Unification of Italy

The unification of Italy unfolded across more than two decades of the mid-nineteenth century, beginning amid the continent-wide revolutions of 1848 and 1849, when an early Italian war of independence against Austrian rule in northern Italy ended in defeat. Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour, prime minister of the Kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont, revived the movement in the 1850s through economic modernization and a French alliance that secured Lombardy from Austria after the Second Italian War of Independence in 1859. The following year, the revolutionary commander Giuseppe Garibaldi led a volunteer force known as the Expedition of the Thousand to conquer the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in southern Italy, and on 17 March 1861 the Kingdom of Italy was formally proclaimed under Victor Emmanuel II of Sardinia as its first king. Unification was completed in September 1870, when Italian forces captured Rome from the Papal States during the Franco-Prussian War, and Rome was formally designated the new kingdom's capital in 1871, ending centuries of political fragmentation across the Italian peninsula.