Prisoner in the Vatican
When Napoleon III withdrew his troops from Rome, writes John Quinlan, the unification of Italy was at last accomplished.
At approximately 9.30am on September 20th, 1870, Bersaglieri troops of the Italian Army entered Rome, city of the Caesars and the Popes. Thus were the Middle Ages, in the picturesque phrase of the historian Gregorovius, blown suddenly away as by a tramontana, the wind from the north.
Since A.D. 754, when Pepin le Bref, the Frankish King, presented Pope Stephen II with the conquered exarchate of Ravenna, the States of the Church had waxed and waned until by 1861 the Patrimony of St Peter consisted merely of the City and a strip of the western Italian coast roughly corresponding to the old province of Latium.
The population was about 680,000, of whom less than a third lived in the Eternal City. The rest of the peninsula, except for Austrian Venetia, now formed the new Kingdom of United Italy. Rome as capital remained the goal of the Unitarians.
In effect, Italy had been made. Now it only remained, as d'Azeglio observed, to make Italians. For Italy was still to a considerable degree a geographical expression, as Metternich had said.
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