Volume 15 // A National Movement and the Year 1848

The period contemplated in this volume is the first half of the Nineteenth Century. It is present in the historiography as a period of a central importance in the troubled process of the Italian state unification. The years analyzed here go from 1815 to 1849: they see, in the context of the Italian economy, the origin of undeniable and, at the same time, geographically inhomogeneous tendencies to start industrialization and to introduce capitalism in rural areas (in the valley of the Po river). These tendencies accompany: the hardships of the alphabetization, unsolved problems of poor hygienic, sanitary and nutritional conditions of the greatest part of the population, a lasting stagnation and slow changes in the production relations in the areas of the Centre and of the South governed by landowners. Diversity and constant contradictions in the dynamics of the modernization that, after the unitary state was created, will be, then, the ground for the appearance of the “Southern question”. This is also a period in which discussions and politic forces come to life and, through tactical and strategical plans and programmes, will contend the hegemony and the political and mental direction of the country Unification: moderate groups of Vincenzo Gioberti, Massimo D’Azeglio, Bettino Ricasoli, Marco Minghetti, and the democratic and radical wing of Giuseppe Mazzini, Carlo Cattaneo, Giuseppe Ferrari and Carlo Pisacane. An ideal, cultural and political history that is being analyzed in its complicated plot unraveling itself up to the 1848, the year of the revolutions in Palermo, Milan and Venice. These revolutions see the return of popular classes as leading characters to the historical stage.

SUMMARY

The Restauration and the Italian states
Luigi Ambrosoli

The organization of culture in the period of a restoration
Marino Berengo

Agriculture from 1815 to 1859
Luigi Faccini

Italian industry from 1815 to 1861
Roberto Romano

Illness and society in the Nineteenth Century’s Italy
Franco Della Peruta

Giuseppe Mazzini and the Unification democracy (1830-1861)
Franco Della Peruta

Other democratic movements. Cattaneo and Ferrari
Luigi Ambrosoli

The moderate milieu, a new Guelfs
Giampietro Beni

A long Italian 1848
Simonetta Soldani

The critical survey of 1848-1849 and the new perspectives by Pisacane
Luciano Rossi

Literature and Unification
Grazia Melli Fioravanti