Europe · The successor kingdoms
Kingdom of Italy
1861–1946
Proclaimed on 17 March 1861, with Victor Emmanuel II of Savoy as king and (until his death that year) Camillo Cavour as first prime minister, uniting most of the peninsula under the Piedmontese/Sardinian crown and its constitution (the Statuto Albertino). Venetia was added in 1866 (after the Austro-Prussian War) and Rome in 1870 (after French troops withdrew during the Franco-Prussian War), completing unification and making Rome the capital (1871).
- Existed
- 1861–1946
- Shown on the map
- AD 587–774, 887–895, 898–899, 911–921, 936–969, 1862–1946 (6 periods)
- Peak area
- 461k km²
- Region
- Europe
Overview
Proclaimed on 17 March 1861, with Victor Emmanuel II of Savoy as king and (until his death that year) Camillo Cavour as first prime minister, uniting most of the peninsula under the Piedmontese/Sardinian crown and its constitution (the Statuto Albertino). Venetia was added in 1866 (after the Austro-Prussian War) and Rome in 1870 (after French troops withdrew during the Franco-Prussian War), completing unification and making Rome the capital (1871). The liberal constitutional monarchy industrialized the north, struggled with the "Southern Question" and mass emigration, and acquired colonies. After the trauma of World War I, Benito Mussolini and the Fascists came to power (1922) and established a dictatorship; the monarchy's complicity discredited it. Following defeat in World War II and Mussolini's fall, a referendum on 2 June 1946 abolished the monarchy, and the Italian Republic was proclaimed — ending both the Kingdom of Italy and the reign of the House of Savoy.
Common questions
- What was the Kingdom of Italy?
- Proclaimed on 17 March 1861, with Victor Emmanuel II of Savoy as king and (until his death that year) Camillo Cavour as first prime minister, uniting most of the peninsula under the Piedmontese/Sardinian crown and its constitution (the Statuto Albertino). Venetia was added in 1866 (after the Austro-Prussian War) and Rome in 1870 (after French troops withdrew during the Franco-Prussian War), completing unification and making Rome the capital (1871).
- When did the Kingdom of Italy exist?
- The Kingdom of Italy existed 1861–1946. On this map it is drawn AD 587–774, 887–895, 898–899, 911–921, 936–969, 1862–1946.
- How large was the Kingdom of Italy?
- At its greatest extent drawn on this map, the Kingdom of Italy covered about 461,000 km². That is the largest area the border data gives it across the years it is drawn, not necessarily its greatest extent in history.
Sources
This compendium cites its sources once for the whole document rather than per territory. Its bibliography names the English Wikipedia articles for each polity as the primary basis, cross-checked against Encyclopædia Britannica, the World History Encyclopedia and the scholarship of Donald Queller, Thomas Madden and Jonathan Harris on the Fourth Crusade, whose post-conspiracy reading of 1204 this document follows. The article this entry is anchored on:
- Wikipedia — Kingdom of Italy en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Italy
This entry was last updated .
This entry was researched and drafted with AI from the sources above, and has not been reviewed by a historian. How entries are made
Text available under CC BY-SA 4.0: reuse it with a credit to The World Through Time and a link to this page. Passages drawing on the Wikipedia articles listed above are also licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 by their contributors.
Border geometry for the map itself comes from Cliopatria v0.12 (Seshat Global History Databank, CC-BY-4.0).
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