Italy's history: an old idea and a young state

What came before the state

The territory carried a Roman empire, a papacy that held temporal power for more than a thousand years, and a set of city-states that were among the richest polities in Europe.

Venice and Genoa were Europe's gateways to the East, and Venice produced fine glass. Florence was a centre of silk, wool, banking and jewellery. The wealth those cities generated is what paid for the artistic commissions of the Renaissance, and the sequence runs in that order: the banking came first.

The city-states were also, for a period, the most consequential polities in Europe by measures that have nothing to do with size. Florentine credit financed rulers elsewhere; Venetian and Genoese shipping carried the eastern trade; and the concentration of wealth in a few hundred square kilometres funded a body of work that a continent still travels to look at.

What none of it produced was a state. The phrase that recurs in accounts of the period is centuries of political and territorial division, and it is accurate. A traveller crossing the peninsula in 1800 passed through several sovereignties, several currencies and several written standards of what would later be one language.

Why the territory mattered before it was a country

Rome expanded from the peninsula to most of the Mediterranean by 100 BC, was destabilised by civil wars, and became an empire that dominated the Mediterranean, much of Europe, western Asia and north Africa. Its first two centuries were the Pax Romana, and it reached its greatest extent under Trajan, who ruled from 98 to 117.

More than a thousand years later the same peninsula produced the Renaissance, and the sequence of causes is specific rather than mysterious. It began in Tuscany and centred on Florence, and the Florentine Republic rose to prominence by providing credit to Europe. Northern and central Italy had become among the richest regions in Europe, with trade links to the Levant built by the Crusades. The literature usually begins with three fourteenth-century writers: Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio.

The fourteenth century also brought catastrophe. The Medieval Warm Period was ending, the Little Ice Age beginning, agricultural output declining, and the European economy went into recession. That the Renaissance followed rather than preceded that shock is the part most summaries reverse.

How the peninsula was assembled

Unification ran from 1848 to 1870 and was carried out by two movements that did not want the same thing.

One was republican. Its most famous figure, Giuseppe Garibaldi, led the drive for unification in the south, taking Naples and Sicily in 1860 and 1861 with the Expedition of the Thousand. The other was monarchical: the House of Savoy, ruling the Kingdom of Sardinia, whose government led the process from above.

The two met at Teano, where Garibaldi shook Victor Emmanuel's hand and hailed him as king of Italy. A republican general handed a conquered south to a northern monarchy, and the settlement that resulted was a unitary state proclaimed on 17 March 1861 with Victor Emmanuel II as king.

The assembly continued after the proclamation. In 1866 Italy allied with Prussia, declared war on Austria and received the Veneto. In 1870 Italian troops entered Rome, ending more than a thousand years of papal temporal power. In 1919, after the First World War, the kingdom annexed Trieste and Trentino-Alto Adige, which closed the northeastern frontier fifty-eight years after the state was declared.

Rome is the detail that shows what kind of assembly this was. The kingdom proclaimed itself in 1861 and took the city its name pointed at nine years later, which makes the founding a process with a start date attached to it, announced by people who knew how much was still missing.

The papacy had held temporal power in Rome for more than a thousand years when Italian troops walked in, and the state that took it had existed for nine.

A state whose capital arrives nine years after its proclamation, and whose northeastern border is settled fifty-eight years after that, is a state assembled in stages by people who disagreed about the design.

What the crown actually held

The kingdom's arrangement was neither absolute nor fully parliamentary, and the ambiguity mattered later.

The king was formally the holder of state power and supreme commander of the army, navy and later the air force. He could exercise the right of legislation with the national parliament and not without it, and the government was in practice responsible to parliament rather than to him. Succession followed Salic law.

That is a system with two centres and no rule for what happens when they disagree. It worked while they did not.

What the new kingdom had to invent

A state assembled from separate sovereignties has to build the things a state runs on, and Italy built them fast and from nothing.

A single fiscal system replaced several. A single legal order replaced several. A written standard of the language had to be spread across a population most of whom spoke something else at home, which is why Italian nation-building is so often described in terms of schooling. A statistical apparatus was created to count a country that had never been counted as one, and a central banking arrangement to finance it.

The institutions of that period are why Italy today holds unusually deep long-run series: the national statistical institute and the central bank both maintain historical collections running back through unification, because the new state's first problem was making itself legible to itself.

From the late nineteenth century into the early twentieth the kingdom industrialised and acquired colonies, both of which are the actions of a state that had decided what kind of power it wanted to be.

How a liberal state produced a dictatorship

The First World War left socialist agitation, inspired by the Russian Revolution, and a counter-revolution against it.

The decisive move came from the liberal establishment itself. The liberal establishment, fearing a Soviet-style revolution, began to endorse the fascist movement, and the constitutional ambiguity above did the rest: a monarch who formally held state power could appoint a government parliament had not chosen, and did.

The fascist period ran for two decades before the war and it changed the state rather than merely occupying it. Parties were abolished, the parliament that had appointed the government was hollowed out, and the ambiguity in the 1861 settlement was resolved in favour of the executive by simply using it. The crown remained, formally supreme, throughout.

Italy entered the Second World War as a leading member of the Axis in 1940. After initial success, Italian forces were defeated in North Africa, East Africa and on the Eastern Front. Allied landings in Sicily brought down the fascist regime and the new government surrendered.

The surrender split the country. In the north the Germans set up the Italian Social Republic, a puppet state with Mussolini installed as its leader after German paratroopers rescued him, while the government that had surrendered held the south. For the rest of the war there were two Italian administrations on the same peninsula, at war with each other.

What followed was not a clean end. An Italian civil war was fought between partisans and the forces of the fascist republic in the north. In April 1945 Mussolini attempted to escape northwards, was captured and was summarily executed by partisans. Hostilities ended on 29 April 1945 with the surrender of German forces in Italy.

The cost is measurable and worth stating plainly. Nearly half a million Italians died. Society was divided and the economy was destroyed: per capita income in 1944 was at its lowest point since 1900.

Why the monarchy ended

The king who had appointed the fascist government was still the king when it fell, and that is why Italy is a republic.

A revival of republicanism produced the institutional referendum of 2 June 1946. The monarchy was abolished, the date has been celebrated since as the Festa della Repubblica, and Umberto II was forced to abdicate.

One detail of that vote is easy to miss. It was the first time Italian women voted nationally, so the first national decision Italian women took part in was the abolition of the monarchy.

A republican constitution followed. The country that emerged had a deliberately weak executive and a parliament designed to stop any single office accumulating what the crown and the prime ministership had held between them. That design is a direct answer to the twenty years before it, and it is also why Italian governments are short-lived: the institutions were built by people whose recent experience was of a government that could not be removed.

What the south inherited

The unification carried a distributional consequence that Italian politics has been arguing about ever since, and it follows directly from how the assembly happened.

The drive in the south was republican and led by Garibaldi; the state that took possession was the northern monarchy of Savoy. Naples and Sicily entered a kingdom whose capital, administration, fiscal system and industrial policy were designed elsewhere, by a government they had not elected and had handed themselves to.

Northern and central Italy had been among the richest regions in Europe since the late Middle Ages, on trade links to the Levant and on Florentine credit. The south entered the same state with a different economic history, a different agricultural structure and a different relationship to its own cities. A single fiscal and legal order was then applied to both.

From the late nineteenth century Italy industrialised and acquired colonies, and the industry went where the industry already was. The consequence is the most durable internal division in western Europe, and the manner of unification is what created it.

What the assembly left unresolved

Two consequences of how Italy was made are still visible, and both are structural.

The first is that a unitary state was built out of polities with separate histories, economies and written traditions. Venice, Florence, Naples and Sicily entered the kingdom with centuries of independent institutional life behind them, and the state that absorbed them was designed in Turin. Regional identity in Italy is the residue of arrangements that were sovereign within living memory of the founding generation, which is why it behaves like politics rather than like nostalgia.

The second is the relationship between the state and the papacy. Italian troops took Rome by force in 1870 from a power that had held temporal authority there for more than a millennium, and the accommodation between the Italian state and the Holy See took decades to settle. The Vatican remains a sovereign state inside the Italian capital, which is the physical trace of that history.

Neither is a problem the catalogue takes a position on. Both are the reason Italian politics reads differently from that of a country whose institutions and borders arrived together.