Ebook: Cavour

From the world's leading scholar of Italian history, a new biography of Cavour, the greatest Italian politician of the nineteenth century, and architect of Italy's unification from a patchwork of small states into a single nation.

When Count Camille de Cavour died in 1861, at the age of fifty, soon after the proclamation of the United Kingdom of Italy (for the first time since the Roman Empire), he was already a legend. Lord Palmerston hailed him for achieving a "miraculous ending to one of the most extraordinary and romantic stories in all history"; Gladstone ranked him as the most illustrious liberal in Europe; fifty years later the historian George Trevelyan described him as "The Master Statesman of his century -- if not of all time."

This biography of a political genius reveals Cavour from childhood on. Born of Swiss-French-Italian stock, an aristocrat, raised to manage the family estates, he moves gradually from this unexceptional life into local politics (his first post is as village mayor), watching and learning, drawing on the lessons of his own family background as he assesses the chaos around him and prepares himself to achieve his vision. And then, in his thirty-eighth year, we see the beginning of his meteoric rise to power -- within five years he becomes Prime Minister of his native Piedmont-Sardinia, transforming it into the most powerful and progressive state in Italy; in 1855 he begins deliberately to precipitate a major European war that, despite military setbacks and short-term defeats, causes the dismemberment of the mighty Austrian Empire and the joining of Northern and Central Italy; with tactical brilliance he harnesses the revolutionary campaigns of Garibaldi and Mazzini, absorbing their newly won territories into a larger United Italy, and then, in defiance of a threat of excommunication, declares war on the Pope himself in order to establish full authority over all Italian citizens, destroying centuries of Papal power in political affairs. He oversees the development of a genuine parliamentary system that will guarantee the survival of this precarious new entity -- and then, suddenly, only fourteen brief years after the beginning of this personal and national odyssey, he dies.

This brilliant and judicious biography, based om the widest possible range of both published and unpublished sources, will become the definitive account of an extraordinary man and his times.