The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Risorgimento

a national liberation movement of the Italian people against Austrian oppression with the goal of unifying the small, fragmented Italian states into a single national state. The Risorgimento is also understood as the period during which this movement occurred—from the late 18th century to 1861. The movement culminated in 1870 with the annexation of Rome to the kingdom of Italy.

The Risorgimento reflected the objective historical necessity that had developed in the Italian states for destroying the obsolete feudal-absolutist order and establishing a bourgeois system. The bourgeoisie headed a broad antifeudal front of class forces. Heterogeneous in its social composition, the bourgeoisie comprised two principal political currents. The first was a moderately liberal one, reflecting the interests of the big landowning, commercial-usurious, and industrial bourgeoisie, who acted in alliance with the gentry turned bourgeois; the other current was a democratic one, which reflected the interests of the petite and middle bourgeoisie. These political currents advocated fundamentally divergent programs for the social reorganization of the country. While the liberals were seeking to create a unified Italy headed by the pope or a monarch from the House of Savoy, the democrats were fighting for a unified Italy in the form of a democratic republic.

Taking on greater and greater sweep in scope during the course of its development, the Risorgimento movement at the moments of its greatest surges turned into bourgeois and bourgeois-democratic revolutions—the Neapolitan Revolution of 1820–21, the revolution in Piedmont in 1821, the Revolution of 1831 in central Italy, the Italian Revolution of 1848–49, and the Revolution of 1859-60. Revolutionary actions by the popular masses were significant and at certain stages decisive (the Roman Republic of 1848-49 and the revolutionary events of 1859-60, especially in southern Italy). Italy, as noted by F. Engels, was unified, in contrast to Germany, not “from above” by dynastic wars and diplomatic maneuvers but by revolution (K. Marx and F. Engels, Soch., 2nd ed., vol. 21, p. 430). However, in the course of the complex process of the Risorgimento, the democratic, republican current proved unable to carry out a bourgeois-democratic reorganization of the country because of the class limitations of the bourgeois democrats. The democrats dared not initiate a broad peasant movement aimed at effecting a radical break in feudal agrarian relations. Moreover, they even hampered the revolutionary action of the urban poor to a certain extent. The liberal current took over the political leadership of the movement, and as a result, the unified Italian state created in 1861 was a constitutional monarchy. A capitalist socioeconomic structure was established that preserved a number of feudal vestiges.

The liberation struggle against Fascism waged by the Italian people in the years 1943-45 during World War II is referred to as the second Risorgimento.

K. F. MIZIANO

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References in periodicals archive

As the narration makes clear at the dramatic start to the exhibition's seven sections ('From Salon to Altar'), Pope Pius IX co-opted diverse strands of his century's current narrative, historicist styles to help reclaim lost ground at a time of papal political impotence in the face of Italian unification. Once the door was opened to contemporary artistic developments as the 19th Century turned into the 20th, this exhibition argues, it was never to be shut again.

Divine Beauty: from Van Gogh to Chagall and Fontana

He was the great popular hero of Italian Unification who stayed for three weeks in the North East between March and April 1854 and gave a talk at an informal meeting at the Blaydon Mechanics' Institute.

The world-famous faces that knew life in North East; From Garibaldi to Arnold Schwarzenegger, we look at the celebrities it might surprise you to learn have lived in the North East. Mike Kelly reports

Studies of Italian unification have often overlooked the importance of nature, and yet, as Gai illuminates through his close study of poetry and patriotic novels, the 'nation' is intricately connected to conjugations of heritage and landscape and especially through its associations of productivity, fertility and a garden both pleasing and provident.

Editorial

The name is owed to Giuseppe Garibaldi's volunteer army, the "Giubbe Rosse" (Red Coats), during the mid-1800s surge toward Italian unification (which also leant its name to the literary cafe in Florence, Caffe Giubbe Rosse), and to the popular song of Italian singer Mina, "Le Mille Bolle Blu" ("A Thousand Blue Bubbles").

Translating Amy Clampitt into Italian

In "Rome in the Colonial Imagination," the author demonstrates that while many American artists who traveled to Italy were politically progressive and in favor of Italian unification efforts, their privileged position as expatriate artists was dependent on the structures of colonialism.

A Sisterhood of Sculptors: American Artists in Nineteenth-Century Rome

Crispi was referring to one of the central issues for policymakers after Italian unification: how to address the fact that millions of hard-working and newly nationalized Italians were leaving Italy, often permanently, in search of better fortune in Europe and, in ever increasing numbers, across the Atlantic.

Race and colonial (re)productivity in post-unification Italy

He devotes considerable space to assessing the philosopher Giovanni Gentile's neo-Hegelian view of Giuseppe Mazzini, the prophet of Italian unification. Faith was at the heart of Mazzini's vision of national rebirth; by the end of the First World War Gentile had come to appreciate its potency in gaining mass support, soon concluding that the Fascist movement "was heir to a substantial part of Mazzini's doctrinal legacy" (p.

Totalitarianism and Political Religion: An Intellectual History

It is worth mentioning that Giuseppe Verdi was the first composer in Italy who wanted the covers of his music illustrated by the great artists, including Roberto Focosi, official portraitist of the historical figures of the Italian Unification. Among the scores stands out in particular the first edition of "Aida" with a cover designed by the famous editor Giulio Ricordi.

The Giuseppe Verdi's Scores Exhibition Opens at ROH Muscat

It is this reader's opinion that Myers should have devoted greater attention to this aspect, especially in light of the recent celebrations of the 150th anniversary of Italian unification. Furthermore, the interclassism in this subgenre appeared quite fascinating and should have been further analyzed, particularly because Myers cites Gramsci who wrote extensively on the failures of Italian unification, in part due to a lack of interclassism.

Myers, Lindsay. Making the Italians: Poetics and Politics of Italian Children's Fantasy

Its smooth but soft, ripe plum flavours are supplemented by a cocktail of chocolate, figs, nuttiness and lingering vanilla to give a further endorsement to Italian unification.

Wine seller with Brian Elliott

(The exhibition was part of "Arte Povera 2011," a nation-wide celebration coinciding with the 150th anniversary of Italian unification.) Curated by Eduardo Cicelyn and Arte Povera's instigator, Germano Celant, the show directly appropriated the title of one of Arte Povera's founding events: a three-day festival held in the southern Italian seaside town of Amalfi in 1968.

Dust to dust

Catherine's promotion as patron saint of Italy came as the culmination of a process that began with Italian unification, when she was recruited as a paragon of Roman values--that is, the values of a Church establishment locked in a culture war with anticlerical Italian national governments.

The Cult of Saint Catherine of Siena: A Study in Civil Religion