ABSTRACT
Italy in the early modern period, roughly from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries, Renaissance to the Enlightenment, is not normally seen as a coherent unit. Politically it was subdivided into different kinds of States, as maps 2 and 4 indicate.1 In the nineteenth century the dominant European statesman Prince Metternich notoriously stressed, when resisting nationalism, that Italy was merely a ‘geographical expression’. It remained without political unity until 1870-71 when Rome itself was finally absorbed into United Italy, and became the capital. Even then the political state of Italy might arguably be seen as devoid of real Italian national feeling through the peninsula. It has been argued that there was a deep North-South divide within Italy, based on mutual ignorance, distrust or envy, that had made political unity of the whole geographical expression even more difficult for the few who desired it; and rendered such full unity unpalatable even to the majority of those who understood what was taking place in the 1850s to 1870s. Bitter civil war scarred the South in the 1860s.
