Customer Reviews

Sicily and the Unification of Italy: Liberal Policy and Local Power 1859-1866

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Generally speaking you are not going to look to amazon for an in depth review of this work. Obviously a search of JSTOR articles will provide a more probing analysis of Lucy Riall's books. However with that said I would just like to throw together a quick guide to the book and its usefulness.

The book in general as the title suggests is a study of Sicily, primarily the Western Half, in the post-unification period through the Palermo revolt of 1866. It is not for people without any background in 19th century Italy, however it is also not hard to tackle with if you are not a full blow scholar of the period and country in question. Riall like many others scholars of the last fifty years puts emphasis on the local developments in the South, but she also analyses larger policy decisions by the new Italian government and how they affect the development of Sicily. She does both these things, it is important to note, extremely well.

This book is essential to a study of Italy during this time period. In fact my writing a review of it for Amazon seems absurd because if you are studying this period you most likely already know about this book as its cited everywhere. So I will simply cut myself short and say to learn about post unification Sicily go with this book, its one of the newest and one of the best, but to be fair just get it from your school library because its priced for institutional use.