Bersaglieri Enter Rome: Italy Unifies at Last

Italian Bersaglieri troops poured through a breach in the Aurelian Walls near the Porta Pia on September 20, 1870, ending more than a thousand years of papal temporal sovereignty over Rome and completing the unification of Italy. Pope Pius IX, who had excommunicated the entire Italian government and refused all negotiation, ordered his small garrison to offer token resistance before surrendering to avoid a massacre. The cannon fire lasted approximately three hours. Forty-nine Italian soldiers and nineteen papal defenders died in the final battle of the Risorgimento. Italian unification had been proceeding in stages since 1859, when Piedmont-Sardinia, allied with France, drove Austria out of Lombardy. Giuseppe Garibaldi’s expedition of the Thousand had conquered the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in 1860, and the Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed in 1861 with Turin as its capital. But Rome, protected by a French garrison that Napoleon III maintained to please Catholic opinion at home, remained under papal control. The Italian government coveted Rome as its natural capital but could not risk war with France. The Franco-Prussian War solved the problem. When Prussia invaded France in July 1870, Napoleon III recalled his troops from Rome to defend Paris. Pius IX’s remaining defense consisted of roughly 13,000 soldiers, a mixture of papal Zouaves, Swiss Guards, and foreign volunteers. King Victor Emmanuel II sent a diplomatic note asking the pope to yield peacefully. Pius refused. General Raffaele Cadorna advanced on Rome with 50,000 troops and positioned his artillery facing the northeastern wall. The breach at Porta Pia became the foundational myth of the Italian nation-state. September 20 was celebrated as a national holiday until 1929, when Mussolini signed the Lateran Treaty with the Vatican, creating the independent state of Vatican City and granting the papacy sovereignty over 109 acres within Rome. Pius IX declared himself a prisoner of the Vatican and never left the papal enclave for the remaining eight years of his life. The relationship between the Italian state and the Catholic Church, strained to the breaking point at the Porta Pia, took nearly six decades to formally reconcile.