Altar of the Fatherland

The Victor Emmanuel II National Monument is Rome's largest modern monument and City Hall.

Negotiating Piazza Venezia on foot is an adrenaline sport. The streets are wide and you have to assert your pedestrian right-of-way by going for it!

Victor Emmanuel II National Monument is a monument to Italy’s First King and the Unification of Italy. Front and center is Italy’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier beneath an equestrian statue of the King.

The 1848 SpringTime of the Peoples was a turning point in history, perhaps the point in time when the Enlightenment ended and the Romantic, or Nationalist era began. If Romanticism was the rise of feelings and emotion, then Nationalism was the political manifestation of that! (Music also became much more expressive, such as Ma Vlast by Smetana).

Thus the unification of Italy (and Germany) was a process of accretion that began in 1848 and culminated in 1871, the rise of nation states that was resisted by the existing dynastic world empires at the time. Although paradoxically this period of time also marked the zenith of the British Empire.

Also paradoxically, despite Italian Unification occurring during the Romantic or Nationalist era, the architecture of the monument is firmly neo-Classical.