Narrates Italian history since unification in 1861, when Piedmont-led monarchists annexed republican southerners. Through the 1990s, government alternated between idealism and materialism, but generally operated as a one-party state compromised by the burden of southern economic development. Italy traditionally lacked the agriculture of Europe’s northern plain, has no navigable north-south rivers to facilitate trade and communications, was for many years plagued by malarial swamps that forced people into the hills, and until 1850s, silk was its only major industry. Italy’s ruling class was small, with comparatively fewer commercial interests and more landowners. Roman cities persisted into the medieval ages, presaging a tradition of communal autonomy. Venice, Milan, Genoa, and Florence (along with Paris) were the five great cities of the early 14th century, the Florentines and Venetians being strongly republican, with imperial (Ghibelline) vs papal (Guelf) rivalries also prominent. Charles V’s 1530 conquest brought the Catholic Church patronage: the Counterreformation revitalized 16th-century Rome; the opening of Atlantic trade marginalized the great trading cities. The Napoleonic era resurfaced the national question. 1848’s failed uprising against ruling Austria showed lack of unity among federalist moderates and democrats. Over the next decade, Piedmont king Victor Emmanuel accepted the principle of the executive answering to parliament, not the crown. Prime minister Cavour, seeing the need for an ally, struck a secret treaty with France and then provoked Austria in 1859, drawing in the French, who won a minor engagement at Solferino and then concluded an armistice; Savoy and Nice were traded in exchange for Piedmont’s annexing Lombardy; the central states were to revert to Austrian-supported rulers but instead asked join Piedmont. Separately, Garibaldi’s volunteers swept the south and then conceded at Teano. Unification was completed by Prussia’s 1866 defeat of Austria, which gifted Italy the Veneto, and 1870 victory over France, which brought Rome. Northerners dominated government; with the latifundi frustrating reform and excluding southern peasants from voting, legitimacy was a problem. One-quarter of manufacturing jobs were in textiles; emigration was widespread; an economic surge in the first decade of the 1900s depended on remittance. Giolotti, the predominant figure prior to Mussolini, failed to ‘transform’ the socialists into a parliament party, to build intellectual support of the liberal state. Followers of Croce’s neo-idealist, anti-socialist La Voce and the Futurists paved the way for corporatist fascism. Italy entered World War I by result of secret diplomacy; the effect of the war was to increase fragmentation; Italy overreached at the Paris peace conference and so didn’t get Dalmatia or Fiume. D’Nunzio’s 1924 occupation of the Adriatic city forced the one-time socialist Mussoilini to move rightward. Mussolini wasn’t part of the March 1922 march on Rome – his appointment was constitutional – and until 1927 he was forced to alternate between conciliating the establishment and movement faithful. The Acerbo bill legally provided the fascists 2/3ds parliament. Fascism was never an ideology, never strong enough to do more than temporize. By the 1930s, the Romantic, rank-and-file angry young men (or junior WWI officers) had become a church-going family man. But as they were unqualified to run the state, the liberal machinery was never abolished, the bureaucracy never aggrandized, the police independent (until 1940). Italians believed they gained security in exchange for loss of freedom. Mussolini’s economic policy was hodge-podge, despite controlling 20 percent of industry (second-highest in Europe, behind the USSR), and there were no gains in the south. Consequently, although jealous of Hitler, Mussolini was ill-prepared for war and performed poorly in Greece. The slowness of 1943’s Allied counterattack mean partisan resistance formed in the north (unlike southern liberation). After the war, the monarchy was narrowly abolished but general amnesty granted, so fundamental disagreement remained. The Christian Democrats ruled an essentially one-party state via Church support (against the PCI) and southern clientelism; the lightly planned economy favored northern industrialization (i.e., rising employment and materialism) as well as EEC membership. Notwithstanding legislation to break up the estates, the price was continued southern subordination. Regional autonomy (from 1970) introduced a degree of leftist influence (in the red zone of Tuscany, Umbria, and Emilia-Romagna, while post-1968 industrial unrest was channeled into constitutional forms, marginalizing the Communists. The postwar system collapsed in the 1980s; the northern separatists Forza Italia (and Berlusconi) rose in 1994, via the latter’s domination of mass media. The country just squeaked into the Euro, potentially exacerbating an internally conflicted nation.