Turin, Florence, Rome

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Italy proclaimed itself a kingdom on 17 March 1861, and its first capital was not Rome but Turin, the Piedmontese city that had led the unification movement under the House of Savoy and its prime minister, Cavour. Turin held the capital for four years while the new kingdom absorbed the rest of the peninsula piece by piece; Venice, still under Austrian control in 1861, joined only in 1866, after Italy sided with Prussia in the Austro-Prussian War. Rome itself remained outside the kingdom the longest, held by the Pope and garrisoned by French troops as the last independent piece of the old Papal States; the capital moved to Florence in 1865 as a temporary, symbolic step toward Rome without provoking a premature confrontation over the city. Only in 1870, when French troops withdrew during the Franco-Prussian War, could Italian forces take Rome itself, and the capital finally moved there in 1871, completing a decade-long journey from Turin through Florence to the city the kingdom had wanted from the start.