many millions more left along the way. Right after unification, 60% of the labor force worked the land. A cholera epidemic killed at least 55,000 people. When parliament opened an investigation in 1877, it ran for eight years and blamed old methods and landowners who would not develop their estates. Strong landowner opposition blocked action. Another commission in 1910 found the same faults.

  Wine offered a brief boom. When insects ruined French vineyards in the 1870s and 1880s, Italy became Europe's largest wine exporter. France recovered in 1888, Italian exports collapsed, and unemployment and bankruptcies followed.

  The worst conditions were in the south, the Mezzogiorno. An 1881 census found over a million southern day-laborers chronically under-employed. Land once held by aristocrats, religious bodies or the king was freed from the feudal system, but peasants rarely gained their own plots. Plots shrank as they were split among heirs. Cavour judged that the south's basic problem was poor government, to be cured by applying the Piedmontese legal system. The result was a surge of brigandage that became a bloody civil war lasting almost ten years. It peaked in Basilicata and northern Apulia, led by the brigands Carmine Crocco and Michele Caruso. Intellectuals began to study the region in a movement called Meridionalismo, and the gap between north and south became known as the Southern question.

  In Sicily, the Fasci Siciliani, a workers' movement of democratic and socialist spirit, rose in 1892-93 and was crushed by military operations in 1894. The Italian Workers' Party formed in 1892 and became the Italian Socialist Party in 1893.

  People voted with their feet. From 1876 to 1915, more than 14 million Italians emigrated, 8.3 million from the north and 5.6 million from the south. One study counts 9 million who left permanently out of 16 million who departed between 1860 and the First World War. Annual departures averaged almost 220,000 from 1876 to 1900 and almost 650,000 from 1901 to 1915. The migrants sought, in Italian, "pane e lavoro", meaning bread and work. Two-thirds of those who left between 1870 and 1914 were men with traditional skills. Central Italy sent fewer, because peasants there could lease land and keep a relatively large share. Italian Americans are today the third largest European immigrant group in the United States, after Germans and Irish, at 6% of the population.

  The bond endured. Emigrants donated to the Altare della Patria, a monument to Victor Emmanuel II, and an inscription at its eternal flames reads "Gli italiani all'estero alla Madre Patria." It means Italians abroad to the Motherland.

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• 6. Rails and Steel

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  The first railway section on Sicily opened on the 28th of April 1863, between Palermo and Bagheria. Italy's rail network more than tripled between 1861 and 1872, then doubled again by 1890. By 1914 it ran about 17,000 km. Gio. Ansaldo and Company, from the former Kingdom of Sardinia, built the first Italian locomotives.

  Industry started small. In the 1860s and 1870s, manufacturing was backward, the country lacked large coal and iron deposits, and farming was the backbone of the economy. Protective tariffs from 1878 to 1887 aimed to build a base of heavy industry. In the 1880s industrialization took off, and from 1881 to 1887 the textile, mechanical, steel, iron and chemical industries grew by an average of 4.6% a year. Between 1887 and 1911, more than sixty plants made hydroelectricity the main energy source. Schools fed the boom, including the Politecnico founded in Milan in 1863 by Francesco Brioschi.

  Steelworks rose at Terni in 1884 and Piombino in 1897, the latter using iron ore from Elba. In 1898 the Neapolitan engineer Ernesto Stassano invented the Stassano furnace, the first indirect-arc electric furnace, to cut reliance on imported coal. By 1917, Italian plants ran 88 indirect-arc furnaces.

  In 1899 Giovanni Agnelli bought the designs and patents of the Ceirano brothers and founded Fiat. In 1906 a factory opened in the Portello district of Milan for the French entrepreneur Alexandre Darracq. In 1910 it launched its first successful model, the 24 HP, carrying the badge ALFA. The Targa Florio, among the first sports car races in the world, began in the mountains of Sicily in 1906.

  Italian labor also built other countries' tunnels. The Simplon Tunnel opened in 1906, after the Gotthard and before the Lotschberg. At the Gotthard, 90% of miners came from northern Italy. At the Lotschberg, 97% were Italian, chiefly from the south.

  Still, in 1911-55.4% of Italians worked in agriculture and 26.9% in industry. In 1908, laws capped working hours at 12 for women and children.

  Under Fascism, the government poured money into prestige projects. A new ocean liner set a four-day transatlantic record in 1933. The Macchi-Castoldi M.C.72 was the world's fastest seaplane that year. Italo Balbo flew across the Atlantic to the World's Fair in Chicago. Italy's economy, estimated at about 155 billion US dollars in 1940, had shrunk to about 114 billion by 1945.

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• 7. Colonial Ambitions

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  In 1885, soon after Egyptian rule fell in Khartoum, Italy landed soldiers at Massawa in East Africa. Italian missionaries had been there since the 1830s. In 1888 Italy annexed Massawa by force, creating Italian Eritrea, and it occupied the southern side of the horn of Africa, forming what became Italian Somaliland. Italy exported manufactured goods and imported coffee, beeswax and hides.

  Italy joined the scramble for Africa weak against Britain, France and Germany. Britain helped it gain territory on the Red Sea, hoping to block France. Nationalists wanted to rebuild a Roman Empire, and the colonial projects won their support. They were costly and unprofitable.

  The Treaty of Wuchale, signed in 1889, said in its Italian version that Ethiopia would become an Italian protectorate. The Amharic version said only that Emperor Menelik II could use Italy to conduct foreign affairs. The gap is blamed on a verb that formed a permissive clause in Amharic and a mandatory one in Italian. In 1895 Menelik abrogated the treaty.

  Italy chose force, trusting in technology and divisions within Ethiopia. On the 1st of March 1896 the Ethiopian army routed the Italians at Adwa, in what the historian R. J. B. Bosworth called "an unparalleled disaster for a modern army." The Treaty of Addis Ababa that year recognized Ethiopia as independent. Crispi went into dishonorable retirement.

  Farther east, Italy took part in the Eight-Nation Alliance forces during the Boxer Rebellion, from the 2nd of November 1899 to the 7th of September 1901. The Qing dynasty ceded Italy a concession at Tientsin, taken into possession on the 7th of June 1902 under an Italian consul.

  In 1911 Italy declared war on the Ottoman Empire and invaded Tripolitania, Fezzan and Cyrenaica, which together became Libya. The war lasted a year. In October 1911 Libyans were deported to the Tremiti Islands, and by 1912 one-third of them had died of hunger and exposure. The war also made military history, as Italy was the first country to use an airship in combat and to bomb enemy troops from the air.

  The victory emboldened nationalists, who now called for Italian rule over the Mediterranean, with Greece and Dalmatia in their sights.

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• 8. War and Fall

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  In 1882 Italy joined the Triple Alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary. Relations with Berlin grew warm, but the tie to Vienna stayed formal, partly because Italy coveted Trentino and Trieste from Austria. In 1915 Italy stayed neutral for six months, since the alliance was defensive. Prime Minister Antonio Salandra and Foreign Minister Sidney Sonnino bargained secretly with both sides. The Entente offered more, including promises of slices of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Russia vetoed Dalmatia. When the Treaty of London was announced in May 1915, antiwar voices erupted. Rural people saw war as a disaster, like drought or plague.

  Victory in 1918 gave Italy a permanent seat in the Council of the League of Nations. It was not all that had been promised. Woodrow Wilson refused to recognize the London Pact, and in the Treaty of Rapallo in 1920 Italy dropped its claims on Northern Dalmatia. The kingdom had annexed Trieste and Trentino-Alto Adige in 1919. Some historians count the Armistice of Villa Giusti on the 4th of November 1918 as the end of unification.

  Postwar politics fractured. Proportional representation made the Socialists the largest party, but they split among three factions and could not form a government. In 1922 Benito Mussolini became prime minister. For the 1924 elections he replaced proportional representation with the Acerbo Law, which gave the largest party two-thirds of the seats. From 1925 to 1943 Italy was a quasi-de jure fascist dictatorship. The constitution stayed formally intact while the monarchy accepted Fascist institutions. In 1928 the Grand Council of Fascism took over government administration, and in 1939 the Chamber of Fasces and Corporations replaced the Chamber of Deputies. On the 11th of April 1929, Mussolini replaced the two Savoy lions on the coat of arms with lictor's bundles. From 1938 to 1943 both the king and Mussolini held the title of First Marshal of the Empire, commanding the armed forces and the Blackshirts militia.

  Abroad, Italy attacked Ethiopia in 1935, Spain in 1937 and Albania in 1939. Sanctions, departure from the League of Nations and alliances with Germany and Japan followed. Italy entered the Second World War in 1940 and was defeated in North Africa and the Soviet Union. After Allied landings in Sicily, the Fascist regime fell, and a new government surrendered in September 1943. German forces then occupied the north and center, set up the Italian Social Republic, and reappointed Mussolini as dictator. Italy descended into civil war, pitting the Co-belligerent Army and the resistance against the Social Republic and its German allies.

  A referendum on the 2nd of June 1946 established a republic. Umberto II, nicknamed the May King, had come to the throne only on the 9th of May. He left it on the 13th of June, ending the House of Savoy's rule.

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