Unification of Italy
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Italian unification, also known as the Risorgimento (meaning "Resurgence"), was the 19th-century political and social movement that resulted in the consolidation of different states of the Italian Peninsula into a single state, the Kingdom of Italy. Inspired by the rebellions in the 1820s and 1830s against the outcome of the Congress of Vienna, the unification process was precipitated by the revolutions of 1848, and reached completion in 1871, when Rome was officially designated the capital of the Kingdom of Italy.
Some of the states that had been targeted for unification (terre irredente) did not join the Kingdom of Italy until 1918, after Italy defeated Austria-Hungary in World War I. For this reason, historians sometimes describe the unification period as continuing past 1871, to include activities during the late 19th century and the First World War (1915–1918), and reaching completion only with the Armistice of Villa Giusti on November 4, 1918. This more expansive definition of the unification period is the one presented, for example, at the Central Museum of the Risorgimento at the Vittoriano.
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