01 - History Of Italy In A Nutshell

HISTORY OF ITALY (TO 1946) IN A NUTSHELL; ALL YOU NEVER EVEN THOUGHT OF ASKING ABOUT ITALIAN HISTORY, BUT NEVERTHELESS MIGHT FIND INTERESTING by Seymour Becker ETRUSCAN ERA (9th to 3rd centuries BCE) The Etruscans, from whom the name Tuscany derives, spoke a non-IndoEuropean language, which suggests that they, like the Basques, appeared in Europe before the speakers of languages belonging to the Indo-European family (Latin, Greek, and the Celtic, Germanic, and Slavic languages). Etruscan culture was partly original and partly influenced by that of the Greek colonies which existed along the coasts of Italy and Sicily; it was a major influence on Roman architecture, engineering, religion, the alphabet, etc. The seat of Etruscan power was in the area between the Tiber and the Arno rivers, but by the 6th century BCE Etruscan control extended to the Bay of Naples, Bologna, the Po River valley from Milan to the Adriatic Sea, and Corsica. Fiesole was an Etruscan city, but Florence did not yet exist. In the 7th-6th centuries, the Etruscans competed with the Greeks and Carthaginians for control of trade in the western Mediterranean. Rome, founded in 753, expelled its last Etruscan king in 509. Etruscan decline began in the 5th century under Greek pressure, to which was soon added pressure from the Romans to the south and the Celtic Gauls to the north. By the 3rd century the dozen or so Etruscan city-states had been annexed by Rome, and in the following two hundred years their inhabitants were fully assimilated by the Romans. ROMAN REPUBLIC (509-31 BCE) After the expulsion of its last Etruscan king, Rome conquered all of Italy south of the Rubicon River (south of Ravenna, closer to Rimini) from the mid-4th to the mid-3rd century. Over the following century and a third, Rome built a Mediterranean empire from Spain and North Africa to Greece and Asia Minor. At the beginning of the 2nd century BCE, Rome conquered Cisalpine Gaul (Italy between the Rubicon and the Alps). A century of class tensions, civil war, dictatorship, and renewed civil war led to the collapse of the republic in 31 BCE. Florence was founded in 59 BCE and at first occupied the area between the Duomo and the Piazza della Signoria and between Via de’ Tornabuoni on the west and Via del Proconsolo on the east. The rectangular street grid of this part of Florence betrays its origins as a small Roman town. ROMAN EMPIRE (31 BCE-476 CE) Defeating his rival Marc Antony, Augustus (nephew of Julius Caesar, who had been assassinated in 44 BCE) established a de facto monarchy, headed by the imperator (a title which had originally meant simply a military commander), although he preserved republican institutions like the Senate. The empire expanded territorially but experienced bouts of civil war among contenders for the throne, especially in the late 2nd century CE and the mid-3rd century. The western and eastern halves of the empire were divided at times after 253 and were never again reunited after 395. In the mid-3rd century began the settling of Germanic barbarians as auxiliary imperial troops inside the empire’s

2 boundaries. In 378 invading Visigoths defeated the imperial army near Adrianople in today’s Turkey-in-Europe, then moved west into Italy, where they sacked Rome for three days in 410. The emperor had recently moved his capital first to Milan and then to Ravenna. The mosaics in the mausoleum of his half-sister, Galla Placidia, who had been married off to the Visigothic chieftain, are one of the marvels of Ravenna. The Visigoths were then forced to move west; they settled in southern France and Spain, where they established a kingdom that lasted till the Muslim invasion at the beginning of the 8th century. Rome was sacked again in 455, this time for two weeks, by the Vandals, Germanic barbarians coming from Tunisia, which they had reached by way of France and Spain. BARBARIAN SUCCESSOR-STATES (476-800) In 476 the last Roman emperor in the West was deposed in Ravenna by the leader of a minor Germanic tribe. Roman emperors contined to rule in the East at Constantinople till the Turkish conquest of that city in 1453. The emperor in the East sent the Ostrogoths, led by Theodoric, to deal with the chieftain who had deposed the last emperor in the West. Theodoric made Ravenna capital of his north Italian kingdom; his mausoleum (he died in 526) is another of Ravenna’s marvels. Theodoric, like the other Germanic kings of the successor states by the 6th century, was a Christian. In the second third of the 6th century, much of Italy was (re)conquered by Justinian, the emperor in the East. In 568, however, the Lombards, another Germanic tribe, conquered most of Italy, leaving to the eastern Roman empire only Ravenna, the northern Adriatic coast from Venice (founded by fugitives from the Lombards) to Ancona, as well as the heel and toe of the peninsula, Naples, and Rome (now under the direct rule of the pope). Two hundred years later Charlemagne, king of the Franks, annexed the Lombard kingdom to his own, ending Lombard control over the pope. This was the beginning of the pope’s temporal power, which lasted till 1870. In 800 Charlemagne had the pope crown him as the first Roman emperor in the West since 476. MEDIEVAL ITALY, NORTH AND SOUTH (800-1250) Charlemagne’s empire was divided among his grandsons in the mid-9th century. Italy remained together with the eastern part (Germany), whose ruler alone inherited the title of Roman emperor. In the same period Muslims from North Africa conquered Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica, and even attacked Rome. In the 10th century, Charlemagne’s descendants in Germany-Italy died out. The German dynasty which succeeded them revived the power and prestige of the emperor and subjected the pope to its close control. Since the emperor only rarely came south of the Alps, the cities of northern Italy began to develop as autonomous polities. In the mid-11th century, Norman knights descended from 9th-century Viking raiders of northern coastal France conquered Sicily from the Arabs and also much of southern Italy, eliminating the last Byzantine (East Roman) footholds. Their kingdom, with its capital at Palermo in Sicily, lasted into the early 13th century. From 1075 to 1250 all of Western Christendom (that part of the Christian world in which the pope was recognized as the sole head of the church and Latin was the language

3 of the Bible and the liturgy) was affected by the bitter struggle between the empire and the papacy. It began with the popes asserting their right to rule the church free of secular interference. This was followed immediately by a decade-long civil war in Germany over succession to the imperial title between the house of Welf (Guelf in Italian) and the house of Hohenstaufen or Waiblinger (Ghibelline in Italian). Both the papacy and the north Italian cities took advantage of the weakening of imperial authority to expand their authority. Florence’s commune, or city government, was established in 1138, at the end of the civil war in Germany. The Ghibelline family won the imperial office, and its head in the second half of the 12th century, Emperor Frederick I “Barbarossa,” made six expeditions to Italy to enforce his political control. He was opposed 1) by a league of northern city-states, which forced him to recognize their autonomy, although not formal independence, from the empire, and 2) by the papacy. His son and successor conquered the Norman kingdom of Sicily and southern Italy, and married the heiress to that kingdom. The son of this couple, Emperor Frederick II, made Palermo his capital and preferred Sicily to Germany, which led to the weakening of his authority over the latter. The papacy, now surrounded by the territories of the Ghibelline emperor, carried on an unrelenting struggle, politically and militarily, against Frederick. All the cities north of Rome joined the struggle, but not necessarily because they were committed to either pope or emperor. Established rivalries between neighboring city-states were simply incorporated into the larger struggle, as were partisan rivalries within the city-states. Both types of rivalries long outlasted the death of Frederick II. Florence is a typical example. It was usually controlled by the Guelf faction, whose symbol was the fleur-de-lys still seen on so many medieval buildings in the city. Florence’s closest and most important rivals, Pisa and Siena, were both in the Ghibelline camp. When Siena achieved a crushing victory over Florence in 1260, a decade after Frederick’s death, the Florentine Ghibellines seized power and drove out the leading Guelfs. Six years later the Guelfs regained control in Florence and soon turned the tables on Siena as well. All of this was related to the struggle between empire and papacy only in the sense that each city-state and faction within it looked for support to its enemy’s enemy. It was not too different from the situation of many third-world states during the Cold War of the 20th century.. RENAISSANCE IN THE NORTH, FEUDALISM IN THE SOUTH (1250-1504) By the death of Frederick II in 1250, both empire and papacy were so weakened politically by their long struggle that neither ever fully recovered. The major beneficiaries were the city-states of northern Italy, which had gained de facto independence and now entered on their period of greatest power, prosperity, and cultural leadership. As early as the 11th century, the maritime republics of Genoa and Venice were trading in the eastern Mediterranean, while Pisa by the 12th-13th century controlled Corsica, Sardinia, and much of the Tuscan coast. Now the inland cities of the north, with economies based on manufacturing for export, joined in the prosperity of the maritime states. Florence was known throughout Europe for its fine woolen cloth. The north was plagued, however, by continual warfare among the city-states, which led in many cases to the seizure of power by leaders of hired armies who then established princely dynasties— the Visconti, followed by the Sforza, in Milan, the Della Scala (Scaligeri) in Verona, the

4 Este in Ferrara and Modena. The Tuscan cities avoided this fate. In Florence the Medici family was one of several wealthy mercantile or banking families that vied for control of the city-state’s republican institutions. From 1434 to 1492 the family’s dominance was rarely challenged, an exception being the Pazzi conspiracy, supported by the pope, in 1478. The family’s heads during this period were Cosimo the Elder, his son Piero the Gouty, and the latter’s son Lorenzo the Magnificent. Like some others of the city-states, Florence expanded at the expense of its neighbors, annexing Pistoia (to the northwest) in 1301, Volterra (to the southwest) in 1361, Arezzo (to the southeast) in 1384, and Pisa (to the west) in 1406. Venice followed a similar course in the first third of the 15th century, expanding far to the west on the mainland by annexing Padua, Verona, Brescia, and Bergamo. Very different was the fate of the south, which the papacy succeeded in keeping out of the hands of Frederick II’s successors in Germany. Backed by the pope and recognizing him as their feudal overlord, the Angevins, a branch of the French royal family, took control of Sicily and the peninsula up to and beyond Naples in 1266. A decade and a half later the Angevins lost Sicily to the royal dynasty of Aragon (in northeast Spain) but continued to rule the southern third of the peninsula from Naples till 1435, when the Aragonese dynasty replaced them there as well. Till 1494 the Aragonese ruled both Sicily and Naples. While Italy north of Rome was divided among warring city-states ruled by a commercial middle class or by dynasties founded by military adventurers, the south consisted of two large feudal kingdoms ruled in the end by different branches of the same family, with a purely agrarian economy and a population divided into noble lords and dependent peasants. In the center was the Papal States, ruled from Rome and extending right across the peninsula to the Adriatic Sea. The papacy was in a state of crisis in the 14th and 15th centuries. In 1305-78 the popes, having expended much of their former authority and power in the struggle against the empire, lived at Avignon in southern France, under the protection and control of the French king (the Babylonian Captivity). Matters worsened in 1378-1417 when there were two lines of popes, one in Avignon and one in Rome, each excommunicating the other, and at the end of the period, three (the Great Schism). After the schism ended and there was a single pope again in Rome, his power over the church was challenged throughout the first half of the 15th century by the Conciliar Movement (to limit the pope’s power by a parliament of bishops) and the Hussite movement in Bohemia, a forerunner of the Protestant Reformation a century later. The papacy survived both challenges, but the worldliness of the Renaissance popes in the second half of the 15th century (e.g., Pope Alexander VI (1492-1503) and his two illegitimate children, the notorious Cesare and Lucrezia Borgia) provoked much criticism and helped bring on the Protestant Reformation. The period ended in a generation of struggle between France and Spain, with all of Italy as their battleground. In 1494 the king of France crossed the Alps to make good his claim to the throne of Naples, to reach which he marched through northern and central Italy. Spain contested his claim. The city-states of the north, continuing their age-old rivalries with each other, lined up either with the French or the Spanish. It was similar to the Guelf-Ghibelline divisions of the 12th-13th centuries, with the significant difference that this time the major powers involved, France and Spain, were each many times

5 mightier than any combination of petty Italian states. The latter turned out to be the victims, not the beneficiaries, of the struggle. Among the major victims was Florence. Lorenzo the Magnificent’s eldest son and successor was driven out of the city-state after he surrendered it to the French in 1494. Then Savonarola, a Dominican monk, religious fanatic, and spell-binding orator, led a popular movement against the Medici which established a revised republican form of government. His tirades against the worldly Renaissance papacy led to his burning at the stake for heresy in 1498; the spot is marked in the pavement of the Piazza della Signoria. The victory of the Spanish army against Florence placed Lorenzo the Magnificent’s two younger sons in power in 1512 with papal support. One of them, a cardinal at the age of 17 through his father’s influence, served as Pope Leo X in 1513-21 and was followed in 1523-34 by a second Medici pope, Lorenzo’s nephew, Clement VII. SPANISH HABSBURG ERA (1504-1713) In the end Spain won the struggle for Italy, conquering Naples in 1504 and putting the finishing touches to its victory in 1535 by ending a generation of French rule in Milan and adding that duchy to its possessions. All of Italy was now a Spanish sphere of influence. An infamous event early in this era was the sack of Rome in 1527 by imperial troops who had not been paid (Emperor Charles V of the house of Habsburg was also, as the grandson of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castille, the king of Spain). The brutality of the sack equaled, if it didn’t exceed, the plundering of the city by the Visigoths and then the Vandals eleven centuries earlier. The sack of Rome and consequent souring of relations between Charles V and the pope led to the second ouster of the Medici from Florence, but when pope and emperor made peace, the family was forcibly reimposed upon the city in 1529. Charles V married his daughter to Alessandro, Lorenzo the Magnificent’s great-grandson, and appointed him duke of Florence. In 1537 Alessandro was murdered by a cousin, and a distant branch of the family took power in Florence. Cosimo I the Great, at first duke of Florence, later grand duke of Tuscany, founded a dynasty which lasted two hundred years. One of Charles V’s last acts was to give Siena to Cosimo in 1555. It is these later Medici whose many statues adorn Florence and whose magnificent burial chapel is attached to the family church, San Lorenzo. Two Medici women were married to kings of France in the mid- and late-16th century and played important political roles in that country. Catherine de Medicis was sister to the unlucky Alessandro, wife of Henri II, and mother of the three succeeding French kings. Marie de Medicis was Cosimo I’s granddaughter, wife of Henri IV, mother of Louis XIII, and mother-in-law of Charles I of England and Scotland. The Medici had come a very long way from their modest beginnings in two and a half centuries. The city-states of northern Italy had become victims of their own inability to unite and compete as equals with Europe’s great powers, thereby becoming political satellites of one of the latter. At the same time their economies went into decline as maritime trade routes between Europe and Asia shifted from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic and Indian oceans and new sources of wealth were exploited in the Americas by the European states that had direct access to the Atlantic.

6 The papacy meanwhile survived the challenge of the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation. Although it lost its hold on much of Europe north of the Alps, it put its own house in order by eliminating abuses and also enlarged the Papal States, adding Bologna and Ravenna at the beginning of the 16th century, Ferrara at its end. The pope’s domains now extended to the lower Po valley. AUSTRIAN HABSBURG ERA (1713-1860) The War of the Spanish Succession (1701-13) divided the lands of the Spanish crown when that branch of the Habsburgs died out. Milan, Naples, and Sicily, together with indirect control of the rest of Italy, were transferred to the Austrian branch of the family. At the same time a new power appeared—the kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia, with its capital at Turin in the northwest and ruled by the house of Savoy, a principality that straddled the Alps. In 1735 Austria ceded Naples and Sicily to the Spanish Bourbons on condition that this kingdom of the “Two Sicilies” was never to be united with Spain. When the Medici line died out in 1737, Tuscany was inherited by the duke of Lorraine, whose marriage to Maria Theresa, the Austrian Habsburg heiress, made the grand duchy an Austrian appendage. Their son Pietro Leopoldo, grand duke in 1745-90 before he became Emperor Leopold I, was one of the era’s “enlightened despots.” The republic of Genoa, faced with a generation-long rebellion in Corsica, sold the island in 1768 to Louis XV of France, incidentally transforming the Corsican Buonaparte family into the French Bonapartes. Italian intellectuals were significant contributors to the 18th-century Enlightenment (the “Age of Reason”), but politically and economically Italy remained a European backwater. Napoleon Bonaparte led his army into northern Italy in 1796. His subsequent conquest of the entire peninsula redrew its political map several times. At first Italy was divided into a number of republics (the flag of one of these, the Ligurian republic, i.e. Genoa, modeled on the flag of revolutionary France, is now the Italian national flag). After he crowned himself emperor of the French in 1804, Napoleon annexed northwestern Italy, including Tuscany, to France and set up kingdoms and principalities elsewhere in the peninsula, doling them out to his relatives. After his defeat and overthrow, the Congress of Vienna in 1814-15 reestablished the former borders and regimes in Italy, with two major exceptions. The Venetian republic was not restored, both Lombardy and Venetia being placed instead under Vienna’s direct rule, and the lands of the former Genoese republic were added to Piedmont-Sardinia. The impact of the Napoleonic interlude, brief as it was, was not so easily erased in Italy, despite the harshness of the Austrian-backed reactionary regimes. The concept of a nation ruling itself through a government of its own choosing and composed of fellow nationals had taken root among the liberal-minded members of the small literate minority. The concept had been brought to Italy by the French and was then fostered by local opposition to their rule. Thus began the Risorgimento (Revival), the movement for Italian independence and unity--two integrally linked goals, for one was not conceivable without the other. Revolutions, the goal of which was the establishment of constitutional monarchies with elected parliaments and liberation from foreign political influence, occurred in a number of Italian states--in 1820-21 in Naples and Turin; in 1831 in Modena, Parma, and the Papal States; and in 1848-49 in Sicily, Naples, Florence, Turin,

7 Rome, Milan, and Venice. All were crushed by Austrian troops, except for Rome in 1849, where French troops were sent in to restore the pope by Louis Napoleon (Napoleon I’s nephew), recently elected president of France and soon to become Emperor Napoleon III. The results of the revolutions were disappointing everywhere, but Piedmont at least emerged with a parliamentary regime and an electorate. Count Cavour, prime minister of Piedmont and a skillful diplomat, inveigled Napoleon III into joining Piedmont in a war against Austria in 1859. The plan was to establish a federation embracing the entire peninsula, with the pope as president. France’s reward was to be Piedmont’s cession to her of Savoy and Nice. Austria suffered major defeats, but from Napoleon’s point of view, the situation quickly got out of hand. The rulers of Tuscany, Modena, and Parma were expelled peacefully by their subjects, while violent revolts against papal rule took place in Ravenna, Ferrara, and Bologna. Napoleon withdrew from the war after agreeing to receive Lombardy from Austria, which he would then hand over to Piedmont; deposed Italian rulers would be restored and grant amnesties to their subjects. It was too late, however, to halt the process Napoleon had unwittingly helped set in motion—the unification of Italy. UNITED ITALY (1860 to 1946) Assemblies in Tuscany, Parma, Modena, and Romagna voted for political union with Piedmont. Early in 1860 Napoleon gave his consent to this when Cavour arranged the transfer to France of Savoy and Nice. At this point Cavour persuaded Garibaldi, a radical republican, not to take his 1,000 redshirted volunteers to Nice, to defend it against the French, but to sail with them to Sicily, to liberate it from its reactionary king. Garibaldi did so successfully, then crossed into southern Italy and took Naples. Meanwhile the Piedmontese army invaded the Papal States, annihilated the papal army, and advanced into Neapolitan territory, where it joined forces with Garibaldi. In a magnanimous gesture, Garibaldi, a hater of monarchy, turned over his conquests to Victor Emmanuel II of Piedmont, who became the first king of united Italy in 1861. He moved his capital from Turin to Florence in 1864, taking up residence in the Pitti Palace. In 1866 Italy joined Prussia in its brief war against Austria, the second of the three wars by which Prussia achieved German unification. Although the Italians were defeated, Prussia won the war and Italy’s reward was Venetia. In 1870 Napoleon III, caught up in the war with Prussia that was to end his reign, withdrew his troops from Rome, where they had been protecting the pope since 1849. A month later, Italian troops took Rome, and the capital was soon transferred there from Florence. The pope, protesting the loss of papal sovereignty over Rome after eleven centuries, refused to leave the Vatican palace, where he proclaimed himself held prisoner by the Italian state. Each of his successors did the same till the late 1920s. Italy had become the sixth of Europe’s great powers (the others at the time were Great Britain, France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia), but its poverty, lack of industrialization, low level of literacy, lack of social services (all especially characteristic of the south) placed it toward the bottom of the list. Nor was its political life something to be admired. A small group of politicians played a game of continually exchanging ministries with each other—a game whose object was to keep them in power rather than to pursue any particular policy that might benefit the country. The system was called

8 trasforismo, cynically suggesting the absence of real change or transformation in the midst of constant meaningless changes. Little was done to build an Italian national identity to counter the strong regional and local identities formed over a thousand years of political disunity. The one area in which bold steps were taken, not always successfully, was foreign policy. Reacting to France’s establishment of a protectorate over Tunisia, upon which Italy had its own designs, she joined the recently formed German-Austrian alliance directed against France and Russia in 1882, transforming it into the Triple Alliance. Seven years later Italy established her own protectorate over Ethiopia, but when that country tried to rid itself of Italian control, Italy invaded and suffered a humiliating defeat at Adua in 1896. Her protectorate came to an end, although she retained Ethiopia’s Red Sea coast as the colony of Eritrea. In 1911-12 Italy conquered from the Ottoman Empire (Turkey) both Libya in North Africa and Rhodes and the Dodecanese Islands in the Aegean Sea off the coast of Asia Minor. When World War I began in 1914 Austria and Germany were the aggressors, since they fired the first shots. Since the Triple Alliance was a defensive one, Italy was not obligated to come to their support. She finally joined Britain, France, and Russia in May 1915 because they promised her territorial gains at Austria’s and Turkey’s expense if/when they won the war. The Austrian territories in question had long been viewed by Italian nationalists as Italia irredenta (Unredeemed Italy), i.e., lands inhabited by members of the Italian nation but lying beyond the borders of the Italian state—the Trentino in the northeast and the Dalmatian coast from Trieste to Ragusa (Dubrovnik). For over two years Italian troops fought inconclusive battles on a stationary front northeast of Venice, just inside the border with Austria, until they suffered a major defeat and retreated in disarray in autumn 1917. They redeemed themselves in the closing weeks of the war in October-November 1918 with a breakthrough at Vittorio Veneto and then a rapid advance to Trieste and Fiume on the Adriatic. At the Paris Peace Conference Italy was awarded much, but not all, of Italia irredenta that had been promised her. Disappointment over her territorial gains and unease over her poor military performance in the war added to the social turmoil that Italy shared with much of Europe in the immediate postwar years. Lenin’s Bolsheviks had seized power in Russia in late 1917 and were victorious over their opponents by early 1921, while short-lived communist regimes appeared during this period in Germany and Hungary. The specter of communism frightened the upper and middle classes. Mussolini and his Fascists posed as the defenders of the nation, using strong-arm tactics against their rivals. Italy’s political leaders were helpless to resolve the situation; some felt they could use the Fascists to defend the status quo against the radicals on the left. In October 1922 King Victor Emmanuel III bowed to intimidation and appointed as prime minister Mussolini, whom parliament granted dictatorial powers to restore order. Barely surviving the crisis caused by the 1924 assassination by Fascists of Matteotti, a socialist member of parliament, Mussolini gradually strengthened his hold over Italy. He persecuted political opponents and critics ruthlessly, and he settled the six-decade-long feud with the church. His 1929 Lateran Treaty with the pope recognized the independence of Vatican City and the civil validity of religious marriage, and introduced religious instruction into Italian secondary schools.

9 Mussolini’s answer to the lack of a strong Italian national consciousness was to identify Fascist Italy with ancient Rome. An unquestioned benefit of this was his support of archeological work in the city of Rome. But this policy led Mussolini to attempt to build a new Roman Empire. He began by erasing the bitter memory of Adua by conquering Ethiopia in 1935 in the face of ineffective League of Nations sanctions. In 1936-39 he joined Hitler’s Germany in militarily assisting General Franco to overthrow the republic and establish a fascist-type regime in Spain. Initially suspicious of Hitler, Mussolini persuaded himself that cooperation with the Nazi dictator would serve his own aims. In 1937 Italy joined the German-Japanese Anti-Comintern [i.e., Anti-Soviet] Pact and withdrew from the League of Nations. Although Fascism had previously lacked any anti-Semitic content, in 1938 Mussolini introduced racist legislation against Jews to please his Nazi partner. In April 1939 Italy conquered Albania. When Hitler launched World War II in September 1939 by invading Poland, Mussolini remained neutral, despite his close ties to Germany. He waited to see how Britain and France would react; they didn’t. Hitler’s successful invasion of France in June 1940 convinced Mussolini that it was time to jump on the bandwagon; he declared war on Britain and France and sent his troops into southern France. In late summer he conquered British Somaliland in order to round out Italian East Africa and invaded Egypt from Libya. In October he invaded Greece. The winter of 1940-41, however, destroyed Mussolini’s carefully nurtured image of a new, strong, Fascist Italy as the heir of ancient Rome. A Greek counteroffensive drove the Italians back, deep into Albania, while the British took much of Italian East Africa and Libya. German troops had to rescue the Italians in both Greece and North Africa. For the next two and a half years, it was clear that Mussolini’s army was more of a hindrance than a help to the Nazi war effort. In the summer of 1943, British and American troops from North Africa conquered Sicily, and Victor Emmanuel III backed a coup d’etat that removed Mussolini from power and imprisoned him. In September Allied forces crossed into the toe of the peninsula, and Italy surrendered. The Germans rescued Mussolini from jail and placed him at the head of a puppet government, while they occupied northern and central Italy. After taking Naples in October 1943, the Allied advance went slowly. Rome fell in June 1944 and Florence in August. The front then remained stable from Livorno on the Tyrrhenian Sea to Ancona on the Adriatic till the last weeks of the war in the spring of 1945. While attempting to escape to neutral Switzerland in April, Mussolini and his mistress were captured and shot by a partisan band. Tainted by his long association with Mussolini, the king abdicated in favor of his son, but a referendum in June 1946 replaced the monarchy with a republic. Florence’s central square, Piazza di Vittorio Emmanuele (in honor of the second, not the third of that name) was rechristened Piazza della Repubblica. The postwar territorial settlement took from Italy all her territorial gains since the late 19th century except for the Trentino and Trieste. She lost the rest of the Istrian peninsula, Zara (Zadar) on the Dalmatian coast together with four offshore islands, Libya, Rhodes and the Dodecanese, Eritrea, and Italian Somaliland.