Italian Unification Quotes

Two formidable historic powers --the temporal dominion of the Popes and the Austro-Hungarian Empire--have stood in her path and attempted to bar her way. Italy has overthrown them one after the other. If any other power should insist upon barring her way today, Italy will sooner or later know how to force it aside also.

The word 'Italy' is a geographical expression, a description which is useful shorthand, but has none of the political significance the efforts of the revolutionary ideologues try to put on it, and which is full of dangers for the very existence of the states which make up the peninsula.

Hercules King of Rome and of Annemark, three times one surnamed de Gaulle will lead, Italy and the one of St. Mark to tremble, first monarch, renowned above all.

It was in the Papal States that I studied the Roman Question. I traveled over every part of the country; I conversed with men of all opinions, examined things very closely, and collected my information on the spot.

Let the French ministers take care of France; we will take care of Italy!

Here we shall make Italy- or die!

(Carmine Crocco) A farm-labourer and cowherd, had joined the Bourbon army, killed a comrade in a brawl, deserted and lived as an outlaw for ten years. He joined the liberal insurgents in 1860 in the hope of an amnesty for his past offences, and subsequently became the most formidable guerilla chief and leader of men on the Bourbon side.

We Italians would speak to the world as representatives of an age-old civilization of which we had inherited countless works of artists and thinkers --a civilization that entitled us to a place among the foremost Powers in Europe--and all the while we were speaking in the name of a very young state, still administratively incomplete, still divided by the remains of a feudal structure, and lacking economic and military independence.

When Garibaldi passed through a village you would not have said he was a general, but the head of a new religion followed by a crowd of fanatics.

Umberto Poli was born in Trieste in 1883, when the city was at its zenith as the major port of the Habsburgs. The irredentist sympathies of Umberto's Italian-speaking parents can be detected in their giving him the first name of the Italian emperor.