The European Risorgimento: why Italy's unification is the mirror of today's Europe

Cavour, Mazzini and Garibaldi agreed on almost nothing. Yet Italy was born. There is a lesson for Europe

When I think about Europe today and its limitations, I keep coming back to a phrase attributed to Massimo d'Azeglio, one of the protagonists of the Risorgimento: "We have made Italy, now we must make Italians." He said it in 1861, immediately after the proclamation of the Kingdom. He was describing a problem he knew well: a country formally united but substantially fragmented, with regional identities so strong that imagining something common above them seemed nearly impossible. I would replace "Italy" with "Europe" and "Italians" with "Europeans" today, and the phrase would still work perfectly.

But let us take things in order. Before understanding what Europe lacks, it is worth examining what Italy lacked before the Risorgimento transformed it.

The pre-unification mosaic

Before 1859, the Italian peninsula was divided into seven states with seven systems of government, seven parliaments, seven armies, seven currencies and seven customs regimes. A merchant wishing to move goods from Naples to Milan crossed borders, paid duties, changed currency multiple times. Exchange rates were mutually incompatible: 270 Milanese lire equalled 405 Venetian lire and 855 Parman lire. A common market was structurally impossible.

The railways told the same story. At the moment of unification in 1861, the total active lines amounted to 2,064 kilometres, but they did not form a network: they were fragments of local systems, owned by different concessionaires, with gauges that were not always compatible. Piedmont had 850 kilometres, Lombardy-Venetia 522, the Papal States 317, Tuscany 257. The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, which covered the entire southern peninsula, had only 128 kilometres on the mainland, and Sicily did not yet have a single railway in 1861.

Industrially, the picture was even more uneven. Austrian Lombardy was the most advanced region: the eighteenth-century reforms of Maria Theresa and Joseph II had modernised agriculture, created banking institutions such as the Cassa di Risparmio delle Province Lombarde founded in 1823, and developed the first mechanical industries. It was not Piedmont that was the most industrialised zone, as one might assume: it was Lombardy, despite being under foreign rule. Cavour's Piedmont was the most dynamic politically and institutionally, but industrially it ranked second.

The South presented a contradictory picture. The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies had some notable achievements: the first Italian railway was the Naples-Portici line, inaugurated on 3 October 1839. The Pietrarsa workshops were the largest industrial complex in Italy. But all this coexisted with a feudal system that remained virtually intact, with land concentrated in the hands of a few hundred baronial families who controlled over 70 per cent of the rural population. There was no entrepreneurial middle class. There was no modern credit system.

And then there was the language. In 1861, according to the linguist Tullio De Mauro, only 2.5 per cent of the Italian population spoke standard Italian. A Venetian and a Neapolitan had no common language. The literacy rate stood at 25 per cent. They were, in effect, two separate worlds that could not understand each other.

For and against: a debate that repeats itself

The Risorgimento was not a unanimous process. Inside and outside the peninsula, positions were divided and often irreconcilable, and the fault lines did not follow the simple geographical divisions that later history sometimes suggested.

Among those in favour of unity there were profoundly different visions. Cavour wanted a constitutional kingdom led by Piedmont, liberal and secular, capable of competing with the great European powers. He did not dream of a romantic Italy: he wanted a modern state, with an internal market, a railway network, a banking system. Mazzini wanted a democratic republic, born from popular will, not from the military conquest of a Savoy monarchy. Garibaldi stood in between, a romantic soldier willing to serve whoever brought unity, monarchy or republic mattered little. Three mutually incompatible visions, united only by a common objective.

Among those opposed there were equally powerful interests. The Church of Rome was fiercely hostile: unity meant the end of papal temporal power, the loss of the Papal States, the secularisation of the state. Pius IX issued the Syllabus of Errors in 1864 and excommunicated the protagonists of unification. The Bourbon rulers of the South resisted militarily until the fall of Gaeta in 1861. The southern landed aristocracies feared the loss of their feudal privileges. And then there were the great powers: Austria, which controlled Lombardy and Venetia and had no intention of ceding them, and Napoleon III's France, which played both sides, favouring northern unification while protecting papal Rome.

The parallel with Europe today is immediate. The European project has always had supporters and opponents, and here too the divisions do not follow simple lines. Committed federalists like Spinelli, who dreamed of a United States of Europe as early as 1941 while in confinement on Ventotene, clashed with confederalists like de Gaulle, who wanted a Europe of sovereign nations without transfers of power to the centre. Today these tensions have not disappeared: they resurface in German and Dutch resistance to common debt, in the anti-European populism growing from Warsaw to Paris, in the difficulty of building a common foreign policy when every state has its own national interests. As in the Risorgimento, those who favour integration often disagree on how much to integrate and by what methods. And those who oppose it do so for different reasons: some fear losing sovereignty, some fear paying others' debts, some use Euroscepticism as an electoral tool without really believing it.

The difference from the Risorgimento is just one, and it is not a small one: in the Italy of 1859, in the end, someone chose. Cavour forced the issue, Garibaldi set sail with a thousand men, Victor Emmanuel signed. Europe today is still waiting for someone to make the first move.

Unification and its effects: light and shadow

The process was rapid in its final phase: in 1859 Lombardy joined Piedmont, in 1860 plebiscites brought Tuscany, Emilia and the South into the new state, and on 17 March 1861 Parliament proclaimed the Kingdom of Italy. Within a few years, internal customs barriers were abolished, the lira was introduced as the single national currency, and the construction of a national railway network was under way.

But unification was not painless. The model adopted was essentially Piedmontese: the institutions, the civil code and the fiscal system of the new kingdom were those of Piedmont, extended by decree to the rest of the peninsula. The South, which had radically different economic and social structures, underwent a sudden and poorly managed transformation. The abolition of customs barriers opened the southern market to northern manufactures without giving the South time to modernise.

There is an aspect of this that strikes me as the most directly relevant to today's European debate: the debt. Piedmont had financed the wars of independence by accumulating enormous debt, and in 1861 that debt was incorporated into the budget of the new kingdom, effectively distributing it across all the other states. Per capita fiscal pressure in Piedmont stood at 142 lire, more than double that of Tuscany at 67, Naples at 63, and Lombardy at 56. Tuscany and the South, which had relatively sounder public finances, found themselves underwriting the debt of those who had led unification. The resistance of Germany and the northern European countries to common European debt today is precisely the same mechanism seen from the other side: the fear of paying for others' obligations. Italian history teaches that this fear is not irrational, but that the alternative — permanent fragmentation — costs more.

The result was brigandage: an undeclared civil war that between 1861 and 1864 caused roughly 20,000 deaths, more than all the wars of the Risorgimento combined. It was followed by mass emigration: between 1876 and 1914, nine million Italians left the country permanently. Post-unification railway spending went 53 per cent to the North between 1861 and 1911. Today, GDP per capita in the Mezzogiorno stands at 58 per cent of that in the Centre-North: the gap has never truly closed.

The lesson is uncomfortable but necessary: integration without compensatory mechanisms for the weakest regions produces fractures that last for generations.

The school as social glue

Amid the contradictions of unification, there is one process that seems to me the most directly relevant for today's Europe on the question of identity. It is that of linguistic unification.

In 1861, 2.5 per cent of Italians spoke standard Italian. By 1911, the literacy rate had risen to 60 per cent. By 1951, 87 per cent of the population spoke standard Italian, though many still used dialect in daily life. It was compulsory schooling that accomplished this, slowly and not without resistance. It did not erase the dialects, which still exist today as a living linguistic heritage, but built above them a common language that allowed Italians to communicate, work together and feel part of the same community. It took decades. It also took television in the 1950s, which brought standard Italian into every corner of the peninsula.

The parallel with Europe seems clear to me. Today English is already in practice the European lingua franca: 58.6 per cent of Europeans speak it as a second language. But what is missing is what Italy's post-unification school built: an educational system that produces a common basic formation, that teaches European history as shared history and not merely as the sum of national histories, that forms aware European citizens without erasing national identities. The point is not to impose a language, English already functions as the instrument, but to build a common cultural substrate. A European school not in the sense of a centralised institution, but of a shared curriculum, systematic exchanges, and an idea of European citizenship that today exists on paper and barely at all in practice.

The economic miracle

The real turning point for the Italian economy did not come with unification in 1861, nor in the decades immediately following. It came with European integration. In 1951 the ECSC was born, the European Coal and Steel Community, the first example of European pragmatic federalism: not a treaty that refounded everything, but an agreement among six countries on specific strategic sectors. In 1957 came the Common Market.

The effect on the Italian economy was extraordinary. Between 1951 and 1963, Italian GDP grew at an average of 5.8 per cent per year. It was the economic miracle: Italy moved from an agricultural country devastated by war to the world's fifth largest industrial power. In 1987, for a brief period, Italian GDP surpassed that of the United Kingdom.

The lesson I draw from this is clear: the formal unification of 1861 had created the necessary but not sufficient conditions. It was integration into a larger market, with common rules and shared institutions, that unlocked productive potential. The same pattern repeats itself at European scale: the single market and the euro have produced real benefits, but they remain structurally incomplete without a fiscal union, without an integrated capital market, without a common defence.

The lesson for Europe today

Europe in 2026 has 27 governments, 27 parliaments, 27 judicial systems, 27 armies buying different weapons from the same American suppliers, 27 fragmented capital markets that force the best companies to raise finance on Wall Street. It has done one thing that pre-unification Italy had not yet done: a common currency, the euro. But in everything else, the parallel with the Italian states before 1859 is more precise than anyone cares to admit.

Mario Draghi, in the report delivered to the European Commission in September 2024, certifies that the model on which Europe built its prosperity is dead: cheap Russian energy, open Chinese markets, free American military protection. Three pillars collapsed. And he points the way: more integration, not less. Fiscal union, common debt, integrated defence, unified capital markets.

This is exactly the same logic that led to Italian unification. Not a leap into the void, but a gradual process guided by those who were ready to take the first step. The pragmatic federalism Draghi proposes for Europe, starting from a core of states willing to integrate without waiting for unanimous agreement among twenty-seven, is the same method that produced the ECSC in 1951, Airbus in 1970, and the euro in 1999.

Italian history teaches the shadows too. Integration without compensatory mechanisms for weaker areas produces fractures that last for generations. The Mezzogiorno still pays today for a unification that was rapid in institutions and slow in substance. Europe will need to do better.

And it teaches patience. The Italy of 1861 had a head of state, a government, a parliament and a unified judicial system. But it took decades before Italians felt genuinely Italian. It took schooling, compulsory military service, television. Europe has its institutions, its currency, its market. What it still lacks is what Italy built slowly: a common sense of belonging.

The history of the Risorgimento teaches that integration does not happen by waiting until everyone is ready together. It happens when the largest and economically strongest choose to read history honestly and understand that more integration means more prosperity and more security for their own citizens, not less. Energy, defence, new technologies: these are the sectors where scale matters, where no European state is large enough to count for anything alone, and where a core of countries willing to take the first step can demonstrate that it works. The others will follow. They have done it once already, with the currency. They can do it again.