Lucio Villari
Beautiful and Lost. Italy during the Risorgimento

The conquest of ‘Italian’ liberty marked the assertion of the cultural, historical and imaginative unity of an entire people, for centuries prohibited and divided, an affirmation of its political independence, the end of the many subordinations of temporal power to the Church, the entry into the modern Europe of constitutions, of the rights of man and of citizens, of the sentiment of justice and the principle of equality inherited from the French revolution.