How a Divided Peninsula Became Italy in Just 11 Years

Italy as we know it today wasn’t always a single nation. The peninsula spent centuries divided into separate kingdoms and duchies. You had the Kingdom of Sardinia up in the northwest corner. Austria controlled Lombardy and Venetia. The Papal States took up the middle section. The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies owned the entire south.

If you lived in Venice, you were Venetian. Naples, you were Neapolitan. Rome, Roman. After the Congress of Vienna in 1815, Austria controlled the north with a firm hand. Most people believed unification was impossible—at least until things started to change in the 1850s.

1848 was a disaster. Revolutions broke out everywhere. Charles Albert of Sardinia saw his chance and declared war on Austria. Got completely destroyed at Custoza. He had to give up his throne. Austria won. Everything went back to normal. But people had seen what might be possible. They’d tasted independence for a minute.

Cavour became Prime Minister of Sardinia in the 1850s. He figured out pretty quickly that going up against Austria alone was stupid. So he cut a deal with Napoleon III. France helps us fight Austria, we give France some territory. Italian general Garibaldi absolutely hated this because one of those territories was Nice, where he was from. But Cavour did it anyway.

They fought Austria in 1859. Won at Magenta and Solferino. Austria handed over Lombardy and some central Italian states started holding referendums to join Sardinia. Things were rolling now.

This is the crazy part. May 1860. Giuseppe Garibaldi gets on a boat with roughly a thousand volunteers in red shirts. They’re heading to Sicily. Just like that. Landed near Marsala and started fighting the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. And he won. Took Palermo in July. Had Naples by September. The whole southern half of Italy just fell to this guy and his thousand buddies.

Cavour freaked out because Garibaldi might decide to run his own show down there. Cavour sent Sardinian troops marching south. They grabbed chunks of Papal territory along the way. The two forces met at Teano in October. Garibaldi had options here. He could’ve told the king to get lost and kept running the south himself. Instead he just handed it all over to the King of Sardinia, Victor Emmanuel II. They held some quick votes and boom, the south joined the north. March 1861, Kingdom of Italy.

But they didn’t have Venice yet. That stayed Austrian until 1866 when Italy teamed up with Prussia to fight Austria. Italy actually lost most of their battles but Prussia demolished Austria so badly that Italy got Venice anyway as part of the peace deal.

And Rome was still sitting there with French troops protecting it. Had been since 1849. Italy couldn’t touch it while France was there. Then in 1870 France got into a war with Prussia and pulled those troops out. Italian forces walked into Rome in September. Done. The Pope stayed inside the Vatican. Said he was a prisoner. Refused to acknowledge Italy existed. This standoff lasted until 1929 when Mussolini reached an agreement.

Many things could have gone wrong at any point. Austria wins in 1859? No unified Italy. Garibaldi gets killed or captured in Sicily? South stays independent. France keeps troops in Rome for another twenty years? Italy’s stuck without its capital. There were so many points where the whole thing could’ve collapsed.

And honestly, getting everyone into one country initially didn’t fix much. The north had industry and money. The south had farms and poverty. Different regions couldn’t even understand each other’s dialects half the time. Somebody once said “We have made Italy. Now we must make Italians” and yeah, that pretty much captures it. Drawing new lines on a map doesn’t automatically turn separate states into a functioning country.

Those problems haven’t gone away either. There’s still a huge economic gap between north and south. People in Venice or Sicily or Sardinia still argue about whether unification was even good for them. Nation-building is messy.

But this is how Italy happened. This all happened in eleven years. 1859 to 1870. Some wars, some diplomacy, one completely bonkers military campaign, and timing that worked out.