Giovanni Giolitti – Prime Minister

Long-lasting Liberal politician made important social reforms

Giovanni Giolitti was one of
Europe's main liberal reformers

Giovanni Giolitti, who served as Prime Minister of Italy five times, was born on this day in 1842 in Mondovì in Piedmont.

A Liberal, he was the leading statesman in Italy between 1900 and 1914 and was responsible for the introduction of universal male suffrage in the country.

He was considered one of the main liberal reformers of late 19th and early 20th century Europe, along with George Clemenceau, who was twice prime minister of France, and David Lloyd George, who led the British government from 1916 to 1922.

Giolitti is the longest serving democratically-elected prime minister in Italian history and the second longest serving premier after Benito Mussolini. He is considered one of the most important politicians in Italian history.

As a master of the political art of trasformismo, by making a flexible, centrist coalition that isolated the extremes of Left and Right in Italian politics after unification, he developed the national economy, which he saw as essential for producing wealth.

The period between 1901 and 1914, when he was Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior with only brief interruptions, is often referred to as the Giolitti era.

He made progressive social reforms that improved the living standards of ordinary Italians and he nationalised the telephone and railway operators.

Giolitti’s father, Giovenale Giolitti, had worked in the avvocatura dei poveri, assisting poor people in both civil and criminal cases. He died in 1843, the year after his son, Giovanni, was born. The family moved to live in his mother’s family home in Turin, where she taught him to read and write.

Giolitti earned a degree in law
from the University of Turin

Giolitti was educated in Turin and went to the University of Turin at the age of 16, where he earned a law degree after three years.

His uncle was a friend of Michelangelo Castelli, the secretary of Camillo Benso di Cavour - the united Italy's first prime minister - but Giolitti was not interested in the Risorgimento and did not fight in the Italian Second War of Independence, choosing instead to work in public administration.

At the 1882 Italian general election, Giolitti was elected to the Chamber of Deputies. In 1889 he was selected by Francesco Crispi as the new Minister of Treasury and Finance, but he later resigned because he did not agree with Crispi’s colonial policy.

After the fall of a new government led by Antonio Starabba di Rudini, Giolitti was asked by King Umberto I to form a new cabinet.

He resigned after a series of problems and scandals and was impeached for abuse of power, but this allegation was later quashed. He was once again appointed prime minister by King Victor Emmanuel III, but he had to resign in 1905 after losing the support of the Socialists.

When the next prime minister, Sidney Sonnino, lost his majority in 1906, Giolitti became prime minister again. He introduced laws to protect women and child workers and passed a law to provide workers with a weekly day of rest.

Giolitti was re-elected in 1909 but soon had to resign again, afterwards supporting the new head of government, Luigi Luzzatti, while remaining the real power behind the scenes.

In 1911, Luzzati resigned from office and Victor Emmanuel III again gave Giolitti the task of forming a new cabinet.

In 1912, Giolitti got Parliament to approve an electoral reform bill that expanded the electorate from three million to eight and a half million voters. This is thought to have hastened the end of the Giolitti era. The Radicals brought down Giolitti’s coalition in 1914 and he resigned.  

He became prime minister again in 1920, supported by Mussolini’s Fascist party, but he had to step down in 1921. By 1925 he had become completely opposed to the Fascist party and refused to join. He died in 1928 in Cavour in Piedmont and his last words to the priest were that he could not sing the official anthem of the Fascist regime.

A section of the Piazza Maggiore, with its
frescoed Baroque architecture

Travel tip: 

Mondovì is a beautiful town of some 22,000 inhabitants situated in Italy’s Piedmont region at the foot of the southern Alps, close to the border between Piedmont and Liguria.  Like much of the area in which it sits, the town is rich in mediaeval frescoes and Baroque architecture from the 17th and 18th centuries, many of the buildings designed by local architect Francesco Gallo.  The town is in two sections: the lower town called Breo, which grew up alongside the Ellero river, is linked to the upper town of Piazza by a funicular railway.  Mondovì Piazza, the old part of the city founded around 1198, has the two-level Piazza Maggiore at its heart, surrounded by beautiful porticoed buildings such as Palazzo dei Bressani and the Governor’s Palace.  Mondovì was one of the most important towns during the Savoy era, with an ancient university and a printing press that produced, in 1472, the first book printed in Piedmont with modern typography.  The town’s printing museum - the Museo della Stampa - can be found in the 17th century Palazzo delle Orfane. 

Cavour is dominated by the giant Rocca di 
Cavour, which looms over the town

Travel tip: 

Cavour is a small town of around 5,500 residents in Piedmont, situated about 40km (25 miles) southeast of Turin, built at the foot of the Rocca di Cavour, an isolated mass of granite rising from otherwise flat terrain. On top of the Rocca, once the site of a Roman village, are some mediaeval remains. The town gave its name to the Benso family of Chieri, of whom the most famous member was Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour, the statesman who was a driving force in the Risorgimento and was appointed the first prime minister of the united Italy in 1861.  The Rocca di Cavour has been a protected natural park since 1995.

Also on this day:

1782: The birth of virtuoso violinist Niccolò Paganini

1952: The birth of Oscar-winning actor Roberto Benigni

1962: The death of entrepreneur industrialist Enrico Mattei

1967: The birth of mountaineer Simone Moro

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Agostino Bertani – physician and politician

Compassionate doctor was Garibaldi’s friend and strategist

Agostino Bertani was a hero for tending
to the wounds of Garibaldi's soldiers

Agostino Bertani, who worked with Giuseppe Mazzini and Giuseppe Garibaldi to liberate Italy, died on this day in 1886 in Rome.

He had been a surgeon in Garibaldi’s corps in the Austro-Sardinian War of 1859 and personally treated Garibaldi’s wounds after the military leader lost the Battle of Aspromonte in 1862.

Bertani became a hero to the Italian people for his work organising ambulances and medical services during Garibaldi’s campaigns and he became a close friend and strategist to the military leader.

Born in Milan in 1812, Bertani's family had many friends with liberal ideals and his mother took part in anti-Austrian conspiracies.

At the age of 23, Bertani graduated from the faculty of medicine at the Borromeo College in Pavia and became an assistant to the professor of surgery there.

He took part in the 1848 uprising in Milan and directed a military hospital for Italian casualties. He organised an ambulance service for soldiers defending Rome in 1849 and distinguished himself by his service in Genoa with Mazzini during the cholera epidemic of 1854.

In 1860 Bertani was one of the strategists who planned the attack on Sicily and Naples known as the Expedition of the Thousand.

Bertani was one of the strategists who
planned the Expedition of the Thousand

Bertani became Garibaldi’s secretary general after the occupation of Naples in 1860. While serving in this role he reorganised the police and planned the sanitary reconstruction of the city.

He organised the medical service for Garibaldi’s 40,000 and fought in the Battle of Mentana in 1867 during Garibaldi’s march on Rome, even though he had been opposed to the campaign.

Bertani became leader of the extreme left in the new Italian parliament established in 1861. He founded La Riforma, a journal advocating social reforms, and launched an inquiry into the sanitary conditions of ordinary people. It was Bertani who prepared the sanitary code adopted by the administration of Francesco Crispi.

In 1885, along with Anna Maria Mozzoni, a journalist and social reformer, he visited the anarchist Giovanni Passannante in prison. Passannante had attempted to kill King Umberto I but had failed. Originally condemned to death, his sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment.

Passannante was kept in solitary conferment in a tiny cell in Portoferraio on the island of Elba. The inhuman conditions he was kept in eventually drove him insane.

Bertani and Mozzoni reported on Passannante’s maltreatment and after an examination by doctors the anarchist was transferred to the asylum of Montelupo Fiorentino, although doctors there were unable to reverse his poor condition.

Bertani continued to serve in the Italian parliament until his death the following year at the age of 73 in Rome.

The statue of Bertani
in Milan

Travel tip:

There are streets named in honour of Agostino Bertani all over Italy and in his home town of Milan there is a monument to him in Piazza Fratelli Bandiera, near the historic gateway of Porta Venezia. In its present form, the gate dates back to the 19th century; nevertheless, its origins can be traced back to the Medieval and even the Roman walls of the city. The surrounding streets are often referred to as the Porta Venezia district.

The storming of the Roman walls at Porta Pia that enabled
Garibaldi to declare the unification of Italy complete

Travel tip:

Italy was officially declared united after crack infantry troops from Piedmont entered Rome on 20 September 1870 after briefly bombarding defending French troops. They got through Rome’s ancient walls near the gate of Porta Pia. A marble plaque commemorating the liberation of Rome marks the place. Not far away in Piazza Montecitorio is the Camera dei Deputati, Italy’s parliament, which Bertani first entered in 1861.

More reading:

The death of Garibaldi

Why Giuseppe Mazzini was the hero of Italian unification

The novel that became a symbol of the Risorgimento

Also on this day:

1762: The birth of Giovanni Aldini, the physicist thought to have given Mary Shelley the idea for Frankenstein

1926: An airship leaves Rome on an expedition to the North Pole

1991: The Moby Prince Disaster


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The Expedition of the Thousand

Garibaldi's Spedizione dei Mille launched from Genoa

Giuseppe Garibaldi had the support of
King Victor Emmanuel II

The Expedition of the Thousand, the military campaign to unite Italy led by the soldier and revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi, was launched on this day in 1860.

The campaign, in some ways the climax of the Risorgimento movement, began in response to an uprising in Sicily, when Garibaldi set sail from Genoa, with a makeshift army of volunteers, hoping his support would enable the rebels to overthrow the Bourbon rulers of the island.

The greater purpose, though, was to achieve another step towards his ultimate goal, which he shared with his fellow nationalist revolutionary, Giuseppe Mazzini, and which was supported by King VictorEmmanuel II of Sardinia-Piedmont and his prime minister, Camillo Benso di Cavour, that of creating a united Italy.

The revolutionary leader in Sicily, Francesco Crispi, had all but guaranteed that substantial numbers of Sicilians would fight on the side of Garibaldi’s troops.

Some accounts suggest Garibaldi, who had commanded military campaigns in Europe and South America and was a charismatic figure, had wanted to lead his followers into an attack on the French occupiers of Nice, his home city, but was persuaded to turn his attention to Sicily by Cavour, who feared a war with France would result.

A painting by an unknown artist shows soldiers boarding a boat
on the shore at Quarto with the steamships in the background

Whatever the truth of that story, after another revolutionary, Nino Bixio, had requisitioned two steamships from the Rubattino shipping company in Genoa, Garibaldi summoned his volunteers to nearby Quarto, where they were to embark.

The exact number who had enlisted is not known, although 1,089 is the number often quoted.  They are said to have included 434 from Lombardy, 194 from Venetia, 156 from Genoa, 78 from Tuscany, around 45 from each of Sicily and Naples and 33 foreigners. The cities of Genoa and Bergamo were thought to have supplied one third of the force between them.

Nearly all were said to be from middle-class backgrounds. Many were teachers, writers or traders. There were 150 lawyers and law students, 100 physicians, 50 engineers, 20 chemists, ten painters and sculptors, three priests and 30 naval officers.  Armed with outdated muskets, the group were poorly equipped, but their simple uniform of red shirts and grey trousers helped foster a strong sense of unity.

Italy at the time was made up of five states - the Austrians in Venetia, the Papal States, the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia (which by then included Tuscany), the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, and San Marino.

The Piemonte, one of the two steamships that carried
Garibaldi's men from Genoa to Sicily 

Piedmont-Sardinia and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, which essentially encompassed all territories south of Rome, were by far the largest and it was felt that a new state uniting both could justifiably be called the Kingdom of Italy.

After renaming the two steamships Il Piemonte and Il Lombardo, Garibaldi took to the seas on the evening of May 5. On reaching Sicilian waters, he was almost ambushed by the Bourbon fleet but, with cover provided by the British Royal Navy, who had ships in the area monitoring the activities of the French, his armies landed at Marsala on May 11.

Garibaldi’s force was tiny compared with the number of soldiers at the Bourbon leader King Francis II’s disposal, yet in the face of public support for the invaders, who disliked their rulers and hoped Garibaldi would seize land from the wealthy and give it to the poor, the Bourbon defences at Marsala quickly crumbled. 

After the Thousand moved into Palermo, the city came under heavy bombardment from the Bourbon general, Ferdinando Lanza, and 600 civilians were killed. But those who survived never wavered in their resolve and Lanza eventually surrendered the city to Garibaldi.

A painting by Sebastiano de Albertis shows the famous
meeting at Teano between Garibaldi (left) and the King

After proclaiming himself the ruler of Sicily on behalf of King Victor Emmanuel II, Garibaldi led his army across the Straits of Messina and headed north towards Naples.  All along their route, the red shirts were hailed as heroes and resistance was so sparse that Garibaldi was able to arrive in the city by train.

In the meantime, the Kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont invaded the Papal States, conquering Umbria and Marche and reducing the reach of the pope’s territory to just Lazio and the Vatican. In the decisive Battle of the Volturnus in October, Garibaldi’s army had grown to 24,000 men, although it was only with the help of the Sardinian army that the 25,000-strong Neapolitan Army was defeated.

The end of the expedition is traditionally seen as the meeting in Teano in northern Campania between Victor Emmanuel II and Garibaldi on October 26, when Garibaldi formally handed over the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies to the monarch, whom he declared to be the King of Italy.  This conclusion disappointed such as Mazzini, who wanted Italy to become a republic, but Garibaldi believed that unity was the primary requirement. Following the historic ‘handshake’, Garibaldi returned to his home in Caprera, a small island off the northern coast of Sardinia.

Baroni's sculpture at Quarto is a monument to the expedition

Travel tip:

The former fishing village of Quarto al Mare, now a residential area to the east of Genoa, was renamed Quarto dei Mille in 1911 in honour of Garibaldi’s expedition. The road that runs along the sea front is called Via V Maggio (May 5 Street) and passes, on either side of the small inlet from which the boats carrying his men set sail, a couple of commemorative statues, a sculpture by Eugenio Baroni erected in 1915 and opened by the writer and patriot Gabriele D’Annunzio, and a more recent obelisk by Fabrizio Pezzoli, which marks the exact rock from which the Red Shirts climbed into rowing boats to take the to the steamships anchored off the shore.  The nearby Villa Spinola, where the participants gathered, now houses a Garibaldi museum.

The remains of the Roman theatre at Teano, near Caserta

Travel tip:

Teano in Campania, scene of Garibaldi’s meeting with King Victor Emmanuel II, is a town in the province of Caserta, north of Naples, that is built on the site of the important Roman city of Teanum Sidicinum. Roman remains include a theatre, once one of the largest in Italy, some statues and Roman houses. Other sights in the town, which sits at the foot of the extinct Roccamonfina volcano, include a 12^th century cathedral, in front of which is a portico containing two red granite sphinxes that originated in a pagan temple on the same site.  There is a statue in bronze by Oreste Calzolari depicting the handshake on horseback of the monarch and the revolutionary, although this currently resides in Piazza Mino da Fiesole in Fiesole, outside Florence. 

More reading:

Giuseppe Mazzini - ideological inspiration behind Risorgimento

How Camillo Benso Cavour became Italy's first prime minister

Kingdom of Italy proclaimed

Also on this day:

1998: Mudslides kill 161 in Campania

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