After wars against Austria and a campaign of diplomacy and conquest led by Camillo di Cavour and Giuseppe Garibaldi, the various Italian states—kingdoms, duchies, and papal territories—were consolidated under the House of Savoy. Rome and Venice remained outside the new kingdom, added only years later, but the proclamation marked the effective birth of the modern Italian state.
Italian unification, the Risorgimento, had simmered for generations, driven by nationalist intellectuals, secret societies, and a series of failed 1848 revolutions. It took the shrewd statecraft of Cavour, prime minister of Piedmont-Sardinia, who maneuvered Austria into war and struck alliances with France, alongside Garibaldi's audacious military campaigns, most famously his conquest of Sicily and Naples with barely a thousand red-shirted volunteers.
When the new parliament in Turin proclaimed Victor Emmanuel II king on this day, the kingdom already encompassed most of the peninsula, but Venice remained Austrian and Rome was still defended by French troops protecting the Pope. Those pieces would not fall into place until 1866 and 1870 respectively.
The unified Italy inherited enormous internal divisions—a wealthy industrializing north and an impoverished agrarian south—that would shape its politics for the next century and beyond. Cavour himself died just three months after seeing his life's work proclaimed, exhausted by the effort.
Key people: Victor Emmanuel II, Camillo di Cavour, Giuseppe Garibaldi