Museo Nazionale del Risorgimento

National museum chock-full of history of Turino, Italy

To understand Italy—or at the very least to learn the stories behind Cavour, Garibaldi, Mazzini, Vittorio Emanuele II, Massimo d'Azeglio, and other people after whom most of the major streets and piazze in Italy are named—you need to brush up on the Risorgimento, the late 19th century movement that launched Italian unification. While any self-respecting town in Italy has a museum dedicated to it, Turin's is the best of the bunch. After all, much of the history of Italy’s unification played out in this Turin palazzo, which was home to unified Italy's first king, Vittorio Emanuele II, and later became, in 1861, the seat of its first parliament. Documents, paintings, and other paraphernalia recount the heady days when Vittorio Emanuele II banded with General Garibaldi and his Red Shirts to oust the Bourbons from Sicily and the Austrians from the north to create a unified Italy. The plaques describing the contents of each room are in English, and the last rooms house a fascinating collection that chronicles Italian fascism and the resistance against it, which evolved into the Partisan movement during World War II.

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