The dates 1793 and 1830 are not very helpful limits. Much that was of great importance happened in Italy between them, yet they are themselves hardly significant. 1793 began with the murder of the French agent in Rome (13 January) but this is not enough to mark an epoch. Although Italy was by then already involved in the diplomatic and military struggles of Europe, the course of her history was decisively changed only in 1796. In that year, it may be said, the Settecento ended and the Revolution came to the peninsula; the modern history of Italy begins with the physical presence of the French army. The next great change came at the collapse of the Napoleonic system—the restorations of 1799–1800 were only an interlude—and this chapter can be roughly divided at 1814. Before that collapse the whole peninsula had gradually been subjected to common governmental and political influences for the first time in centuries; after 1814, although all the restored regimes had to take account of Austrian predominance, the peninsula was again fragmented. 1830 did not change this state of affairs.

The starting-point of this assessment must be the structure of Italy in 1793. In no sense was it then a unity and its components were to absorb the shock of the revolution in very different ways. Its fundamental divisions were topographical: within regions divided by mountains and climate there existed widely differing societies, separated from one another even by language. Political boundaries stabilised their provincialism. Italy consisted of a jumble of states of which the kingdoms of Sardinia and Naples, the grand-duchy of Tuscany, the lesser duchies of Massa and Carrara, Parma and Modena and the principality of Piombino were monarchical.