The Italian Empire

As late as 1859, Italy was dominated by the Hapsburg Austrian empire. The Hapsburg empire exercised direct sovereignty over the prosperous provinces of Lombardy, Venetia, and Trentino, maintained lesser Hapsburg states in Tuscany and Parma, propped up the teetering Sicilian Bourbon Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, and supported the Catholic Church's control over the Papal States. Of all of Italy, only one state -- the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia -- retained any independence. During the revolutions of 1848 that had swept Europe, Piedmont-Sardinia had led Italian nationalists in the failed attempt to create a Kingdom of Upper Italy. In 1858, the French Empire and Piedmontese government signed the secret Pact of Plombières, committing France to support Piedmontese ambitions in north Italy against Austria with armed force.

The War of Italian Unification was mercifully brief, and one-sided. The might of the French army, and growing nationalist fervour in northern Italy, led to the expulsion of the Hapsburg armies from Lombardy, Venetia, and Trentino. Revolutions in the Papal States caused the separation of Rome -- loyal to the Pope -- from the remainder of the Papal States, which joined the Italian nationalists. Against the opposition of the Pope and Roman Catholics worldwide, France organized an Italian federation comprising a half-dozen separate states. The Piedmontese kingdom, controlling the island of Sardinia, historical Piedmont, Lombardy, Venetia-Trentino, and the Roman Province, was unquestionably the dominant state in the Italian Empire, as the motor of Italian unification. However, the Kingdom of Naples (under its Muratist kings) and the Kingdom of Sicily (still under the Sicilian Bourbons) maintained their fictive independence inside the Italian Empire, and acquired some influence over national policies. Elsewhere in Italy, collateral branches of the French Bonaparte family were placed on the thrones of the Kingdom of Tuscany and the Grand Duchy of Romagna, while the Kingdom of Central Italy was placed under the authority of a collateral branch of the House of Savoy. This federal structure, based upon the German model, endured.

After France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, the Italian federation occupied the entire Lazio district, leaving only part of the city of Rome under the temporal rule of the Pope. In 1874, the Italian states coalesced into the Italian Empire, a federal state on the model of Germany under the hereditary rule of the King of Piedmont-Sardinia. Though the Italian Empire constituted one of the Great Powers of Europe, Italy's attempt to gain worldwide influence was undercut by the mind-numbing poverty and illiteracy in the south of the Italian Empire. From 1860 until 1914, seven million southern Italians were forced to emigrate, to France, to Algeria, to Argentina, and to Brazil, while illiteracy ran rampant. Despite these pressing problems, the Italian Empire spared no effort in a program of colonization in the Mediterranean basin and in the Horn of Africa. Tunisia was placed under an Italian protectorate in 1881, and Somaliland, Eritrea, and Tigray were seized from Ethiopia in the 1890's. Italy took advantage of the Balkan War of 1912-1913 to annex the Turkish provinces of Tripolitania, Fezzan, and Cyrenaica, and to create an Albanian satellite state excluding Epirus but including Kosovo.

Initially, unified Italy was aligned with Germany and the Austro-Hungarian empire. In the 1870's and 1880's, however, France successfully detached Italy from its Austro-German alliance, playing upon Italian sympathies dating from the First War of Italian Unification and encouraging Italian adventures in the Balkans and the Horn of Africa. Beginning in the 1890's, Italian foreign policy sought -- with little success -- to play the Triple Entente against the Austro-German alliance, in the hope of gaining its irredenta against either France (Aosta and Nice) or Austria-Hungary (Trentino, Fruilia, Trieste, and Dalmatia). Despite entreaties from both the Triple Entente and the Austro-German alliance to intervene in the First World War, Italy remained neutral, hoping to emerge all the stronger relative to its rivals in the post-war era.

Indeed, in the decade that followed the end of the world war, Italy did prosper, as the only major industrial or industrializing country in Europe to have avoided the traumas of trench warfare, political collapse, and millions of dead and injured, Italy found itself in an admirable position. During the 1920's, Italian industries -- concentrated in the northern states of the Empire -- enjoyed a remarkable boom, almost doubling their output and transforming such cities as Turin, Milan, and Genoa into world-class industrial centres. Italian culture also enjoyed a golden age, as the Futurists -- avant-garde artists and writers who hoped to renovate the ancient pieties of Italian culture along the streamlined and innovative lines of the new industrial world -- made themselves known worldwide as exciting innovators. Although Italy did not gain territory from the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and radical socialism and fascism were popular among the Italian working classes, Italy did enjoy a modest territorial expansion, as the League of Nations recognized -- in 1925 -- the inclusion of the Kingdom of Albania in the Italian empire and with Italian suzerainty over the Ethiopian monarchy. By the beginning of the Great Depression, even though the average Italian was poorer than the average northern European, Italy was recognized as one of the Great Powers.

Italy's traditional neutrality ended in the 1930's when Bavaria and Austria were annexed into Nazi Germany. Fearful of further Nazi advances into formerly Austrian territory, the Italian Empire joined the French alliance system, and participated in the multi-national containment of Germany. Italy entered the Second World War when Germany launched its invasion of the Po valley in the spring of 1943 was halted in the Battle of the Piave at a heavy cost to the Italian forces. In 1943 and 1944, Italian land and air forces performed a crucial role in the campaign up the Danube to liberate Czechoslovakia, and to crush the Nazi 5th Army of Berlin outside of Leipzig.

The shock of the half-million Italian war dead played a crucial role in convincing Italians to support the creation of the European Confederation. Italy's modernization was completed in the three decades following the Second World War, with even the south managing to close part of the gap with the north and centre. Ironically, this same prosperity encouraged separatist movements, based on general concern for the fate of the still-extant regional languages spoken inside the component states of the Italian empire, northern Italian concerns about the uncontrolled immigration of Sicilians and Neapolitans, and the gradual disappearance of the Italian state as the European Confederation became steadily more important a bureaucracy. Ultimately, in 1971, the Italian Empire dissolved, as Sicily, Naples, Rome, and Tuscany separated from the Italian Empire to become independent member states of the European Confederation, as did Albania and Libya. The Italian State Treaty of 1973 transformed the rump Italian Empire into a federation of self-governing regions, some, like Venezia Fruilia-Guilia, adopting republican models of government, others, like Emilia, Lombardy, and Sardinia, became autonomous regions federated with Piedmont. Sardinia's eventual secession from North Italy in 1978 only symbolized the extent to which the Italian state had decomposed.

More than any other major European region, Italy suffered from the Third World War -- not only does the city of Venice bear the dubious reputation of being the only city in the European Commonwealth within its 1982 borders to suffer nuclear attack, but Italy bore the brunt of the mass migrations from the Maghreb and Africa in 1983 and 1984. By the 1990's, the Italian peninsula and its neighbouring regions have taken part in the general revival of Europe and the Mediterranean basin. The establishment of Venetia as an independent republic supported by Venetian Earth has played a crucial role in completing Italian recovery, making Italy once again a European and world centre.