Count Camillo di Cavour
Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour, made Italy by diplomacy while others made it by fighting. Born in Turin in 1810 into the Piedmontese nobility, he was a second son, took a commission in the engineers, resigned after being posted to a remote fort for his liberal opinions, and spent a decade modernising the family estates, studying agriculture, banking and railways in England and France. He founded a newspaper called Il Risorgimento in 1847, entered the Piedmontese parliament, and became prime minister in 1852. He built the base first — railways, credit, free trade treaties, secularising legislation against the church courts — on the understanding that Piedmont could only lead Italy if it was the most modern state in it. He then sent troops to the Crimea in 1855 for no Italian interest whatever, in order to sit at the peace table and raise the Italian question in front of the powers. At Plombières in 1858 he secured Napoleon III's secret agreement to fight Austria in exchange for Savoy and Nice, and manoeuvred Austria into declaring war in 1859. France stopped short at Villafranca, and Cavour resigned in fury, then returned. When Garibaldi landed in Sicily in 1860 with a thousand volunteers and took the whole south, Cavour's problem became containment. He sent the Piedmontese army through the Papal States to meet him and arranged plebiscites that handed the conquest to the king. Italy was proclaimed in March 1861. He died three months later, at fifty. His last words were reportedly that Italy was made and all was safe.
- Lived: 1810 CE – 1861 CE
- Nationality: Italian
- Roles: statesman, prime_minister, liberal
