Overview
The Kingdom of Italy (1861–1946), ruled by the House of Savoy, was the unified national state that carried Italy through industrialization, two world wars, and the Fascist era.
Key developments
Liberal Italy had a parliamentary system with limited suffrage, an industrializing north set against a poorer south (the “Southern Question”), mass emigration, and colonial ventures in Africa. Italy joined the First World War on the Allied side in 1915 and won at heavy cost, but postwar resentment and unrest opened the way to Benito Mussolini’s Fascists, whose March on Rome (1922) brought Mussolini to power. His dictatorship signed the Lateran Treaty with the papacy (1929), invaded Ethiopia (1935), allied with Nazi Germany, and entered the Second World War in 1940.
End and transition
Military defeat led to Mussolini’s fall in July 1943, an armistice, German occupation, and a resistance struggle until liberation in 1945. Discredited by its ties to Fascism, the monarchy was abolished by referendum on 2 June 1946, creating the Republic.