> Milan and Napoli would both be happier not having to deal with each other.
I'm Italian and this is absolutely false.
While any political and historical event will have people saying that it wouldn't even better if X or Y stayed Z, the overwhelming majority of Italians want a united Italy.
Federalist parties never took huge political weight (and the major one, Lega, won most votes when it dropped that narrative entirely) and separatist ones get irrelevant number of negligible votes.
You could say the same about Germany where there's also huge regional differences (even bigger ones due to religion).
It's very hard to imagine European and world history without a united Italy.
Italian unification success was one (albeit not the primary one, which was the rivalry with Austria) major source of pressure on Prussian elites [1].
We look at history at very abstract level, but in 1861/62 Prussian newspapers were all into "look at how Cavour did in Italy, unlike that incompetent Bismarck".
I'm Italian and this is absolutely false.
While any political and historical event will have people saying that it wouldn't even better if X or Y stayed Z, the overwhelming majority of Italians want a united Italy.
Federalist parties never took huge political weight (and the major one, Lega, won most votes when it dropped that narrative entirely) and separatist ones get irrelevant number of negligible votes.