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The Risorgimento and the Birth of the Italian Nation

A series of attempts at revolution were made up until 1848, mainly by secret societies such as that of the Carbonari, against the arrangement of Peninsula by the Vienna Congress.

The Italian national movement found its main inspiration and apostle in Giuseppe Mazzini who outlined in his writings and actions the goal of a united, independent and republican Italy.

The concrete accomplishment of Italian unification was the work of the Savoy Kingdom.
Under the exceptional political guidance of its greatest statesman, Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour, the small Piedmont kingdom, thanks to an alliance with France and Napoleon III, managed to defeat Austria, during the Second War of Independence in 1859, and to unify central-northern Italy, except for the Veneto region and part of the Vatican State.

Immediately following Cavour's success came an initiative by another great protagonist of the Italian Risorgimento, Giuseppe Garibaldi, who had already taken part in independence struggles in Latin America and earned himself the nickname "Hero of the Two Worlds".

Heading up a band of patriots, he landed in Sicily in June 1860 with the intention of bringing down the Bourbon regime, while the Savoy troops entered the Vatican State to join Garibaldi's forces.
The victorious campaign was crowned by an historic encounter at Teano near Caserta between the Hero of the Two Worlds and King Victor Emmanuel II.

A large part of the Italian nation was thus unified under the Savoy sceptre and on 17 March 1861 the new Turin Parliament, then composed of Deputies elected in all the regions linked to the old Savoy state, decreed the birth of the Kingdom of Italy.

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