Il Regno d'Italia

Luigi Speranza

The Kingdom of Italy (Italian: Regno d'Italia) was a state forged in 1861 by the unification of Italy under the influence of the Kingdom of Sardinia (casa di Savoia) which was its legal predecessor state.

It existed until 1946.

In 1946, the Italians opted for a *republican* constitution.

Italy declared war on Austria in alliance with Prussia in 1866.

Despite an unsuccessful campaign, it received the region of Venice following Bismarck's victory.

Italian troops entered Rome in 1870, ending more than one thousand years of Papal temporal power.

Italy accepted Bismarck's proposal to enter in a Triple Alliance with Germany and Austria in 1882, following strong disagreements with France about the respective colonial expansions.

However, even if relations with Berlin became very friendly, the alliance with Vienna remained purely formal.

So, in 1915, Italy accepted the British invitation to join the Allies in World War I because the western allies promised territorial compensation (at the expense of Austria-Hungary) for participation that were more generous than Vienna's offer in exchange for Italian neutrality.

Victory in the war gave Italy the status of a major power, with a permanent seat in the Council of the League of Nations.

During the time of the regime of the National Fascist Party from 1922 to its ousting in 1943, under the dictatorship of Benito Mussolini, the name often given by some historians to the Kingdom of Italy during this period is "Fascist Italy".

Under fascism, the Kingdom allied with Nazi Germany in World War II until 1943.

In the remaining two years of World War II, the Kingdom of Italy switched sides to the Allies after ousting Mussolini as Prime Minister and banning the Fascist party.

The remnant fascist state that continued fighting against the Allies was a puppet state of Nazi Germany, the "Italian Social Republic", still led by Mussolini and his loyalist Fascists in northern Italy.

Shortly after the war, civil discontent led to the Italian constitutional referendum, 1946 on whether Italy would remain a monarchy or become a republic.

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Italians decided to abandon the monarchy and form the Italian Republic, which is the present form of Italy today.
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The Kingdom of Italy claimed all of the territory which is modern-day Italy.

The development of the Kingdom's territory progressed under Italian unification until 1870.

The state for a long period of time did not have Trieste or Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol, which are in Italy today, and only annexed them in 1919.

After the Treaties of Versailles and St Germain, the state was granted Gorizia, Trieste and Istria (now part of Croatia and Slovenia), and small parts of modern-day northwestern Croatia as well as a tiny portion of the Croatian province of Dalmatia.

During the second World War, the Kingdom gained more territory in Slovenia and more territory from Dalmatia. After the Second World War, the borders of present-day Italy were founded and the Kingdom abandoned its land claims.

The Kingdom of Italy also held colonies and protectorates and puppet states, such as modern-day Eritrea, Somalia, Libya, Ethiopia (occupied by Italy in 1936, and then occupied by the British in World War II), Albania, Greece (occupied in World War II), Croatia (Italian and German puppet state in World War II), Kosovo (occupied in World War II), and Montenegro (occupied in World War II), and a small 46 hectare section of land from China in Tianjin (see Italian concession in Tianjin).

The Kingdom of Italy was theoretically a constitutional monarchy.

Executive power belonged to the monarch, as executed through appointed ministers.

Two chambers of parliament restricted the monarch's power– an appointive Senate and an elective Chamber of Deputies.

The kingdom's constitution was the Statuto Albertino, the former governing document of the Kingdom of Sardinia.

In theory, ministers were solely responsible to the king.

However, in practice, it was impossible for an Italian government to stay in office without the support of Parliament.

Members of the Chamber of Deputies were elected by plurality voting system elections in uninominal districts.

A candidate needed the support of 50% of those voting, and of 25% of all enrolled voters, to be elected on the first round of balloting.

If not all seats were filled on the first ballot, a runoff was held shortly afterwards for the remaining vacancies.

After a brief multinominal experimentation in 1882, proportional representation into large, regional, multi-seat electoral constituencies, was introduced after World War I.

Socialists became the major party, but they were unable to form a government into a parliament split into three different factions, with Christian Populists and classical liberals.

Elections took place in 1919, 1921 and 1924: in this last occasion, Mussolini abolished the PR replacing it with a block voting system on national bases, which gave to the Fascist Party the absolute majority of the Chamber seats.

Between 1925 and 1943, Italy was quasi-de-jure Fascist dictatorship, as the constitution formally remained in effect without alteration by the Fascists, though the monarchy also formally accepted Fascist policies and Fascist institutions.

Changes in politics occurred, consisting of the establishment of the Grand Council of Fascism as a government body in 1928, which took control of the government system, and the Chamber of Deputies being replaced with the Chamber of Fasci and Corporations as of 1939.

The monarchs of the House of Savoy who led Italy are:

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Vittorio Emmanuele II
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(1861–78)


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Umberto I
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(1878–1900)

Approved the Triple Alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary.

Assassinated in 1900 by an anarchist.

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Vittorio Emmanuele III
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(1900–46 )

King of Italy during the First World War and during the Fascist regime of Benito Mussolini.

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Umberto II
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(1946) –

The last King of Italy

who was pressured to call a referendum on whether Italy would retain the monarchy, in which Italians voted for a republic.

The creation of the Kingdom of Italy was the result of concerted efforts of Italian nationalists and monarchists loyal to the House of Savoy to establish a united kingdom encompassing the entire Italian Peninsula.

After the Revolutions of 1848, the apparent leader of the Italian unification movement was Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi.

He was popular amongst southern Italians and in the world was renowned for his extremely loyal followers.

Garibaldi led the Italian republican drive for unification in southern Italy, but the northern Italian monarchy of the House of Savoy in the Kingdom of Sardinia, a de facto Piedmontese state, whose government was led by Camillo Benso, conte di Cavour,

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also had ambitions of establishing a united Italian state.
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Though the kingdom had no physical connection to Rome (deemed the natural capital of Italy, but still capital of the Papal States), the kingdom had successfully challenged Austria in the Second Italian War of Independence, liberating Lombardy-Venetia from Austrian rule.

The kingdom also had established important alliances which helped it improve the possibility of Italian unification, such as Britain and the Second French Empire in the Crimean War.

Sardinia was dependent on France being willing to protect it and in 1860, Sardinia was forced to cede territory to France to maintain relations, including Garibaldi's birthplace, Nizza.

Cavour moved to challenge REPUBLICAN unification efforts by Garibaldi by organizing popular revolts in the Papal States.

He used these revolts as a pretext to invade the country, even though the invasion angered the Catholics, whom he told that the invasion was an effort to protect the Roman Catholic Church from the anti-clerical secularist nationalist REPUBLICANS of Garibaldi.

Only a small portion of the Papal States around Rome remained in the control of Pope Pio Nono.

Despite their differences, Cavour agreed to include Garibaldi's Southern Italy allowing it to join the Union with Piedmont-Sardinia in 1860.

Subsequently the Parliament declared the creation of the Kingdom of Italy on February 18, 1861 (officially proclaiming it on March 17, 1861) composed of both Northern Italy and Southern Italy.

King Victor Emmanuel II of Piedmont-Sardinia from the House of Savoy was then declared King of Italy.

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This title had been out of use since the
abdication of Napoleon I of France on April 6, 1814.
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Following the unification of most of Italy, tensions between the monarchists and republicans erupted.

In April 1861, Garibaldi entered the Italian parliament and challenged Cavour's leadership of the government, accusing him of dividing Italy and spoke of the threat of civil war between the Kingdom in the north and Garibaldi's forces in the south.

On June 6, 1861, the Kingdom's strongman Cavour died.

During the ensuing political instability, Garibaldi and the republicans became increasingly revolutionary in tone.

Garibaldi’s arrest in 1862 set off worldwide controversy.

In 1866 Otto von Bismarck, Minister President of Prussia offered Victor Emmanuel II an alliance with the Kingdom of Prussia in the Austro-Prussian War. In exchange Prussia would allow Italy to annex Austrian-controlled Venice.

King Emmanuel agreed to the alliance and the Third Italian War of Independence began. Italy fared poorly in the war with a badly organized military against Austria, but Prussia's victory allowed Italy to annex Venice. The one major obstacle to Italian unity remained Rome.

In 1870, Prussia went to war with France starting the Franco-Prussian War. To keep the large Prussian Army at bay, France abandoned its positions in Rome - which protected the remnants of the Papal States and Pius IX - in order to fight the Prussians. Italy benefited from Prussia's victory against France by being able to take over the Papal States from French authority. Rome was captured by the kingdom of Italy after several battles and guerilla-like warfare by Papal Zouaves and official troops of the Holy See against the Italian invaders.

Italian unification was completed, and shortly afterward Italy's capital was moved to Rome. Economic conditions in the united Italy were poor:,[5] there were no industry or transportation facilities, extreme poverty (especially in the Mezzogiorno), high illiteracy, and only a small percent of wealthy Italians had the right to vote. The unification movement had largely been dependent on the support of foreign powers and remained so afterwards.

Following the capture of Rome in 1870 from French forces of Napoleon III, Papal troops, and Zouaves, relations between Italy and the Vatican remained sour for the next sixty years with the Popes declaring themselves to be prisoners in the Vatican.

The Catholic Church frequently protested the actions of the secular and anticlerical-influenced Italian governments, refused to meet with envoys from the King and urged Catholics not to vote in Italian elections.

It would not be until 1929, that positive relations would be restored between the Kingdom of Italy and the Vatican after the signing of the Lateran Pacts.

After unification, Italy's politics favored liberalism.

The Liberal-conservative right (

"Destra storica" or Historical right) was regionally fragmented, and Liberal-conservative Prime Minister Marco Minghetti only held on to power by enacting revolutionary and left-leaning policies (such as the nationalization of railways) to appease the opposition.

In 1876, Minghetti was ousted and replaced by Liberal Agostino Depretis, who began the long Liberal Period. The Liberal Period was marked by corruption, government instability, continued poverty in southern Italy, and use of authoritarian measures by the Italian government.

Depretis began his term as Prime Minister by initiating an experimental political idea called Trasformismo (transformism). The theory of trasformismo was that a cabinet should select a variety of moderates and capable politicians from a non-partisan perspective. In practice, trasformismo was authoritarian and corrupt, Depretis pressured districts to vote for his candidates if they wished to gain favourable concessions from Depretis when in power. The results of the Italian general election of 1876 resulted in only four representatives from the right being elected, allowing the government to be dominated by Depretis. Despotic and corrupt actions are believed to be the key means in which Depretis managed to keep support in southern Italy. Depretis put through authoritarian measures, such as banning public meetings, placing "dangerous" individuals in internal exile on remote penal islands across Italy and adopting militarist policies. Depretis enacted controversial legislation for the time, such as abolishing arrest for debt, making elementary education free and compulsory while ending compulsory religious teaching in elementary schools.[9]


The Triple Alliance in 1913, shown in red.In 1887, Francesco Crispi became Prime Minister and began focusing government efforts on foreign policy. Crispi worked to build Italy as a great world power though increased military expenditures, advocacy of expansionism,[10] and trying to win the favour of the German Empire. Italy joined the Triple Alliance which included both Germany and Austria–Hungary in 1882 and which remained officially intact until 1915. While helping Italy develop strategically, he continued trasformismo and was authoritarian, once suggesting the use of martial law to ban opposition parties.[11] Despite being authoritarian, Crispi put through liberal policies such as the Public Health Act of 1888 and establishing tribunals for redress against abuses by the government.[12]

[edit] Culture and societyItalian society after unification and throughout most of the Liberal Period was sharply divided along class, linguistic, regional, and social lines.[13]

Common cultural traits in Italy in this time were social conservative in nature, including a strong belief in the family as an institution and patriarchal values.[14] In other areas, Italian culture was divided. Aristocratic, noble, and upper middle class families in Italy at this time were highly traditional in nature, with the upper middle-class even being known to often settle differences between each other by duels.[15] After unification, a number of descendents of former royal nobility became residents of Italy, numbering at 7,387 nobile families upon unification.[15] Many of Italy's elites were wealthy landowners who maintained a feudal society in regards to their agricultural system's utilization of large numbers of peasants.[15] Italian society in this period remained highly divided along regional and local sub-societies which often had historical rivalries with each other.[16]

Upon unifying, Italy effectively did not have a single national language; Tuscan (which would be then known as Italian) was only used in Florence while outside, regional languages were dominant.[17] Even the kingdom's first king, Victor Emmanuel II was known to speak almost entirely in Piedmontese and French, even to his cabinet ministers.[18] In addition to this, literacy was extremely poor in this era with an 1871 census indicating that 61.9 percent Italian men were illiterate and 75.7 percent of women were illiterate.[19] This illiteracy rate was far higher than that of western European countries in the same time period.[18] Some historians have claimed that census at this time for literacy were very lax as they only rated whether someone could write their own name and read a single passage, which may indicate that literacy in Italy was worse than what census projected.[19] The level of illiteracy was compounded by the fact that Italy had very few public schools upon unification and no popular press was available across Italy due to the language division of the regional dialects.[20] The Italian government in the Liberal Period attempted to reduce illiteracy by establishing state-funded schools to teach the official Italian language.[21] Literacy and illiteracy variated in levels in the different regions of Italy where there were different levels of quality of public education, with the worst being in Southern Italy at the time which received minimal funding.[19]

Living standards were low during the Liberal Period, especially in southern Italy due to various diseases such as malaria and epidemics that occurred during the period.[22] As a whole, there was initially a high death rate in 1871 at 30 people dying per 1000 people, though this reduced to 24.2 per 1000 by the 1890s.[23] In addition, the mortality rate of children dying in their first year after birth in 1871 was 22.7 percent while the number of children dying before reaching their fifth birthday was very high at 50 percent.[23] The mortality rate of children dying in their first year after birth decreased to an average of 17.6 percent in the time period of 1891 to 1900.[23]

[edit] EconomyWith unification, the new kingdom faced serious economic problems and economic division along political, social, and regional lines. In the Liberal Period, Italy remained highly economically dependent on foreign trade and the international price of coal and grain.[24]

Upon unifying, Italy had a predominantly agrarian society as 60 percent of the active population worked in agriculture.[25] Advances in technology, the sale of vast Church estates, foreign competition along with export opportunities rapidly transformed the agricultural sector in Italy shortly after unification .[25] However these developments did not benefit all of Italy in this period, as southern Italy’s agriculture suffered from hot summers and aridity damaged crops while the presence of malaria prevented cultivation of low-lying areas along Italy’s Adriatic coast.[22]

The overwhelming attention paid to foreign policy alienated the agricultural community in Italy which had been in decline since 1873.[26] Both radical and conservative forces in the Italian parliament demanded that the government investigate how to improve agriculture in Italy.[27] The investigation which started in 1877 and was released eight years later, showed that agriculture was not improving, that landowners were earning revenue from their lands and contributing almost nothing to the development of the land. Lower class Italians were hurt by the break-up of communal lands to the benefit of landlords.[27] Most of the workers on the agricultural lands were not peasants but short-term labourers ("braccianti") who at best were employed for one year.[27] Peasants without stable income were forced to live off meager food supplies, disease was spreading rapidly, plagues were reported, including a major cholera epidemic which killed at least 55,000 people.[28]


A factory machinery exposition in Turin, set in 1898, during the period of early industrialisation. National Exhibition of Turin, 1898.The Italian government could not deal with the situation effectively because of overspending by the Depretis government that left Italy heavily in debt. Italy also suffered economically as a consequence of overproduction of grapes by their vineyards. In the 1870s and 1880s, France's vineyard industry was suffering from vine disease caused by insects. Italy prospered as the largest exporter of wine in Europe. But following the recovery of France in 1888, southern Italy was overproducing and had to cut back, which caused greater unemployment and bankruptcies.[29]

The Italian government invested heavily in developing railways in the 1870s, more than doubling the existing length of railway line between 1870 and 1890.[30]

Italy’s population remained severely divided between wealthy elites and impoverished workers especially on regional lines. An 1881 census found that over 1 million southern day-labourers were chronically under-employed and were very likely to become seasonal emigrants in order to economically sustain themselves.[31] Southern peasants as well as small landowners and tenants often were in a state of conflict and revolt throughout the late 19th century.[32] There were exceptions to the generally poor economic condition of agricultural workers of the south, as some regions near cities such as Naples and Palermo as well as along the Tyrrhenian coast.[31] The 1910 Commission of Inquiry into the South indicated that the Italian government thus far had failed to ameliorate the severe economic differences and the limitation of voting rights only to those with sufficient property allowed rich landowners to exploit the poor.[33]

[edit] Francesco Crispi and the rise of Italian colonialismMain articles: Italian Colonial Empire, Boxer Protocol, and Treaty of Addis Ababa

Francesco Crispi promoted the Italian colonialism in Africa in the late 1800s, but the humiliating defeat of Adwa brought about his resignation.A number of colonial projects were undertaken by the government. These were done to gain support of Italian nationalists and imperialists, who wanted to rebuild a Roman Empire. Already, Italy had large settlements in Alexandria, Cairo, and Tunis. Italy first attempted to gain colonies through negotiations with other world powers to make colonial concessions. These negotiations failed. Italy also sent missionaries to uncolonized lands to investigate the potential for Italian colonization. The most promising and realistic of these were parts of Africa. Italian missionaries had already established a foothold at Massawa (in present day Eritrea) in the 1830s and had entered deep into the Ethiopian Empire.[34]

On 5 February 1885, shortly after the fall of Egyptian rule in Khartoum, Italy landed soldiers at Massawa. In 1888, Italy annexed Massawa by force, creating the colony of Italian Eritrea.

In 1895, Ethiopia led by Emperor Menelik II abandoned an agreement signed in 1889 to follow Italian foreign policy. Italy used this renunciation as a reason to invade Ethiopia.[35] Ethiopia gained the help of the Russian Empire, whose own interests in East Africa led the government of Nicholas II of Russia to sent large amounts of modern weaponry to the Ethiopians to hold back an Italian invasion. In response, Britain decided to back the Italians to challenge Russian influence in Africa and declared that all of Ethiopia was within the sphere of Italian interest. On the verge of war, Italian militarism and nationalism reached a peak, with Italians flocking to the Royal Italian Army, hoping to take part in the upcoming war.[36]

The Italian army failed on the battlefield and were overwhelmed by a huge Ethiopian army at the Battle of Adwa. Italy was forced to retreat into Eritrea.[37] The failed Ethiopian campaign was an international embarrassment to Italy.


Italian mounted infantry in China during the Boxer Rebellion in 1900.From November 2, 1899, to September 7, 1901, Italy participated as part of the Eight-Nation Alliance forces during the Boxer Rebellion in China. On September 7, 1901, a concession in Tientsin was ceded to the Italy by the Qing Dynasty. On June 7, 1902, the concession was taken into Italian possession and administered by an Italian consul.

In 1911, Italy declared war on the Ottoman Empire and invaded Tripolitania, Fezzan, and Cyrenaica. These provinces together formed what became known as Libya. The war ended only a year later, but the occupation resulted in acts of discrimination against Libyans such as the forced deportation of Libyans to the Tremiti Islands in October 1911. By 1912, a third of these Libyan refugees had died from a lack of food and shelter.[38] The annexation of Libya led nationalists to advocate Italy's domination of the Mediterranean Sea by occupying the Kingdom of Greece and the Adriatic coastal region of Dalmatia.[39]


Italian dirigibles bomb Turkish positions in Libya. The Italo-Turkish War of 1911–1912 was the first in history in which air attacks (carried out here by dirigible airships) determined the outcome.[edit] Giovanni Giolitti
Giovanni Giolitti was Prime Minister of Italy five times between 1892 and 1921.In 1892, Giovanni Giolitti became Prime Minister of Italy for his first term. Although his first government quickly collapsed a year later, Giolitti returned in 1903 to lead Italy's government during a fragmented period that lasted until 1914. Giolitti had spent his earlier life as a civil servant, and then took positions within the cabinets of Crispi. Giolitti was the first long-term Italian Prime Minister in many years because he mastered the political concept of trasformismo by manipulating, coercing and bribing officials to his side. In elections during Giolitti's government, voting fraud was common, and Giolitti helped improve voting only in well-off, more supportive areas, while attempting to isolate and intimidate poor areas where opposition was strong.[40] Southern Italy was in terrible shape prior to and during Giolitti's tenure as Prime Minister. Four-fifths of southern Italians were illiterate and the dire situation there ranged from problems of large numbers of absentee landlords to rebellion and even starvation.[41] Corruption was such a large problem that Giolitti himself admitted that there were places "where the law does not operate at all".[42]

In 1911, Giolitti's government sent forces to occupy Libya. While the success of the Libyan War improved the status of the nationalists, it did not help Giolitti's administration as a whole. The government attempted to discourage criticism by speaking about Italy's strategic achievements and inventiveness of their military in the war: Italy was the first country to use the airship for military purposes, and undertook aerial bombing on the Ottoman forces.[43] The war radicalized the Italian Socialist Party: anti-war revolutionaries led by future-Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini called for violence to bring down the government. Giolitti returned as Prime Minister only briefly in 1920, but the era of liberalism was effectively over in Italy.

The 1913 and 1919 elections saw gains made by Socialist, Catholic and nationalist parties at the expense of the traditionally dominant liberals and radicals, who were increasingly fractured and weakened as a result.