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The question that stayed open
The fifty-nine years Professoressa Donati ends on are the part of this story that is still visible in Italy today. When the Italian army came through the walls at Porta Pia on 20 September 1870, Pius IX refused to recognise the new state, declared himself a prisoner, and forbade Catholics to vote in its elections. The standoff — la questione romana — lasted until the Lateran Pacts of 1929, which created the Vatican City State and settled the dispute with a government nobody now wants credit for having dealt with. Note how much of the ordinary landscape this explains: a Via XX Settembre in almost every Italian town, a Porta Pia, and streets named for Cavour, Garibaldi and Mazzini in a fixed repertoire you can navigate by. The other thing a museum like this one does carefully is complicate the heroic version. The unification was made by a minority: turnout in the plebiscites was managed, the south was annexed rather than joined and then held down through a decade of fighting the new state called banditry, and the phrase attributed to Massimo d'Azeglio — fatta l'Italia, bisogna fare gli italiani, Italy having been made, the Italians must now be made — was a statement of the problem rather than a slogan. Lesson 83's questione meridionale starts here, as does Lesson 91's point about a country assembled out of seven states. The museum is in Turin because Turin was the capital first, for four years, before Florence and then Rome.