To understand 1861, three distinct things must be kept apart. Italy existed as a geographical space: a recognisable peninsula at the heart of the Mediterranean, crossed by mountains, plains and coasts that shaped trade and political relations. It existed as a cultural civilisation, with a long literary, artistic and religious tradition. Dante, Petrarch, Machiavelli, Roman law, medieval universities, the maritime republics and Rome as the centre of Christianity had created common reference points long before political unification.
There was no Italian state, however. Before the Risorgimento, the peninsula was divided among the Kingdom of Sardinia, the Papal States, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, the duchies of Emilia, Austrian Lombardy-Venetia and other territories with different governments, armies, currencies, borders and administrative systems. People could feel Italian in a cultural or literary sense without thinking of themselves as citizens of the same state.
To say that Italy was invented from nothing in 1861 is too simple. To say that Italians had already formed a compact nation for centuries is just as simple. There were shared ties, memories and ideas of belonging, but no common citizenship, uniform laws, national administration or language used every day by most of the population. [1]
An Incomplete Beginning
On 17 March 1861, the Parliament in Turin proclaimed the Kingdom of Italy. It was a decisive political date: for the first time, a unified Italian state came into being under Victor Emmanuel II. Yet that kingdom still did not correspond to the Italy now pictured on a map.
Veneto and Mantua entered the kingdom only in 1866, after the Third War of Independence. Rome was annexed in 1870, after the breach at Porta Pia, and became the effective capital in July 1871. Trento and Trieste remained beyond Italy’s borders until the end of the First World War, in 1918. “Unity” therefore described an unfinished process rather than a task completed in a single day. [2]
The distinction matters because 1861 is often told as a finale: Garibaldi, Cavour, Victor Emmanuel, the tricolour flag, and then modern Italy. The reality was more uneven. The new state had to extend laws and taxes, build armies, decide how to govern provinces with very different histories, establish schools, define its relationship with the Church and persuade people who had lived under separate governments only a few years earlier that they belonged to one political community.
Across much of the peninsula, the transition to the Kingdom of Italy also meant new officials, courts, tax rules and military duties. For some families, the new state brought the prospect of mobility, fresh infrastructure and participation in a national story. For others, it arrived chiefly through conscription, prefects, taxation and police forces. Institutions can draw a border; confidence in those institutions takes far longer to form.
The Piedmontese Imprint
Unified Italy was not born from an agreement among territories placed on equal terms. It was built around the Kingdom of Sardinia, its institutions and its dynasty. The Statuto Albertino, promulgated in 1848 for the Kingdom of Sardinia, became the constitutional charter of the new kingdom; many Piedmontese administrative, military and legal arrangements were extended to the annexed territories.
One detail says more than a long formula. Victor Emmanuel, king of Sardinia from 1849, became Victor Emmanuel II, king of Italy. He did not call himself Victor Emmanuel I of Italy. Retaining the number signalled dynastic and political continuity with the Savoyard state. Treccani notes that he refused to change the numeral precisely in order to stress that historical continuity. [3]
That does not permit the Risorgimento to be reduced to the phrase “Piedmontese conquest”. The unification movement included liberals, democrats, republicans, Garibaldian volunteers, urban elites, peasants, intellectuals and social groups whose plans often differed sharply. Cavour, Mazzini, Garibaldi and Victor Emmanuel did not imagine the same Italy. The final result nevertheless took a monarchic and centralised form, led by the institutions of the Kingdom of Sardinia.
The consequence was tangible: in several parts of the country, the new state could appear to have arrived from above. This was more than a feeling. Laws, bureaucracy, the army and legal codes largely came from an existing model later adapted to places with very different administrative histories. That original distance does not explain every later Italian division, but it helps explain why political unification did not automatically create a shared identity.
A Language Still to Be Made
In 1861, Italy had a great literary language but lacked a national language genuinely shared in everyday life. Many Italians spoke dialects or regional languages, often far removed from one another. A Venetian farmer, a Sicilian fisherman, a Neapolitan craftsman and a Sardinian shepherd could struggle to understand each other without mediation. Italian belonged to schools, literature, administration and urban elites, but it was not yet the habitual language of most people.
In his Linguistic History of United Italy, Tullio De Mauro showed that the spread of Italian was a long social process. Education, urbanisation, migration, military service, newspapers, radio, television and labour mobility gradually changed Italians’ relationship with a common language. Grammar was only part of the story. Speaking the same language makes it possible to work together, understand a law, read a newspaper, take part in political debate and feel part of a space larger than one’s own town. [4]
Alessandro Manzoni understood the problem clearly. His reflection on language had a practical aim: a living Italian that could circulate beyond literary elites and serve ordinary social life. In the debate that followed his 1868 report, language became an openly political and social question. [5]
Even the king did not usually speak standard Italian. Victor Emmanuel II often used Piedmontese. It is a useful image: the Kingdom of Italy had an Italian sovereign but did not yet possess a common language firmly rooted in society. Dialects carried the texture of local life: words, humour, songs, family memory. The difficulty arose when linguistic distance coincided with exclusion from school, society and politics.
The Southern Divide
Unification brought together territories with very different agricultural economies, tax systems, landholding structures and administrations. Southern Italy was neither an unchanging block nor a place naturally condemned to backwardness. It had commercial towns, manufacturing activities, ports, trading networks and complex local societies. It also had severe inequalities in land ownership, rural poverty, weak infrastructure and social relations shaped by rigid hierarchies.
The new kingdom inherited those differences and, in some cases, sharpened them by making them more visible under a single administration. The extension of taxes, compulsory military service, conflicts over land, crises in the countryside and hostility towards new authorities fed deep tensions. Post-unification brigandage must be read within this setting. It involved armed crime and local violence, but reducing it to ordinary banditry makes its political and social dimensions impossible to understand.
Treccani recalls that the movement which broke out in continental Southern Italy between 1861 and 1865 was a reaction to unification that can only partly be described as brigandage in the ordinary meaning of the term. Former Bourbon soldiers, peasants, landowners, local groups hostile to the new state, deserters and criminal bands all took part. [6]
The “Southern Question” also arose from this difficulty: how to build a common state without treating territorial differences as moral failings of the people living in one part of the country. The opposition between a virtuous North and an inert South remains a familiar shortcut, but it is historically thin. Italian inequalities have economic, political, demographic and institutional causes; they do not come from an innate character attributed to millions of people.
Rome and the Pope
Rome was far more than a territory to be annexed. It was the seat of the Pope’s temporal power, the symbolic centre of Catholicism and a city with universal weight. The breach at Porta Pia on 20 September 1870 completed the kingdom’s territorial unification, but it opened a delicate rift between the Italian state and the Holy See.
For an important part of the Catholic population, the new kingdom had been created by taking the Pope’s temporal power away from him. Pius IX did not recognise Italian sovereignty over Rome and declared himself a “prisoner” in the Vatican. This gave rise to the Roman Question, which would shape Italian public life for decades.
The non expedit, the instruction discouraging Catholics from taking part in national politics, made the relationship between the liberal state and the Catholic population more fragile. Catholics remained active in many civic and administrative roles, yet for years the instruction curtailed their organised participation in parliamentary life. Treccani notes that the non expedit was abolished in 1919, while the legal settlement of the Roman Question came with the Lateran Pacts, signed on 11 February 1929. [7]
This episode shows how difficult it was to create a politically unified Italy without clashing with part of its own heritage. Rome was at once the desired capital, the universal religious centre and the site of a lost papal sovereignty. The Italian state had to learn to live with this tension, while Catholics had to negotiate their place inside a nation many initially viewed with suspicion.
The State in Everyday Life
Making Italy meant more than winning battles or annexing territory. It meant creating an everyday experience of the state. Schools taught Italian and a national history; compulsory service brought together young men from different regions; railways shortened distances and travel times; prefects, courts, registries, taxes and documents brought the state into people’s lives.
This presence could be useful, intrusive or both. For someone living in a small municipality, obtaining a certificate, learning about a law, sending a child to school or receiving a conscription notice became a practical way of encountering unified Italy. Citizenship itself remained restricted for a long time. When the kingdom was proclaimed, the active vote belonged only to a small male minority, subject to requirements of age, income, education and property. Treccani estimates that about 7 per cent of adult men could vote in 1861. [8]
A nation is not created by borders, laws and flags alone. It also needs shared experience and a sense of fair treatment. When the state provides education, transport, security, accessible justice and opportunities for social mobility, national belonging becomes more believable. When it appears distant, ineffective or unjust, the family, the municipality, the region and informal networks again become the first places where people seek protection.
Italian history is full of this double movement: the centralisation of institutions alongside the persistence of local loyalties. It is not uniquely Italian. In Italy, however, the speed of political unification and the strength of existing identities made the pattern especially visible.
Internal Migration
Migration has united Italians more effectively than many public speeches. First emigration abroad, then internal movement during the post-war decades, carried families, dialects, food habits and ways of living from one part of the country to another. A Calabrian in Turin, someone from Puglia in Milan, a Sicilian family in Genoa or a Venetian who moved to Lombardy experienced in practical terms what it meant to meet another Italy.
Between 1955 and 1975, according to Istat, about 2.5 million people moved from Southern Italy to the North-West, and just under half a million moved from the South to the North-East. Turin and Milan were among the cities that absorbed the largest share of these flows, linked to post-war industrial growth. [9]
Internal migration mixed families and transformed neighbourhoods, schools, factories and apartment blocks. It also produced discrimination. Many southerners were treated as outsiders within their own country: refused leases, slurs such as terroni, suspicion directed at accents and prejudice about crime or hygiene all belong to the memory of that period.
This matters because it shows that national unity does not automatically erase territorial hierarchies. At times it makes them more visible by placing different people side by side. In the northern industrial cities, everyday proximity forced millions of Italians to discover traditions they had previously known only through stereotypes. Many contemporary Italian families exist precisely because of those encounters, often difficult ones, between territories that had lived apart for centuries.
Shared Memories
The twentieth century created common symbols: the First World War, fascism, the Resistance, the institutional referendum of 2 June 1946, the Constitution, the economic boom, mass schooling, television and football. None of these made Italy uniform. They did, however, give millions of people images, fears, celebrations, bereavements and reference points recognised at national level.
The First World War brought together soldiers from every part of the country, but it also cost hundreds of thousands of lives and left different local memories. Fascism tried to impose an aggressive nationalism, turning the idea of the homeland into discipline, obedience and propaganda. The Resistance and the Republic were born in a country marked by war, dictatorship, German occupation and civil conflict.
The Constitution of 1948 offered another idea of belonging: loyalty shifted from king and regime to rights, work, pluralism, local self-government and the formal equality of citizens. The Republic tried to hold together national unity and recognition of territorial differences. It has not always succeeded.
Television played an equally practical part. For decades it spread a common Italian, consumer habits, music, variety programmes, advertising, news and collective rituals. Football did its part too: the national team brings people together for ninety minutes, while domestic championships reactivate city and regional rivalries. It is an imperfect metaphor, but a useful one. Italy shares many national emotions without giving up local loyalties.
Many Italies
North and South remain useful categories for describing some economic and social gaps, but they explain only part of Italy. There are struggling inland areas in northern regions, dynamic southern cities, productive districts in central Italy, depopulated mountain zones, fragile metropolitan outskirts and coastal areas facing problems unlike those of the interior.
Istat data confirm that territorial gaps remain significant. In its 2026 Annual Report, Istat points to persistent differences in economic and social conditions between Southern Italy, the Centre-North and inland areas, including problems connected to depopulation, health services and access to opportunities for young people. [10]
The Bank of Italy also shows that the economic divide between the South and the Centre-North has a long history and cannot be reduced to one cause. Slower productivity growth, lower participation in the labour market, business structures, demographics, the quality of public services and infrastructure combine differently from one territory to another. [11]
The phrase “productive North, subsidised South” is therefore a political shortcut before it is a poor statistical description. It risks turning real problems into moral identities: on one side, those who deserve; on the other, those who are a burden. A country becomes harder to govern when its citizens read inequality as collective guilt rather than as a matter to be addressed through investment, functioning institutions and shared responsibility.
Overlapping Identities
Italian campanilismo is often treated as an amusing obsession: rivalry between neighbouring towns, a dialect defended stubbornly, endless disputes over the authentic recipe, the local derby as symbolic warfare. At times it really is a form of closure. It can feed stereotypes, suspicion and an inability to see common interests.
It can also preserve something useful. Local identities keep alive words, festivals, cuisines, trades, family archives, associations, voluntary work and neighbourly ties. Many Italian communities have a strong capacity for self-organisation precisely because people feel a concrete bond with their municipality, neighbourhood or valley.
The question is not whether to choose local identity over national identity. Italians almost always live with both, alongside other forms of belonging: European, religious, professional, family and generational. A woman may feel Palermo-born first, then Sicilian, Italian and European; a man may change the order according to the setting. There is no logical flaw in this. It is how collective identities normally work.
Italy is one because it has a state, a Constitution, a common language, an institutional history and a vast number of shared experiences. Its diversity has always been part of its fabric. Unity becomes fragile when local differences become a pretext for inequality, stereotypes or indifference towards others. In 1861 a state was created. Building a national community has been slower, uneven and remains unfinished: a plurality of stories still searching for a common language.
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