Customer Reviews

Risorgimento: The History of Italy from Napoleon to Nation State

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Riall's panorama of the nineteenth-century Italian unification combines breadth and brevity. Riall looks at social and economic factors, the cultural context, and the Italian unification process itself. Yet the book's title is surprising: Riall is quite clear that the Risorgimento and unification were two different things, and her book is about unification, with the Risorgimento the background to it. Perhaps because of this ambiguity, the book occasionally gets lost in semantics and definitional debates. Riall must be lauded for treating her subject's historiography thoroughly. But her writing is marked by the cultural, post-modern approach to which it belongs, shrinking from conclusions and occasionally veering into obscurity. And the socio-economic section is unsurprisingly weak on data and evidence. This is an up-to-date, balanced view of Italy's national awakening, but it falls somewhat short as an account.

I can't comment as to whether or not this is 'a good book,' but I can say what I felt it did and did not do from my POV. The book reads like a thesis with the starter argument: "It is widely believed that Italy unified into one country because... however these are the reasons that I believe that Italy became a country..."

This is more a book of political theory than history. If, say, all your knowledge to date on the unifcation of Italy comes from wikipedia, (like some people who shall remain me, I admit) you will not round out your knowledge with this book. There's presupposition here that you have already a picture of the states that became Italy, and the key players. I didn't really come away with a grasp of the chronology of events(we jumped around from proof to proof) nor in any way a sense of what peoples lives were like and then changed during this span of years. So if, like me, you are searching for facts and little jewels of detail, this is not your banner book. If you geek out on theory and already are well versed and like to exercise why's and wherefores, bingo, Freddie, you are home. Love the cover.