On March 17, 1861 the official proclamation of the birth of the kingdom of Italy took place, at that moment the King of Piedmont and Sardinia, Vittorio Emanuele II of the House of Savoy, assumed for himself and for his descendants the title of King of Italy, acclaimed by the Italian people and legitimized by a norm of the newborn Italian parliament.
The history of the kingdom of Italy begins at this time, the various revolutionary and independence movements, the various insurrections and the wars of independence that had taken place in the decades immediately preceding March 17, 1861 had been an important prelude to the history of national unity of one of the last European countries to have known its own unification, with a delay of just four centuries compared to the rest of Europe, and yet, in those four centuries of modern age, if politically unitary Italy did not exist, and its territories were divided between the various European nations and the countless Italic courts, republics and lordships, its cultural history continued to be in step with the rest of Europe and its protagonists, nobles, notables, philosophers and popes, continued to play a central role in European history.
There is an Italian history, a history of Italy that goes from Rome to nineteenth-century unification, and it is a history of continuity, influence and power, both cultural and economic, and this history is the basis, the point of origin of what it would later be the history of the kingdom of Italy.
In this article I do not want to go into the merits of the wars of independence, we will talk about that in other articles and posts, but I want to introduce a speech that will accompany us in the next ten weeks, through the first season of the series on the history of the kingdom of Italy, a series that begins today, with a video dedicated to the birth of the kingdom of Italy and that you can find below, and will end exactly on December 12, in a sense with the end of the kingdom of Italy.
Each video will be accompanied by an article like this, they will be wide-ranging articles aimed at introducing the topic of the video, alongside it with apparently disconnected information which, however, I consider fundamental for a full understanding of the historical dynamics that will be discussed in the video.