ABSTRACT
On 20 September 1870, Rome became Italian. The national army under King Vittorio Emanuele II breached the walls of the papal capital and the Risorgimento rushed in. The unification of the various regions of the peninsula into Europe’s latest nation proceeded fitfully during the nineteenth century, and Rome was claimed as its seat only when a fortuitous shift of the balance of powers during the Franco-Prussian war allowed it.2 The Risorgimento was no showcase of Italian military triumph. The siege of Rome, centred on the Porta Pia gateway, had not been much of an event either, so a few soldiers posed the following day for the photojournalists Antonio and Paolo Francesco D’Alessandri (Figure 5.1). Martyrs to the cause were multiplied in the lab, an early example of the manipulation of the photographic medium for a political agenda. While the papal defences closed ranks around the person of Pope Pius IX at the Vatican palace, the national troops took aim at the deposed ruler’s latest public work. Virginio Vespignani (1808-82), who had completed Michelangelo’s unfinished inner facade of Porta Pia, had also crafted a new outer facade in the form of a triumphal arch suggesting the pope’s temporal power.3 The troops took it as their target, battering it with cannon fire while the breaching took place fifty metres to the right to avoid damage to Michelangelo’s work. This first rowdy event presages all the features of Rome’s imminent transformation: selected symbols of papal temporal power were defaced, historical monuments of artistic tradition were preserved, and a wilful configuration of images, both ephemeral and permanent, was constructed, all guided by the political imperative of showing the shift of power from papal to national control. The Via Pia beyond the gate is now known as Via XX Settembre, marking that 20 September. Ferdinand Gregorovius, the German scholar of papal Rome and witness to its fall, presciently analysed the consequences of institutional change on urban form:
The Italians … have made the ancient cosmopolitan city of Rome the capital of their young national realm. A future historian will have to describe the effect of this immeasurable act and the transformation to which it will necessarily subject the physiognomy of the papacy, the church, Italy and the city of Rome … The Italians gained possession of Rome and the most venerable of historical legacies that never gave a people a seat more exalted and never imposed a mission more difficult and a duty more grievous than this: to be the great conservator and the renewer of Rome, to become once again great through her greatness and to reconcile the terrible breach between the church and the nation through a moral reform.4
