The historian John A. Davis said in 2005, "Everyone, it seems, is busy rethinking, revisioning, revisiting, remaking, remapping or demythologizing the Risorgimento. However, it is not the Risorgimento that is being revisited but the changing images that have made it the potent founding myth of the Italian nation for successive generations of Italians." In the 20th century, and especially since the end of the Second World War, the received interpretation of Italian unification, the Risorgimento, has become the object of historical revisionism. The justifications offered for unification, the methods employed to realise it and the benefits supposedly accruing to unified Italy are frequent targets of the revisionists. Some schools have called the Risorgimento an imperialist or colonialist venture imposed by Savoy.
Some revisionists tend to negatively re-evaluate key characters of Italian national unity, such as Camillo Benso di Cavour, Giuseppe Garibaldi and Victor Emmanuel II of Savoy. They grafted in this way in the debate on the causes of the so-called Southern Question (Questione Meridionale), and say that the Risorgimento was a true work of colonization, followed by a centralizing policy of conquest, because of which the Italian Mezzogiorno would have fallen into a state of backwardness still manifest. Others consider that the policies of tax, toll and industry implemented in the southern regions by the Savoy government since 1861, together with endogenous factors, have further depleted the area or they have affected its development.
Background and historical basis of revisionism on the Risorgimento
The ideas behind the revisionist movement already began to awaken and strengthen in the years immediately following the events that led to the Kingdom of Sardinia to become the Kingdom of Italy, even before the birth of a historical debate on the subject. The first doubts about the reasons behind the foreign policy of the House of Savoy were raised by Giuseppe Mazzini, one of the theorists and supporters of Italian unification. In this regard Mazzini suggested in his paper "Italy of the people" that the government of Cavour was not interested in the principle of a united Italy, but simply to push the boundaries of the Savoy state. Even once Italy was unified, Mazzini returned to attack the government in respect of the new nation: "There is no man who can understand how unhappy I feel when I see increasing year by year, from a materialistic and immoral government, corruption, skepticism about the benefits of Unity, the financial difficulties, and fade the entire future of Italy, all the ideal Italy."
Statements of Mazzini are precursors of the dispute on the ideal unification process, which began already during the 20th century, as a continuation of the contentious debate between the moderate and democratic parties of Risorgimento. The first criticism of the hagiographic reconstructions came by the same liberal leaders, who had enthusiastically promoted any political activity that would have contributed to the national cause. Among the main targets, there were contentious politics of the new centralized unitary state, defined negatively by the neologism of "piemontesizzazione" (homologation to Piedmont).
Parallel to the abovementioned political and ideal dispute, across the late 19th century began to appear the first historiographical contributions alternative to the mainstream historiography on the Italian Risorgimento. These works furnished the substrate on which the later revisionist theories were built.
A prime example was the writer Alfredo Oriani, which put into question the outcome of the events of the Risorgimento in his work The political struggle in Italy (1892), which examined the conflict between federalism and unitarianism. Oriani criticized the "royal conquest" as a unilateral action to create a new state, assuming that without the support of a strong democratic movement, it would prove to be weak in its foundations. This work is considered the prototype of the first modern revisionist historiography on Italy, alternately to apologetic historiography of Savoy.
Criticisms against the interpretation of the Risorgimento events were also moved by Francesco Saverio Nitti, who in his works North and South (Nord e Sud)(1900) and Italy at the dawn of the twentieth century (L'Italia all'alba del secolo XX) (1901), analyzed the consequences of the national Unity from a framework illustrating the political and economic situation in the pre-unification states. According to Nitti, the benefits of the national unification process were not equitably distributed throughout the country, facilitating further development of northern Italy at the expense of the South.