Institute for the History of the Italian Risorgimento

Complesso del Vittoriano, Piazza Venezia, 00187 Rome: this is the home of the Institute for the History of the Italian Risorgimento, its archive, its specialized library and the Central Museum of the Risorgimento. Secretariat: +39 06 6793598. Administration and library: +39 06 6793526. Email: istituto@risorgimento.it, certified email segreteria.istrisorgimento@pec.it, official website risorgimento.it. The Institute is not a museum and you don't visit it with a ticket. It is a public research body overseen by the Ministry of Culture, and what it offers the public is a study room, a documentary collection of about a million items, a library of Italian history between the 18th and 20th centuries, a journal, a few book series and a calendar of conferences. Consulting the archive and library is free, reserved for people with a study purpose, and arranged in advance by email or by phone. The days and hours of the room change during the year, with a summer closure in August, and must be confirmed with the secretariat before you show up. The museum that the Institute runs, on the other hand, has a ticket: the single VIVE circuit ticket, 18 euros full price, 5 euros reduced for young adults up to 25 years old, free under 18 and for people with disabilities, valid seven days from the chosen date and including the Vittoriano, the Central Museum of the Risorgimento, Palazzo Venezia and temporary exhibitions. Admission is free on the first Sunday of the month. Hours of the complex: every day from 9:30 to 19:30, last entry 18:45, with extended evening hours on Friday until 23:30. Metro line B, Colosseo stop, then a 10-minute walk along Via dei Fori Imperiali. Tram 8 ends at Piazza Venezia during the day.

If you're putting together a tour of the city's public collections, the annotated list is on the page about the state museums of Rome.

Where the Institute for the History of the Italian Risorgimento is and how to get there

The postal address, the one that appears on all the body's official documents, is dry almost to the point of reticence: Complesso del Vittoriano, Piazza Venezia, 00187 Rome. There is no street number, because the Vittoriano is a monumental block that occupies the whole northern flank of the Capitoline Hill by itself, and the Italian library registry lists the location of the Institute's library as "Piazza Venezia snc". Anyone arriving for the first time almost always makes the same mistake: looking for a door with a plaque in the piazza, in front of the stairway of the Altar of the Fatherland, and not finding it. The offices, the archive and the study room are reached through the side entrances of the complex, the ones that the tourist crowd ignores because it is looking up at the quadriga. Call the secretariat and ask which door to use on the day of your appointment. It's the only piece of information that really solves the problem, and it changes depending on the construction work going on in the monument.

The address and the entrances of the Vittoriano complex

The Vittoriano has four main entrances and none of them is called "Institute for the History of the Italian Risorgimento". You enter from the central staircase on Piazza Venezia, from the sides that climb toward the Ara Coeli and toward Via di San Pietro in Carcere, and from the upper level that connects to the terrace. The Central Museum of the Risorgimento occupies the interior rooms on the side facing Via dei Fori Imperiali, while the body's service areas, the offices and the consultation room are in the interior spaces of the monument, which the State Property Office has granted to the Institute for use along with the museum and the archive. It is an administrative detail, but it explains something that seems strange to visitors: inside the same building live a research body with its scientific staff, a state museum that belongs to another circuit, a panoramic terrace, a café and a conference room. The coexistence has not always been peaceful, and in the monument's recent history it has produced more than one argument over space.

Bus, tram and metro to the Institute for the History of the Italian Risorgimento

Piazza Venezia is one of the best-served surface hubs in Rome and, at this stage, one of the most unstable. The construction site of the future Venezia station of metro line C has reshuffled the stops. The lines that gravitate to the piazza and the streets immediately around it number about 20 between day and night services, among them H, 30, 40, 46, 60, 62, 63, 64, 70, 80, 81, 87, 170, 628 and 916. But some of them skip the Aracoeli stop and are diverted to Via del Teatro Marcello, to Via del Plebiscito at the height of Via degli Astalli, to Via delle Botteghe Oscure or to Corso Vittorio Emanuele at the corner with Largo Argentina. The changes follow one another at a rapid pace. The practical advice is banal and it works: check the stop on the same day on the Atac website or on the Roma Servizi per la Mobilità one, and allow 200 meters more walking than you expect.

Tram 8 remains the most elegant solution for those coming from Trastevere, Monteverde or Casaletto. During the day it runs on rails all the way to the terminus at Piazza Venezia, in the evening the service is replaced by buses along the whole route, with the last tram runs leaving in the late afternoon. On holidays the tram runs all day. The metro doesn't serve the piazza directly. The useful stop is Colosseo, on line B, and from there you go up Via dei Fori Imperiali in barely 10 minutes, with the not small advantage of reaching the Vittoriano from the side that shows its full bulk. If you get off at Cavour, also line B, it takes a few minutes more going through the Forums. From Termini, on foot, it is about 25 minutes along Via Nazionale and Via IV Novembre.

On foot to the Institute for the History of the Italian Risorgimento

You understand Rome by walking, and this address rewards those who arrive on foot. From Largo Argentina it is 600 meters along Via delle Botteghe Oscure. From the Pantheon it is a good quarter of an hour's walk by way of Via del Gesù. From the Colosseum you go up the whole of Via dei Fori Imperiali with Trajan's Markets on the right and the Museo dei Fori Imperiali halfway. From the Capitoline Hill two minutes is enough: Michelangelo's cordonata and the Ara Coeli staircase both lead down to Piazza d'Aracoeli, which borders the flank of the Vittoriano. If you have an appointment in the study room and want to arrive on time, though, avoid crossing Piazza Venezia at peak hours. The pedestrian light on Via del Corso side is very slow and the traffic is unforgiving.

What the Institute for the History of the Italian Risorgimento really is

It's best to clear the ground right away, because under the quadriga the misunderstanding is daily. The Institute for the History of the Italian Risorgimento is not the room with the flags, it is not the exhibition route with the Garibaldi relics, it is not the terrace with the view over the Forums. It is the body that owns those papers, sorts them, preserves them, studies them and publishes them. The museum is one of its functions, not its identity. In legal terms it is a legal entity under public law subject to the oversight of the Ministry of Culture, financed almost entirely by an annual state contribution, with governing bodies, an auditing body and scientific staff. In the financial statement published by the Ministry's competent directorate general, the ordinary state contribution comes to a little under 590,000 euros a year and covers about 95 percent of revenue. That order of magnitude says a lot about how much this kind of institution depends on the public budget and how little room it has to invent its own revenue.

The Institute for the History of the Italian Risorgimento is a research body, not a tourist attraction

The practical difference is enormous. In a museum you enter with a ticket, you look, you leave. In a research institute you enter with a motivated request, you fill out a form, you consult an inventory, you ask for an item, you read it in a supervised room and you take notes. The public of the Institute for the History of the Italian Risorgimento is not the passing tourist. They are students preparing a thesis, doctoral students, university professors, archivists, exhibition curators, descendants of families who left their papers, enthusiasts of military and 19th-century history, genealogists chasing a Garibaldian ancestor. Anyone who arrives hoping for a guided tour is disappointed. Anyone who arrives with a precise question leaves with material that doesn't exist anywhere else.

An unpopular opinion: this address is more interesting than the museum it houses. The museum tells the Risorgimento to a general audience, with a display that is by now a few years old. The archive contains the real letters, the real diaries, the real posters, and it lets you touch the distance between patriotic rhetoric and the daily life of those who lived through that period. If you have the excuse of a study, even a modest one, to get into the consultation room, use it.

The Institute for the History of the Italian Risorgimento among the national historical institutes

The body belongs to the family of the national historical institutes, the group of research institutions that the Italian state has built over a century, each one to watch over a season of national history. Coordination belongs to the Giunta Storica Nazionale, the body created in 1934 as the Giunta Centrale per gli Studi Storici, which is based in a very beautiful and little-visited palace, Palazzo Antici Mattei di Giove, at Via Michelangelo Caetani 32. The institutes now linked to the Giunta are the Istituto italiano per la storia antica, the Istituto storico italiano per il medio evo, the Istituto storico italiano per l'età moderna e contemporanea, the Istituto italiano di numismatica, the Domus Mazziniana in Pisa and, precisely, the Istituto per la storia del Risorgimento italiano. The Institute's website still presents itself as one of the five national historical institutes, a formula that dates to an earlier phase of the arrangement. The number changes depending on if you count the Domus Mazziniana or not, which has a particular statutory nature. The substance doesn't change: this is one of the bodies the State charges with doing historical research, not a cultural association.

The chronological scope of the Institute for the History of the Italian Risorgimento: from the 18th century to the Great War

The Institute's statutory task is to promote and facilitate the study of the history of Italy from the period preparing for Unity and Independence up to the end of the First World War, collecting documents, publications and relics, editing editions of sources and memoirs, and organizing scientific congresses. It is a broader definition than it seems. The Risorgimento, in the body's sense, doesn't begin in 1848 and doesn't end in 1861. It starts from the 18th-century reforms and the Napoleonic wave, passes through 1799, 1820, 1831, 1848, the wars of independence, the breach of Porta Pia, and reaches 1918, because Italian historiography long read the Great War as the fourth act of the unification process. The formula the body uses today to describe its field, the "long nineteenth century", conveys well the idea of a periodization that goes beyond the boundaries of the civil century.

This breadth explains the makeup of the archive and the library, which collect material from the mid-18th century to the 1920s. And it also explains why the Institute for the History of the Italian Risorgimento is, in practice, the first address for anyone working on the Great War from the standpoint of patriotic culture, propaganda and the memory of the fallen.

The founding of the Institute for the History of the Italian Risorgimento: two bodies of 1906 and a royal decree

The date you read around, 1936, is a simplification that has circulated for decades. The body's documentation gives 1935 as the birth year of the current name, by virtue of the Royal Decree of June 20, 1935, which changed the name of the Società Nazionale per la storia del Risorgimento to Istituto per la storia del Risorgimento italiano. But the story begins 30 years earlier, and it begins double.

The Comitato Nazionale per la storia del Risorgimento, May 1906

Royal Decree May 17, 1906, no. 212, establishes a Comitato Nazionale per la storia del Risorgimento with a task formulated in an administrative language that today sounds almost moving: to collect, prepare and order the documents, books and all other memorabilia that concern the history of the Italian risorgimento, and to prepare and facilitate its study. It is 1906, the 45th year of the Kingdom. The real protagonists are still alive, or have died only recently, leaving trunks of papers to their children. The generation that had made Unity was leaving the stage and the State was realizing, with its usual delay, that the sources of that process risked being scattered among private attics and autograph dealers. The Comitato was born for this reason. It is a documentary rescue operation even before it is a scientific project.

The presidency of the Comitato passes through leading figures of Italian political life: Giuseppe Biancheri from 1906 to 1908, Gaspare Finali from 1908 to 1914, Paolo Boselli from 1915 to 1932, Giovanni Gentile from 1933 to 1934. Boselli, who would lead the Italian government between 1916 and 1917, presides over the body for 17 years. It's a fact that says how much the history of the Risorgimento was considered a matter of State and not a pastime of scholars.

The Società Nazionale per la Storia del Risorgimento, Milan, November 9, 1906

Almost at the same time, and this simultaneity is no accident, the Società Nazionale per la storia del Risorgimento was born in Milan on November 9, 1906, private in nature and organized as an association. Milan in 1906 is the city of the Simplon International Exposition, industrial capital of the Kingdom and home to a very active bourgeois patriotism. The Società collects members, dues, donations, private libraries. The Roman Comitato carries the stamp of the State. Two parallel paths that for 30 years run side by side, sometimes in competition, often sharing the same people.

The Società too has a succession of presidents worth reading by name: Bassano Gabba from 1906 to 1911, Ettore Pedotti from 1911 to 1919, Matteo Mazziotti from 1920 to 1923, Gaetano Giardino from 1924 to 1932, Cesare Maria de Vecchi di Val Cismon from 1933. Gabba had been a Garibaldian officer. Giardino and Pedotti were generals. Mazziotti was a prefect and a southern historian. The Risorgimento, in those years, was studied in large part by its direct heirs in uniform.

The first congress and the birth of a discipline

The Milan of 1906 is also the year of the first congress of Italian Risorgimento history, the founding act of a discipline that until then had moved among memoir writing, hagiography and partisan polemic. From that congress descends the series of national conferences that the Institute still organizes today, with a progressive numbering that passed 60 editions long ago. The 60th was held in Rieti between October 18 and 21, 2000, on the theme "Cento anni di storiografia sul Risorgimento", and its proceedings remain one of the most useful readings for understanding how historians' view of this subject has changed.

1935 and the current name of the Institute for the History of the Italian Risorgimento

The Royal Decree of June 20, 1935 closes the double phase. The forms and structures of the two earlier institutions merge into a single body that inherits their documentary and artistic heritage and preserves the peculiarity of the associative form. That is, it continues to have members, like the Milan Società, while being a public body like the Roman Comitato. It is a hybrid solution typically Italian and, it must be said, it has proved long-lived. 90 years later the Institute for the History of the Italian Risorgimento still works this way, with a network of local committees made up of dues-paying members and a central structure financed by the State.

The first president of the unified body is Cesare Maria de Vecchi di Val Cismon, quadrumvir of the March on Rome, governor of Somalia, minister of national education. The choice says everything about the political value the regime attached to managing Risorgimento memory. The Risorgimento, in the 1930s, is reread as the necessary prelude to Fascism, and the Institute is one of the instruments of that operation. It would take the war and a long season of scientific reforms to bring the body back into a normal historiographical channel.

A curiosity about the Institute for the History of the Italian Risorgimento

The curiosity I like best concerns the legal nature of the offices, and you only discover it by reading the transparent administration section of the website. All the positions in the bodies of the Institute for the History of the Italian Risorgimento are purely honorary. The president and the councillors receive no attendance fee. In a country where every board of directors produces fees, allowances and reimbursements, here they sit for free. The only compensation that appears in the public documents concerns the auditing body, with an annual fee on the order of several thousand euros per member: figures that in the Italian public administration are little more than an expense reimbursement in disguise.

The practical consequence is interesting and worth explaining, because it shows how this world really works. The Institute's council is made up in large part of university professors of Risorgimento history and related disciplines, or of scholars of recognized authority. Sitting on that council brings no money. It brings academic prestige, access to sources, the chance to steer the book series and the journal. The currency of exchange is symbolic and curricular. It is the reason why, when a body like this goes into crisis, the crisis is almost never economic in the strict sense. It is a crisis of authority, of generational turnover, of the ability to attract young scholars to a subject that Italian universities have progressively scaled back in their curricula.

I'll add a second curiosity, of a more concrete kind. For decades the body's email address was hosted on a general commercial domain, that of an old Italian internet access provider, and dozens of pages still circulate online that give that now outdated contact. Today correspondence should be addressed to istituto@risorgimento.it, with certified email at segreteria.istrisorgimento@pec.it. If you write to the old address nobody answers, and not because they are ignoring you. It seems like nothing: in practice it is the reason many students convince themselves that the archive is closed.

The statutes and governance of the Institute for the History of the Italian Risorgimento

A statute is a boring document until you read it with the right question in mind: who decides what is studied, who decides what is published, who decides who can enter the archive. In the case of the Institute for the History of the Italian Risorgimento the answers have changed several times, and the latest statutory revision is recent: the new statute was approved at the end of 2023, after a long period under a commissioner.

What Article 1 of the statute of the Institute for the History of the Italian Risorgimento says

The opening article sets out the mandate: to promote and facilitate the study of the history of Italy from the period preparing for Unity and Independence to the end of the First World War, collecting documents, publications and relics, editing editions of sources and memoirs, and organizing scientific congresses. Four verbs, four activities. Collecting means acquiring archival collections by purchase, gift, bequest or deposit. Editing editions means publishing sources in a critical edition, that is, transcribed, annotated and placed in their context. Organizing congresses means keeping a scientific community alive. And "facilitating study" means something very practical: making the papers consultable, which requires inventories, staff, rooms, catalogs.

In the current wording the body's tasks are spelled out in a more detailed way, with the addition of the promotion and advancement of studies and the management of the facilities entrusted to it. The Institute operates through the central office and the local committees, which the new statute defines as coinciding with one or more provinces or with the metropolitan cities. It is a sensible change: the old provincial structure reflected the administrative geography of the Kingdom of Italy, not that of the Republic after the reform of local authorities.

The bodies of the Institute for the History of the Italian Risorgimento

The governance structure includes a head appointed by the Ministry, a council with a strong academic component, an auditing body and a scientific committee. In the arrangement settled over recent decades the presidential council had 18 members: 13 university professors of Risorgimento history and related disciplines, or scholars of recognized fame, and five members elected by the Consulta, that is, by the assembly of representatives of the local committees. The council in turn appointed a vice president and a secretary general, in office for three years and renewable. The presidency also coordinates the foreign groups, which are the body's international antenna.

The figure I advise keeping in mind is that ratio of 13 to 5. It means that academia weighs more than the regions, but that the regions have a say: five councillors out of 18 are not an ornament. It is the legacy of the associative form inherited from the Milan Società of 1906, and it remains the most original feature of the Institute for the History of the Italian Risorgimento compared with the other national historical institutes, which are purely academic structures.

The Consulta and the local committees of the Institute for the History of the Italian Risorgimento

The network of committees is the least known and the liveliest part of the whole organization. They number in the dozens, spread across the peninsula and the islands, from Piedmont to Sicily, with historically strong centers in Turin, Milan, Naples, Palermo, Cosenza, Treviso, and a presence in small towns where a group of enthusiasts keeps conferences, exhibitions and local research going with minimal means. Each committee has its own members, its own activity, often its own website and its own series of publications. The Consulta is the body that represents them to the Roman top level and elects a share of the councillors.

This outlying structure produces an effect that anyone who studies the Risorgimento knows well: a substantial part of local research on 19th-century Italy, the kind that digs into municipal archives and provincial family papers, passes through these committees. They are the ones who publish the little volume on the uprising of 1848 in a particular city, who survey the commemorative plaques, who organize the conference for the anniversary. The archival heritage produced by the committees themselves, moreover, is kept in Rome along with the body's historical archive: the committees' papers are in turn a source for the history of Risorgimento memory in the 20th century.

The foreign groups

Even less known are the foreign groups, coordinated directly by the presidency. The Risorgimento was a European phenomenon, not an Italian one. It was made with exile in London, Paris, Marseille, Switzerland, with the legions in South America, with Masonic networks and transnational secret societies, with the English and French opinion press. There is therefore an international community of scholars working on this subject, and the foreign groups serve to keep it connected to the Institute. They are also the channel through which foreign contributions and reviews reach the body's journal.

How to become a member of the Institute for the History of the Italian Risorgimento

You become a member by joining a local committee or the central office, with an annual fee and an application for admission. The terms and amounts are given in the dedicated section of the official website, along with the form. The most concrete advantage of joining, for those who work on the subject, is receiving the journal and staying within the circuit of invitations to conferences and presentations. The less concrete but more real advantage is supporting a body that, with that budget, has no great alternatives: membership fees don't pay salaries, but they pay for part of the publications.

The archive of the Institute for the History of the Italian Risorgimento

Here we come to the heart of the matter, and it is the reason this address exists. The archive holds a documentary and iconographic heritage that covers the span between the second half of the 18th century and the end of the First World War, and which the guide to the collections puts at about a million documents. It is one of the main sources for the study of Italy and the international context in that period, and it has no equivalent on the peninsula for the density of private Risorgimento papers gathered in a single place.

A million documents at the Institute for the History of the Italian Risorgimento: what it really means

The number alone says nothing. A million documents means letters, a great many letters, and then circulars, posters, proclamations, personal diaries, travel journals, commemorative albums, photographs, paper money and monetary documents, tickets, receipts, notes from clandestine meetings, drafts never sent. The guide to the collections defines the whole as an exceptional typological sample of 19th-century and early 20th-century documentation, and the definition is exact: there is hardly a documentary genre of the period that isn't represented here.

The value, for those doing research, lies in two characteristics. The first is the private provenance: they are largely family papers, arrived by gift or by bequest, that is, materials you don't find in the state archives because they never passed through a public office. The second is the geographic breadth: in the same repository live the papers of a patriot from Lucania, a Sardinian cardinal, a Tuscan family and a Lombard volunteer, which allows comparisons that elsewhere would take months of travel.

How the archive of the Institute for the History of the Italian Risorgimento is organized

The arrangement distinguishes three large categories. The first is that of family and personal archives: the collections that bear the name of a person or a family. The second includes the archives of institutions: bodies, committees, associations, societies. The third gathers the collections, that is, sets artificially built by a collector or by the body itself around a theme, a type or a subject. It is a classic threefold division of archival science and it isn't pedantry: understanding which of the three categories the material you're looking for falls into changes the way you have to query the inventories.

The description of the collections follows the international standards ISAD, which governs archival description, and ISAAR, which governs the description of the producers. Alongside the description there is an indexing system that lets you get to the document by subject, by personal name and by place. Translated into human language: you can search "Aspromonte" and find all the papers in which that place appears, within different collections, without knowing in advance who wrote them. It is exactly what someone working on an event and not on a person needs.

The personal collections of the Institute for the History of the Italian Risorgimento

Browsing the guide to the collections is an exercise I recommend to anyone with a serious historical curiosity, because it reveals the social geography of the Risorgimento better than any textbook. A few examples worth citing to understand what material we're talking about.

The Amat collection holds the papers of Luigi Amat di San Filippo, a Sardinian cardinal of great weight in the 19th-century curia, and counts more than 1,200 archival units of correspondence with ecclesiastical and civil figures. It is a valuable and little-trodden source, because it lets you look at the unification process from the side of those who suffered it: the Church. Anyone studying the Roman question and the relationship between State and Holy See finds first-hand materials here.

The Albini collection gathers the papers of Giacinto Albini, the man who organized the Lucanian insurrection of August 1860, when Basilicata rose up even before Garibaldi arrived on the mainland. It is one of the least told chapters of 1860 and one of the most interesting, because it shows that the South was not simply conquered. In some areas it moved on its own, and with a precise political direction.

The Andreini collection holds historical manuscripts gathered by Rinaldo Andreini, among them the so-called Colombario Italico, and belongs to that category of 19th-century learned collections that today are worth mostly as documents of the mentality of those who put them together. The Ademollo family collection brings together materials of several members of the family active in Risorgimento events, and is a good example of a family archive layered over generations.

Alongside these there are dozens of other groups, and the logic of how they formed is almost always the same: a descendant who in the 1920s, 1930s or 1950s decides not to leave a great-grandfather's papers in a cellar and takes them to the Vittoriano. That is the reason the archive of the Institute for the History of the Italian Risorgimento exists: the generosity of private families, multiplied over a century.

The body's historical archive and the committees' papers

Besides the acquired collections, the Institute keeps its own historical archive from its foundation and the documentation on the activity of the local committees. It is material that at first sight seems bureaucratic and that is instead gold for a line of research that is by now mature, the one on the 20th-century construction of Risorgimento memory: how the dates to celebrate were chosen, which figures were preferred in the foreground and which were left in the shadows, how public discourse on the Risorgimento changed between the liberal age, Fascism and the Republic. Anyone who wants to write the history of national history finds the papers of the workshop here.

Consulting the archive of the Institute for the History of the Italian Risorgimento online

The official website provides a section dedicated to consulting the archive online and a description of the collections, with a downloadable guide. The practical advice is to work with those tools before asking for the appointment: arriving in the study room already knowing which collection and which archival units you need completely changes the productivity of the day. Part of the material, moreover, has flowed into national digitization projects: the body's iconographic collections appear on the public cultural portals together with those of the Library of Modern and Contemporary History, particularly in the strand devoted to images of the Great War.

The iconographic collection of the Institute for the History of the Italian Risorgimento

Alongside the papers there is the image, and the iconographic part of this archive is, for a popularizer, the most usable of all.

20,000 prints, engravings and drawings

The collection includes about 20,000 pieces among prints, engravings and drawings. These are the images that built the Risorgimento imagination before mass photography existed: portraits of patriots circulated as lithographs, views of battles, political caricatures, allegories of turreted Italia, posters. Anyone interested in the history of political propaganda finds a mine in this material, because it shows how consent was manufactured in an era without radio and without cinema. The caricatures, in particular, are an underrated genre. They say more about 19th-century public opinion than many treatises.

75,000 photographs

The photographic collection counts about 75,000 pieces datable between the first half of the 19th century and the second decade of the 20th, organized in groups uniform by type or by subject. The chronological span is what makes the collection extraordinary. It starts from the very first years of photography, when portraying a person required very long poses and bulky equipment, and arrives at the images of the Great War, the moment when photography becomes an instrument of mass documentation. In between is the whole technical arc of the medium and the whole visual history of united Italy.

In these materials it is worth looking not for the official portraits of the protagonists, which are known and reprinted everywhere, but for the photographs of ordinary volunteers, the ones with a dedication on the back, the group ones taken before a departure. There you see the real face of the Risorgimento, which was made of 20-year-old boys and not of monuments.

Relics, flags and objects

The body also inherits from the two organizations of 1906 an artistic and relic heritage, which is the basis of the museum collections: uniforms, weapons, flags, personal objects, medals. The exhibited part can be seen in the museum route. The part not on display, as in every institution of this kind, is much larger than the visible one. The flags, in particular, form a group of enormous identity value, and are a type of textile artifact that is extremely fragile, requiring storage in the dark, controlled humidity and rotation of the displays. If you happen to find on display a banner you had never seen, it's no accident: it's the rotation cycle.

Something nobody tells you about the Institute for the History of the Italian Risorgimento

Nobody tells you that this library has a declared chronological limit, and that this limit is the real secret to using it well. The national library registry classifies the Institute's holdings as specialized in Italian history of the period between 1796 and 1870. It's not a bureaucratic formula. It is the declaration of an acquisition policy. 1796 is the year of Bonaparte's first Italian campaign, the moment when the peninsula stops being a mosaic of old regimes and starts to move. 1870 is Porta Pia. Within that 70-year span the bibliographic coverage is thorough to the point of obsession. Outside that span, the library thins out quickly, even though the archive runs up to 1918.

The practical consequence is clear. If you work on 1848, on the Roman Republic, on the wars of independence, on the Expedition of the 1,000, on post-unification brigandage, this is the first Italian library to consult, and you will find pamphlets, memoirs, 19th-century editions and periodicals that no university catalog holds. If instead you work on the Giolitti era or on the Great War, the library helps you little and you are better off aiming straight at the archive, filling in the printed material elsewhere, for example at the National Central Library of Rome or at the Library of Modern and Contemporary History.

The second thing nobody tells you is about the real size of the holdings. The figures recorded in the library registry speak of about 25,000 volumes, more than 1,000 manuscripts, 623 periodical titles, 32,000 prints and 25,000 photographs and engravings. 25,000 volumes are few, if you compare them with a university library. They are a great many if you think that they cover a single 70-year span of the history of a single country. That is the difference between a general library and a specialist one, and it is the reason people come here in Rome: not for the quantity, for the density. A good 1,000 manuscripts, then, put the institution in a different class from ordinary research libraries, alongside historic collections such as the Biblioteca Casanatense, the Biblioteca Angelica and the Biblioteca Vallicelliana, with which it shares the logic of the old collection and not that of current lending.

Third thing, and I say it because it saves you a wasted trip: there is no local lending. You consult on site, you can ask for reproduction within the limits set by the regulations, you get bibliographic information from the staff. No volume leaves the building. Anyone used to municipal libraries arrives convinced they can take the book home for a week and is left stunned.

The Library of the Istituto per la Storia del Risorgimento Italiano

Founded together with the institute in 1935, with cores that go back to the two institutions of 1906, the library is the other half of this address. The registered address is Piazza Venezia, the telephone +39 06 6793526, the email istituto@risorgimento.it.

What the Library of the Istituto per la Storia del Risorgimento Italiano Holds

The holdings divide into three big blocks. The first is the historical monograph: the works of the historians of the Risorgimento, from the memoirs of the protagonists published while events were hot up to contemporary academic output. The second is the minor publications, meaning pamphlets, speeches, funeral orations, society statutes, committee reports: ephemeral material that general libraries have historically thrown away and that here was instead collected systematically. The third block is the periodicals: more than 600 titles, which means newspapers, magazines, bulletins of patriotic associations, exile sheets.

The minor publications are the most valuable part and the least visited. A 16-page pamphlet printed in Naples in 1861 to celebrate the entry of Vittorio Emanuele II is worth, for understanding the mood of those months, as much as a whole volume written 100 years later. And of those pamphlets, often, very few copies survive in all of Italy.

The Digital Library of the Istituto per la Storia del Risorgimento Italiano

For some years now the institute has opened a digital library that makes volumes from its own series and period materials available online, with access from the dedicated section of the site. You find there, among other things, historic volumes of the Institute's Scientific Library and tomes of the National Edition of the writings of Giuseppe Garibaldi, digitized with optical text recognition. For those who work from outside Rome it is a substantial change: it lets you prepare the research from a distance and cut the time in the study room down to what really requires the original paper.

Services, Reproductions, Bibliographic Information

The registered services are consultation on site, reproduction and bibliographic information from the staff. That last one is a resource that users almost always underrate. In a specialist library the librarian knows the collection, and a 10-minute conversation with someone who has worked there for years can save you weeks of blind searching. Asking costs nothing and in this kind of institute people answer gladly: those who work there have chosen a niche subject and appreciate anyone who takes it seriously.

How to Get Into the Study Room of the Istituto per la Storia del Risorgimento Italiano

This is the practical part you really need, and I write it in the order in which things have to be done.

Who Can Enter the Istituto per la Storia del Risorgimento Italiano

Access is classified as restricted: it is not a public reading library and you don't go in out of general curiosity. You need a reason for study, which can be a degree thesis, doctoral research, professional work, a publication, but also serious and well-documented personal research. You don't need to be enrolled at a university. You need to know what you are looking for.

How to Book

You write to istituto@risorgimento.it or phone the numbers of the office, saying who you are, what you are working on and which material interests you. The secretariat confirms the day, the time and the entrance to use. Booking is not a formality: the room has few seats, the staff is small and the items have to be brought up from the storerooms, an operation that takes time. Showing up without an appointment almost certainly means finding the door closed.

Hours and Closures

The national library registry records an opening spread over the five weekdays, with the morning always available and two or three midweek afternoons, closed on Saturday and Sunday and closed for the year in the month of August. These are typical hours for Roman research institutes and they need to be confirmed with the secretariat when you book, because they change with staff shifts and with works going on in the complex. The rule: aim for the morning, arrive at opening time, and consider that the real useful time in a day of consultation is four or five hours, not eight.

What to Bring and What to Leave Outside

A valid ID, a pencil, a laptop. Pens are not used in a reading room for old material: it is the universal rule of every archive and it applies here too. Bags and backpacks stay outside the room. To photograph the documents you need authorization, which depends on the state of conservation of the item and on its possible publishing use: ask in advance, by email, together with the booking. And forget the portable scanner, which in this kind of institution is almost never allowed.

The Mistakes to Avoid on a First Visit

The first mistake is arriving without having read the inventories: you lose the morning working out where you are. The second is asking for too many items at once, because the room has daily delivery limits and you end up with material on the table that you can't manage to read. The third is confusing the archive with the museum and showing up at the Vittoriano ticket office asking for the study room: they are two different chains of command and the ticket office staff have no authority over the archive. The fourth, the most frequent, is thinking that the Risorgimento is an exhausted subject. It is nothing of the kind: whole strands, from the history of women patriots to the social history of volunteering, from the international circulation of ideas to the religious dimension of the unification process, still have entire collections to explore in this archive.

The Advice I Give You for Visiting the Istituto per la Storia del Risorgimento Italiano

The advice is to stop thinking of it as a visit and start thinking of it as an appointment. Anyone who arrives at the Vittoriano with the idea of "visiting the Institute" leaves unsatisfied, because there is nothing to visit: the offices are offices, the study room is a study room, and the exhibition route belongs to the museum. Anyone who arrives instead with a question written on a sheet of paper, a collection identified and a confirmed appointment leaves with a day of work behind them and with the impression, quite right, of having touched the history of Italy with their hands.

The sequence I recommend to anyone, student or enthusiast, is this. First step, at home: browse the online archive section of the official site and download the guide to the collections, which is a substantial and well-made document. Second step: pick two or three collections relevant to your research and note down the shelfmarks. Third step: write to the secretariat explaining in five lines who you are, what you are looking for and what you would like to consult, and ask for an appointment giving two or three alternative dates. Fourth step: while you wait for the answer, read at least one recent essay on the subject, so you don't arrive without any bibliography behind you. Fifth step: show up on time in the morning, with ID and pencil.

One more piece of advice, for those who come from out of town and want to make the trip pay off. Piazza Venezia is a great starting point for a real Risorgimento day. The morning in the archive, the afternoon at the Central Museum of the Risorgimento to see the objects, and if there is time a climb up the Janiculum to the Museo della Repubblica Romana e della memoria garibaldina, which tells the story of 1849 in the exact place where it was fought. Three stops, three different registers on the same theme: the document, the object, the territory. It is the best way I know to understand this period, and it works for an adult as well as for a high school kid.

Last recommendation, about expectations. Don't ask the archive for what the archive can't give you. If you are after a flat answer like "was my great-grandfather with the 1,000?", bear in mind that the list of the volunteers of the expedition has a complicated publishing history and that identification takes work across several sources. If instead you are after context, letters, mentality, language, this is the right place and you will come away with more than you hoped.

The Publications of the Istituto per la Storia del Risorgimento Italiano

A research body is judged by what it publishes, and on this ground the Institute has a respectable history that is more than a century long.

The Rassegna storica del Risorgimento, the Journal of the Istituto per la Storia del Risorgimento Italiano

The body's journal has been coming out since 1914 under the title Rassegna storica del Risorgimento, born as the organ of the Società Nazionale per la storia del Risorgimento italiano and later passed to the Institute. It is one of the oldest Italian historical journals still alive, it has a regular periodic schedule and publishes essays, editions of documents, critical notes, reviews and a bibliographic survey that works as an update bulletin for specialists in the field. The archive of the historical volumes is consultable in the library and, in part, online through public digital collections.

If I had to point a student to a single tool for understanding the state of the art on a Risorgimento theme, I would point to this journal's index by year. More than 100 years of issues are the complete map of how the interpretation of the Risorgimento has changed: from the patriotic and celebratory reading of the 1910s to the nationalist rereading of the 1930s, from the postwar revisionism to social history, up to the most recent approaches on gender, political emotions and transnational networks. A century of historiography on a single shelf.

The book series of the Institute for the History of the Italian Risorgimento

Alongside the journal the body publishes a number of series that make up its Scientific Library. The historical editorial lines are the Atti dei congressi, which collect the work of the national conferences, the Fonti, devoted to critical editions of documents, the Memorie, which host monographs and studies, a series with an international slant with texts in several languages, and the Repertori, that is, reference tools, indexes, bibliographies, surveys. It is the classic equipment of a national historical institute: the congress produces the proceedings, research produces the memoirs, the archive produces the sources and the repertories.

The Fonti are, for a researcher, the series that matters most. Publishing a source in a critical edition means transcribing it in full, collating the witnesses, annotating names and references, reconstructing the context. It is very slow and not very gratifying work, but it makes available to the scientific community material otherwise accessible only to those who can physically come to Rome. It is the highest public function of a body like this.

The Edizione Nazionale of the writings of Giuseppe Garibaldi

The most demanding editorial undertaking of the Institute for the History of the Italian Risorgimento is the Edizione Nazionale of the writings of Giuseppe Garibaldi, a project that collects in series the general's entire written output: the memoirs, the novels, the political writings and above all the letters, which are the most voluminous and most useful part. The series has passed 20 volumes and continues to this day, with recent volumes also available through the body's bookshop.

A couple of words are worth spending on Garibaldi's letters, because they are a case study. Garibaldi wrote a great deal, to anyone, in a personal Italian and an approximate French, and his letters have scattered across hundreds of public and private collections around the world. Reconstructing the corpus meant surveying, requesting, transcribing and dating thousands of documents spread between Rome, Genoa, Caprera, Montevideo, London and New York. The result gives back a figure very different from that of the monuments: practical, stubborn, often irritated, extremely attentive to money and logistics, able to go from military strategy to a request for a pair of boots on the same page. The volumes of the Edizione Nazionale are partly available in the body's digital library too, and it is the reading I recommend to anyone who thinks they already know Garibaldi because they've seen his statue on the Janiculum.

The bookshop and publications for sale

The official website hosts an online bookshop from which you can buy the volumes of the series and the issues of the journal, with a section dedicated to the Biblioteca del Risorgimento. For anyone building a bibliography it is the most direct channel: many of these editions don't go through commercial book distribution and can't be found in general bookstores.

The congresses and conferences of the Institute for the History of the Italian Risorgimento

The third leg of the activity, after the archive and the publications, is scientific organization. The body promotes a national congress at regular intervals, traditionally every two years, hosted each time in a different city and entrusted to the collaboration of the local committee. The formula is old and it works: it brings scholars to the places being discussed, involves the city's institutions, produces a volume of proceedings that remains.

The national congress, from Milan 1906 to today

The series starts with the Milan congress of 1906, which coincides with the founding of the Società, and continues without interruption apart from the war years. The 60th was held in Rieti in October 2000 and was devoted to an assessment of 100 years of historiography on the Risorgimento. The volume of proceedings, published in Rome in 2002, contains among other things an essay devoted precisely to the organization of historical studies in Italy, which is the reference reading for understanding how these bodies work. It is more than 100 years of congresses, a continuity that very few cultural institutions in Italy have.

Conferences, traveling exhibitions and prizes

The current activity is made up of more agile initiatives. The recent calendar includes monographic conferences, among them one devoted to the relationship between Giovanni Gentile and the Risorgimento, which is a delicate and interesting subject precisely because Gentile was president of the Comitato Nazionale in the 1930s. It also includes traveling exhibitions taken to the cities that host committees, like the one on the female presence in national history, also hosted in Rieti, and a national prize named after the Risorgimento, now in its third edition, which serves to catch young research. Then there is the acquisition activity, which continues: among the recent additions to the collections is a rare album linked to the Società Nazionale Dante Alighieri.

On this chapter the verdict is clear: the conference side of this body is better than its communication. The initiatives exist, they are serious and they are almost always free, but they are announced on channels that the public doesn't use. If the subject interests you, the thing to do is to sign up for the news section of the official website and check it now and then: book presentations and seminars are often held in rooms of the Vittoriano complex that no tourist will ever see.

Another well-known fact, yet rarely mentioned

Everyone knows that the Vittoriano houses the Central Museum of the Risorgimento. Almost nobody connects that museum to the fact that the building was born precisely to contain it. When Victor Emmanuel II died in 1878 and Parliament decided to dedicate a monument to him in Rome, the program didn't provide only for an equestrian statue and a staircase. It provided for a place of national memory, and inside that place there was to be room for the collection of documents and relics of the unification process. The monument and the scientific institution were born from the same idea, a few decades apart, and the chronological coincidence proves it: the Vittoriano was inaugurated in 1911 for the 50th anniversary of Unity, the Comitato Nazionale and the Società Nazionale were born in 1906, in the full preparation for that anniversary.

The little-cited fact, then, is this: the Institute for the History of the Italian Risorgimento is not a tenant who happened to land inside a monument. It is the scientific part of a project that had a monumental part and a documentary part, conceived together. The Botticino marble from Brescia was there to celebrate, the papers were there to prove. That the celebratory part then devoured the public's attention and the documentary part ended up in the shadows is another story, a very Italian one.

It is worth adding an administrative detail that closes the circle. The premises of the Vittoriano, those of the museum and those of the archive, are state property granted for use to the body: the Institute does not own the building, it uses it. This explains why, over the years, the spaces available for the archive and for the study room have changed several times, and why the coexistence between the scientific functions and the exhibition and tourist functions of the complex has produced recurring tensions. Anyone who knows the building knows that, in the last 20 years, its vocation as a big container for temporary exhibitions has more than once squeezed the research spaces. It is the kind of conflict that never makes it into a newspaper and that decides the daily life of those who work in those spaces.

The Institute for the History of the Italian Risorgimento and the Central Museum of the Risorgimento: what's the difference

It is the most frequent question at the foot of the staircase, and it deserves an orderly answer.

The Institute for the History of the Italian Risorgimento and the museum: two functions, a single building

The Institute for the History of the Italian Risorgimento is the body: a public legal entity, overseen by the Ministry of Culture, with a statute, bodies, members, a budget, an archive, a library and publishing activity. The Central Museum of the Risorgimento is its museum: the exhibition route that makes a selection of the collections visible to the public. One is the structure, the other is the service to the public. A useful comparison: the body is the publisher, the museum is the bookshop window. In practice, then, the museum is visited together with the rest of the monumental complex with the single ticket of the circuit that manages the Vittoriano and Palazzo Venezia, while the body's archive and library are consulted free of charge by appointment. Two doors, two logics, two publics.

What you see at the museum and what you find in the archive

At the museum you see objects: flags, weapons, uniforms, Garibaldi relics, works of art, documents displayed in cases, multimedia installations. The route is thematic and chronological, and runs from the Napoleonic age to the First World War. In the archive you see none of this: you ask for a folder, it is handed to you, you open it and read handwritten papers. The museum gives you the overall picture. The archive gives you the documentary proof and, almost always, complicates the picture that the museum had simplified for you. It is the ideal combination, and it is the reason to do both things on the same day, in this order: first the papers, then the objects. Anyone who does the opposite tends to read the documents looking in them for confirmation of what they have already seen.

And the rest of the complex

The circuit ticket also includes the other spaces of the monument and the museum of Palazzo Venezia, on the other side of the piazza. If you want to look into the individual parts, you'll find the pages devoted to the Altar of the Fatherland, the Brasini Wing of the Vittoriano and the National Museum of Palazzo Venezia. They are four very different experiences within a radius of 200 meters, and fatigue builds up faster than you'd think: putting everything in one afternoon is a classic mistake.

The Vittoriano as the container of the Institute for the History of the Italian Risorgimento

Sacconi, the construction site, the shape of the building

The monument comes from an international competition won by the architect Giuseppe Sacconi from the Marche, and the construction site occupies the city for more than a quarter century, from the laying of the first stone to the inauguration of 1911, with completion work that continues for decades. To open up the space, an entire piece of medieval and Renaissance city on the northern flank of the Capitoline Hill was demolished, an operation that provoked protests at the time and that today would be considered unacceptable. The result is a building that Romans called by unaffectionate nicknames for a century and that, seen from the top of the terrace, reveals itself for what it is: a scenic machine built to be looked at from afar.

Inside that machine there are spaces the public doesn't imagine: storage areas, offices, consultation rooms, laboratories. The museum part occupies a portion of them. The scientific body occupies another. The Brasini Wing, built later to a design by Armando Brasini on the flank toward the Forums, is today the space for the big temporary exhibitions and has a building history independent of the Sacconi main body.

Why the body ended up here

The placement in the national monument was not a logistical choice. It was a declaration of intent. Putting the archive of the Risorgimento inside the monument to the first king of Italy meant asserting that documentary memory and monumental memory were the same thing. For better or worse, that choice conditioned everything else: it guaranteed the body a prestigious, free home, and it imposed on it a coexistence with a tourist flow that has no interest in historical research. Anyone working in that study room hears, through the walls, the noise of school groups on the staircase. It is a contrast that is amusing and makes you think.

The right photo to take at the Institute for the History of the Italian Risorgimento

A premise that holds for all the archives in the world: inside the study room you don't photograph freely. Reproduction of documents requires authorization, depends on the item's state of preservation and has to be agreed in advance. So the photograph to take home is not made on 19th-century paper. You make it outside, and there are three shots worth the trip.

The first is the least obvious and I prefer it to all the others. Don't photograph the Vittoriano from the piazza, where 10,000 people a day do it with exactly the same result. Climb the Ara Coeli staircase, the very long and steep one that leads to the basilica of Santa Maria in Aracoeli, stop halfway, turn around and frame the flank of the monument on the diagonal. You get a raking perspective that shows the layering of the columns and, in the light of late afternoon, a marble that turns to gold. It is the face of the building behind which the archive and the library work, and almost nobody photographs it.

The second shot is from inside, from the panoramic terrace reached by elevator. From up there, looking south, you fit into a single frame the sequence that explains Rome better than any caption, with the Capitoline Hill in the foreground, the Imperial Forums in the middle and the Colosseum in the background. Go in the last hour of opening, when the raking light separates the planes. On Friday, with the extended evening hours, you can stay until dark and the city lights up beneath you. It's the only case in which I agree to recommend a crowded viewpoint: here the crowd is paid back.

The third is a detail, and details are what distinguish a travel photograph from a postcard. Look for the plaques, inscriptions and service signs of the complex, the ones that indicate the offices, the archive, the library. A service door with a brass plate inside a national monument tells exactly the double nature of this place: where the tourist sees rhetoric, here people work. If you happen to come on a conference day and find the poster pinned at the entrance, that is the best photograph of all, because it documents a living institution and not a backdrop.

A technical note: the piazza is almost always backlit in the middle hours of the day and the white marble blows out the highlights. If you have a camera, underexpose by one stop. If you have a phone, tap the brightest point on the screen to lock the exposure. And if you want the monument without crowds, the only possible moment is the first half hour of the morning.

Some important events that happened here in history

This place has a double chronology: that of the monument, which is public and loud, and that of the scientific institution, which is quiet and just as dense. It is worth keeping them together.

1878. On the death of Victor Emmanuel II, Parliament resolves to erect a national monument in Rome. It is the act that generates the whole complex and, indirectly, the future home of the body.

May 1906. The Royal Decree of May 17, number 212, establishes the Comitato Nazionale per la storia del Risorgimento, with the task of collecting, preparing and ordering documents, books and memorabilia of the unification process. Giuseppe Biancheri, president of the Chamber of Deputies, takes the presidency.

November 9, 1906. In Milan the Società Nazionale per la storia del Risorgimento is born, a private body in associative form, chaired by Bassano Gabba. In the same year the first congress of Italian Risorgimento history is held, which founds the discipline as an organized field of study.

1911. Inauguration of the Vittoriano for the 50th anniversary of Unity. The monument goes into service as a symbolic place of the nation and, progressively, as a container of the Risorgimento collections.

1914. The first issue of the Rassegna storica del Risorgimento comes out, organ of the Società Nazionale. The journal will pass unharmed through two world wars, a regime, a republic and more than a century of historiographical debate.

1915-1932. Paolo Boselli presides over the Comitato Nazionale for 17 years, including the period in which he is head of the Italian government during the Great War. It is the moment when Risorgimento memory is officially welded to interventionism and the war under way.

1933-1934. Giovanni Gentile takes the presidency of the Comitato Nazionale, while Cesare Maria de Vecchi arrives at the Società. It is the phase in which the regime takes direct control of the management of national memory.

June 20, 1935. A royal decree changes the name of the Società Nazionale to Istituto per la storia del Risorgimento italiano. The new body inherits the documentary and artistic heritage of the two earlier institutions and keeps their associative form. It is the birth certificate of the body in its current configuration.

1944. With the fall of the regime the presidency passes to a commissioner, and the choice falls on Gaetano De Sanctis, a great historian of antiquity who had refused the oath of loyalty to Fascism in 1931. It is a precise change of sign: the body is entrusted to one of the very few Italian academics who had said no. De Sanctis will remain in office until 1951.

1952-1983. 31 years of presidency of Alberto Maria Ghisalberti. It is the longest and most fertile season: the series are consolidated, the archives are put in order, the network of committees is built, a generation of scholars is formed. Anyone who knows the field knows that the Institute for the History of the Italian Risorgimento we see today is in large part his work.

1983-1995. The presidency of Emilia Morelli. A woman at the head of a national historical institute, in the 1980s, was an absolute rarity in the Italian academic landscape, and Morelli was a first-rate Mazzinian.

1995-2010. Presidency of Giuseppe Talamo, who takes the body through the turn of the century and the reopening of the museum.

2001. The Central Museum of the Risorgimento reopens to the public after a long period of closure. The Vittoriano, in the same years, is reopened in full to visitors and becomes the home of big exhibitions.

2010-2017. Presidency of Romano Ugolini, which covers the celebrations of the 150th anniversary of Unity.

2011. For the 150 years of Unity the museum is reinstalled in the configuration seen today, with works, relics, period footage and sound routes built on 19th-century pieces. It is the last major exhibition intervention on the collections.

2017-2024. A long irregular season, marked by commissionerships and rapid turnover at the top: an extraordinary commissioner from 2017 to 2020, a presidency from January 2021 to February 2022, a new commissionership, and finally the appointment of Alessandro Campi, first as commissioner and then, from February 22, 2024, at the ordinary head of the body. Seven years of interim governance is a lot for any institution, and it showed in the continuity of activities.

Late 2023. The new statute is approved, which redesigns the tasks and reorganizes the local network by replacing the old provincial structure with committees coinciding with one or more provinces or with the metropolitan cities.

Recent years. The body's digital library opens, putting volumes of the series and period materials online. A national prize devoted to the Risorgimento starts, now in its third edition. Acquisitions continue, among them a rare album linked to the Società Nazionale Dante Alighieri. Conferences and traveling exhibitions continue in the committees' cities.

Who has passed through the Institute for the History of the Italian Risorgimento

A research body has no illustrious visitors in the tourist sense of the term. It has a genealogy of people who directed it, frequented it, fed it with their own papers. And it is a list that, read in full, tells the story of a century of Italian intellectual and political life.

Giuseppe Biancheri, first president of the Comitato Nazionale in 1906, had been several times president of the Chamber of Deputies: a man of the real Risorgimento, who entered Parliament in the Kingdom of Sardinia. Gaspare Finali, who succeeded him, had been in time to be a minister under the Historic Right and had been secretary to Marco Minghetti.

Paolo Boselli is the heaviest name of the first phase. President of the Comitato from 1915 to 1932, he was prime minister from June 1916 to October 1917, that is, in the hardest years of the Great War, and died almost 100 years old in 1932. That the man who led the Italian government during the war was at the same time president of the body charged with writing the history of the Risorgimento says a lot about the relationship between power and memory in those years.

Giovanni Gentile, president of the Comitato Nazionale in 1933 and 1934, is the philosopher of Fascism, the reformer of the Italian school, the organizer of the Enciclopedia Italiana. His relationship with Risorgimento historiography is still an object of study, so much so that the Institute for the History of the Italian Risorgimento recently devoted a specific conference to him.

Cesare Maria de Vecchi, first president of the unified body from 1935 to 1943, was a quadrumvir of the March on Rome and minister of national education. His management coincides with the phase in which the Risorgimento is reread as a premise of the regime.

Gaetano De Sanctis, commissioner from 1944 to 1951, is the morally highest figure of this series. A historian of antiquity of European stature, author of the monumental Storia dei Romani, he was one of the 11 Italian university professors who in 1931 refused to swear loyalty to Fascism, losing their chairs. Entrusting him with the Institute after the war was a gesture of reparation and at the same time a choice of method.

Alberto Maria Ghisalberti led the body from 1952 to 1983: 31 years. He is the scholar who built the Risorgimento as a modern academic discipline in Italy, and his name recurs throughout the bibliography of the field. Anyone who has studied this subject at university has met him.

Emilia Morelli, president from 1983 to 1995, was one of the leading Italian scholars of Giuseppe Mazzini and worked for decades on his papers. Giuseppe Talamo, from 1995 to 2010, a historian of the 19th century and of political journalism, steered the body into the new century. Romano Ugolini, from 2010 to 2017, led the institution during the 150th anniversary. In the current leadership, since 2024, sits Alessandro Campi, a political scientist and university professor.

Alongside the leaders there are the donors, who would deserve a separate list. The collections of the archive bear the names of families who chose to hand over to the State the papers of their ancestors: the Amat, with the papers of Cardinal Luigi Amat di San Filippo, the descendants of Giacinto Albini, the organizer of the Lucanian insurrection of 1860, the Ademollo, Rinaldo Andreini with his collection of manuscripts. None of them is as famous as the figures in the museum's rooms, but without those private gestures this archive would not exist.

And then there are the thousands of researchers who in 90 years have spent their days at those tables. It is a less spectacular passage than that of a king or a dictator, but it is the one that gives meaning to the building.

Who the Institute for the History of the Italian Risorgimento is really for

The Institute for the History of the Italian Risorgimento for students and thesis writers

It is the ideal public. A master's thesis on a 19th-century theme done on unpublished sources from this archive is worth, at the defense, double a compilation thesis. The practical suggestion is to choose a small collection not yet exploited, perhaps a provincial family archive, and work through all of it: you get original research with an effort compatible with university timelines. Going to look for yet another reading of Cavour or Mazzini, on the contrary, means competing with a boundless bibliography.

Researchers, doctoral students, professionals

For anyone doing structured research, the Institute is an almost unavoidable stop. The combination of private archive, specialized library and iconographic collection in the same building lets you wrap up in a few days research that elsewhere would require three different locations. Anyone who curates exhibitions, moreover, finds here images and documents in sufficient number to build an entire exhibition route, with the not small advantage of having a single contact for reproduction rights.

Enthusiasts, collectors, genealogists

Enthusiasts are welcome if they arrive prepared. Anyone who collects postcards, medals, prints or 19th-century autographs finds in the archive the points of comparison to date and attribute their own pieces. Anyone looking for an ancestor, on the other hand, has to adjust expectations: this is not a civil registry archive and it doesn't replace the state archives, the parishes or the military archive. It can, however, give back the context and, with luck, the name in a list or in a letter.

Teachers and schools

For a high school class the most effective combination is the museum visit paired with a workshop on documents, when the body offers one. The complex has a teaching room and services for groups. The educational value, for a 17-year-old, is enormous: seeing that the history in books comes from handwritten sheets, often in a script hard to decipher, changes the relationship with the subject more than 10 lectures.

What's around the Institute for the History of the Italian Risorgimento

A 10-minute walk from the Institute for the History of the Italian Risorgimento

The position is the most central imaginable. Going up the cordonata you arrive at Piazza del Campidoglio and the Capitoline Museums. On the other side, the Ara Coeli staircase leads to Santa Maria in Aracoeli, which holds the Bambinello and the Bufalini Chapel frescoed by Pinturicchio. Going down toward the Forums you meet the Mamertine Prison and the church of San Pietro in Carcere, then the Imperial Forums Museum in Trajan's Markets. Toward Corso Vittorio you reach Largo Argentina and the Crypta Balbi in a few minutes. At 200 meters, on the Corso, is the Galleria Doria Pamphilj, which is the most beautiful private collection in Rome.

To stay on the Risorgimento theme

Anyone who wants to extend the 19th-century thread has two obligatory destinations beyond the museum of the Vittoriano. The first is the Napoleonic Museum, in Palazzo Primoli, which tells the story of the Rome of the Bonapartes and the Napoleonic phase from which everything begins. The second is the Museum of the Roman Republic and Garibaldian Memory at Porta San Pancrazio, on the Janiculum Hill, where the fighting took place in 1849. For those with more specialized interests there is also the Historical Museum and Archive of Fiume, which documents an early 20th-century affair closely tied to the nationalist culture that came out of the Risorgimento.

Where to stop between consultations

Piazza Venezia is surrounded by venues tuned to passing tourism, with the prices that follow. The advice is to move 300 meters away: toward Via dei Funari and the Ghetto, or toward Via del Gesù and Piazza della Minerva, you find normal cafes at normal prices. The monumental complex has an internal cafe, convenient for those who don't want to go out and come back in, and a bookshop.

When to go to the Institute for the History of the Italian Risorgimento and when to avoid it

For the study room the best season is autumn, from late September to December: the academic year has begun, the staff is at full strength, the room isn't yet crowded with the spring thesis writers. Avoid August, which is the annual closing month, and the second half of July, when activities thin out. The week around March 17, the anniversary of Unity, and the days of June 2 and November 4 are also complicated: the monument goes into ceremony mode, the area is closed for security reasons and access to the offices becomes problematic.

For the museum and the complex, instead, the good time is the first hour of the morning or the Friday evening slot. On the first Sunday of the month you get in free, and for exactly that reason it is the worst day for anyone looking for a quiet visit: the rooms fill up and the line for the terrace gets longer. If you have little time and no budget constraints, pay for the ticket on a weekday.

Accessibility of the Institute for the History of the Italian Risorgimento

The Vittoriano complex has elevators and assistance services for visitors with disabilities, and entry to the museum is free for people with disabilities. The monument remains, however, an early 20th-century building full of level changes, staircases and long routes. If you have mobility difficulties, work out the interior distances carefully and ask in advance for the accessible route. For access to the study room and the library, it's best to state your needs already in the appointment request, so that the staff can indicate the most convenient entrance and organize the delivery of the material. The facility is small and, in this kind of institute, the flexibility of the staff counts for more than signage.

Quick questions about the Institute for the History of the Italian Risorgimento

Can you visit the Institute for the History of the Italian Risorgimento?

Not the way you visit a museum. It is a research body. You get into the archive and the library by appointment and for study reasons. The route open to the public is that of the Central Museum of the Risorgimento, which you visit with the complex ticket.

How much does it cost to enter the Institute for the History of the Italian Risorgimento?

Consulting the archive and the library is free. The ticket is needed instead for the museum and the rest of the monumental complex: full price 18 euros, reduced 5 euros for young adults up to 25 years old, free under 18 and for people with disabilities.

What is the exact address of the Institute for the History of the Italian Risorgimento?

Complesso del Vittoriano, Piazza Venezia, 00187 Rome. There is no street number: the monument occupies an entire block.

What is the difference between the Institute for the History of the Italian Risorgimento and the Central Museum of the Risorgimento?

The Institute is the public research body that owns and governs the collections. The museum is the exhibition route that makes part of them visible. One you consult by appointment, the other you visit with a ticket.

How do you book the study room?

By writing to istituto@risorgimento.it or phoning the office, saying who you are, the subject of the research and the material that interests you. The secretariat confirms day, time and entrance.

What are the hours of the archive and the library?

Opening is spread over the weekdays, with mornings always available and some midweek afternoons. Saturday and Sunday are closed and in August there is the annual closure. The exact hours must be confirmed with the secretariat when you book.

Do you have to be a university student to consult the archive?

No. You need a documentable study purpose and a well-detailed request. Even an independent researcher or an enthusiast with a precise project is admitted.

Can you photograph the documents?

Reproduction is subject to authorization and depends on the item's state of preservation and on the use you intend to make of it. It must be requested in advance, together with the booking.

Can you borrow the library's books?

No. Local lending is not provided: you consult on site. Reproduction within the limits of the regulations and bibliographic information from the staff are available.

How many documents does the archive of the Institute for the History of the Italian Risorgimento hold?

The guide to the collections speaks of about a million documents, from the second half of the 18th century to the end of the First World War, to which are added about 20,000 prints, engravings and drawings and about 75,000 photographs.

What kind of books does the library contain?

It is a specialized library of Italian history, with its strong core on the period between 1796 and 1870: about 25,000 volumes, more than a thousand manuscripts and more than 600 periodical titles, as well as a substantial collection of prints and photographs.

Is there a digital library?

Yes. The body has put online a digital library that makes volumes of its own series and period materials consultable, accessible from the dedicated section of the official website.

What is the Rassegna storica del Risorgimento?

It is the body's scholarly journal, published since 1914. It hosts essays, editions of documents, notes and reviews, and is one of the longest-lived Italian historical periodicals.

What is the Edizione Nazionale of the writings of Giuseppe Garibaldi?

It is the editorial project that collects in series all of Garibaldi's written output, memoirs, political writings and letters. It has passed 20 volumes and is still under way.

How many committees does the Institute for the History of the Italian Risorgimento have?

They number in the dozens, spread across Italy. The new statute defines them as local committees coinciding with one or more provinces or with the metropolitan cities. The updated list is published on the official website.

How do you become a member?

By joining a local committee or the central office, with an application for admission and an annual fee. Terms and amounts are given in the dedicated section of the website.

Is the Institute for the History of the Italian Risorgimento suitable for children?

The archive no, the museum yes. For the smallest children the flags, uniforms and Garibaldi relics work well, and the panoramic elevator gets everyone to agree. Under 18, entry is free.

How much time do you need for the museum visit?

An hour and a half for the exhibition route if you look at it with attention, a good two hours if you add the terrace and the other spaces of the complex. For a day in the archive, on the other hand, count on four or five useful hours.

How long is the ticket valid?

The circuit's admission ticket is valid seven days from the chosen date and includes the Vittoriano, the museum, the National Museum of Palazzo Venezia and the temporary exhibitions under way.

Is entry free on the first Sunday of the month?

Yes, entry to the museum is free on the first Sunday of every month. Expect quite a crowd, though, and lines for the panoramic elevator.

How do you get to the Institute for the History of the Italian Risorgimento by public transport?

Metro line B, Colosseo stop, and a 10-minute walk along Via dei Fori Imperiali. Tram 8 ends at Piazza Venezia during the day. Many bus lines serve the piazza and the nearby streets. The metro C construction site often moves the stops, so check on the same day.

Can you get there by car?

Not recommended. The area is inside the limited traffic zone of the historic center and surface parking doesn't exist. If you really must, use a park-and-ride and continue by metro.

Is there a coat check?

The monumental complex has the public services typical of a state museum, including a bookshop and cafe. For the study room, bags and backpacks aren't taken to the consultation table: ask the staff where to leave them.

Is the archive wheelchair accessible?

The complex has elevators and assistance for visitors with disabilities. For the study room, it's best to state your needs already in the appointment request, so as to agree on the most convenient entrance.

Can you find material on the Great War?

Yes, and in abundance on the archival and photographic side, because the body's scope runs up to 1918. The library, on the other hand, is stronger on the period before 1870.

What should you read before coming?

The guide to the collections published by the body, to understand what is there, and at least one recent essay on the subject that interests you, so as not to arrive without bibliography. The volumes of the Institute's journal are the best tool for finding your way in the historiography.

Does the Institute for the History of the Italian Risorgimento organize events open to the public?

Yes: conferences, book presentations, traveling exhibitions in the committees' cities and a national prize devoted to the subject. The initiatives are almost always free and are announced in the news section of the official website.

We close with our opinion. Piazza Venezia is the place in Rome where it is hardest to see what matters: the monument is enormous, the rhetoric is cumbersome, the traffic distracts. But inside that white marble, with little money and little fanfare, one of the most serious cultural institutions in the country is at work, and anyone who takes the trouble to write an email, wait for an appointment and sit at a table with a pencil in hand discovers an Italy different from that of the textbooks: more uncertain, more quarrelsome, more human. If you're a student, don't put it off. If you're an enthusiast, try to formulate a serious question and bring it here. This is one of the very few Roman addresses where the answer comes in the form of paper written by hand by someone who really lived that history.

Article written by the editorial team of TourLeaderPro, contact them for Private/Corporate/V.I.P. Tours and Experiences.

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