Rome’s designation as the capital of Italy in 1870 is presented as the official culmination of the revolutionary phase of the Risorgimento. It came after the campaign to unite the peninsula and the defeat of Giuseppe Garibaldi’s attempt to force the unresolved question of Rome by marching on the city; the account identifies the declaration as the formal endpoint, without detailing the declaration ceremony itself.

From the Sicilian Campaign to Unification

In May 1860, Giuseppe Garibaldi sailed from near Genoa with a thousand volunteers to take Sicily from Bourbon rule. His forces landed at Marsala, defeated Bourbon troops at Calatafimi, and occupied Palermo within three weeks. Hailed as Dictator of Sicily, he gathered more volunteers, crossed to the mainland, and entered Naples. In the autumn, Bourbon armies were defeated on the Volturno, while Piedmontese forces besieged Francis II of the Two Sicilies at Gaeta. Giuseppe Garibaldi then handed southern Italy to King Victor Emmanuel II and withdrew from public life.

Plebiscites subsequently registered the peninsula’s states in favor of joining the new united kingdom, with the Papal States the exception. The account attributes that exception to the presence of Napoleon III’s troops, maintained for reasons of French domestic politics. Thus, the unification process had secured broad formal assent while Rome remained an unresolved political issue.

The Suppression at Aspromonte

In 1862, Giuseppe Garibaldi tried to press the issue by marching on Rome. His men were routed on the slopes of Aspromonte in Calabria, and he was wounded by Piedmontese troops. The account marks this intervention by Italian government forces as the end of the Risorgimento’s revolutionary phase. The 1870 designation of Rome as the capital followed as its official culmination, distinguishing the end of revolutionary action from the later formal completion of the national project.

The Plebiscite and the Problem of Consent

The narrative’s account of the plebiscite at Donnafugata gives a local measure of how the new national reality was authorized. Don Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina, had urged people who sought his advice to vote yes, yet he estimated that the electorate would include about forty negative votes. On voting day, he himself submitted a yes ballot to Don Calogero Sedàra. The publicly announced count was 515 voters, 512 votes cast, 512 yes votes, and no votes against.

That unanimous result is unsettled by Don Ciccio Tumeo’s later account that he had voted no and that his vote was erased. Don Fabrizio understands the episode not as a change in the broad national outcome, which the suppressed dissent would not have reversed, but as the destruction of honest civic consent. Read beside the national plebiscites, the Donnafugata episode complicates the apparent smoothness of unification: formal agreement could establish political legitimacy while concealing the exclusion of actual dissent.

Historical Significance

The event’s significance lies in the distinction between revolutionary struggle and official national completion. The defeat at Aspromonte ended the revolutionary phase, but the account reserves the status of formal culmination for Rome’s declaration as capital in 1870. The intervening plebiscites and the contested local count show that unification was not only a sequence of campaigns and decisions; it also depended on how consent was recorded and represented.