Best Books on the Unification of Italy: Garibaldi, Cavour and the Risorgimento

The unification of Italy between 1848 and 1871 is one of the great political dramas of the nineteenth century. It involved a red-shirted guerrilla landing in Sicily with a thousand volunteers, a Piedmontese prime minister playing great powers against each other with calculated cynicism, a Piedmontese king of limited intelligence and considerable personal courage, and a papal state that resisted absorption until French troops were finally withdrawn. The result was a kingdom that most of its citizens initially had no particular reason to feel loyal to. The books below take that complexity seriously. ## The Risorgimento as Idea The word Risorgimento, meaning resurgence or resurrection, captures something important about the movement: it was animated by a story about Italy recovering something it once had and had lost. The Italian peninsula had been the center of the Roman Empire, the birthplace of the Renaissance, and the seat of a Christianity that spread across the world. The fragmentation of the peninsula into Austrian-controlled territories, papal states, Bourbon kingdoms, and small duchies looked, to patriots, like a historical aberration demanding correction. Denis Mack Smith's *Cavour* (ISBN 978-0394531625) is the essential study of the statesman who made unification happen by conventional political means: alliances, diplomacy, and a willingness to use Garibaldi as a tool while limiting his political influence. Mack Smith is consistently skeptical of nationalist mythology without being dismissive of what the protagonists actually achieved, and his portrait of Cavour as a pragmatist who cared more about Piedmontese power than about Italy as such is one of the most illuminating reassessments in modern Italian historiography. ## Garibaldi and the Thousand Giuseppe Garibaldi is one of the most improbable figures in modern political history. A sailor and guerrilla fighter who had spent years in exile in South America, he commanded genuine popular devotion across Europe and the Americas in a way that no other nineteenth-century revolutionary quite matched. His Expedition of the Thousand, which landed in Sicily in May 1860 and conquered the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in a matter of months, was militarily audacious and politically disruptive to almost everyone involved. Lucy Riall's *Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero* (ISBN 978-0300127102) examines the gap between the historical Garibaldi and the myth that grew up around him, often with his active encouragement. Riall argues that Garibaldi understood modern media and celebrity politics with unusual sophistication, and that his public persona was carefully constructed as well as genuinely felt. The book is as much about nineteenth-century political culture as it is about a single life. ## The South and the Costs of Unification Italian unification did not bring equal benefits to all parts of the peninsula. The south, incorporated by force into a state that northern Piedmontese bureaucrats ran with limited sympathy for local conditions, experienced unification partly as a military occupation. Brigandage, which the new Italian state suppressed with considerable violence, was partly a political insurgency against a regime that many southerners had not asked for and did not want. The structural gap between north and south, the Questione Meridionale that Italian politicians and intellectuals have debated ever since, was not created by unification but was deepened by the way it was managed. Any honest account of the Risorgimento has to reckon with this outcome. ## Making Italians The famous observation attributed to the statesman Massimo d'Azeglio, "We have made Italy, now we must make Italians," captures the challenge that faced the new kingdom after 1861. The Italian language was spoken natively by a small minority. Regional identities were strong. The Catholic Church, whose temporal power had been stripped by unification, withheld its cooperation from the new state for decades. The project of constructing a genuinely Italian national identity took generations, and some historians argue it was never fully completed. The twentieth-century crises of liberal Italy, fascism, and the Second World War all drew on the unresolved tensions left by the speed and manner of unification. ## Further Reading [Explore more European history books](/category/history) [Browse books on 19th-century politics](/category/politics)