A Culture without a Nation

Abstract

At the moment of Italian unification, the ruling Piedmontese class faced an unexpected reality: Rather than governing a small, semi-French, mostly homogeneous, subalpine region, it now had to govern an almost entirely Mediterranean entity, disparate both geographically and in human terms. Deeply pragmatic, these first rulers wasted no time contemplating their difficulties, but instead plunged straight into what they considered the most urgent tasks facing them. The thorniest of these, in their eyes, was the survival of the new state.