Every year on March 17, Italy celebrates the anniversary of the Unification of Italy, in other words when Italy as a modern nation state was born. Why March 17? Because on March 17, 1861, Victor Emmanuel II of Savoy, King of Sardinia and Piedmont, and one of the main promoters of the Italian independence movement, became the first King of Italy.

If the unification of Italy was (almost) completed (Veneto was still under the Hapsburg Empire, as were Trento and Trieste, while Lazio was governed by the Pope who did not want to recognize the Italian state), the Italians of the Risorgimento had not yet conquered a national identity. Out of 23 million inhabitants in the Italian peninsula in 1861, less than two million spoke Italian. A Sicilian and a Piedmontese did not understand each other and 78% of people could neither read nor write.