Status Updates From Modern Italy: A Political H...

Attempts to make Rome a capital in the style of Paris were to fail. Rome remained a city of the past - ancient, medieval or baroque. It was not a town of theaters and banks, but of churches, palaces and monuments. Some people called it too southern, others too international, others too corrupt, and it soon became fashionable to lament that the capital was not somewhere else.

Successive governments tried hard to catch the imagination and sympathy of the common people in the capital. The results were not always in good taste. Palazzi were converted into government departments, the flora of the Colosseum was stripped off, excavations began on the site of the forums. Hare was later to write that a few years of Italian rule had done more to destroy Rome than the Goths and Vandals together.

Sicily had to endure large-scale military operations.Govone cut off water from villages in the middle of the Sicilian heat& used torture to exact information, burning people alive in their houses.Northeners had little idea of the social and economic derangement which unification had brought to the South, &when feelings of revolt became more intense,this was treated as simple lawlessness calling for police repression.

The Italy resulting from the plebiscites seemed artificial &deficient in national character.Italian culture still lacked a distinct identity of its own: the intellectual classes looked to France for their lead &other liberal politicians to England.Regional self-suffiency could not be broken down & there had been no social revolution to convince the peasants that they were participants in,not victims of,the new order.

Vittorio Emanuele became King of Italy in 1861.Because of the challenge of republicanism and the need to overshadow Garibaldi in popular esteem, an official apologetic and panegyric was developed to inflate his reputation.The true picture hidden behind clouds of incense is of a usually insignificant man,good-natured and shrewd,but superstitious and ill-educated, possessing little of the luster and aureole of majesty.