Victor Emmanuel II

• 1. Introduction

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  Victor Emmanuel II rode into Rome on the 20th of September 1870, entering a city that no Italian king had controlled since the fall of the Western Roman Empire over thirteen centuries before. He was not a romantic figure. A British diplomat, Lord Clarendon, had visited Florence just three years earlier and collected the frank opinions of Italian politicians. Their verdict was blunt: Victor Emmanuel was an imbecile, a dishonest man who told lies to everyone. Yet this same king, born in Turin on the 14th of March 1820, would die in that same Rome in 1878 as the first ruler of a unified Italian nation in the modern era, buried with honor in the Pantheon, and mourned as "Padre della Patria" - Father of the Fatherland.

  How does a king dismissed as dishonest and dim become the symbol of an entire national movement? What combination of shrewd alliances, battlefield gambles, and diplomatic maneuvering turned the ruler of a small Alpine kingdom into the sovereign of a peninsula? And what kind of man was he in private, behind the battles and the proclamations?

• 2. The Making of a King

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  Palazzo Carignano in Turin was where Victor Emmanuel was born, the eldest son of Carlo Alberto, Prince of Carignano, and Maria Theresa of Tuscany. His childhood moved between Turin and Florence, and he showed an early draw toward politics, military affairs, and sport. In 1842, he married his paternal first cousin Adelaide of Austria, with whom he would have eight children.

  His path to the throne was accelerated by military disaster. When his father, King Charles Albert, was defeated by the Austrians at the Battle of Novara in 1849, Charles Albert abdicated. Victor Emmanuel, who had already fought alongside his father at the battles of Pastrengo, Santa Lucia, Goito, and Custoza during the First Italian War of Independence, suddenly found himself king at the age of twenty-eight.

  What followed was a sharp demonstration of his political instincts. He secured a favorable armistice at Vignale with the Austrian commander Radetzky, but the Piedmontese Chamber of Deputies refused to ratify the treaty. Victor Emmanuel fired his Prime Minister, Claudio Gabriele de Launay, and replaced him with Massimo D'Azeglio. After new elections, the peace was accepted. That same year, he crushed a revolt in Genoa with enough ferocity to describe the rebels as a "vile and infected race of canailles."

  The appointment that would shape his entire reign came in 1852, when he named Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour, as Prime Minister. Cavour was a strategist of a different order - a liberal nationalist who set about modernizing the Kingdom of Sardinia, dismantling its old structures, and advancing an anti-clerical agenda that had roots in the reign of Charles Albert.

• 3. The Crimean Gambit

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  Cavour was reluctant to send Sardinian troops to the Crimean War. Russia was powerful, the campaign was expensive, and the gains were far from certain. But Victor Emmanuel read the geopolitical situation differently. He was convinced that allying with Britain and, more critically, with Napoleon III of France would pay dividends far beyond the Black Sea.

  Sardinian forces joined the fight, and in the Battle of the Chernaya on the 16th of August 1855, they performed with enough distinction to matter. The gallantry shown in the Crimea, and the broader conduct of the campaign including the siege of Sevastopol, earned the Kingdom of Sardinia a seat at the peace conference. Sardinia sent no warships to the Black Sea, but it arrived at the Congress of Paris in 1856 as a legitimate European power.

  Cavour used that access carefully, meeting privately with Napoleon III. In 1858, the two men met at Plombières-les-Bains in Lorraine. The deal they struck was specific: if France helped Piedmont fight Austria, which still held the Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia in northern Italy, France would receive Nice and Savoy in return. Victor Emmanuel received his alliance - though the price was two pieces of territory that had long been part of the House of Savoy's patrimony.

• 4. War, Betrayal, and Lombardy

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  The Italo-French campaign against Austria in 1859 opened well. French and Piedmontese forces pushed into northern Italy, and Milan and other Austrian territories fell. Then Napoleon III did something that no one in Turin had anticipated. Sickened by the casualties and alarmed by the mobilization of Prussian troops on the Rhine, he secretly negotiated a separate peace with Franz Joseph of Austria at Villafranca. Lombardy would go to Piedmont. But Venetia would stay Austrian. And France would receive neither Nice nor Savoy, since the full terms of Plombières had not been honored.

  Cavour was furious. He resigned. Victor Emmanuel was left to manage the fallout with new advisors. The situation was salvaged only after Cavour was reinstated as Prime Minister. Under the Treaty of Turin, signed in March 1860, France finally received Nice and Savoy, in exchange for allowing plebiscites to take place in the Central Italian Duchies. Tuscany, Modena, Parma, and Romagna all voted to join Piedmont-Sardinia that same year.

  Venice remained out of reach for another six years. Austria's grip on the northeast meant that the map of the new Italian state would remain incomplete. Victor Emmanuel would have to wait for the right European crisis to hand him the opportunity.

• 5. Garibaldi and the South

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  Giuseppe Garibaldi's Expedition of the Thousand in 1860-1861 did not follow a neat plan. Garibaldi sailed for Sicily with a volunteer force and proceeded to sweep through the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies with a speed that astonished Europe. Victor Emmanuel supported the expedition, but the relationship between king and general was complicated from the start.

  When Garibaldi's momentum began to point toward Rome, Victor Emmanuel stopped him. Rome was under the Papal States and under French protection, and attacking it would have meant war with France. Victor Emmanuel instead marched his own forces through the Marche and Umbria, defeating the Papal army at the Battle of Castelfidardo in 1860. That victory drove the Pope into Vatican City and, as a consequence, earned Victor Emmanuel excommunication from the Catholic Church.

  The two men met at Teano. Garibaldi handed over control of southern Italy to the king. A series of plebiscites in the occupied lands confirmed the transfer, and on the 17th of March 1861, the Parliament of unified Italy proclaimed Victor Emmanuel the first King of Italy. Turin became the new capital, though Lazio, Veneto, and Trentino still lay outside the kingdom.

  Victor Emmanuel made a decision about his royal title that struck many as tone-deaf. He kept the number II rather than becoming Victor Emmanuel I of Italy. Critics read it as a signal that Piedmont-Sardinia had simply absorbed the peninsula rather than genuinely uniting it. The king either did not recognize the symbolic damage or did not care.

• 6. Completing the Map

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  In 1866, Victor Emmanuel allied with Prussia in the Third Italian War of Independence. Italy's military performance on its own front was poor, but Prussia defeated Austria decisively in Germany, and Austria ceded Veneto to Italy as part of the general settlement. The prize came despite, not because of, Italian arms.

  Rome was the last piece. Garibaldi had attempted twice to take it and failed. Victor Emmanuel waited. In 1870, France declared war on Prussia, and Prussia won with stunning speed. The French troops protecting Rome were recalled. Victor Emmanuel's forces entered the city on the 20th of September 1870. After a temporary capital in Florence since 1864, the permanent capital was established in Rome on the 2nd of July 1871. The new royal residence was the Quirinal Palace.

  Lord Clarendon's 1867 report to London had suggested that Victor Emmanuel might end up losing his crown and ruining his dynasty. Instead, the king who had been called an imbecile now ruled from the Eternal City. His role in day-to-day governing had steadily diminished. The Statuto Albertino still said ministers were responsible to the crown, but in practice they answered to Parliament. The king who had unified Italy found himself governing a constitutional monarchy where his personal power counted for less each year.

• 7. Family and Private Life

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  Rosa Vercellana, known in Piedmontese as "Bela Rosin," was born a commoner and became Victor Emmanuel's principal mistress. In 1858 she was made Countess of Mirafiori and Fontanafredda. In 1869, after Adelaide of Austria had died, Victor Emmanuel married her morganatically, meaning the marriage did not grant her royal status or allow their children to inherit the throne. Together they had two children: Vittoria Guerrieri, born on the 2nd of December 1848, and Emanuele Alberto Guerrieri, born on the 16th of March 1851.

  Rosa was not Victor Emmanuel's only mistress. The source records several others, with documented children across Turin, Stupinigi, and Mondovì. Laura Bon at Stupinigi bore him two children. Baroness Vittoria Duplesis bore him a daughter, Maria Savoiarda Projetti, who was born in 1854. Virginia Rho in Turin bore him two more: Vittorio di Rho, who became a notable photographer, and Maria Pia di Rho, who died in Vienna in 1947. Rosalinda Incoronata De Domenicis bore him a daughter who married a doctor. Angela Rosa De Filippo bore him a son, Domenico Scarpetta, who became an actor and lived until 1952.

  With Adelaide, his legitimate family was equally large. Umberto, born in 1844, became his successor as King of Italy. Amadeo, born in 1845, became King of Spain. Maria Clotilde, born in 1843, married Napoléon Joseph; their grandson Prince Louis Napoléon became the Bonapartist pretender to the French imperial throne. Maria Pia married King Louis of Portugal. Three of Adelaide's children died very young.

• 8. Death and Memory

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  Victor Emmanuel II died in Rome in 1878, just as his excommunication was lifted. Before he died, he met with envoys of Pope Pius IX, who reversed the church's censure. He received last rites and was buried in the Pantheon, the ancient Roman temple converted into a Christian church, where the bones of Raphael also rest.

  His son Umberto I succeeded him. In the decades after his death, Italy built the Victor Emmanuel II Monument in Rome, a massive white marble structure in Piazza Venezia containing the Altare della Patria, the Altar of the Fatherland. Romans have given it several informal nicknames over the years, none of them flattering, but it remains one of the most prominent landmarks in the city he spent twenty years trying to capture.

  The epithet "Father of the Fatherland" borrowed from the old Latin title Pater Patriae that Roman emperors had used. Whether the man deserved the title is a question his descendants continued debating. What the record shows is a king who fought in four battles before reaching the throne, sent troops to Crimea for diplomatic leverage, lost a prime minister over a broken treaty, excommunicated himself in the pursuit of papal territory, and managed to hold together a coalition of soldiers, generals, and revolutionaries long enough for a peninsula of competing kingdoms to become a single nation.