The Pursuit of Italy, on the other hand, is about how Piedmont-Sardinia colonized and unified Italy—and why perhaps that should not have happened.
The book’s theory is essentially that Italy was a mistake. France at least possesses a large, roughly hexagonal territory that could plausibly be unified. Italy consisted of city-states and regions that had not been politically unified for thousands of years and were suddenly expected to coalesce into a single country.