Italy

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.

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

Unification took as long as it did partly because Italy before 1861 was never one political thing to unify. Florence, Milan, Venice and Rome had spent centuries as the seats of genuinely separate, often rival powers: the Republic of Florence and later the Grand Duchy of Tuscany; the Duchy of Milan, fought over repeatedly by French, Spanish and Austrian claimants; the Republic of Venice, an independent maritime power for over a thousand years until Napoleon ended it in 1797; and Rome, governed directly by the Pope as the capital of the Papal States. Each had its own currency, its own laws, its own army and often its own foreign alliances, and the wealth and rivalry among them produced the Renaissance as much as any single national culture did. The Risorgimento that Cavour and Garibaldi led in the 1850s and 1860s was not simply expelling foreign rulers, though Austria controlled the northeast and Spain and France had ruled parts of the south for centuries; it was persuading city-states and kingdoms with genuinely different histories that they were one nation at all, a persuasion Italian regional identity and dialect still show the limits of today.