Medieval and Renaissance Rome

Papal and Renaissance Rome

When Pepin III defeated the Lombards in 756, Rome became the capital city of the Papal States, a territorial entity at least nominally ruled by the Papacy. In practice, however, the government of the city was hotly contested between various factions of Roman nobility, the Pope, the Holy Roman Emperor, and occasional republican insurrections. After the suppression of the republic of 1434 (Gibbon's "last revolt of Rome"), the Papacy folded the government of Rome into the ecclesiastical bureaucracy. During this period Rome became the worldwide centre of Christianity and increasingly developed a relevant political role that made it one of the most important towns of the Old Continent. In art, although Florence became the center of humanism and the Rinascimento (Renaissance), Rome was the center of baroque, and architecture deeply affected its central areas.

In the 16th century a central area was delimited around the Porticus Octaviae, for the creation of the famous Roman Ghetto, in which the city's Jews were forced to live.

Another Roman Republic arose in 1849, within the framework of revolutions of 1848. Two of the most influencing figures of the Italian unification, Giuseppe Mazzini and Giuseppe Garibaldi, fought for the short-lived republic.

The return of Pope Pius IX in Rome, with help of French troops, marked the exclusion of Rome from the unification process that embodied in the second Italian independence war and the Mille expedition, after which all the Italian peninsula, except Rome and Venetia, where unified under the House of Savoy.

In 1870, the Franco-Prussian War started, and French Emperor Napoleon III could no longer protect the Papal States. Soon after, the Italian government declared war against the Papal States. The Italian army entered Rome on September 20, after a cannonade of three hours, through Porta Pia. Rome and Latium were annexed to the Kingdom of Italy.

Initially the Italian government had offered to let Pope Pius IX keep the Leonine City, but the pope rejected the offer because acceptance would have been an implied endorsement of the legitimacy of the Italian kingdom's rule over his former domain. Pope Pius IX declared himself a prisoner in the Vatican, although he was not actually restrained from coming and going. Officially, the capital was not moved from Florence to Rome until early 1871.