Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour – Institute for the Study of Western Civilization

Cavour (1810-1861) has always been seen as the indispensable man in the story of the unification of Italy. But, without the King, there might have been no unification. Maybe: ever! But if the person, the royal person of Vittorio Emanuele II, was essential in order to create a unified Italian peninsula, none of it would have happened without Cavour. He had a plan, a secret plan, and it worked. He did not live to see it work. He died(1861)just when Italy needed him the most, exactly as the United States lost its Lincoln at the crucial moment.

REQUIRED BOOKS FOR WINTER QUARTER

Make sure you are buying this edition since it has been updated in 2007.

Giuseppe Di Lampedusa,

The Leopard: A Novel,

Pantheon; Reprint edition (November 6, 2007),

ISBN 0375714790

Christopher Duggan,

A Concise History of Italy,

Cambridge University Press; 2 edition (January 20, 2014),

ISBN 0521747430

On Tuesday nights during this academic year, the Institute will present a thirty-week course on Modern Italy taught by William Fredlund, Ph.D. The study of Modern Italy will begin in the year 1600, and will offer the student the opportunity to discuss the idea of “Modern.” as well as the flowering of Italian culture in seventeenth century Rome. During the Winter Quarter we will study the making of the modern Italian democracy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. And then in Spring Quarter we will follow the evolution of the new democratic state of Italy into the twentieth century and the story of the Fascist dictatorship of Mussolini.