reater.
Throughout the Middle Ages she was a suburb, not a country. Rome was the
capital of the world, Italy only its environs. Moreover, since all roads
lead to Rome, and the lord of Rome was the master of Europe, the roads
Romeward were worn by the tramp of the armies of all nations. Thus Italy
was constantly subject to invasion, and the state-systems with which the
Congress of Vienna resaddled her in 1814 were little more than relics of
past military occupations of her soil by foreign armies. The main problem,
therefore, in the making of modern Italy was how to get rid of the heavy
burden of the past, how to deal with Rome and all that Rome stood for.

The problem would have been insoluble had not the prestige of Rome declined
considerably since the Middle Ages, a prestige which sprang from the fact
that she was the capital of two Empires--the spiritual Empire of the
Papacy, and the secular Empire founded by Charles the Great. The former had
suffered from the Reformation and the rise of the great Protestant nations,
the latter had been growing feebler and feebler for centuries, until it
was abolished as an institution by Napoleon. Yet Italy in 1814 still lay
helpless and divided at the feet of Rome. The Pope held under his immediate
sway a large zigzag-shaped territory running across the centre from sea to
sea, and, as spiritual leader of half Europe, he could at any moment summon
to his assistance the Catholic chivalry of the world. "The Roman emperor"
no longer existed, but "the Austrian emperor" was another title for the
same man, holding much the same territory; and the fact that he had
renounced his vague suzerainty over the rest of Europe did not prevent him
exercising a very real suzerainty in Italy, not merely over the eastern
half of the Lombard Plain which definitely belonged to Austria, but also
over the other States of the peninsula which were, in theory at least,
independent. The kingdom of the two Sicilies in the South, the grand duchy
of Tuscany on the West, and the smaller duchies of Parma, Modena, and
Lucca were only stable in so far as Austria bolstered up their corrupt and
unpopular governments. Even the Papal States themselves, equally undermined
with corruption and unpopularity, ultimately rested upon the same support.
Thus Austria represented for Italy all that evil past of which she wanted
to be rid: the foreign yoke against which her newly conscious spirit of
nationality revolted, the dynastic f