7. Italy in the 1850s: the Rise of Piedmont and the Conquest of Lombardy

About this Lecture

Lecture

In this module we think about the role of Piedmont in the movement towards the unification of Italy, focusing in particular on the importance of the region of Piedmont and its Prime Minister, Camillo Cavour, and the agreement made between Cavour to Napoleon III at Plombières in 1858.

Course

In this course, Dr David Laven (University of Nottingham) explores the Unification of Italy between 1789-1871. We begin by thinking about what Italy was like in the late 18th century, emphasising its regional diversity in terms of both politics and society. After that, we think about the changes wrought by Napoleon's invasion of Italy in the 1790s, before turning in the third module to what happened after Napoleon and the French had been driven out of Rome after the Battle of Waterloo. Over the following five modules, we follow the progress of Italian unification from the revolutions of 1820-21 and the early 1830s to the creation of the state of Italy in 1861. In the ninth module, we think about some of the public responses to unification, which weren't quite as jubilant as we might expect, before turning in the tenth and eleventh modules to think about how Venetia and Rome came to be incorporated into the new state of Italy. Finally, in the twelfth module, we think about the longer-term legacy of unification: to what extent was the creation of an Italian state matched by the creation of an Italian national consciousness?

Lecturer

Dr David Laven is Associate Professor in History at the University of Nottingham. His principal interests lie in the field of Italian history from the late eighteenth century to Fascism, with a particular interest in nineteenth-century Venice and its mainland.