Piazza Venezia

After touring the Vatican, I headed to the Piazza Venezia, Rome's enormous monument to Victor Emmanuel II and site of the Central Museum of the Risorgimento. The scale of it is huge, vastly more imposing than any of Rome's other structures. This is almost certainly a deliberate decision, used to help impress the national legend of Italy's creation upon the citizens of it's capital.

The Risorgimento, the time period during which the various Italian-speaking provinces on Europe's largest peninsula united to form Italy, was in truth a messy affair. Italy's four "founding fathers" were often at each other's throats - the freedom fighting ideologues Giuseppe Garibaldi and Giuseppe Mazzini were loathed by the Piedmont king Victor Emmanuel II and his prime minister, Camillo Benso Di Cavour. The Piedmontese faction were far more motivated by expanding the power of Turin than any notion of a united Italy, and often expressed total disdain for Southern provinces. Conversely, Mazzini was an avowed republican who never accepted the legitimacy of Victor Emmanuel II.

The provinces they "liberated" were also rarely crying out to be saved. The Papal States and Venice were the last to be absorbed into the Kingdom of Italy - Venice was fairly content with Austrian rule while Rome had been ruled directly by the Pope for almost two millennia. Aside from Garibaldi's expedition to Sicily, the provinces that were merged into the Kingdom of Italy were not conquered militarily by Piedmont, instead most of them were handed to Italy by their allies during the 19th Century's post-Great Power conflict negotiations. One of the final cities to be brought into the Italian kingdom was Trieste, with apparently devastating consequences that I'll be seeing first-hand later on in this trip.

As such, the extent to which the Heroes of the Risorgimento are celebrated today is quite comical - from Orvieto to Rome, Catania to Venice, every single Italian city I've visited has had at least one piazza or via named after each of the founding fathers. It feels very forced, particularly in the South and especially in Sicily. Most Italians I've met have been fiercely proud of their cities and their regions but their enthusiasm for Italy has varied quite considerably - all this is exemplified in Italy's famed north-south divide.

Putting the propagandistic nature of the Monument to Victor Emmanuel II aside, its enormous size does offer one considerable benefit - the views of Rome from the top of it are spectacular, the photos unfortunately struggle to do it justice.Lue lisää