Italy: the Centrality of Opera

Abstract

When the young Napoleon Bonaparte led a French army into Italy in 1796 it marked the end of an unusual half-century of peace for a much-invaded country. It also launched a series of revolutions, imposed by the French with the help of a minority of intellectuals rather than generated from within. Wars and repeated changes of government ensued until, nearly twenty years later, the victorious allies fastened on Italy an Austrian hegemony; this in turn lasted, with occasional troubles, until Austria and the other Italian states were severely shaken by the revolutions and nationalistic movements of 1848–9. Independence and unification were to follow within little more than a decade.