ABSTRACT
In April 1859, the so-called “Second Independence War” began, with the Kingdom of Sardinia and France allied against the Habsburg Empire. The conflict involved only Lombardy, and ended with a Franco-Savoy victory and the subsequent peace of Zurich in November. In the meantime, however, under pressure from internal revolts, the regimes of central Italy’s small states had collapsed, and the Kingdom of Sardinia had also extended its control over that area. However, the situation in the peninsula was not yet a stable one.
In the spring of 1860 the military initiative passed into the hands of democratic volunteers. Guided by Garibaldi, a volunteer army invaded the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, and in November 1860 was able to take control of a kingdom that, while militarily strong, was racked by civil war. With the consent of international diplomacy, the Savoy army intervened in the south to prevent the volunteers from attempting to go on to conquer the area of Rome in the Papal State.
The situation in the field was by now no longer the same as that enshrined in the treaties, and with a series of plebiscites the subjects of the ancient Italian states chose to become citizens of the constitutional monarchy of Savoy.
