HISTORY OF ITALY (TO 1946) IN A NUTSHELL; ALL YOU NEVER EVEN

THOUGHT OF ASKING ABOUT ITALIAN HISTORY, BUT NEVERTHELESS

MIGHT FIND INTERESTING by Seymour Becker

ETRUSCAN ERA (9th to 3rd centuries BCE)

The Etruscans, from whom the name Tuscany derives, spoke a non-Indo-
European language, which suggests that they, like the Basques, appeared in Europe
before the speakers of languages belonging to the Indo-European family (Latin, Greek,
and the Celtic, Germanic, and Slavic languages). Etruscan culture was partly original and
partly influenced by that of the Greek colonies which existed along the coasts of Italy and
Sicily; it was a major influence on Roman architecture, engineering, religion, the
alphabet, etc. The seat of Etruscan power was in the area between the Tiber and the Arno
rivers, but by the 6th century BCE Etruscan control extended to the Bay of Naples,
Bologna, the Po River valley from Milan to the Adriatic Sea, and Corsica. Fiesole was
an Etruscan city, but Florence did not yet exist. In the 7th-6th centuries, the Etruscans
competed with the Greeks and Carthaginians for control of trade in the western
Mediterranean. Rome, founded in 753, expelled its last Etruscan king in 509. Etruscan
decline began in the 5th century under Greek pressure, to which was soon added pressure
from the Romans to the south and the Celtic Gauls to the north. By the 3rd century the
dozen or so Etruscan city-states had been annexed by Rome, and in the following two
hundred years their inhabitants were fully assimilated by the Romans.

ROMAN REPUBLIC (509-31 BCE)

After the expulsion of its last Etruscan king, Rome conquered all of Italy south of
the Rubicon River (south of Ravenna, closer to Rimini) from the mid-4th to the mid-3rd
century. Over the following century and a third, Rome built a Mediterranean empire
from Spain and North Africa to Greece and Asia Minor. At the beginning of the 2nd
century BCE, Rome conquered Cisalpine Gaul (Italy between the Rubicon and the Alps).
A century of class tensions, civil war, dictatorship, and renewed civil war led to the
collapse of the republic in 31 BCE. Florence was founded in 59 BCE and at first
occupied the area between the Duomo and the Piazza della Signoria and between Via de’
Tornabuoni on the west and Via del Proconsolo on the east. The rectangular street grid
of this part of Florence betrays its origins as a small Roman town.

ROMAN EMPIRE (31 BCE-476 CE)

Defeating his rival Marc Antony, Augustus (nephew of Julius Caesar, who had
been assassinated in 44 BCE) established a de facto monarchy, headed by the imperator
(a title which had originally meant simply a military commander), although he preserved
republican institutions like the Senate. The empire expanded territorially but experienced
bouts of civil war among contenders for the throne, especially in the late 2nd century CE
and the mid-3rd century. The western and eastern halves of the empire were divided at
times after 253 and were never again reunited after 395. In the mid-3rd century began the
settling of Germanic barbarians as auxiliary imperial troops inside the empire’s
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boundaries. In 378 invading Visigoths defeated the imperial army near Adrianople in
today’s Turkey-in-Europe, then moved west into Italy, where they sacked Rome for three
days in 410. The emperor had recently moved his capital first to Milan and then to
Ravenna. The mosaics in the mausoleum of his half-sister, Galla Placidia, who had been
married off to the Visigothic chieftain, are one of the marvels of Ravenna. The Visigoths
were then forced to move west; they settled in southern France and Spain, where they
established a kingdom that lasted till the Muslim invasion at the beginning of the 8th
century. Rome was sacked again in 455, this time for two weeks, by the Vandals,
Germanic barbarians coming from Tunisia, which they had reached by way of France and
Spain.

BARBARIAN SUCCESSOR-STATES (476-800)

In 476 the last Roman emperor in the West was deposed in Ravenna by the leader
of a minor Germanic tribe. Roman emperors contined to rule in the East at
Constantinople till the Turkish conquest of that city in 1453. The emperor in the East
sent the Ostrogoths, led by Theodoric, to deal with the chieftain who had deposed the last
emperor in the West. Theodoric made Ravenna capital of his north Italian kingdom; his
mausoleum (he died in 526) is another of Ravenna’s marvels. Theodoric, like the other
Germanic kings of the successor states by the 6th century, was a Christian. In the second
third of the 6th century, much of Italy was (re)conquered by Justinian, the emperor in the
East. In 568, however, the Lombards, another Germanic tribe, conquered most of Italy,
leaving to the eastern Roman empire only Ravenna, the northern Adriatic coast from
Venice (founded by fugitives from the Lombards) to Ancona, as well as the heel and toe
of the peninsula, Naples, and Rome (now under the direct rule of the pope). Two
hundred years later Charlemagne, king of the Franks, annexed the Lombard kingdom to
his own, ending Lombard control over the pope. This was the beginning of the pope’s
temporal power, which lasted till 1870. In 800 Charlemagne had the pope crown him as
the first Roman emperor in the West since 476.

MEDIEVAL ITALY, NORTH AND SOUTH (800-1250)

Charlemagne’s empire was divided among his grandsons in the mid-9th century.
Italy remained together with the eastern part (Germany), whose ruler alone inherited the
title of Roman emperor. In the same period Muslims from North Africa conquered
Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica, and even attacked Rome. In the 10th century,
Charlemagne’s descendants in Germany-Italy died out. The German dynasty which
succeeded them revived the power and prestige of the emperor and subjected the pope to
its close control. Since the emperor only rarely came south of the Alps, the cities of
northern Italy began to develop as autonomous polities. In the mid-11th century, Norman
knights descended from 9th-century Viking raiders of northern coastal France conquered
Sicily from the Arabs and also much of southern Italy, eliminating the last Byzantine
(East Roman) footholds. Their kingdom, with its capital at Palermo in Sicily, lasted into
the early 13th century.
From 1075 to 1250 all of Western Christendom (that part of the Christian world in
which the pope was recognized as the sole head of the church and Latin was the language
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of the Bible and the liturgy) was affected by the bitter struggle between the empire and
the papacy. It began with the popes asserting their right to rule the church free of secular
interference. This was followed immediately by a decade-long civil war in Germany
over succession to the imperial title between the house of Welf (Guelf in Italian) and the
house of Hohenstaufen or Waiblinger (Ghibelline in Italian). Both the papacy and the
north Italian cities took advantage of the weakening of imperial authority to expand their
authority. Florence’s commune, or city government, was established in 1138, at the end
of the civil war in Germany. The Ghibelline family won the imperial office, and its head
in the second half of the 12th century, Emperor Frederick I “Barbarossa,” made six
expeditions to Italy to enforce his political control. He was opposed 1) by a league of
northern city-states, which forced him to recognize their autonomy, although not formal
independence, from the empire, and 2) by the papacy. His son and successor conquered
the Norman kingdom of Sicily and southern Italy, and married the heiress to that
kingdom. The son of this couple, Emperor Frederick II, made Palermo his capital and
preferred Sicily to Germany, which led to the weakening of his authority over the latter.
The papacy, now surrounded by the territories of the Ghibelline emperor, carried on an
unrelenting struggle, politically and militarily, against Frederick.
All the cities north of Rome joined the struggle, but not necessarily because they
were committed to either pope or emperor. Established rivalries between neighboring
city-states were simply incorporated into the larger struggle, as were partisan rivalries
within the city-states. Both types of rivalries long outlasted the death of Frederick II.
Florence is a typical example. It was usually controlled by the Guelf faction, whose
symbol was the fleur-de-lys still seen on so many medieval buildings in the city.
Florence’s closest and most important rivals, Pisa and Siena, were both in the Ghibelline
camp. When Siena achieved a crushing victory over Florence in 1260, a decade after
Frederick’s death, the Florentine Ghibellines seized power and drove out the leading
Guelfs. Six years later the Guelfs regained control in Florence and soon turned the tables
on Siena as well. All of this was related to the struggle between empire and papacy only
in the sense that each city-state and faction within it looked for support to its enemy’s
enemy. It was not too different from the situation of many third-world states during the
Cold War of the 20th century..

RENAISSANCE IN THE NORTH, FEUDALISM IN THE SOUTH (1250-1504)

By the death of Frederick II in 1250, both empire and papacy were so weakened
politically by their long struggle that neither ever fully recovered. The major
beneficiaries were the city-states of northern Italy, which had gained de facto
independence and now entered on their period of greatest power, prosperity, and cultural
leadership. As early as the 11th century, the maritime republics of Genoa and Venice
were trading in the eastern Mediterranean, while Pisa by the 12th-13th century controlled
Corsica, Sardinia, and much of the Tuscan coast. Now the inland cities of the north, with
economies based on manufacturing for export, joined in the prosperity of the maritime
states. Florence was known throughout Europe for its fine woolen cloth. The north was
plagued, however, by continual warfare among the city-states, which led in many cases to
the seizure of power by leaders of hired armies who then established princely dynasties—
the Visconti, followed by the Sforza, in Milan, the Della Scala (Scaligeri) in Verona, the
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Este in Ferrara and Modena. The Tuscan cities avoided this fate. In Florence the Medici
family was one of several wealthy mercantile or banking families that vied for control of
the city-state’s republican institutions. From 1434 to 1492 the family’s dominance was
rarely challenged, an exception being the Pazzi conspiracy, supported by the pope, in
1478. The family’s heads during this period were Cosimo the Elder, his son Piero the
Gouty, and the latter’s son Lorenzo the Magnificent. Like some others of the city-states,
Florence expanded at the expense of its neighbors, annexing Pistoia (to the northwest) in
1301, Volterra (to the southwest) in 1361, Arezzo (to the southeast) in 1384, and Pisa (to
the west) in 1406. Venice followed a similar course in the first third of the 15th century,
expanding far to the west on the mainland by annexing Padua, Verona, Brescia, and
Bergamo.
Very different was the fate of the south, which the papacy succeeded in keeping
out of the hands of Frederick II’s successors in Germany. Backed by the pope and
recognizing him as their feudal overlord, the Angevins, a branch of the French royal
family, took control of Sicily and the peninsula up to and beyond Naples in 1266. A
decade and a half later the Angevins lost Sicily to the royal dynasty of Aragon (in
northeast Spain) but continued to rule the southern third of the peninsula from Naples till
1435, when the Aragonese dynasty replaced them there as well. Till 1494 the Aragonese
ruled both Sicily and Naples. While Italy north of Rome was divided among warring
city-states ruled by a commercial middle class or by dynasties founded by military
adventurers, the south consisted of two large feudal kingdoms ruled in the end by
different branches of the same family, with a purely agrarian economy and a population
divided into noble lords and dependent peasants.
In the center was the Papal States, ruled from Rome and extending right across
the peninsula to the Adriatic Sea. The papacy was in a state of crisis in the 14th and 15th
centuries. In 1305-78 the popes, having expended much of their former authority and
power in the struggle against the empire, lived at Avignon in southern France, under the
protection and control of the French king (the Babylonian Captivity). Matters worsened
in 1378-1417 when there were two lines of popes, one in Avignon and one in Rome, each
excommunicating the other, and at the end of the period, three (the Great Schism). After
the schism ended and there was a single pope again in Rome, his power over the church
was challenged throughout the first half of the 15th century by the Conciliar Movement
(to limit the pope’s power by a parliament of bishops) and the Hussite movement in
Bohemia, a forerunner of the Protestant Reformation a century later. The papacy
survived both challenges, but the worldliness of the Renaissance popes in the second half
of the 15th century (e.g., Pope Alexander VI (1492-1503) and his two illegitimate
children, the notorious Cesare and Lucrezia Borgia) provoked much criticism and helped
bring on the Protestant Reformation.
The period ended in a generation of struggle between France and Spain, with all
of Italy as their battleground. In 1494 the king of France crossed the Alps to make good
his claim to the throne of Naples, to reach which he marched through northern and central
Italy. Spain contested his claim. The city-states of the north, continuing their age-old
rivalries with each other, lined up either with the French or the Spanish. It was similar to
the Guelf-Ghibelline divisions of the 12th-13th centuries, with the significant difference
that this time the major powers involved, France and Spain, were each many times
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mightier than any combination of petty Italian states. The latter turned out to be the
victims, not the beneficiaries, of the struggle.
Among the major victims was Florence. Lorenzo the Magnificent’s eldest son
and successor was driven out of the city-state after he surrendered it to the French in
1494. Then Savonarola, a Dominican monk, religious fanatic, and spell-binding orator,
led a popular movement against the Medici which established a revised republican form
of government. His tirades against the worldly Renaissance papacy led to his burning at
the stake for heresy in 1498; the spot is marked in the pavement of the Piazza della
Signoria. The victory of the Spanish army against Florence placed Lorenzo the
Magnificent’s two younger sons in power in 1512 with papal support. One of them, a
cardinal at the age of 17 through his father’s influence, served as Pope Leo X in 1513-21
and was followed in 1523-34 by a second Medici pope, Lorenzo’s nephew, Clement VII.

SPANISH HABSBURG ERA (1504-1713)

In the end Spain won the struggle for Italy, conquering Naples in 1504 and
putting the finishing touches to its victory in 1535 by ending a generation of French rule
in Milan and adding that duchy to its possessions. All of Italy was now a Spanish sphere
of influence. An infamous event early in this era was the sack of Rome in 1527 by
imperial troops who had not been paid (Emperor Charles V of the house of Habsburg was
also, as the grandson of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castille, the king of Spain).
The brutality of the sack equaled, if it didn’t exceed, the plundering of the city by the
Visigoths and then the Vandals eleven centuries earlier.
The sack of Rome and consequent souring of relations between Charles V and the
pope led to the second ouster of the Medici from Florence, but when pope and emperor
made peace, the family was forcibly reimposed upon the city in 1529. Charles V married
his daughter to Alessandro, Lorenzo the Magnificent’s great-grandson, and appointed
him duke of Florence. In 1537 Alessandro was murdered by a cousin, and a distant
branch of the family took power in Florence. Cosimo I the Great, at first duke of
Florence, later grand duke of Tuscany, founded a dynasty which lasted two hundred
years. One of Charles V’s last acts was to give Siena to Cosimo in 1555. It is these later
Medici whose many statues adorn Florence and whose magnificent burial chapel is
attached to the family church, San Lorenzo. Two Medici women were married to kings
of France in the mid- and late-16th century and played important political roles in that
country. Catherine de Medicis was sister to the unlucky Alessandro, wife of Henri II, and
mother of the three succeeding French kings. Marie de Medicis was Cosimo I’s grand-
daughter, wife of Henri IV, mother of Louis XIII, and mother-in-law of Charles I of
England and Scotland. The Medici had come a very long way from their modest
beginnings in two and a half centuries.
The city-states of northern Italy had become victims of their own inability to unite
and compete as equals with Europe’s great powers, thereby becoming political satellites
of one of the latter. At the same time their economies went into decline as maritime trade
routes between Europe and Asia shifted from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic and
Indian oceans and new sources of wealth were exploited in the Americas by the European
states that had direct access to the Atlantic.
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The papacy meanwhile survived the challenge of the sixteenth-century Protestant

Reformation. Although it lost its hold on much of Europe north of the Alps, it put its
own house in order by eliminating abuses and also enlarged the Papal States, adding
Bologna and Ravenna at the beginning of the 16th century, Ferrara at its end. The pope’s
domains now extended to the lower Po valley.

AUSTRIAN HABSBURG ERA (1713-1860)

The War of the Spanish Succession (1701-13) divided the lands of the Spanish
crown when that branch of the Habsburgs died out. Milan, Naples, and Sicily, together
with indirect control of the rest of Italy, were transferred to the Austrian branch of the
family. At the same time a new power appeared—the kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia,
with its capital at Turin in the northwest and ruled by the house of Savoy, a principality
that straddled the Alps. In 1735 Austria ceded Naples and Sicily to the Spanish Bourbons
on condition that this kingdom of the “Two Sicilies” was never to be united with Spain.
When the Medici line died out in 1737, Tuscany was inherited by the duke of Lorraine,
whose marriage to Maria Theresa, the Austrian Habsburg heiress, made the grand duchy
an Austrian appendage. Their son Pietro Leopoldo, grand duke in 1745-90 before he
became Emperor Leopold I, was one of the era’s “enlightened despots.” The republic of
Genoa, faced with a generation-long rebellion in Corsica, sold the island in 1768 to Louis
XV of France, incidentally transforming the Corsican Buonaparte family into the French
Bonapartes. Italian intellectuals were significant contributors to the 18th-century
Enlightenment (the “Age of Reason”), but politically and economically Italy remained a
European backwater.
Napoleon Bonaparte led his army into northern Italy in 1796. His subsequent
conquest of the entire peninsula redrew its political map several times. At first Italy was
divided into a number of republics (the flag of one of these, the Ligurian republic, i.e.
Genoa, modeled on the flag of revolutionary France, is now the Italian national flag).
After he crowned himself emperor of the French in 1804, Napoleon annexed
northwestern Italy, including Tuscany, to France and set up kingdoms and principalities
elsewhere in the peninsula, doling them out to his relatives. After his defeat and
overthrow, the Congress of Vienna in 1814-15 reestablished the former borders and
regimes in Italy, with two major exceptions. The Venetian republic was not restored,
both Lombardy and Venetia being placed instead under Vienna’s direct rule, and the
lands of the former Genoese republic were added to Piedmont-Sardinia.
The impact of the Napoleonic interlude, brief as it was, was not so easily erased in
Italy, despite the harshness of the Austrian-backed reactionary regimes. The concept of a
nation ruling itself through a government of its own choosing and composed of fellow
nationals had taken root among the liberal-minded members of the small literate
minority. The concept had been brought to Italy by the French and was then fostered by
local opposition to their rule. Thus began the Risorgimento (Revival), the movement for
Italian independence and unity--two integrally linked goals, for one was not conceivable
without the other. Revolutions, the goal of which was the establishment of constitutional
monarchies with elected parliaments and liberation from foreign political influence,
occurred in a number of Italian states--in 1820-21 in Naples and Turin; in 1831 in
Modena, Parma, and the Papal States; and in 1848-49 in Sicily, Naples, Florence, Turin,
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Rome, Milan, and Venice. All were crushed by Austrian troops, except for Rome in
1849, where French troops were sent in to restore the pope by Louis Napoleon (Napoleon
I’s nephew), recently elected president of France and soon to become Emperor Napoleon
III. The results of the revolutions were disappointing everywhere, but Piedmont at least
emerged with a parliamentary regime and an electorate.
Count Cavour, prime minister of Piedmont and a skillful diplomat, inveigled
Napoleon III into joining Piedmont in a war against Austria in 1859. The plan was to
establish a federation embracing the entire peninsula, with the pope as president.
France’s reward was to be Piedmont’s cession to her of Savoy and Nice. Austria suffered
major defeats, but from Napoleon’s point of view, the situation quickly got out of hand.
The rulers of Tuscany, Modena, and Parma were expelled peacefully by their subjects,
while violent revolts against papal rule took place in Ravenna, Ferrara, and Bologna.
Napoleon withdrew from the war after agreeing to receive Lombardy from Austria,
which he would then hand over to Piedmont; deposed Italian rulers would be restored and
grant amnesties to their subjects. It was too late, however, to halt the process Napoleon
had unwittingly helped set in motion—the unification of Italy.

UNITED ITALY (1860 to 1946)

Assemblies in Tuscany, Parma, Modena, and Romagna voted for political union
with Piedmont. Early in 1860 Napoleon gave his consent to this when Cavour arranged
the transfer to France of Savoy and Nice. At this point Cavour persuaded Garibaldi, a
radical republican, not to take his 1,000 redshirted volunteers to Nice, to defend it against
the French, but to sail with them to Sicily, to liberate it from its reactionary king.
Garibaldi did so successfully, then crossed into southern Italy and took Naples.
Meanwhile the Piedmontese army invaded the Papal States, annihilated the papal army,
and advanced into Neapolitan territory, where it joined forces with Garibaldi. In a
magnanimous gesture, Garibaldi, a hater of monarchy, turned over his conquests to
Victor Emmanuel II of Piedmont, who became the first king of united Italy in 1861. He
moved his capital from Turin to Florence in 1864, taking up residence in the Pitti Palace.
In 1866 Italy joined Prussia in its brief war against Austria, the second of the three
wars by which Prussia achieved German unification. Although the Italians were
defeated, Prussia won the war and Italy’s reward was Venetia. In 1870 Napoleon III,
caught up in the war with Prussia that was to end his reign, withdrew his troops from
Rome, where they had been protecting the pope since 1849. A month later, Italian troops
took Rome, and the capital was soon transferred there from Florence. The pope,
protesting the loss of papal sovereignty over Rome after eleven centuries, refused to leave
the Vatican palace, where he proclaimed himself held prisoner by the Italian state. Each
of his successors did the same till the late 1920s.
Italy had become the sixth of Europe’s great powers (the others at the time were
Great Britain, France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia), but its poverty, lack of
industrialization, low level of literacy, lack of social services (all especially characteristic
of the south) placed it toward the bottom of the list. Nor was its political life something
to be admired. A small group of politicians played a game of continually exchanging
ministries with each other—a game whose object was to keep them in power rather than
to pursue any particular policy that might benefit the country. The system was called
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trasforismo, cynically suggesting the absence of real change or transformation in the

midst of constant meaningless changes. Little was done to build an Italian national
identity to counter the strong regional and local identities formed over a thousand years
of political disunity.
The one area in which bold steps were taken, not always successfully, was foreign
policy. Reacting to France’s establishment of a protectorate over Tunisia, upon which
Italy had its own designs, she joined the recently formed German-Austrian alliance
directed against France and Russia in 1882, transforming it into the Triple Alliance.
Seven years later Italy established her own protectorate over Ethiopia, but when that
country tried to rid itself of Italian control, Italy invaded and suffered a humiliating defeat
at Adua in 1896. Her protectorate came to an end, although she retained Ethiopia’s Red
Sea coast as the colony of Eritrea. In 1911-12 Italy conquered from the Ottoman Empire
(Turkey) both Libya in North Africa and Rhodes and the Dodecanese Islands in the
Aegean Sea off the coast of Asia Minor.
When World War I began in 1914 Austria and Germany were the aggressors,
since they fired the first shots. Since the Triple Alliance was a defensive one, Italy was
not obligated to come to their support. She finally joined Britain, France, and Russia in
May 1915 because they promised her territorial gains at Austria’s and Turkey’s expense
if/when they won the war. The Austrian territories in question had long been viewed by
Italian nationalists as Italia irredenta (Unredeemed Italy), i.e., lands inhabited by
members of the Italian nation but lying beyond the borders of the Italian state—the
Trentino in the northeast and the Dalmatian coast from Trieste to Ragusa (Dubrovnik).
For over two years Italian troops fought inconclusive battles on a stationary front
northeast of Venice, just inside the border with Austria, until they suffered a major defeat
and retreated in disarray in autumn 1917. They redeemed themselves in the closing
weeks of the war in October-November 1918 with a breakthrough at Vittorio Veneto and
then a rapid advance to Trieste and Fiume on the Adriatic.
At the Paris Peace Conference Italy was awarded much, but not all, of Italia
irredenta that had been promised her. Disappointment over her territorial gains and
unease over her poor military performance in the war added to the social turmoil that
Italy shared with much of Europe in the immediate postwar years. Lenin’s Bolsheviks
had seized power in Russia in late 1917 and were victorious over their opponents by early
1921, while short-lived communist regimes appeared during this period in Germany and
Hungary. The specter of communism frightened the upper and middle classes.
Mussolini and his Fascists posed as the defenders of the nation, using strong-arm tactics
against their rivals.
Italy’s political leaders were helpless to resolve the situation; some felt they could
use the Fascists to defend the status quo against the radicals on the left. In October 1922
King Victor Emmanuel III bowed to intimidation and appointed as prime minister
Mussolini, whom parliament granted dictatorial powers to restore order. Barely
surviving the crisis caused by the 1924 assassination by Fascists of Matteotti, a socialist
member of parliament, Mussolini gradually strengthened his hold over Italy. He
persecuted political opponents and critics ruthlessly, and he settled the six-decade-long
feud with the church. His 1929 Lateran Treaty with the pope recognized the
independence of Vatican City and the civil validity of religious marriage, and introduced
religious instruction into Italian secondary schools.
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Mussolini’s answer to the lack of a strong Italian national consciousness was to

identify Fascist Italy with ancient Rome. An unquestioned benefit of this was his support
of archeological work in the city of Rome. But this policy led Mussolini to attempt to
build a new Roman Empire. He began by erasing the bitter memory of Adua by
conquering Ethiopia in 1935 in the face of ineffective League of Nations sanctions. In
1936-39 he joined Hitler’s Germany in militarily assisting General Franco to overthrow
the republic and establish a fascist-type regime in Spain. Initially suspicious of Hitler,
Mussolini persuaded himself that cooperation with the Nazi dictator would serve his own
aims. In 1937 Italy joined the German-Japanese Anti-Comintern [i.e., Anti-Soviet] Pact
and withdrew from the League of Nations. Although Fascism had previously lacked any
anti-Semitic content, in 1938 Mussolini introduced racist legislation against Jews to
please his Nazi partner. In April 1939 Italy conquered Albania.
When Hitler launched World War II in September 1939 by invading Poland,
Mussolini remained neutral, despite his close ties to Germany. He waited to see how
Britain and France would react; they didn’t. Hitler’s successful invasion of France in
June 1940 convinced Mussolini that it was time to jump on the bandwagon; he declared
war on Britain and France and sent his troops into southern France. In late summer he
conquered British Somaliland in order to round out Italian East Africa and invaded Egypt
from Libya. In October he invaded Greece. The winter of 1940-41, however, destroyed
Mussolini’s carefully nurtured image of a new, strong, Fascist Italy as the heir of ancient
Rome. A Greek counteroffensive drove the Italians back, deep into Albania, while the
British took much of Italian East Africa and Libya. German troops had to rescue the
Italians in both Greece and North Africa. For the next two and a half years, it was clear
that Mussolini’s army was more of a hindrance than a help to the Nazi war effort.
In the summer of 1943, British and American troops from North Africa conquered
Sicily, and Victor Emmanuel III backed a coup d’etat that removed Mussolini from
power and imprisoned him. In September Allied forces crossed into the toe of the
peninsula, and Italy surrendered. The Germans rescued Mussolini from jail and placed
him at the head of a puppet government, while they occupied northern and central Italy.
After taking Naples in October 1943, the Allied advance went slowly. Rome fell in June
1944 and Florence in August. The front then remained stable from Livorno on the
Tyrrhenian Sea to Ancona on the Adriatic till the last weeks of the war in the spring of
1945. While attempting to escape to neutral Switzerland in April, Mussolini and his
mistress were captured and shot by a partisan band.
Tainted by his long association with Mussolini, the king abdicated in favor of his
son, but a referendum in June 1946 replaced the monarchy with a republic. Florence’s
central square, Piazza di Vittorio Emmanuele (in honor of the second, not the third of that
name) was rechristened Piazza della Repubblica. The postwar territorial settlement took
from Italy all her territorial gains since the late 19th century except for the Trentino and
Trieste. She lost the rest of the Istrian peninsula, Zara (Zadar) on the Dalmatian coast
together with four offshore islands, Libya, Rhodes and the Dodecanese, Eritrea, and
Italian Somaliland.