Italy

ITALIA. - The Italian region corresponds, within its natural borders, to that part of Europe extending south of the Alpine arc, from the mouth of the Var to the Quarnero.

SUMMARY:

I. Geography

II. Civil and Ecclesiastical History

III. Ecclesiastical Organization

IV. Legal Status of the Church

V. Literature

VI. Art

VII. Educational System.

I. GEOGRAPHY.

The surface area of the Italian region amounts to approximately 325,000 km². That of the Italian State, however, as it emerged from the Second World War, falls somewhat below this figure (301,021 km²), not only due to recent territorial losses on the western borders (Colle del S. Bernardo, Moncenisio Pass, Val Stretta, "hunting territories" on the headwaters of the Tinée and Vésubie rivers, and the upper and middle Val di Roja: a total of 710 km²) and eastern borders (Zara, Istria, the middle and upper Isonzo Valley: 7,390 km², excluding the 783 km² of the Free Territory of Trieste), but also because the pre-war political borders (310,190 km²) did not coincide with the natural ones either. Thus, outside the Italian State, in addition to those already mentioned, there remain and still remain fragments that geographically belong to the Italian region: the Principality of Monaco (1.5 km²), Italian Switzerland (3,933 km²), the County of Nice and Corsica (9,409 km²), and the Maltese Archipelago (316 km²).

Italy, which occupies a central position among the southern European peninsulas, is the smallest of these: one-fifth of its area belongs to its insular part, two-fifths to the peninsular proper, and an equal portion to the continental. Characteristic of its shape, often likened to a boot, is the oblique development of the peninsula relative to the parallels and the marked disproportion between its length (1,200 km) and its width, which averages 350 km in continental Italy and 150 km in the peninsular. This same obliquity also accounts for the fact that this disproportion almost entirely disappears when considering the extreme coordinates of latitude (from 47° 5' 30" N at the Vetta d'Italia to 35° 29' 24" N at the tip of Cala Maluk on the island of Lampedusa) and longitude (from 6° 22' 59" E Greenwich at Rocca Chardonnette in the Cottian Alps to 18° 31' 18" E at Cape Otranto): the difference is respectively 13° 36' 6" and 13° 58' 19". The advantages due to the peninsula's position are evident, as it lies in the middle of the Mediterranean, between its two basins, serving as a bridge between the opposite shores: it is equidistant from the natural gateway (Gibraltar) and the artificial one (Suez Canal) of this basin, and thus along the sea, land, and air routes between the northeastern Atlantic and Western Europe on one side, and Northern Africa, the Near and Middle East, and Australia on the other.

In the topography of Italian territory, hills (40%) and mountains (39.6%) prevail. Plains occupy barely one-fifth of the surface: among these, the only one that stands out for its size and complex geographical importance is the Po Valley, enclosed on three sides by the Alps and the Apennines, and opening onto the Adriatic with a broad lagoon edge. Although orographically connected, the Alps and the Apennines differ not only in the greater average height of the former, of which Italy includes only the shorter and steeper inner slope, but also in the less rugged forms of the latter, which, in addition to the presence of plateaus (Abruzzi) and volcanic zones (Anti-Apennines), are characterized by the frequency of more or less extensive intermountain basins, often corresponding to filled lakes. The relief of the major islands can essentially be traced back to that of the Apennines (Sicily), even if in Sardinia more distinctly anti-Apennine features prevail and Corsica resembles the Alps. Overall, both due to the variety of structures and forms determined by their complex geological history, and the alternation, even over short distances, of uplifted and depressed zones, or those distinguished by the nature of the dominant rocks (typical, for example, in this regard, is the diffusion of limestones in the central-southern regions), as well as the disposition of mountain masses relative to the peripheral seas, and finally the consequences this has had on the original vegetation cover or reveals in particular economic vocations, the Italian landscape presents a rich range of nuances. The regional compartmentalization that results is much more detailed than what appears from the 24 historical units recognized by tradition and administration: numerous toponyms still perpetuate, in local usage, the vitality of distinctions that suffice to characterize continental fragments (Monferrato, Brianza, Cadore), peninsular (Lunigiana, Mugello, Marsica, Cilento), and insular (Valdemone, Gallura, Balagna; chosen at random, only a few examples) each possessing a more or less clear geographical individuality.

Such compartmentalization also reflects climatic diversities, natural given the considerable latitudinal extent of Italian territory, though mitigated, as regards thermal regimes, by the protective action of the Alpine barrier and the equalizing influence of the Mediterranean. Less distinctly maritime types occur in northern Italy, not so much due to its continentality as to the proximity of the Pannonian-Balkan region: notable, therefore, is the thermal contrast between the side facing the Adriatic, which is more influenced by it, and that on the Tyrrhenian, benefiting from the warm breath of western winds. As for rainfall, more abundant in the Pre-Alps and the high Apennines, less so in the plains and especially in the South, the average annual amount is everywhere above 500 mm (and considerably higher in the Alpine area) and thus generally adequate for cultivation needs, except for some areas (Tavoliere delle Puglie). It should be noted, however, that these precipitations, while tending to concentrate in the summer season in southern Italy and the islands (which thus suffer from prolonged summer drought), present two maxima (early and late spring) in the rest of the peninsula, and a single summer maximum (with a winter minimum) along the Alpine arc.

These climatic conditions, together with the shape of the territory and the disposition of the relief, explain why Italy lacks notable river arteries, except for the Po (650 km; basin 75,000 km²), the only one comparable to the major European watercourses. The irregularity of regimes, steep gradients, and thus limited navigability are common traits of almost all others, and are accentuated in the South and the islands. Lakes are relatively numerous, the largest of which are found along the Alpine chain, as well as coastal ponds and typical lagoons (Veneto-Romagna coastline). The presence of the latter, which attest to insufficient drainage of waters in coastal regions, is linked to the spread of malaria, which for a long time was the most pernicious endemic disease afflicting Italy.

Italian territory, inhabited since the most remote antiquity (at least from the Middle Paleolithic), constitutes one of the European zones of highest population density. It is no surprise, therefore, that the original vegetation and fauna have undergone such profound transformations as to be recognizable only in fragments and residual forms. Both the Mediterranean maquis (an association of evergreen trees and shrubs, characteristic of coastal and sub-coastal regions) and the forest have almost everywhere given way not only to cultivation but also to pasture, while many marshy or flood-prone areas, or conversely steppe-like ones, have also been reclaimed for agriculture. Moreover, this transformation continues today with land reclamations, intended to gain ever more space for the growing population.

Over the past hundred years, Italy’s population has more than doubled. The first official census of the Kingdom of Italy (31 December 1861) recorded 21.8 million inhabitants, which, within the current borders, corresponded to a total of 25.6 million souls.

The average population density of Italy (153 inhabitants per km²) is surpassed in Europe only by that of the United Kingdom (207) and Germany (193): the higher figures for Belgium (282) and the Netherlands (293) relate to territorial bases comparable to our regions. The population typically lives scattered across the countryside or gathered in small centres in the northern and central regions; in southern Italy and the islands, by contrast, it abandons the countryside and clusters in large towns and cities. Around 1800, however, there were only five urban centres in Italy with over 100,000 inhabitants (Naples with 400,000, Palermo with 200,000, Rome with 150,000, Venice with 140,000, and Milan with 130,000), and until twenty years ago, none of our cities exceeded one million inhabitants. Today, there are 77 municipalities with more than 50,000 inhabitants (of which 65 are provincial capitals), and 14 have a population exceeding 100,000 (Messina, Verona, Taranto, Padua, Brescia, Livorno, Reggio Calabria, Ferrara, Cagliari, La Spezia, Parma, Modena, Bergamo, Reggio Emilia), 6 exceed 250,000 (Palermo, Florence, Bologna, Venice, Catania, and Bari), 2 exceed 500,000 (Turin and Genoa), and three exceed one million (Rome [1,650,000], Milan [1,287,000], and Naples [1,021,000]).

Just under 50% of the active population lives off agriculture (including hunting and fishing), one-third from industry (including transport and communications), less than one-tenth from commerce (including credit and insurance); the remainder is employed in public administration (4.3%), domestic economy (3.6%), the liberal arts and religion (1.5%), etc. This distribution refers to the 1936 census: fifty years earlier, agriculture alone absorbed three-fifths, and industry less than a quarter, of that same total.

Only 7.8% of the state’s territorial area is unproductive; the agricultural and forest area is divided as follows: arable land 43.2%, woods and chestnut groves 18.6%, specialised tree crops 7.8%, productive wasteland 5.1%, meadows, meadow-pastures, and permanent pastures 17.4%.

The Mediterranean character of Italian agriculture is well illustrated by its most typical productions and also by the limited specialisation of crops, with herbaceous plants generally grown alongside trees (mulberry, vine, olive, almond, etc.). Cereal production, though relatively significant (second place among European states, excluding the U.S.S.R., for wheat, third for maize), does not cover domestic demand, so that related items usually figure among the largest imports. Wines and oils once sustained a modest export flow, but now the only agricultural products that carry weight in exports are dried fruit and citrus fruits, although the latter must increasingly contend with growing and successful competition.

Italy possesses a modest livestock heritage (in millions of head, 1948: 9.4 sheep; 7.9 cattle; 3.8 pigs; 2.2 goats; 1.6 equines), further damaged by the recent two wars. Northern Italy was renowned for its thriving silkworm breeding: the average cocoon harvest exceeded 300,000 quintals in normal times, securing it first place in Europe for silk production.

Forest reserves are negligible (timber is one of the main import items), and the benefits derived from fishing are modest, with maritime fishing essentially limited to national waters.

The last great world conflict severely struck Italian industry, which had made considerable progress after 1900, despite the disadvantageous position of the territory due to the absolute lack or scarcity of essential raw materials. Among energy sources, the only one Italy possesses in abundance is hydroelectric power, which has over a million plants and produced a total of 20.8 million KWh in 1949; however, aside from the uneven regional distribution of installations, it is already insufficient for domestic consumption (energy is imported from Switzerland) and can only be supplemented to a minimal extent by fossil fuels (primarily lignite) or liquid fuels (limited to Emilia), and by the significant production of methane (236.2 million cubic meters in 1949). Among metallic minerals, only mercury, aluminum (though with a total lack of cryolite), lead, and magnesium stand out.

This greatly hinders the expansion of a heavy industry adequate to the country's needs, and the same can essentially be said for other sectors of activity (suffice it to consider the lack of cotton), with the exception of the food industry and some minor ones. Nevertheless, the abundance of labor, the high specific preparation of the workforce, and the traditional industriousness and ingenuity of the Italian people have allowed Italian industry to rank among the foremost in Europe, both in terms of production volume and its high technical level: particularly the textile sector (silk mills, cotton goods, artificial fibers, and wool), which in the Po-Veneto region boasts a powerful complex of plants, not only met domestic demand but also generated a strong export current.

The remarkable progress of the national economy over the last fifty years could not, however, prevent the trade balance from closing in deficit; this deficit was regularly offset by emigrants' remittances, revenues from the maritime industry, merchant marine freight, and interest on capital invested abroad. Normally, 60% of imports by value before the war were absorbed by raw or semi-finished materials necessary for industries, 20% by raw materials or food products, and the remainder by manufactured goods. In exports, approximately 40% consisted of finished products, 30% of specialized foodstuffs (wines, oils, citrus fruits, fruit, etc.), 20-25% of semi-finished materials, and the rest of raw materials. Germany led both as a customer and supplier, followed at a considerable distance by the United States, Great Britain, and France. The recent postwar period has brought significant shifts: in 1949, the United States alone absorbed 35.3% of imports, followed by Australia (5.6%), Argentina (5.3%), and Germany (4.4%), while in exports, Argentina held first place (12.3%), followed by Great Britain (10.6%), France (5.7%), and Switzerland (5.5%).

Internal communications rely on a road network of over 170,000 km (of which 21,000 are state roads and 42,000 provincial roads), not including approximately 600 km of motorways (almost all in northern Italy). The railways (23,222 km in 1942), heavily damaged by the war, have essentially returned to prewar efficiency (21,643 km in 1950), while road transport has seen considerable growth and now exceeds prewar figures. In terms of its merchant marine, Italy ranked 6th in the world in 1939 in terms of tonnage (3.5 million tons) and among the first for the efficiency of its services; despite the losses suffered (tonnage reduced to 2.6 million tons in 1950), the country is on track to regain this position. Civil aviation (41,033 km of routes in 1949) has also resumed its growth after the wartime hiatus.

In 1939, Italian control extended over a territory of over 3.5 million km² with 14.3 million inhabitants.

(photo: G. Bruckert, Aosta)
Italy - Bell tower of Courmayeur (12th century) - Aosta.

The fate of the former Italian Africa remains uncertain, Somalia (v.), which was returned to Italy by a resolution of the UN (21 December 1949), with the mandate to administer it under a trusteeship regime and prepare it for independence.

II. CIVIL AND ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY.

1. GEOLOGY

Italy is the image of a providential design, with its powerful physical unity, well-defined within the frame of its natural borders, the Alps and the sea, and internally connected by the branches of the Apennines and the numerous river arteries that traverse the Peninsula in all directions.

Formed in the depths of the sea in the most remote millennia and first emerging from the waters with the crystalline rocks that form the inner skeleton of the Alpine system and with the Calabro-Sicilian zone of the Apennine chain, then covered again by the sea and re-emerging with other lands temporarily joined to Africa, later separated by fractures, foldings, and various subsidences, then filled in the great inlet at the foot of the Alps with alluvial deposits, covered here and there by volcanic eruptions, while the glaciers melted and retreated, Italy was almost definitively constituted in the Quaternary age in the very centre of the Mediterranean, like an immense pier extending southward toward the Levant, and northward connected to the Danubian region.

A geological torment, to which seems to correspond an equal torment in its historical life, where emergences and submersions, fractures and recompositions of moral and political life perpetually alternate, in the contested world of Mediterranean and then European civilisation.

Yet Italy’s geological past weighs continually upon its historical becoming, determining constant influences no less upon the conformation of civilisation than upon vegetable and animal life. The ancient connection with Africa influenced the primitive flora and fauna of Italy; its Mediterranean character facilitated reciprocal exchanges between region and region; volcanic development enhanced the fertility of the soil; the richness of its coasts fostered maritime life; the variety of its internal regions encouraged the flourishing of local separatism; but in compensation, the frequency of valleys incised by rivers facilitates communications and connections even between distant regions.

2. THE NAME

The name Italy derives from a tribe of the most ancient Indo-European stage, located in a part of Bruttium (present-day Calabria) that took its name from the calf (viteliu vitilu: buc, bull), certainly the sacred animal of the group; rendered by Greek writers as Ἰταλός. The name gradually extended as far as Taranto (4th century), then to central Italy (3rd century) from the Arno to the Rubicon, and in the administrative reform ordered by Augustus it reached the circle of the Alps from the Var to the Arsa in the Istrian peninsula: «haec est Italia diis sacra» (Pliny, Nat. hist., III, 5, 46). The origin of the name is confirmed by the fact that at the outbreak of the Social War (90-87 B.C.), provoked by the Italic Allies (Marsi, Samnites, Lucani) for the equalisation of rights with Rome, the rebels chose the bull as their monetary symbol and gave the city of Corfinium, centre of the insurrectionary movement, the name of Italica.

Other names for Italy are: Hesperia, for its western position relative to Greece; Ausonia, a Grecised form of Aurunci, an Osco people bordering the Greek colonies of southern Italy; Oenotria, from the eponymous Oenotrus, a coloniser of the country; the historian Antiochus of Syracuse (5th century, in Dion. Halic., I 35, followed by Aristotle, Polit., VIII, 1329 b) derived the name Italy from an eponymous Italus.

3. THE FIRST PEOPLES

Italy too, like all the peoples of Europe, had, after the Palaeolithic and Neolithic ages, a Chalcolithic age not unlike the Neolithic, initiating metallurgy with the first imperfect copper alloys and preceding the bronze industry, which was then followed by the Iron Age that, in the Mediterranean, unlike other regions, falls within full history.

Its position made it the great crucible where all the human elements of the great Mediterranean civilisation came to meet and coexist in its dolichomesocephalic variety of the south and brachycephalic or Alpine variety of the north, with funerary rites differing from place to place, from the most ancient inhumation to cremation. Consequently, various prehistoric civilisations flourished in Italy, but they are to be attributed to peoples mostly inhumators and ascribed to a single race, the dolichocephalic Mediterranean.

The descendants of this stock, which is Mediterranean and which populates the entire peninsula and the islands while preserving the ancestral custom of inhumation, are known by the names of Ligurians, who, akin to the Iberians, were spread throughout northern Italy, part of central Italy, Corsica, Sardinia, Malta, and Pantelleria, with various local names; the others, in southern Italy, and seemingly the authors of the first painted ceramics.

Upon these Neolithic peoples were superimposed, descending through the Julian Alps from transalpine lands, the Indo-Europeans in two waves, an older one (ca. 2500 B.C.) that cremated its dead and occupied a large part of the peninsula, reaching as far as eastern Sicily, and a more recent one (1500 B.C.), inhumating, already in possession of iron.

Thanks to this double immigration, without entering into too minute distinctions and subdivisions, often a matter of opinion, the ethnographic situation of Italy is as follows:

A. Indo-European Italics: 1. Latins, settled in the centre of Latium; Falisci around Civita Castellana. To the east and south of Latium, Aequi in the upper valley of the Aniene, Volsci from the Lepini Mountains to the sea, Hernici in the territories of Ferentino and Anagni.

2. Italics of the Osco-Umbrian group, also called Umbro-Sabellic: Sabines (Safini), in the centres of Terni and Rieti; Umbrians, settled in the upper course of the Tiber; Marsi, in the basin of the Fucine Lake; Paeligni, to the west of this basin; Picentes and Praetutii, on the Adriatic coast between Ancona and Adria; Vestini and Marrucini on the same coast on either side of the Pescara; Campanians, in Campania; Samnites, in the central mountainous area, with capital at Bovianum; Frentani on the Adriatic slope.
ITALIA - Ponte Lunetto - Premosello (Novara).

B. Non-Italic Indo-Europeans: Greeks of Magna Graecia and Sicily; Celts in northern Italy, subdivided into the tribes of the Insubri, around Lakes Maggiore and Como; Cenòmani, around Lakes Iseo and Garda; Lingoni, south of the lower course of the Po; Boii, between the Po and the Apennines; Sènoni on the Adriatic between Ravenna and Ancona; Siculi and Sicani in eastern and central Sicily; Veneti, an Illyrian tribe, settled in Venetia and Istria; Iapigi, another Illyrian tribe settled in Apulia, subdivided into the three tribes of the Dauni, northern Apulia below the Gargano, Peucetii to the southeast of the former, and Messapi in the present-day Salento peninsula, once called Calabria.

C. Non-Indo-European populations: Ligurians from the mouth of the Arno to the Ticino; Corsi; Sardinians; Elimi, on the western tip of Sicily; Etruscans, between the Apennines and the Tyrrhenian Sea; Phoenicians at certain points along the coast of western Sicily and in Sardinia.

4. INFLUENCES OF EXOTIC CIVILIZATIONS: PHOENICIANS, GREEKS, ETRUSCANS

From 1000 B.C. onward, Phoenician ships sailed the Mediterranean and, according to Thucydides, preceded the Greeks in frequenting the coasts of Sicily, occupying promontories and adjacent islands. However, no Phoenician traces emerged from explorations of the eastern side of Sicily, unlike the western side.

Phoenician remains are found in Malta, though not earlier than the 7th century B.C., at Motya, Solunto, and Panormo, particularly in the latter, a heavily fortified port and stronghold in the Tyrrhenian Sea for Phoenician expansion, which from Sicily spread to Sardinia. Nora appears to have been the oldest city on the island, the earliest Phoenician colony, later succeeded in importance by Cagliari. Yet Phoenician culture had little influence on Italy, lacking originality and reducing itself to a decorative repertoire drawn from Mycenaean art. Of an entirely different nature was the Greek influence, which intensified during the 8th and 7th centuries B.C. with the Hellenic colonial movement. It was the Greeks, not the Phoenicians, who transmitted to the peoples of Italy the use of writing, derived from ancient Hellenic alphabets, and, with writing, much of their knowledge in poetry, science, law, religion, and philosophy.

Magna Graecia was the name given to the vast region they occupied, comprising the southern part of the peninsula, where the principal colonies were Taranto, Sybaris, and Croton. Taranto endured the longest; Sybaris, legendary for the softness of its customs, was later subdued by Croton, famous for its athletes. In Sicily, the most notable city for its monuments was Syracuse, but Gela, Agrigento, Messina, and, further west, Segesta, Selinunte, and Himera—which Strabo considers part of Magna Graecia—should also be mentioned. On the mainland, Cumae was one of the richest, built upon a volcanic rock, a highly active port for merchants who brought Greek vases in exchange for grain; a bulwark of Italic civilization and mediator of Hellenic culture toward the peoples of central Italy. A colony of Cumae was Naples, the "new city." The rivals of the Greeks were the Carthaginians, whom only Rome would expel from Italy.

A third ethnic and cultural element, also of exotic origin, is represented by the Etruscans. While the Greeks clung to the coast, preferring the hills that jutted into the sea as a shield against the interior, where they founded colonial cities equipped with ports, the Etruscans instead entered through river mouths and valleys into the open plain, immediately penetrating the interior of the Italic region to establish a center of territorial organization, a capital. Their origin remains controversial: some argue for a transmarine origin, which is the most probable thesis; others derive them from transalpine regions, descending later from the Po Valley into Tuscany. Their language, too, remains shrouded in obscurity. The Etruscans settled particularly in the territory of the Umbrians, between the Tyrrhenian Sea, the Arno, and the Tiber, where they established themselves with a solidity unmatched elsewhere. The timing of their arrival is also uncertain: some place their Tyrrhenian beginnings around 1000 B.C., others three centuries later. The Etruscan nation experienced a magnificent and luxurious development, suggesting a highly refined and aristocratic civilization. To the 7th century B.C. belong the Tombs of the Goldsmiths, exquisitely crafted in the jewelry that adorns them, particularly the tombs along Lake Bolsena near Capodimonte. Volterra was a rich city with an extensive perimeter; it had cyclopean walls, five meters thick, with a circumference of 7 km. Etruria was a dodecapolis, a confederation of 12 cities, united by an annual gathering at a location where a common sanctuary stood.

5. THE ETRUSCAN INFLUENCE ON THE LATINS

Toward the end of the 7th century B.C., the Etruscans crossed the Tiber and besieged the first villages of Rome: this, according to legend, which concludes Rome’s monarchical period with three Etruscan kings, responsible for uniting the various villages on the left bank of the Tiber into a single city.

Built by Etruscan craftsmen was Rome’s greatest temple, dedicated to the Capitoline triad. For religion V. TURCHIA, RELIGIONE degli. The Etruscans gave the Romans and the Italic peoples not only the temple, the dwelling, and the tombs, but also the orientation of the temple and the street grid upon which houses were distributed; customs and traditions, funeral games, gladiators, symbols of power such as the fasces littorii, the construction of walls and gates, architectural and engineering arts applied to public works.

In the 6th century, expanding into Latium and toward the sea, they occupied Campania, where Capua was the principal city. Even more notable was their settlement in the Po Valley, dated around 500 B.C. The Etruscans of the Arno Valley, having crossed the Apennine passes, would have emerged into the vast plain, populating it with cities, some built on stilts: Adria, Mantua, Ravenna, Bologna, Rimini, Cesena, Modena, Parma, Piacenza. The powerful military invasion of the Gauls destroyed all the organizational work already undertaken and advanced by the Etruscans toward the Alps, thus delaying the attainment of this natural boundary by the unified peninsular peoples. On the whole, the Etruscan conquest asserted itself more in breadth than in solidity. A confederation of multiple cities, each with full autonomy, not a compact force; a system of city-states, as in Greece, not a unitary state, but small states.

Here, instead, is the work of Rome: the gradual, continuous ascent of a single city that centralizes everything around itself, with a rigidly unitary policy. This explains the disappearance of the Etruscans and the absorption of all other peoples into the great Roman structure, after the fall of the Etruscan bulwark of Veii, which stood opposite Rome on the banks of the Tiber.

6. THE HISTORICAL PROBLEM OF ITALY — Even in the most ancient times, the peoples of Italy displayed a fierce will to distinguish themselves from place to place in governance, customs, methods of labor, and funerary rites. The geographical unity was contrasted by the variety of life and peoples. The question of whether it is possible to speak of an Italian population fused by Rome through its political unification must be resolved affirmatively in the sense that Rome left Italy ethnically as it had received it from previous centuries; so much so that regional differences in dialect, customs, and somatic traits still persist in modern Italy. However, these do not negate the fundamental unitary character of Italy’s history, which was facilitated by the country’s geographical unity; by the fact that four of the most widely diffused populations within it—Italic, Greek, Celtic, and Illyrian—belong to the same Indo-European stock, while the Latins, situated at the center of the Italian region on the banks of a navigable river, at the border of the civilized peoples of Etruria and Campania, created a political system that, after subjugating these peoples, facilitated their progressive assimilation.

7. ROME AND ITS CONQUESTS

The founding of Rome is dated to 754-53 B.C. The city’s first historical period is the regal one (754-509), followed by the Republic, which lasted until 23 B.C. and constituted the most constructive epoch in Roman history. Territorial expansion was accompanied by class struggles due to economic conflicts and the plebeians’ demand for legal equality with the patricians. The conquest of Italy required nearly 300 years and was the most difficult undertaking.

The conquest of Italy increased Rome’s attraction to the Mediterranean. However, its coincidence with Carthage’s greatest power in these waters, on the western side from Spain to Sicily, made conflict between Rome and Carthage inevitable. From the Punic Wars, Rome emerged vastly enlarged territorially, dominating almost the entire Mediterranean basin on both sides. With the defeat at Zama (202 B.C.), Carthage lost Spain and Sicily. By pursuing Hannibal into the East and after victories against Antiochus, king of Syria, Rome occupied Macedonia and Greece, opening the paths to Asia. By 146 B.C., it held undisputed dominion over the Mediterranean.

The struggle waged by the Italic peoples against Rome was severe; having cooperated in its great conquests, they demanded equality with the Romans in privileges and civil rights, which were tied to the condition of Roman citizenship within Rome’s boundaries.

This was the Social War (91-88 B.C.), won by the Italic peoples, who attained the status of Roman citizens. Italy, in turn, shared the fortunes of the Empire, of which it formed the center and which it helped to establish.

8. TRANSFORMATIONS IN THE MORAL AND POLITICAL ORDER

Profound was the revolution in customs prompted by contact with the East. The Roman world began to orientalize in its way of life, undermining the advantages of Hellenic culture, which had given the Romans a sense of measure, balance, and moral harmony in art and thought.

The vastness of the frontiers increased the difficulties of defense and the occasions for war. Dangers grew by the hour, along with opportunities for military and political adventures.

Spartacus roused the masses of slaves; Mithridates, king of Pontus, stirred the East; Catiline conspired against the Senate; pirates disrupted maritime trade. Rome was already experiencing the gravity of Germanic pressure acting along the Alpine line and spilling into the Po Valley. Among military leaders, the allure of fortune and the incentives to risk fate grew. Power was no longer an element of order but the prey of ambition: Caesar and Pompey aspired to it, as had Marius and Sulla before them. While Pompey contested Mithridates for the lands of the East, Caesar subjugated Gaul, the first episode in the conquest of the Empire. The attempt at an agreement among Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus to divide command over the Republic’s lands turned into an armed conflict between the first two after Crassus’s death in a clash with the Parthians, culminating in Caesar’s victory, who thus became absolute lord of Rome.

Though he presented himself as a democratic reformer and, with his laws, defined himself as a friend of the people, his guise as an almost omnipotent dictator inspired a republican conspiracy that saw the old form of government endangered by him (March 44). But Brutus, who wished to be the defender of liberty, killed Caesar, not Caesarism. A triumvirate among Octavian, Caesar’s nephew, Antony, and Lepidus ended in the struggle between Antony and Octavian, with the latter’s affirmation after the naval victory at Actium (31 B.C.).

9. THE EMPIRE OF ROME

Octavian, while apparently restoring the Republic, gave life to a monarchical regime: the principate. The territory subject to Rome was divided into 18 provinces: ten senatorial, for which the Senate appointed proconsuls; the other eight imperial, governed directly by Augustus’s legates. The principal merit of the imperial regime was its particular attention to their conditions.

The imperial age marks the highest point of Rome’s organization at its greatest spatial, constructive, and monumental development.

From the shores of the Atlantic, the Empire extended to the regions near the Caucasus, and from the borders of the African deserts to much of Britain, leaving everywhere indelible traces of civilization with roads, bridges, aqueducts, a sense of order and discipline, the empire of law, and the unity of justice.

Even more remarkable was the rise of Christianity, which overthrew local gods, unified peoples in the worship of one God, and brought a revolution in the moral, legal, and social order of the classical world.

Octavian imposed a truce on party struggles and proclaimed the pax romana. In foreign policy, he aimed to create a frontier line to protect Romanity from barbarian invasions; but the Rhine-Danube line was not surpassed, except to acknowledge the superiority of the Germanic tribes moving beyond II.
Caesarian power reached its apogee by aligning with the absolutist traditions of the East and dissolving into a military government that, given the vastness of the borders, could scarcely sustain itself on the strength of its own army. Thus, it had to resort to the aid of barbarian elements, accepting increasingly humiliating and dangerous pacts, while Roman society slumbered in political servitude, outwardly softened by public games and masked to the eyes of the rich by the labor of an ever-growing number of slaves. Nevertheless, the Epicurean spirit spreading through Roman society did not deter the study of lofty moral problems, and culture reworked the philosophical thought of Hellas, which helped consciences better perceive the innovative force of Christianity. Poetry attained artistic dignity with the great poets of the golden age. Stoicism aided in tolerating the harshness of the political moment, preparing the soul for a resigned acceptance of tyranny itself. This tyranny sharpened under Augustus’s first successors; it was mitigated by acts of goodness, years of peace, and improvements in the condition of slaves, the poor, and orphans under the Antonine emperors.

Public offices lose their political prestige. The Romans abandon the old magistracies; civic consciousness wanes, and participation in government no longer constitutes an ambition for the citizen.

Subsequently, political-military events profoundly transform the structure of the Empire, especially following the upheavals that endangered its cohesion during the 3rd century. The division into West and East has now matured: the former of Latin language, the latter predominantly of Hellenistic language. With this, Rome ceases to be the directive center of government and administration, which for the West is temporarily shifted to Milan and Trier; Constantine in 330 founds Constantinople, the new Rome, which becomes the true capital of the East. To replenish the army, recruits from Italy are no longer sufficient; all the provinces of the Empire contribute, and even this is not enough: it becomes necessary to resort to barbarian auxiliaries who enter in troops, before assaulting the Empire in force as invaders. They already have some provinces under their guard. Theodosius must cede them some lands in the Balkans in 378 A.D., welcoming them as foederati of the Empire; the Goths mount guard on the Danube.

Indeed, these barbarians would like to prolong the life of the Empire, replacing the Germans with the Romans in the army and in the higher organs of government: thus thinks Ataulf when he marries Galla Placidia, the daughter of Theodosius. The plan fails due to the opposition of internal groups, jealous of Roman nationality, offended by foreign contacts. With the beginning of the 5th century, the Western Empire retreats to Ravenna as a safer place; in Rome remains the head of the universal Church, who, with the collapse of institutions, rises as the defender of the Italic people. Pope Leo I moves to meet the terrible Attila and obtains that he leave part of Italy unharmed, delaying its sack. But the breach is open. Rome itself is repeatedly assaulted and plundered. The barbarians no longer appear as isolated warrior bands, but as masses of people without homeland and without land who want to settle on the rich soil of the Empire.

The attempt succeeds with Odoacer, leader of the Heruli, who, having deposed Romulus Augustulus, the last emperor in the West, to whom he grants an annual pension, sends back to Constantinople the imperial insignia of the West to give concrete form to the new fact: the cessation of the direct authority of the Empire in the West (476 A.D.).

Italy has become a barbarian kingdom, which still calls itself Roman, to indicate the two types of subjection to the sovereign. Odoacer initiates the traditions of Regnum opposed to the old Imperium, but does not dare to call himself rex Italiae: with greater respect for the supremacy of the East, he calls himself rex in Italia.

The fortune of Odoacer awakens the ambitions of Theodoric, king of the Ostrogoths, who, favored by the policy of the East to weaken barbarians with other barbarians, expels Odoacer and establishes a new Kingdom in Ravenna. But in vain does he dream of placing himself in the path of Romanity and removing the contrast between the barbarian element and Roman civilization; as soon as he dies, the former attempts to stifle the latter, until the East, with Justinian (v.), regains the upper hand with the end of the Gothic wars, which sowed ruins throughout Italy. The Byzantine regime, in turn, is disrupted by the Lombard invasion (568), with which, one can say, the Middle Ages begin.

10. CHRISTIANITY IN ITALY - Rome did not intend to impose in Italy and then in the Empire its specific religious forms, nor to destroy the traditional cults and the sanctuaries of individual places with which the public manifestations of the social life of the inhabitants were closely connected. However, it was inevitable that with the prevalence of the new political systems, local religious traditions would decline: and with their progressive cessation, they would also cease to constitute a social force, reducing at most to mere personal superstitions. The common bond and mark of legitimacy became the cult of Rome and the emperor, insofar as the latter embodied the governing power; even the new priestly colleges supplanted those proper to each city or region. Soon, however, the oriental cults of Isis, Cybele, Mithras, etc., gained wide popularity among the different social classes, which the military, merchants, and slaves took care to transport everywhere, sometimes creating capricious contaminations of cults and beliefs. Against all this heterogeneous symbiosis of religious practices, which persisted in Italy until the 4th century and beyond, Christianity opposed its spiritual intransigence based on a solid structure of truth and a precise moral code. By the middle of the 1st century, it was already established in Rome and from there spread first of all in Latium and Campania. Unfortunately, almost all the details that would shed light on the subsequent phases of diffusion are lacking, especially for the regions of the South and the islands. Local traditions, though late, attempt to link the origin of their Churches with St. Peter and his immediate disciples; in any case, no appeal is made anywhere to apostles of other provenance. Naturally, the major centers in turn became centers of evangelization and organization in the surrounding cities. In this condition were especially Ravenna for Emilia, toward the end of the 2nd century, Milan for Liguria, toward the beginning of the 3rd, and a little later Aquileia for Venetia and Istria. The fact that numerous cities existed in the central regions of Italy and that they were independent of one another meant that episcopal sees were numerous from the beginning, unlike the northern regions where cities were comparatively few. In any case, it is known that in 251 about sixty bishops, if not all, at least mostly Italian, were present at a council in Rome; and since certainly not all bishops could be present, the number of sees was greater.

With this early organization, the Italian Churches survived the imperial persecutions. Even in this regard, particular details are lacking. Martyrs, numerous especially in Rome and the surrounding areas most deeply Christianized, were not absent in other regions, especially during the reign of Maximian, but there are no reliable historical sources that offer precise and certain data. With the Constantinian peace, Christianity spread in depth, and new episcopal sees were founded in all the provinces, both through the zeal of the Roman pontiffs and through the spirit of proselytism, which must have been quite lively. Nor did the Arian struggles, which certainly had their repercussions in Italy as well (it suffices to mention the Council of Rimini in 359) and particularly in Milan and Aquileia, delay the definitive consolidation of the new faith. It was especially St. Eusebius of Vercelli and later St. Ambrose of Milan who promoted the rise of new Churches; the same must have occurred through the work of the bishop of Aquileia in Venetia and the neighboring transalpine provinces. However, while throughout the early Middle Ages there was no other intermediate authority between the bishops and the pope, in cisapennine Italy, between the 4th and 5th centuries, two great metropolitan sees were established in the North: first Milan and then Aquileia. Milan became the head of Liguria and later Raetia I, Aquileia of Venetia and Istria, Raetia II, Noricum, and Upper Pannonia. Political reasons led in the 5th century...

in the latter half of the fifth century, the metropolis of Ravenna was established in Emilia for political reasons. The bishops of the three northern metropolises gathered around their metropolitans; the bishops of peninsular Italy and the islands, however, regularly convened each year around the Roman pontiff to address current needs. Only occasionally did representatives of the entire Italic episcopate gather in Rome.

The controversies concerning Pelagian doctrines had only passing repercussions among the clergy of Venezia; instead, a serious fracture emerged within the Italian episcopate in the mid-sixth century as a consequence of the condemnation of the "Three Chapters" decreed by the Council of Constantinople in 553. Believing that the work of St. Leo the Great had been undermined, the bishops of central and northern Italy protested against the Emperor and against Pope Pelagius I. The bishops of Tuscia and the Ravennate submitted. Those of the metropolises of Milan and Aquileia, however, gave rise to a schism that ended for Milan at the beginning of the seventh century but persisted for Aquileia throughout that century, giving rise to the patriarchate of Aquileia in Lombard territory and that of Grado in the region remaining under the Empire. Even with the extinction of the schism, the original unity of the metropolis could not be restored.

Alongside the definitively organized hierarchy, a new force emerged that was not independent of it but soon acquired autonomous development: monasticism. Introduced in Italy following the example of the East after the mid-fourth century, it found followers among the clergy who continued to gather around their bishop, but particularly among laymen and women, with an initially uncertain organization, oscillating between eremitic and cenobitic life—that is, communal living. It was St. Benedict of Nursia (v.) who, during the Gothic wars, from the heights of Montecassino, compiled a Regula that gave absolute preference to cenobitism by ordering communities in which, alongside prayer, work—particularly agricultural—was made obligatory. Disseminated also among the barbarian peoples, it became both a powerful reviver of spirituality amid a world threatened by brutality in hatred and moral and social misery, and a civilizing force by contributing, through labor and fraternal coexistence, to the progressive rebirth of better economic and social relations. Later, to Benedictine monasticism was added that of Eastern origin, which reached as far as Rome but had particular expansion in southern Italy and Sicily (v. DIO).

Thus organized, the Church in Italy faced the barbarian invasions and the upheaval of public institutions that followed. A new task began alongside that entrusted by its Divine Founder: to save the remnants of civilization and to support and direct its efforts toward new destinies.

11. THE MIDDLE AGES

The brief reconstitution of Italian unity, albeit under Byzantine rule with its capital at Ravenna, was completely disrupted by the invasion of the Lombards. These barbarians, having descended (568) without any imperial investiture, began on their own an enterprise that led them to establish a kingdom exclusively their own, with its capital at Pavia and two nearly autonomous appendages: the Duchies of Spoleto and Benevento, which occupied almost the entire mountainous backbone of the Apennines. But their ambition did not stop there: recovering from internal upheavals, they advanced toward the cities of Apulia and Lucania, where they encountered the Byzantines and later also the Muslims; they also aimed at conquering the cities of Campania, pressed upon Ravenna and the Pentapolis, and from Tuscia upon Rome. The Italic populations, however, despite the heresies (Monothelitism and the iconoclastic controversy) that Constantinople attempted to impose even by force, intended to remain faithful to the Empire, providing for their own defense when necessary. The Empire still represented civilization against barbarian institutions, and they did not wish these to supplant lex Romana. In this reaction, the Roman pontiffs took the lead, and not even the conversion of the Lombards altered the political-national relations with them, so much so that when the last Lombard kings, having already occupied Ravenna, thought to have Rome in their grasp, the popes, in defense of what remained of the Roman world—including the Venetian lagoons and Istria—appealed, in full agreement with the civic nobility, to the intervention of the Franks. The Eastern Empire did not oppose this intervention, thinking it could be useful to drive out barbarians with other barbarians, according to the maxim of Byzantine policy. But Charlemagne, who led the Franks into Italy in 773, disposed otherwise: he proclaimed himself king of the Lombards, that is, of the northern Kingdom and the two Duchies, and assured the Roman See of the instituta sancti Petri—the lands that the Lombards had not yet firmly occupied—while the Byzantines retained in the south the regions still subject to their rule. On Christmas Day in the year 800, Pope Leo III, evidently obeying a classical tradition, reconstituted the Western Empire with Charlemagne, with the concept of having a qualified defender for Rome and the Western Church, which at that moment was almost entirely comprised within his dominion. He, now king of the Lombards, became Roman emperor (a title that would last until the dawn of the nineteenth century), but precisely in Rome and its dependencies he was not truly sovereign, and his authority clashed with that of the Pope. This was certainly not without conflict for him and his successors. Thus began a brilliant, if brief, period during which feudalism matured, great lay principalities and later also ecclesiastical ones were constituted, and the great monasteries founded everywhere extended their influence. An unshakable principle emerged: only Catholicism, guided by the pontiff, was to govern consciences, inform laws, correct customs, and direct the conversion of the infidels.

A new surge of barbarism, due to the decline of Frankish rule and the invasion of the Hungarians, raged during the brief period of national kings; while

The Muslim conquest of Sicily saw them infiltrate the entire peninsula, and it was only with great difficulty that they were held at bay and eventually expelled. The great feudal lords, divided among themselves, sought to wrest privileges from the sovereign and render themselves as independent as possible. However, by weakening the sovereign power, they also weakened themselves, both against the common enemy and against their own subjects, who began to do to them what they had done to the sovereign—fragmenting possession (which was a good thing), but also fragmenting power, increasing arbitrariness, and often setting land against land, castle against castle. Bishoprics and monasteries, by receiving land donations and accumulating exemptions and privileges, also became secularized entities within this fragmentation of powers. They surrounded themselves with vassals and replaced counts in the dominion over cities. This was already occurring by the end of the 9th century with the bishops of Parma, Reggio, Arezzo, Trento, Novara, Vercelli, and Aquileia. Other sees, such as Milan, while not directly dominating the cities, held extensive control over castles, valleys, rivers, and so on. The Abbey of Farfa (like that of Montecassino in the south) wielded such power that it dared to challenge even Rome. All this gradually drew prelates into the orbit of the sovereign, to whom they were bound to render service and oath and from whom they received investiture of the fiefs annexed to their office, creating an easy confusion between the spiritual and the temporal. This, in turn, led sovereigns and princes to interfere in the internal affairs of the Church, to appoint bishops and abbots at their own discretion, and to demand tithes for themselves. Ancient legal systems and concepts declined, and high ecclesiastical offices were too often entrusted to rough men of arms and ambitious courtiers, willing to squander ecclesiastical patrimony for the benefit of partisans and vassals, with little concern for ecclesiastical discipline. Simony became commonplace, and even relations with the supreme ecclesiastical authority risked bending before the greed of great urban families and the pressure of the feudal world that permeated all active forces, both religious and national.

With the Saxon dynasty, the Holy Roman Empire was reconstituted, now in the service of the German nation, and it included the Kingdom of Italy in the north. However, those sovereigns vainly attempted to assert their power over the south, which remained far less influenced by feudal structures. Freeing themselves from feudal constraints and creating new, more civil relationships would henceforth be the aim of both the pontiffs and the Italian population, animated by new spirits and forces. The former, more conscious and programmatic, found its strength in the spiritual awakening largely due to the great monastic reforms that followed one another until culminating in the Franciscan movement, which arose in Italy at the beginning of the 13th century, and the Dominican movement, which found its most favorable environment in Italy. Both achieved complete independence from the feudal system. When feudalism was at its peak (mid-11th century), the moral reform of the Church gained strength. Under Gregory VII, this reform also took on a legal aspect in the Investiture Controversy, which lasted half a century and resulted in a clearer definition of the Church’s freedom and rights. This struggle had its dramatic episodes in Italy, and the emperors of the Franconian house vainly expended their best forces there. Meanwhile, the Normans succeeded in forming a solid unitary kingdom in southern Italy, soon adding Sicily, reconquered from the Muslims, and triumphing over the various regional elements that had kept the country divided. The papacy maintained its dominion in central Italy, far more lenient and less organic than that of the Normans.

In the north, more dramatic and complicated events unfolded, in which ecclesiastical reform proceeded alongside popular movements of both social and political character. Multiple forces shaped a new era, rich with future promise: the maritime cities—Venice, Genoa, Pisa, Amalfi—had the Mediterranean as their field of action and, under the pressure of a freer and broader economy, tended to become independent republics with their own commercial spheres of exploitation. In the inland cities, thanks to specialized crafts, astute monetary exchange, a shrewd bourgeoisie, and industries, the Commune organized itself socially and politically above the power of the bishop and in opposition to the feudal lords of the countryside.

The city rejected the old tributes to the transalpine Caesar with lordly pride and repelled his envoys as elements foreign to Italy. Conflict erupted between the cities, which aspired to their own life, and the Swabian emperors, who sought to keep them within their orbit of servitude. Supported by the Church, which aimed to make the freedom won in the Investiture Controversy more solid and effective, the cities formed leagues, strengthened themselves with the new motto "libertas," and inscribed the new law of Italy in their municipal statutes. The Empire was defeated. The victory of Legnano removed the obstacles to the development of the Commune, an Italian creation and architect of all future history.

The Commune was an expansive force: it conquered the countryside, subdued rural feudalism, dominated the great trade routes, created ever-larger political and economic unities around itself, and prepared the modern state. It had its own finances, its own army, and where possible, a merchant fleet. It organized military leagues, fought other Communes, and dreamed of broad dominion. The demands of war centralized power, stifled democratic forms, and paved the way for small and large local and regional dictatorships.

From this arose broader and more complex organisms—lordships and principalities—which gave rise to the problem of a more unitary and secure political order in the peninsula. Some attempted a federal solution (such was the idea of Cola di Rienzo), others a unitary one, with Gian Galeazzo Visconti in Milan and Ladislaus, King of Naples. Vain hopes, nullified by mutual jealousies, habits of local freedom, the immaturity of national consciousness, and even more by the balance of power among those who aspired to establish a great kingdom, so that the attempts of one side were paralyzed by those of the other. Unity appeared as a danger to freedom. Under such conditions, it was only possible to arrive at a system of political equilibrium, which only the personal prestige of Lorenzo the Magnificent managed to prolong.

But such an equilibrium, sustained by small expedients and deceptive compromises, could not produce lasting agreements. None of the contracting states—Milan, Venice, Florence, Naples—was willing to renounce its autonomy and remained distrustful of the others. When the great European monarchies, France and Spain, militarily stronger and advancing alleged rights, sent their armies into the peninsula, Italy found a collective force of resistance too late, and the country lost its freedom.

Studi: F. Dahn, Urgeschichte der germanischen und romanischen Völker, 4 voll., Berlino 1881-98; F. Gregorovius, Storia della Città di Roma nel Medio-Evo, 4 voll., tre net. Roma 1900; F. Chalandon, Histoire de la domination Normande en Italie et en Sicile, Parigi 1907; L. Halphen, Etudes sur l'administration de Rome au Moyen âge (351-1755), Parigi 1907; L. M. Hartmann, Geschichte Italiens im Mittelalter, 3 voll., Gotha-Lipsia 1897-1911; L. Duchesne, Les premiers temps de l'Etat Pontifical, Parigi 1911; L. Fliche, La Réforme Grégorienne, 2 voll., Lovanio 1924-25; F. Schneider,

Rom und Romgedanke im Mittelalter, Monaco 1926; H. Grisar, Roma alla fine del mondo antico, 2 voll., 2ª ed., Roma 1931; G. Volpe, Il Medioevo, 2ª ed., Firenze 1932; R. Morghen, La concezione dell'Impero romano-germanico e la tradizione di Roma da Carlo Magno a Federico II, in Rend. Acc. Lincei, sess. VI, vol. XIII, 1936; E. Jordan, L'Allemagne et l'Italie au XIIe et XIIIe siècles, Parigi 1939; G. Romano-A. Solmi, Le dominazioni barbariche in I. (393-888), 3ª ed., Milano 1940; L. Salvatorelli, L'I. comunale dagli inizi del sec. XI alla metà del sec. XIV, 2 voll., ivi 1940; E. Garin, Il Rinascimento italiano, Milano 1941; G. Falco, La Santa Romana Repubblica. Profilo storico del Medio Evo, Napoli 1942; E. Dupré Theseider, L'idea imperiale di Roma nella tradizione del Medioevo, Milano 1942; L. Sorrento, Medievalia, Brescia 1943; Ch. Petit-Dutaillis e P. Guinard, L'Essor des états d'Occident, 2ª ed., Parigi 1944; P. Brezzi, Roma e l'Impero medievale, Bologna 1948; N. Valeri, L'I. nell'età dei Principati, Milano 1949; L. Salvatorelli, I. medievale, Milano s. d.; R. Cessi, Regnum ed Imperium in I., Bologna 1949; G. Fasoli, I Re d'I., Firenze 1949; G. Mollat, Les Popes d'Avignon, 10ª ed., Parigi 1950; L. Simeoni, Le Signorie, Milano 1950.

12. ETÀ MODERNA E CONTEMPORANEA

a) La conquista dell'I. — «Anno 1494: anno infelicissimo, anno primo degli anni miserabili», scriveva il Guicciardini, pur non celando il suo grande stupore per la ricchezza delle nostre città: robuste come organismi economici, masstre di arte e di scienza, centri cospicui di un nuovo movimento di civiltà, animate dalla protezione di pontefici e di signori.

Il contrasto che turbava Guicciardini era nell'esistenza di una superiorità civile dell'I., compromessa nel momento in cui l'I. stessa stava per divenire la più ambita preda delle grandi monarchie d'Europa, forti della propria unità politica.

L'I. è una costellazione di cinque maggiori Stati che faticosamente si bilanciano: Milano, Venezia, Firenze, Roma, Napoli; pure indipendenti sono alcuni Stati minori: Savoia, Mantova, Ferrara, Saluzzo, Modena, Genova; la Sicilia e la Sardegna, sono alla dipendenza degli Aragonesi di Spagna.

Frantumata e perciò debole, logorata da gelosie interne, incapace di accordi durevoli, l'I. diventa l'oggetto comune delle ambizioni delle giovani potenze, poiché l. vuol dire il più ricco tesoro di beni e di fortune mediterranee, strada aperta verso l'Asia e verso l'Africa; con numerosi porti, naviglio mercantile o da guerra, ricchezza bancaria e industriale, robusta riserva di uomini, di armi e di vettovaglie. Dapprima Francia e Spagna, poi Impero, Svizzera, Turchi, si prefiggono la conquista dell'I. o di una parte di essa.

b) Tentativi di re francesi. — La Francia elabora una politica italiana invocando vecchi diritti sulla Lombardia e sul Regno di Napoli, senza pensare più all'altra sponda. Abbandona le sue aspirazioni sull'Inghilterra: rinuncia anche alla espansione verso le Fiandre, la Germania e la Spagna per avere l'I. Carlo VIII, sebbene abbia preso il titolo di «re di Sicilia e di Gerusalemme», non aspira che al Regno di Napoli, quale erede degli Angioini.

Il suo governo disapprova questa guerra: non vede quale sicurezza possa dare una terra tanto distante. Ma il suo amore di avventura lo sollecita come lo sollecita Ludovico il Moro, usurpatore di Gian Galeazzo e imparentato con il Re di Napoli; ancora più lo sospingono alla conquista i baroni napoletani, in conflitto con la corona. L'impresa non incontra resistenza per la superiorità dell'artiglieria di Carlo VIII. Valicato il Moncenisio nel sett. 1494, egli passa a Milano avendo ottenuto promessa di libero passaggio dal Duca, e si dirige verso Firenze; Pietro de' Medici, figlio di Lorenzo il Magnifico, gli fa omaggio, ma è costretto a lasciare la sua città dove il popolo è in fermento. Quando il Re vuol imporre alla Repubblica odiosi patti, si trova di fronte la minaccia di Pier Capponi e desiste dalle pretese. A Roma costringe ad accordi Alessandro VI. Il 22 febbr. dell'anno dopo entra in Napoli festeggiato dai baroni e prende possesso del reame. Al fulmineo successo delle armi francesi risponde tosto una coalizione fra Spagna, Casa d'Austria,

Venezia, Milano ed Alessandro VI: inizio di una politica di alleanza che nasce intorno al problema italiano; Carlo VIII, sopraffatto dalle forze della lega, si apre a stento un passaggio a Fornovo (6 luglio 1495) e ripara in Francia.

Nel 1498, moriva Carlo VIII senza discendenti. Gli succedeva il cugino Luigi XII (1498-1515) della Casa Valois d'Orléans. Già signore di Asti in I., assunse il titolo di re delle Due Sicilie e di duca di Milano, pretendendo al Milanese come erede di Valentina Visconti, figlia di Gian Galeazzo. Egli si alleò con Venezia, a cui promise Cremona e Ghiaradadda, e affidò a Gian Giacomo Trivulzio, milanese, il comando delle sue truppe. Il Moro fuggì in Germania; ivi raccolse forze ma fu sconfitto a Novara e condotto in Francia dove finì i suoi giorni prigioniero. Luigi XII rimase signore di Milano. Di là, aggregatosi Cesare Borgia, il figlio di Alessandro VI che si era creato una propria signoria con alcune città delle Marche e di Romagna, mosse alla conquista di Napoli. Segreti accordi con Ferdinando di Aragona re di Spagna e di Sicilia, per una ripartizione del Regno, lo esposero a litigi per questioni di confini che gli costarono la rinuncia al Regno (1504). Napoli diventa, con la Sicilia, una provincia del Regno di Spagna.

I Veneziani, cresciuti in potenza con l'acquisto di Cremona, della Ghiaradadda e di alcuni porti delle Puglie e di città in Romagna, sembravano in procinto di avere in loro balia la penisola, per cui Machiavelli scriveva: «O la sarà una porta che aprirà loro tutta I. o le fia la rovina loro».

Upon the death of Alexander VI in 1503, Julius II ascended to the papal throne. To reclaim the cities of Romagna that had been occupied from him, he joined the League of Cambrai with the German Caesar, France, and Spain against Venice (1508). Defeated at Agnadello (1509), Venice relinquished its new possessions to the Pope and the King of Spain. Julius II then sought to expel the French from Italy by forming another league, known as the Holy League (8 October 1519). It included the Spanish, the Imperials, alongside the English, and later the Swiss and even the Republic of Venice. The peninsula was once again reshaped. Massimiliano Sforza, son of il Moro, received the Duchy of Milan. The Republic of Florence, which had sided with the French, was overthrown and fell back into the hands of the Medici (August 1512). Parma and Piacenza were ceded to Pope Julius II; the Swiss took Locarno and the Valtellina.

In 1515, Francis I, succeeding his cousin Louis XII on the French throne (1515-47), reclaimed the Milanese with the Battle of Marignano (13-14 September) and subdued Genoa.

c) The contest between France and Spain. — The following year, Ferdinand the Catholic, King of Spain, was succeeded by his sixteen-year-old grandson, who three years later, in competition with Francis I, was elected Emperor. The vastness of the domains that Charles V inherited with the dual crowns of Spain and Germany encircled France on all sides, while his overseas possessions seemed to confer upon him a global sovereignty. Francis I dared to challenge such power, and the struggle, fought in Italy and France with the involvement of the major states, lasted 39 years: from 1520 to 1559, mostly to the disadvantage of the French, and brought profound upheavals to the territorial system of the peninsula. Francis I began the war in 1521. A Hispano-German army conquered Milan. The Swiss, in the service of France, attacked the Imperial army near Milan, at La Bicocca, but were defeated; Genoa was also taken from France, and Lombardy was given to Francesco II Sforza, brother of Massimiliano. Francis I descended from France into Italy via Mont Cenis and reoccupied Milan (October 1524). Charles's troops retreated within Pavia, which was besieged by the French. After four months of siege, a pitched battle was fought (24 February 1525), disastrous for Francis I, who was captured and taken to Madrid. All was lost. The Italian states sensed the danger of Habsburg power and aligned themselves with France (August 1525), followed by England, which also participated in Italian politics.

Once freed, Francis I once again became the center of a league against the Imperials, together with Pope Clement VII, the Venetians, the Florentines, and the Sforza. Once more, the Pope appeared as the liberator of Italy. But the league's troops met with no fortune. Rome was assaulted and sacked by the Landsknechts (1527); the Pope, having taken refuge in Castel Sant'Angelo, after nine months ransomed his city with money; meanwhile, plague desolated Italy, poverty and dissolution afflicted all, from peasants to artists, scattered and exiled. A brief truce marked by the Peace of Cambrai (1529) restored the Sforza to Milan and the Medici to Florence, while Charles V, lord of Naples, received the imperial crown in Bologna (21 February 1530). Florence, where the republic had been restored in 1527, attempted to resist the return of the Medici and withstood a ten-month siege by the Imperials, defended by Michelangelo's fortifications. In August, it surrendered, and the Medici returned, remaining until 1737.

The sack of Rome and the capitulation of Florence close the golden age of the Renaissance. In 1520, Raphael died; a year later, Leonardo; in 1527, Machiavelli; in 1533, Ariosto; the following year, Correggio; in 1531, Andrea del Sarto. Writers and artists moved to foreign courts, spreading the light of their genius. The Italian Renaissance became European, while it declined in its land of origin. The age of the Reformation began.

After Luther's triumphs in Germany, the Council of Trent opened in 1545 (v. TRENTO, CONCILIO di).

Meanwhile, in 1536, the conflict resumed. Without a declaration of war, Francis I, with unjustified violence, entered Turin on 3 April, considering it a base for Imperial resistance and a new starting point for the conquest of Lombardy: Piedmont remained in Francis's possession for 23 years.

In 1536, Charles V abdicated, leaving the Empire to his brother Ferdinand I and the Spanish dominions to his son Philip II; the House of Austria was no longer a single bloc but was divided into the Austrian and Spanish branches. The war continued, reaching its sixth resumption. Henry II, succeeding his father Francis I in 1547, renewed the past hostility, but for a shorter time and with adverse fortune. Philip II opened the way to Paris with the Battle of Saint-Quentin (August 1557). The peace treaty concluded at Cateau-Cambrésis (1559) affirmed Spanish predominance in Italy: Lombardy, Naples, Sicily, Sardinia, and the State of the Presidi (fortresses on the Tyrrhenian Sea) remained in Spanish possession for a century and a half. Piedmont was partly returned to the Savoy, in the person of Emanuele Filiberto, the combatant of Saint-Quentin with the Imperials. The Duchy of Florence, soon to become a grand duchy, remained with the Medici, enlarged with the territory of Siena.

d) Spanish period: activity and passivity. — This period of war was not entirely passive for Italy. It lost men, lands, and arms, but never lost the prestige of its intellectual superiority.

The new order represented progress: it offered greater political homogeneity by gathering more lands under the same state authority.

The regression occurred in economic and civil life, as well as in industrial and agricultural production; the best minds went into exile, the nobility withdrew from customary activities, the bourgeoisie was stifled by foreign competition and the shift of trade to transoceanic routes, from which it was excluded. Yet not everywhere was life miserable and provincial; that part of Italy still free from foreign domination re-entered great politics, resumed the old contest between France and Spain, and seized every new opportunity to pursue an autonomous policy. Through Piedmont, Italy ceased to be a passive element in European politics. Already with Emanuele Filiberto, it exerted its weight on Europe's destiny; he regarded his state as "the bulwark of Italy," sought an outlet to the sea by purchasing Oneglia, and imposed the use of the Italian language in public acts. Even more decisively Italian was the diplomatic and military activity of Carlo Emanuele, who attempted a joint action with Henry IV of France to shake off Habsburg hegemony. He pressed more on the Po Valley than on transalpine possessions, aiming at Milan; he targeted Genoa, which resisted, but succeeded in acquiring Finale; he obtained from Henry IV the Marquisate of Saluzzo and possessions in French territory. He fought twice to gain Monferrato and opposed Habsburg settlement in the Valtellina. Great politics also attracted Venice. It showed signs of strong vitality in the struggle against the Turks at Lepanto (1572), in the defense, though ruinous, of Cyprus and Candia, and in the occupation of the Peloponnese, which it held from 1699 to 1718.

Tuscany made great efforts to escape the common danger of decline, and under Grand Duke Cosimo I (1537-1574) and later Ferdinand I (1587-1609), it experienced moments of commercial and port flourishing. The Papal States, which divided the Spanish dominions of the north from those of the south, acted as a brake on the expansion of Madrid's power. Entirely devoted to the restoration of Catholicism, it rediscovered the forces of order and discipline that had made the papacy great in the Middle Ages and benefited from the Council of Trent (1545-63), the Society of Jesus, other Orders and Congregations, and the Supreme Tribunal of the Inquisition in Rome for a systematic struggle against heresy, which had also appeared threateningly in Italy.

GIOVANNI SORANZO

Italy contributed daily to this work of religious restoration and lived in solidarity with the Church, refusing to adhere to Protestantism. While the papacy nurtured the ideal of a Christian humanism that, unlike the old humanism, did not sacrifice the cult of virtue to that of art, the leaders of the Catholic Reformation placed moral perfection above all other perfections, achieving prodigies of Christian spirituality that flowed into religious and civil works, unmatched by Lutheran leaders: schools, orphanages, hospitals, oratories for children, colonies of missionaries in distant lands, and so on.

e) Italy and the Wars of Succession. — Italy’s internal situation changed radically with the three Wars of Succession: Spanish, Polish, and Austrian. The first, concluded with the Treaties of Utrecht (1713) and Rastatt (1714), stripped Spain of its Italian possessions and assigned Austria the Duchy of Milan, along with the Mantuan territories taken from the Gonzaga, enemies of the Empire, as well as Naples and Sardinia. It granted Sicily to Vittorio Amedeo II with the royal title. The second war (Peace of Vienna, 1718) assigned Tuscany to the Duke of Lorraine, Francesco Stefano, following the extinction of the Medici with Gian Gastone; it took Naples and Sicily from Austria and transferred them to Don Carlo of Bourbon, leaving Austria with Milan, Parma, and Piacenza. It assigned Novara and Tortona to the King of Piedmont, Carlo Emanuele III. The Peace of Aachen (1748), which concluded the third war, reduced Austria’s Italian dominion to Lombardy alone, while the Savoyard Kingdom expanded to the Ticino, including the upper Novarese and the Oltrepò Pavese.

These wars found Piedmont prepared to exploit the old Franco-Habsburg dualism and to seek foreign support to connect with European forces and actively enter international life.

Between the first and second wars occurred the adventure of Giulio Alberoni, the cardinal who served as prime minister at the court of Madrid, with his grand plan to strip Austria of its Italian provinces and grant them to the sons of Elisabetta Farnese, whom he had married to Philip V of Spain. The outcome was unfortunate: Alberoni was dismissed.

Vittorio Amedeo had to accept Sardinia in exchange for Sicily, ceded to Austria. In the War of the Polish Succession, Carlo Emanuele III of Savoy took up arms with the promise of Milan, which was later denied and reduced to the handover of a few cities.

In the third, Austrian war, the same king renewed his collaboration with the same stake of Milan, which he occupied for a few months before advancing further after the brilliant victory at the Assietta (1747). A year earlier, Genoa had expelled the Austrians who had entered Liguria.

f) The Reformist Period. — And now, fifty years of peace. The territorial situation remained unchanged, except for the loss of Corsica, which Genoa sold to France in 1768 to free itself from the island’s constant unrest. This peace was fertile with ideal and real advancements. No longer the movement of armies, but of thought: the study of economic and administrative problems; the examination of Italy’s problem. The necessity of a free Italy began to emerge, one that could stand alongside Europe’s great powers. Muratori presented Italy’s history in an organic body. Vico upheld the intimate autonomy in the development of peoples, within eternal rules.

Parini deplored the idleness of the nobility; Alfieri, Italy’s servility; Genovesi, its economic disunion; Baretti, its political division; Verri, the hindrance of internal barriers; Filangieri, the lack of colonies on the opposite shore; Beccaria, the inhumanity of penal law and the monopoly of labor. Philosophers and men of letters urged Italy’s governments to implement reforms that would increase industrial and agricultural production, reduce class privileges, equalize the clergy’s tax obligations with those of the laity, free lands from mortmain, and liberate labor from the shackles of medieval corporatism. Reforms were also sought to favor trade through road systems and inland navigation. The inferiority of small states within a provincial economy was keenly felt. Italy began to be considered on a plane of national interests: thus emerged Galeani Napione’s 1780 project for a federal unitary organization of the peninsula, for a military and commercial agreement among all its states. He invoked Rome’s moral influence and hoped for the effective primacy of the Savoy. The first great idea of national collaboration, with the pope as supreme moderator of a Savoyard policy on a vast scale.

During these fifty years of peace, cultured Italy also benefited by favorably welcoming doctrinal innovations that would mature with the French Revolution.

Indeed, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was received with enthusiasm in the philosophical circles and Masonic lodges of Italy: it fostered the formation of a democratic, republican party—unitary according to some, federal according to others. The principle of popular sovereignty was equally embraced, its significance appreciated as a public affirmation of the right to independence from foreign domination. It gave rise to "patriotism," no longer local or cultural, but national and democratic.

ITALIA - Prehistoric caves on the banks of the Gravina torrent - Matera.

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

Naples, etc. To these are added the correspondence of illustrious figures, diplomatic reports, political speeches, papal bulls, and so on. Yet not all that has been printed has received an adequate edition. Pastor: C. Morandi, Idee e formazioni politiche in Lombardia dal 1748 al 1814, Turin 1927; N. Cortese, Stato ed ideali politici nell'Italia meridionale nel '700, Bari 1927; C. A. Jemolo, Il giansenismo in Italia prima della rivoluzione, ibid. 1928; B. Croce, Storia dell'età barocca, ibid. 1929; A. Anzilotti, Movimenti e contrasti per l'unità italiana, ibid. 1930; F. Valsecchi, L'assolutismo illuminato in Austria ed in Lombardia, Bologna 1931; E. Fueter, Storia del sistema degli Stati europei dal 1490 al 1559, Florence 1932; E. Walser, Gesammelte Studien zur Geistesgeschichte der Renaissance, Basel 1932; A. Fanfani, Le origini dello spirito capitalistico in Italia, Milan 1933; F. C. Church, I riformatori italiani, Italian trans., Florence 1935; F. Chabod, Per la storia religiosa dello Stato di Milano durante il dominio di Carlo V in Lombardia, Bologna 1938; D. Cantimori, Eretici italiani del Cinquecento, Florence 1939; P. Paschini, Roma nel Rinascimento, ibid. 1940; G. Toffanin, Storia dell'Umanesimo, Bologna 1943; E. Pontieri, Il tramonto del baronaggio siciliano, Florence 1943; E. Dammig, Il movimento giansenista a Roma nella seconda metà del sec. XVIII, Vatican City 1945; H. Jedin, Katholische Reformation oder Gegenreformation?, Lucerne 1946; E. Codignola, Illuministi, giansenisti e giacobini nell'Italia del Settecento, Florence 1947; M. Petrocchi, La controriforma in Italia, Rome 1947; H. Jedin, Storia del Concilio di Trento, Brescia 1949; F. Chabod, Gli studi di storia del Rinascimento, in Cinquanta anni di vita intellettuale, Naples 1950, pp. 125-207; P. Tacchi Venturi, Storia della Compagnia di Gesù in Italia, Rome 1950; M. Petrocchi, Il tramonto della Repubblica di Venezia e l'assolutismo illuminato, Venice 1950.

g) The French period. - Masonic lodges are converted into Jacobin clubs. Legal reformism gives way to revolutionary agitation. The new ideas already have their advocates in Naples (1794), Palermo (1795), and Bologna (1794). Napoleon crosses the Alps in 1796 with promises of freedom. The party of innovators, flattered and credulous, facilitates his march. He comes to fight Austria in the Po Valley to open the way to Vienna through the Alpine passes.

King Victor Amadeus III of Sardinia accepts the war by joining the First Coalition alongside Austria and becomes its first victim.

Bonaparte, having defeated the Austro-Sardinians at Montenotte and Millesimo, forces Victor Amadeus III to cede the county of Nice and Savoy, the fortresses of Cuneo, Tortona, and Alessandria. Piedmont becomes a free transit route for the French. Bonaparte enters Milan on 12 May 1796 and advances on Mantua, which capitulates in January 1797.

This first war against Austria ends with the Treaty of Campoformio, which grants Venice to Austria in exchange for Belgium to France. Napoleon continues the campaign in Italy to conquer the entire peninsula, also targeting Rome.

Pius VI has disavowed those French priests who had sworn allegiance to the Republic: for this reason, France considers the Holy See hostile. The Italian populace is also hostile. The victories of the sans-culottes indeed provoke a conservative response in rural and urban uprisings that seek to defend their traditions and their Church; the most notorious were the Veronese Easter, on the anniversary of the Sicilian Vespers.

Bonaparte encourages the innovators to rise against the old governments and establishes an Italic Legion, to which the tricolour flag is entrusted. The ancien régime falls everywhere. Regional republics emerge, Italian in name but protected by French military commands and Bonaparte’s delegates. Thus arises the Cispadane Confederation (7 January 1797: Parma, Modena, Ferrara, Reggio), which, enlarged by Lombardy, becomes the Cisalpine Republic (18 July 1797); then others of the same mould, the Ligurian, the Roman, with the arrest of the Pope (taken prisoner to France), and then the Parthenopean (24 January 1799), provoked by Ferdinand IV’s futile intervention to restore the Papal States; likewise Tuscany, transformed into the Etruscan Republic; and finally the Kingdom of Sardinia, where Charles Emmanuel IV, having succeeded Victor Amadeus III, was forced to renounce Piedmont in favour of France, withdrawing to Sardinia, just as Ferdinand of Naples had withdrawn to Sicily.

Napoleon’s temporary absence from Europe, due to the Egyptian campaign, brings the Austrians back to Italy with the support of the Russians (1799). This is the reaction of the thirteen months; the republics fall, and the former kingdoms are restored. But with Napoleon’s return, another upheaval occurs. The victory at Marengo secures Piedmont and Lombardy for him. The former is incorporated with Genoa into France, while the latter revives the Cisalpine Republic, which shortly thereafter, after the assemblies in Lyon, takes the name of the Italian Republic. Tuscany, along with the Presidi State, becomes the Kingdom of Etruria for Louis I, son-in-law of the King of Spain, in exchange for Parma and Piacenza: the Pope and Ferdinand IV return to their states.

The development of French imperialism, aimed at the conquest of Europe, once again alters the map of Italy. The Italian Republic becomes the Kingdom of Italy (1805): viceroy is Napoleon’s stepson, Eugène de Beauharnais, but with the addition of Parma, while Genoa is annexed to France. In 1806 the Kingdom is enlarged with Venice, but its dominions on the other shore are annexed to France under the name of Illyrian Provinces.

In 1807 Tuscany and Parma become departments of France, and Florence becomes the capital and court seat for Elisa Baciocchi, Napoleon’s sister.

In 1808 the Kingdom of Italy was enlarged with the addition of the Marches to establish more direct communication with the Kingdom of Naples, which passed from Ferdinand of Bourbon to Joseph Bonaparte; the latter, having been made King of Spain, ceded it to Joachim Murat. On 17 May 1809 Rome was declared a city of the Empire and the entire remaining Papal territory became French territory. Pius VII was deported to Savona.

In 1810 the Kingdom of Italy further acquired Trentino and Alto Adige up to the pass of Bressanone. But shortly thereafter everything collapsed along with Napoleon's fortune. Of the Napoleonic rulers, in 1814 only Murat remained in Italy: but he vainly attempted with the Proclamation of Rimini (March 1815) to retain the Kingdom, which was retaken by Ferdinand IV.
The Austrians entered Milan on 30 May 1814.

h) Restoration and liberal ferment. - The Congress of Vienna decided the new fate of Italy with the final act of 9 June 1815; the Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia was given to Austria; Genoa was added to Piedmont; Modena and Reggio passed to an Austrian archduke, Francis IV of Este; the Grand Duchy of Tuscany to Ferdinand III of Lorraine; the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies to Ferdinand I of Bourbon, formerly Ferdinand IV. The Pope was reinstated in his domains, while Austria maintained a garrison in Ferrara and sought to direct Italian politics.

The following years were marked by continuous ferment of innovative ideas and preparatory work for national resurgence. The impetus was still the Napoleonic experience. Twenty years of Italo-French contacts had passed, fruitful even in their daily frictions.

The harsh experience tempered the initial illusions. The belief began to take hold not in granted freedom, but in earned freedom. The anti-Napoleonic movements, prepared by a secret society called the Raggi, a prelude to the Carbonari, and the famous attempt by the Cisalpine general Lahoz to give Alfieri's anti-French sentiment the eloquence of arms, had already tested the national conscience, trained in the insurrectionary proclamations of Bonaparte himself. Italy now continued on that path, making use of the positive results of French domination. If France had given a vain illusion of political freedom, it had nevertheless, if only formally, promoted the exercise of a certain civil and administrative freedom.

Thus Italy resumed the work interrupted by the Congress of Vienna, but with its own initiatives. Here is the first Risorgimento, with the same men of yesterday, the former Italian officers of Napoleon. The ideal of independence, which conspired in societies, erupted in the constitutional movements of 1820-21 and then of 1830-31, which were erroneously hoped to be coordinated with foreign insurrections, first in Spain, then in France. Austria suppressed them at birth. The last Carbonari movement, which broke out in 1831 in Modena, was crushed by Duke Francis IV.
Amid these struggles, Mazzinianism emerged with the new principle: the unitary Republic. Means of action: Italian initiative, popular intervention, the conception of life as a battle, acceptance of trial as a means of resurgence, harmony between thought and action. Immediate goal: the freedom of Italy, but as an essential condition for the freedom of Europe and the world. Ultimate goal: Rome as the seat of a theocratic-laic council of peoples for a fraternity without borders and without distinctions of race. Instruments of propaganda: Young Italy, which was both an association and a newspaper.

The revolutionary idea gained ground, but G. Mazzini's activism resulted in a vain sacrifice of young lives. Criticism of Mazzinianism arose, as it had done toward the Carbonari. Other means were sought. Vincenzo Gioberti looked to the Church. With his Primato degli Italiani (1843), he sought to prepare Italy for a pontiff who would inspire the national revolution, drawing from Italy's history the tradition of a papacy always allied with the Italian cause. This was the historical premise of the neo-Guelph party; the Italian expression of a European movement, Catholic-liberal romanticism. Chateaubriand had written some twenty years earlier: «Le arti italiane ebbero Leone X; non potrebbe avere un altro Leone l'italiana libertà?». Mazzini trusted in the people. Now trust was placed in the Pope and the princes. Massimo D'Azeglio (1846) condemned insurrectionary movements and advocated the need to create a national public opinion around Italy's economic problems to stimulate governmental action in a liberal direction and to foster agreement between princes and people.

The election of Pius IX (1846) seemed to fulfill these aspirations. He initiated the Risorgimento on the terrain of legality and state action. His reforms found the princes of Italy willing to be equally reformist. Public opinion called for a constitution. It was awaited in the name of the new Pontiff, who uttered the fateful cry: «Benedite Gran Dio l'I.». Pius IX became a symbol. When Vienna rose up, stirred by the revolution in Paris, Milan revolted and fought its Five Days to expel Radetzky's Austrians. Venice, too, was in flames. Piedmont's intervention was invoked, and Charles Albert decided on war. On 27 March 1848 he crossed the Ticino and advanced beyond the Mincio. The first war of independence, with military contingents arriving from every state of the peninsula, in fact also from the Papal States, along with numerous volunteers, had a promising beginning at Goito and Peschiera, but an unfortunate end at Custoza (23-25 July). The princes' abandonment, made wary by the fact that Piedmont did not wish to form a federal league, led to dissolution. Radetzky re-entered Milan on 6 August, and Charles Albert returned to Piedmont. The following year, Charles Albert, believing the trial renewed, was again defeated at Novara (23 March 1849). He abdicated in favor of his son Victor Emmanuel II and went into exile in Oporto, where he died on 28 July.

Neo-Guelphism did not fare well, both because of the failed agreement among the princes—fearing Piedmont's supremacy—and because of the subversive maneuvers of the Mazzinian extremists. After 1849, conspiracies resumed.

i) Cavour and Piedmont. — But the Italian question was taken up and monopolized by Piedmont, and it was illuminated by Cavour, who looked to Paris and London. And from those capitals, Turin was also observed. The understanding came about over the Crimean War. Piedmont, requested for aid, participated alongside the Franco-British against Russia. At the peace congress in Paris, Cavour gathered the first international sympathies. These were the first fruits of European liberal politics. Then came the meeting with Napoleon III at Plombières and the commitment to French collaboration in the war against Austria. The second war of independence (1859) was swift, from Magenta to Solferino. Lombardy was independent; however, Venetia remained Austrian. But Cavour reaped a broader harvest. He incited the populations of central Italy (Modena, Parma, Bologna, Tuscany) to rise up. He annexed their territories by plebiscite. The monarchical idea prevailed through a revolution skillfully steered in favor of the Savoy dynasty. Thus, when Garibaldi's march halted at the Volturno, Cavour did not leave the anti-Bourbon initiative entirely in the hands of the action party with its Mazzinian and radical tendencies. He feared the republic and for this reason sent King Victor through the Marches and Umbria to meet Garibaldi, who yielded to the royal army and retired to Caprera.

ii) The Kingdom of Italy. — On 14 March 1861 the Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed in Turin, in the first national Parliament composed of 214 senators and 413 deputies, representing all regions. On 6 June Cavour died, who was diplomatically preparing the acquisition of Venice and Rome.

Of the two problems, one was resolved by La Marmora through the alliance with Prussia, which had risen against Austrian hegemony, thus with a campaign in 1866 in the Veneto both by land (Custoza) and by sea (Lissa). The other, after the Garibaldian attempts, crushed by the Savoy intervention (Aspromonte) and by the combined Franco-Papal forces at Mentana (1867), was resolved thanks to the fall of Napoleon III (1870); the defeat at Sedan gave the Italian government freedom of action, which no longer felt bound by the September Convention (15 Sept. 1864), followed by the transfer of the capital from Turin to Florence to monitor the restless Garibaldinism. On 20 Sept. 1870, Italian troops entered Rome, and Pius IX withdrew into the Vatican. The national unity still lacked the territories of Trento, Trieste, and Istria.

Now remained, for the completion of the national endeavor, the spiritual and material unitary organization of the young State, which was only outwardly unified. A heavy burden of problems weighed on the new Parliament, composed of a Right and a Left corresponding to the two main tendencies of all national movements: the moderate party and the party of action, the monarchists and the republicans. The solution to the financial problem, first in order of time, was the last merit of the historical Right; the budget was balanced in 1876, indeed surpassed with a surplus of over 20 million; the railway and telegraph networks, powerful means of union, had doubled.

In that year, the Right handed over the government to the Left, which had gradually renounced its anti-monarchist program. Agostino De Pretis was the first of the old republicans to don ministerial robes, followed later by Cairoli, Crispi, Nicotera, and Zanardelli. The regime of popular sovereignty was accentuated. But foreign policy diverged from domestic policy: the latter drew closer to democratic France with gradual expansions of the electoral suffrage; the former allied with the Central Empires through the Triple Alliance (1887), Rome’s response to the French occupation of Tripoli.

The Francesco Crispi ministry (1887-96) attempted a military policy with colonial aims, but with dictatorial tendencies, culminating in the disaster of Adua. The Socialist Party, officially founded in 1892, began with Leonida Bissolati, supported by Felice Cavallotti, a fierce opposition to any military adventure.

The government responded with exceptional laws and numerous arrests. Crispi was forced to resign (9 March 1896), handing over power to a man of the Right, the Marquis di Rudinì. On 29 July 1900, the assassination of King Umberto marked the decline of the old I. and the decisive affirmation of a liberal and democratic government, first with Zanardelli, then with Giolitti, from 1903 to 1914. These were years of strong industrial growth, supported by the bourgeois policy of big business, with attention also to the working classes—thus respect for the right to strike, protection of emigrants, campaigns against malaria, promotion of cooperatives, public housing, welfare and assistance institutions, and insurance. In the general economy, large industry, land reclamation, agricultural credit, and railways were favored. And while the Socialist Party abandoned its program of property socialization, leaning toward a moderate state reformism, the Church softened its claims to temporal power, so that gradually even Catholic masses entered the social and political arena, countering liberal agnosticism and Marxist materialism with the Christian conception of public life.