The History of Italy

Italy the peninsula is three thousand years old. The Italian state is younger than the London police force.

When the Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed in 1861, its first census counted 21,777,334 people, three-quarters of them unable to read, speaking languages as far apart as Portuguese and Romanian. This book asks how that became one country, and what the process cost.

Most English-language books about Italy are about the Renaissance, or Mussolini, or the mafia. This one starts in 1796 and runs to the present, answering questions with sourced figures instead of anecdotes.

Inside this book:

• The Risorgimento counted - plebiscites returning above 99 percent, and how the ballots were actually handed out
• The war the kingdom refused to name - 120,000 soldiers in the southern provinces, and two death tolls that differ by a factor of ten
• The great departure - fourteen million recorded crossings, six to eight million people, and a population that grew by eight million anyway
• How a parliament dismantled itself - 26,000 blackshirts, 12,000 regular troops, and a confidence vote of 306 to 116
• The lira, twice - 625 to the dollar, unchanged for twenty-two years, and 1,936.27 to the euro
• Italy now - 369,944 births in 2024, debt near 135 percent of output, 24 million workers carrying 16 million pensioners

Where two reliable sources disagree, both numbers appear, with who did the counting and why. All 150 figures were made for this book: charts, diagrams, terrain-based maps, and ink illustrations.

No background in Italian history is assumed. Start with the numbers.