[1870 – 1922] Kingdom of Italy (Liberal Period)

We find ourselves in Italy, between the years 1870 and 1922. The new nation, a fragile dream stitched together from a patchwork of old kingdoms and duchies, has finally claimed its ancient heart: Rome. On September 20, 1870, Italian soldiers breach the city’s Aurelian Walls at Porta Pia. The tricolor flag flies over a land united, at last, from the Alps to Sicily. But this triumph is not the end of the story; it is the turbulent, uncertain beginning. The new Kingdom of Italy was a nation cleaved in two. Travel north, to Milan or Turin, and you would hear the clang of machinery and the hiss of steam. Factories were rising, churning out textiles, steel, and soon, the first FIAT automobiles. Men in bowler hats and women in corseted dresses strolled beneath the new electric streetlights, discussing business and politics in grand cafés. This was the Italy of progress, of industry, of Europe. Then, journey south, across the invisible line that ran somewhere below Rome. The landscape changes. The air grows still and heavy under a relentless sun. This is the *Mezzogiorno*. Here, time itself seems to move differently. You would not find factories, but vast, semi-feudal agricultural estates called *latifondi*, owned by absentee barons. The people here were the *contadini*, the peasants. For them, life was a cycle of back-breaking labour under the sun, often for a wage that was little more than a bowl of soup. In 1870, over 80% of southerners were illiterate, compared to around 40% in the industrial northwest. The new "Italian" state felt like a foreign conqueror, imposing taxes and military conscription but offering little in return. This chasm between North and South was not just an economic gap; it was a wound in the nation's soul, one that would fester for decades. Governing this divided house was a small, elite class of northern and central Italian gentlemen. For much of this period, politics was a cynical art form known as *trasformismo*, or "transformism." Its master was Agostino Depretis, and later the great manipulator, Giovanni Giolitti. The goal was not to represent the will of the people—most of whom couldn't vote anyway—but to build shifting, unstable parliamentary majorities by bribing and co-opting political opponents. Governments rose and fell with dizzying speed, creating a sense of perpetual crisis while ensuring the same small clique of men remained in power. It was a democracy in name only, a closed theatre for the wealthy. Outside this theatre, frustration mounted. In the sun-scorched fields of Sicily, peasant leagues rose up, demanding land and bread, only to be crushed by the army. In the industrial cities of the north, workers inspired by socialist and anarchist ideas organized strikes. The state’s response was often brutal. In Milan in 1898, General Fiorenzo Bava Beccaris ordered his cannons to fire on a crowd protesting the high price of bread, killing at least 80 people. The acrid smell of gunpowder in city streets became a recurring scent of the era. For millions, the only answer was to leave. This period witnessed one of the largest voluntary migrations in human history. From the port of Naples, ships packed with families departed for the Americas, carrying little more than a bundle of clothes and a heart full of desperate hope. Between 1876 and 1915, over 9 million Italians would leave their homeland behind, a staggering exodus that bled the country of its people. Yet, it was not all shadow. The turn of the century, known as the Giolittian Era, brought a flicker of progress. Giovanni Giolitti, for all his political cynicism, understood that the state could not survive on repression alone. He extended the vote to all adult men, introduced social welfare programs, and legalized trade unions. This was the Italy of the Belle Époque. Elegant *Stile Liberty*—Italy’s Art Nouveau—architecture blossomed in cities. The first cinemas opened, showing silent films to amazed audiences. Technology was changing daily life; the telephone began to connect homes, and the whir of a sewing machine could be heard in middle-class apartments. The nation was building monuments to itself, like the colossal, gleaming white Victor Emmanuel II Monument in Rome—derided by locals as "the Wedding Cake"—a bombastic attempt to sculpt a unified identity out of marble. Like other young European powers, Italy was also gripped by a fever dream of empire, a desperate need to prove its worth on the world stage. An attempt to conquer Ethiopia ended in 1896 in a shocking and humiliating disaster at the Battle of Adwa, where a modern Italian army was annihilated by Ethiopian forces. The defeat sent shockwaves through the country. Italy tried again in 1911, wresting Libya from the crumbling Ottoman Empire in a brutal war that saw the first-ever use of airplanes for bombing raids. Italy now had its "place in the sun," but it was a place bought with blood and treasure the nation could ill afford. This fragile, contradictory, and deeply unequal society was then plunged into the crucible of the First World War. In 1915, ignoring the fact that the country was bitterly divided on the issue, the government joined the war on the side of Britain and France. For three years, Italian and Austro-Hungarian armies fought a horrific war of attrition in the snow and rock of the Alps. The Battle of Caporetto in 1917 was a cataclysm, resulting in over 460,000 casualties and sending the Italian front into a desperate retreat. Though Italy ultimately emerged on the winning side, the victory felt hollow. It had cost 650,000 lives, shattered the economy, and the territorial gains promised by the Allies were only partially delivered. Soldiers returned not as heroes, but as broken men in a broken land. A sense of betrayal, of a "mutilated victory," poisoned the national mood. Into this vacuum of anger, fear, and disillusionment stepped a new, terrifying force. The Liberal state, which had stumbled through fifty years of crisis, now faced its end. The two years following the war, the *Biennio Rosso* or "Two Red Years," saw factory occupations and farm seizures, sparking a paranoid fear of a Bolshevik-style revolution among the middle classes and landowners. They looked for a savior, someone who promised order, national pride, and an iron fist. They found him in a former socialist journalist named Benito Mussolini. His black-shirted followers, the *Fascisti*, unleashed a wave of political violence, beating and killing their socialist and communist rivals while the weak liberal government looked the other way. In October 1922, Mussolini staged his "March on Rome." It was more theatre than coup; there was no great battle. Fearing civil war, King Victor Emmanuel III simply caved. He telephoned Mussolini and invited him to form a government. The liberal experiment, born in the hope of 1870, died not with a bang, but with a handshake, surrendering Italy to a darkness it would not escape for two decades.