Chapter 13: The Unification of Italy
Further reading
The best introductions to Italian unification are to be found in D. Beales, Italy and the
Risorgimento (London, Longman, 1982) and D. Mack Smith, Italy, a Modern History (Ann
Arbor, MI, University of Michigan Press, 1959). S. Woolf, A History of Italy, 1700–1860: the
Social Constraints of Political Change (London, Methuen, 1979) is very useful on the social
and economic background. An overview that takes into account recent Italian scholarship is
provided by Spencer M. Di Scala, Italy from Revolution to Republic: 1700 to the Present Day
(Boulder, CO, Westview Press, 1995). A useful commentary on various aspects of the
Risorgimento will be found in Lucy Riall, The Italian Risorgimento: State, Society and
National Unification (London, Routledge, 1994). There are good biographical studies of
Cavour, Garibaldi and Mazzini in D. Mack Smith, Cavour and Garibaldi in 1860
(Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1954) and Mazzini (New Haven, CT, Yale
University Press, 1994). For a briefer account of Cavour, see H. Hearder, Cavour (London,
Historical Association, 1972). See also a first-class biography by Lucy Riall that considers
the changes in Garibaldi’s reputation, Garibaldi, Invention of a Hero (New Haven, CT, Yale
University Press, 2007) and C.A. Bayly and E.F. Biagini (eds), Giuseppe Mazzini and the
Globalisation of Democratic Nationalism, 1830–1920 (Oxford, Oxford University Press,
2008). For a vivid and still reliable narrative account of various episodes in the Risorgimento,
see G.M. Trevelyan, Garibaldi and the Defence of the Roman Republic, Garibaldi and the
Thousand and Garibaldi and the Making of Italy (London, Cassell, 1988). The best source
book is D. Mack Smith, The Making of Italy, 1796–1866 (London, Macmillan, 1988), and
there is a useful collection of documents in D. Beales, The Risorgimento and the Unification
of Italy (London, Allen & Unwin, 1971). Trevelyan’s three books also have much eyewitness material. A.J. Whyte, The Early Life and Letters of Cavour, 1810–1848 (Oxford,
University Press, 1925) and The Political Life and Letters of Cavour, 1848–1860 (Oxford,
Oxford University Press, 1930) are still worth consulting. The role of the Catholic Church in
the making of Italy is well covered in a book by John Pollard, Religion, Society and Politics,
1861 to the Present Day (London, Routledge, 2008). Two useful articles are Bruce Haddock,
‘Myth and Reality in the Risorgimento’, New Perspective, vol. 2, no. 2, December 1996 and
Raymond Pearson, ‘Risorgimento: People-power in Nineteenth Century Italy?’, New
Perspective, vol. 8, no. 3, 2002. Both are to be found at www.history-ontheweb.co.uk. For a
summary of recent writing on the Risorgimento see John Foot, ‘Signposts: Italy in the 19th
and 20th Centuries’, History Today, vol. 62, no. 2, 2012.
Websites
The Programme of Count Cavour, 1846.
Count Cavour, speech to the Piedmont Chamber of Deputies, 1858,
Garibaldi, Report on the Conquest of Naples, 1860
King Victor Emmanuel, Address to Parliament, Rome 1871
http://eudocs.lib.byu.edu (Italy)
Garibaldi and the Risorgimento, an Illustrated Lecture on his Life and Career
http://dl.lib.brown.edu/garibaldi/panorama.php