The National Italian Navy had been created on 17 November 1860, when the regional navies – Sardinian, Bourbon, Sicilian, Tuscan and Papal – combined. Four months later, on 17 March 1861, it became the Regia Marina Italiana, following the proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy. The outcome of Lissa largely revolved around the irresolution and poor strategic and tactical judgement of the Italian Commander in Chief, Admiral Carlo Pellion di Persano. Urged by the government to take some Austrian territory before the war ended, particularly after Custoza, he conceived a plan to sortie with virtually the entire Italian fleet in order to effect a bombardment of, and landing on, the Austrian island of Lissa (now Vis in Croatia) in the Adriatic.46 Persano deployed twelve ironclad warships and twenty-two unarmoured vessels (including transports for some 3000 troops) against which the Austrian fleet, under vice admiral Wilhelm von Tegethoff, could pit only seven armoured frigates (built of wood and plated with thin armour), seven steam-driven wooden ships without armour, and an assortment of thirteen screw-driven and paddle-wheel gunboats.
Persano left from the port of Ancona on 16 July, and was off the island by 18 July whereupon he commenced firing on the defences. No attempt was made to land as the Italian commander, despite his materiel superiority, feared the Austrians might arrive whilst the procedure was underway. The bombardment continued the next day and some of the troops were landed. Persano however failed to provide a covering force for these landings and was unaware that Tegethoff, who had been informed of the attack by cable, was hurrying to the scene from the Austrian base at Fasana, near Pola (Pula), on the southern tip of the Istrian peninsula. Tegethoff arrived off Lissa on the morning of 20 July, and approached the position with his command organised in three divisions, arranged in succession; armoured ships first, then unarmoured large ships. Each division was in a chevron formation, the flagship of the division in the centre with the rest of the ships echeloned sternwards to port and starboard. The Italians were disorganised and Persano attempted to form a line of battle whilst, for reasons unknown, simultaneously deciding to switch his flagship and thus interrupt command and communication. The end result was that the Austrians were able to charge through and sunder the Italian battle line and defeat them in detail. Persano, who compounded all his earlier errors by initially reporting that he had won the engagement, was dismissed from the navy, which was itself left under a cloud. It was perhaps then unsurprising that one of the government’s first moves after the disaster was to reduce the Navy’s budget, ushering in what the historian Aldo Fraccaroli called ‘dark, sad years for the Navy, [it being] relegated to a position of minor importance’.47
However, despite the defeats of Custoza and Lissa, Italy got what it wanted from the war. Following the Prussian victory at Königgrätz (Sadowa) on 3 July 1866 Austria sought to make peace, and Bismarck was keen to oblige. He did not seek any Austrian territory, but rather wanted to exclude Austria from Prussian and wider German affairs and to bind the small German states that had been allied to Austria to Prussia, mostly by annexation. Bismarck kept his word to Italy however, and Austria was forced to cede Venetia under the terms of the ‘Peace of Prague,’ the treaty that ended the war on 23 August 1866. However, Austria refused to hand the territory directly to Italy, preserving national amour-propre by handing it to Napoleon III, who, in turn ceded it to Italy. The province ceded equates roughly with the modern Italian regions of Veneto, including the capital Venice, and Friuli-Venezia Giulia, though minus its capital, Trieste, which remained in Austrian hands. Austria also retained the Trentino territory (the modern semi-autonomous province of Trento), which remained a major bone of contention.
Otto von Bismarck was again to play an important, albeit indirect, part in the next major redemption of Italian territory; that of Rome and the Lazio. That Rome and the surrounding area had remained beyond the control of the Italian state was mainly due to the presence there of French troops, tasked with preserving the remnant of Papal temporal power by Napoleon III. However, the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 resulted in the withdrawal of this force, and more importantly the backing of the Second Empire for Papal temporal power, leaving the way clear for the Italian state to take control. Without the support of Napoleon III, who was captured at the Battle of Sedan on 2 September and whose rule was ended by the effective declaration of a Third Republic on 4 September 1870, the Papal regime was doomed. The Italian State quickly formed a force of some 50,000 men under general Raffaele Cadorna (the father of the First World War general) which moved on Rome on the 11 September. On the Italian side the hope was for a peaceful solution, and the King of Italy wrote to the Pope on 8 September guaranteeing his person and position:
The Government of the King will protect the interest which the whole Catholic world possesses in the entire independence of the Sovereign Pontiff […] The Government of the King is firm in assuring the guarantees necessary to the spiritual independence of the Holy See, and that the head of the Catholic Church shall preserve on the banks of the Tiber a seat honourable and independent of all human sovereignty.48
Pius IX was however determined upon offering at least token resistance, and he had sufficient force to do so; defending the Papal territory was a force of some 11,00049 troops under a German general, Hermann Kanzler.50 These consisted of members of the Palatine Guard (guardia palatina), Noble Guard (guardia nobile), and the famous Swiss Guard (guardia svizzera), together with the colourful Papal Zouaves (zuavi pontifici) under the command of Roger de Beauffort.51
The Italian army reached the ancient Aurelian Wall on 19 September and took up position. The rituals of siege-craft, formulated over the centuries, stipulated that the defenders of a position could honourably surrender once a ‘practicable breach’ had been made in the wall.52 The Aurelian Wall, built between 270 and 282 AD,53 had been designed, to utilise Gibbon’s picturesque prose, ‘only to resist the less potent engines of antiquity’ and it was no match for the ‘thundering artillery’ that was now pointed at it.54 Nevertheless there was some fighting:
Six battalions of the reserve Bersaglieri had been assigned to advance against Porta Pia. The artillery was still targeting the wall to open the breach […] [and] it was announced that a large hole had been opened near Porta Pia, and that the Pontifical guns, which had been very ineffectual in rate of fire, had been dismounted and silenced. Papal Zouaves were stationed on the thick walls of the Castrum Praetorium and their fire was causing much suffering to one of our regiments. A few hundred metres from the wall two of our large artillery pieces were firing at the wall and with every shot more pieces of the wall fell away. When the Porta Pia was clear [of enemy troops] and the breach nearby open almost to the ground, the infantry launched the attack and the six battalions of Bersaglieri rushed by and entered the city.55
The news of the breach and its successful storming was brought to Pius IX around 09:00 hrs, who was at the time conferring with the diplomatic corps in the throne room of the Vatican. He is said to have murmured ‘fiat voluntas tua in coelo et in terra’ [thy will be done on earth as in heaven] before turning to the diplomats and announcing that he intended to surrender to save the unnecessary shedding of blood, but asked them to witness that he did so only under the threat of violence. The Zouaves, who were manning that particular portion of the defences, and had asked to be allowed to fight to the end, were ordered to surrender after showing sufficient resistance to prove the Pope’s point.56 Casualties were low; the Italians lost 56 dead and some 140 wounded whilst on the Papal side 20 died and 49 were wounded.57 As had occurred in all previous annexations, the people of the areas under question voted in a plebiscite that was held on 2 October 1870. The issue was worded as follows: ‘We wish to be united with the the Kingdom of Italy under the constitutional government of King Victor Emmanuel II and his successors’. The result was promulgated on 9 October. In the City of Rome, 40,785 voted for incorporation in the Italian State, as against 46 for remaining under the Pope. In the region as a whole out of 167,548 regist
ered voters, 133,681 voted for incorporation with 1,507 against.58 The Pope, refusing all entreaties from, and guarantees offered, by the Italian government retreated into the Vatican and became a self-imposed prisoner. Thus began a long period of stand-off, and the state and the church did not reach agreement on their relationship until 1929.59
The incorporation of Rome into Italy seems like a victory for democracy, however it has been convincingly argued that the plebiscites, which were used to legitimise the formation of Italy from its component parts from 1860 onwards, were rigged.60 Certainly, it is difficult to visualise what would have happened had the vote gone against. The vast majority of the population was in any case excluded from any form of political participation. Suffrage, linked to property and literary qualifications, was extremely limited, and the parliamentary system was such that governments were formed from ‘the variable and casual fluctuations of groups and personalities’ over the members of which the Prime Minister, and the monarch, deployed a powerful patronage system. This system was used to ensure that Members of Parliament who toed the line were rewarded. This process was known as transformismo, whereby opposition was ‘transformed’ into support.61
Further, by the Papal decree non expedit of 29 February 1868, Roman Catholics were forbidden to take any part in the political life of the new state. Enough observed this prohibition so as to ensure that prominent politicians were ‘commonly secular or anticlerical, and often Freemasons.’62 Internationally, the Roman Catholic hierarchy were fiercely critical of Italy as a constituted state. The English Cardinal Henry Edward Manning wrote in 1877 that:
The present Chamber, elected by less than a hundredth part of the Catholic Italian people, represents the Revolution, and nothing but the Revolution. The Catholic electors refuse to vote: less than two hundred and fifty thousand elect the Parliament, which Englishmen believe to represent the 26,000,000 of Italy.63
Despite his obvious bias, it has to be conceded that Manning had a point.
Political power at the provincial level was vested in a government appointed prefect, a system borrowed from France, who was responsible for implementing centrally derived policy. The prefect was a powerful figure, being also the head of the police in his province. Prefects could, and did, utilise these powers to neutralise political opposition to the government, dissolve councils and proscribe political associations which posed a threat to what they perceived as ‘public security.’ These measures were applied during election periods when the prefect was able to use these powers so as to disadvantage anti-government candidates.64 This centralisation process, known as Piedmontisation, ensured that Italy was, ostensibly at least, a highly centralized state, albeit with a number of very disparate regions. Division was also evident along class lines; the nobility was in decline but, as late as 1909, ‘over most of the south the old-established oligarchies still retained control.’65 Here the prefect assumed the status of a ‘diplomatic agent’ accredited by a ‘foreign’ government to the local potentates, and the southern peasant – really landless day labourers (braccianti) – remained, in fact, an ‘oppressed serf.’66 Perhaps unsurprisingly, emigration from southern Italy was on a large scale. Between 1876 and 1914 a total of 13,882,000 Italians are calculated to have left Italy. By 1913 sixty-three percent of these had left the northern and central regions, whilst despite only having thirty-eight per cent of the population, forty-seven per cent departed from the south. Most of the latter migrated to the US, Latin America and Australia, whilst the majority of emigration from northern and central Italy was to European destinations.67 However, by far the largest single recipient of Italian immigrants was the US.68
Physical hardship accounted for a large degree of this flight. The standard of living became worse in the whole of Italy between 1870 and 1900, especially in the countryside, where the majority of the population resided. For example, in the ‘pellagra triangle’ of Veneto, Lombardy and Emilia-Romagna the eponymous condition, causing dermatitis, diarrhoea and, in many cases, dementia, was endemic and considered unavoidable. In fact it was easily avoidable; whilst the causes (a deficiency of niacin, which was not present in maize, the staple diet of the rural poor) were not properly identified until early in the twentieth century, that it could be alleviated, if not eradicated, by a slight dietary improvement was well known. It has been calculated that, merely to stay alive, the rural poor were forced to spend up to seventy-five percent of their income on food, which despite its relative cost, did not contain enough nutrition.69 The trouble was, as Zamagni has pointed out, ‘in order to rid the countryside of pellagra the social relations that existed in these areas would have to be revolutionised, and this was something that only started to happen towards the end of the nineteenth century.’70 There is undoubtedly truth in Ashley’s statement that ‘The fact that Italian politicians came from the propertied class made them singularly sanguine about alleviating poverty by stimulating capitalism.’71
The Italian state also suffered from endemic malaria – widely regarded as the ‘Italian national disease’ during the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth – throughout nearly the entire peninsula and the islands of Sicily and Sardinia. Southern Italy, including Rome, was however afflicted with the falciparum strain, the most dangerous and acute type, whilst the north suffered from the less deadly, but still debilitating, vivax malaria. This disease was a part, and probably an important part, of the reason for the large-scale emigration, particularly from the south, causing a cycle of economic backwardness. Perhaps unsurprisingly, in 1900 the average life expectancy for both sexes in Italy has been computed to be about 43 years, which compares rather unfavourably with England and Wales at just over 48 years, France at 47.7, and Germany at a little over 45. It was however better than Austria-Hungary, whose combined figures average out at around 38 years, and much better than Spain at 35 years.72
Perhaps also having an effect on emigration was the widespread social unrest that manifested itself through violence and uprising. One prime example of this was the insurrection that took place in Sicily in 1893; instigated by the fasci movement in protest at an increase in food prices and onerous working terms, it led to the government initiating a state of siege, under which those participating were brutally suppressed. The rural police force, the Carabinieri, was unable to cope and 40,000 troops were sent to Sicily, martial law was declared and military tribunals were established.73 A form of internal exile (domicilio coatto) to penal colonies, usually on islands off the coast such as Pantelleria, was resorted to, and over 1000 were deported without trial.74 Most alarmingly, in January 1894 this unrest spread to the north, leading to an uprising in what is now the province of Massa Carrara in the Tuscany region. Luigi Molinari, an anarchist, syndicalist, and lawyer, and in 1901 the founder of the newspaper L’Università popolare, was held to have been the instigator. At least this was the verdict of the military tribunal that tried him following the extension of the state of siege to the area. Molinari was sentenced to 23 years in prison. This, however, provoked a huge protest movement, and he received an amnesty the following year.75
Anarchism was a powerful force to be reckoned with on the Italian left, and in July 1894 the government of Crispi put in place a series of laws that greatly restricted the exercise of free association. These measures, basically curtailing the ability of workers to collectivise in the name of eliminating ‘incitement to class hatred,’ were defined as ‘anti-anarchic.’76 Furthermore, the electoral registers were ‘amended’, the Socialist Party of Italian Workers was barred, its deputies arrested, and parliament prorogued in October 1894.77 Crispi justified such measures, which made prosecution possible on mere suspicion, on the grounds that they guaranteed the punishment of those criminals who would otherwise have been acquitted for lack of evidence.78 Automatic sentencing for belonging to organisations deemed subversive was also introduced.79 There were many more internal and social problems as helpfully if briefly itemised in 1913 by the historian and po
litician Pasquale Villari when he noted the continuing prevalence of ‘illiteracy, crime, the camorra, the mafia’ and the North-South divide of the country.80
In its relations with other European states the cornerstone of Italian foreign policy was membership of the Triple Alliance, or Triplice, with its old enemy Austria-Hungary, as Austria had become following the ‘Compromise of 1867,’ and its past ally Germany. One of the primary reasons for Italy joining with the members of what had been the Dual Alliance on 20 May 1882 was rivalry with France. Italy and France had been at something approaching loggerheads over North African territory since 1881. In that year France had established a protectorate over the nominally Ottoman territory of Tunis, which Italy had coveted since reunification. The Italian claim was based on it having the largest European population, some 97,000, in residence, and, somewhat more ephemerally, on Roman occupation in antiquity. Whatever merits the Italian claim might have had, it was as nothing when confronted with the realities of French and British power. These states had, as one scholar has put it, ‘abandoned their former policy of working to uphold [Ottoman] territorial integrity and were now helping themselves to its real estate.’81 Perhaps this is overstating the matter, but certainly Britain had also taken charge of Ottoman territory when it gained administrative responsibility, though not sovereignty, over the Ottoman island of Cyprus in 1878. Having been thwarted in her colonial ambitions, Italy was fearful that the resultant discord with France might mean that she was, as Francesco Crispi told Herbert Bismarck, in danger of being placed ‘between two enemies, one on our right and the other on our left.’82 Avoidance of this situation was the leading factor behind Italy joining what then became the Triple-Alliance.83
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