Rimini Proclamation

[1] While it is primarily considered as a desperate attempt from Murat to retain the Neapolitan throne,[3] the Rimini Proclamation was among the earliest calls for Italian unification.

The hour has come to engage in your highest destinies.The Kingdom of Naples, which ruled the southern half of the Italian peninsula, was a client state of Napoleon Bonaparte's French Empire.

[10] At the Congress of Vienna, Klemens von Metternich, Austria's Foreign Minister, was bound by other coalition allies that wanted to restore Ferdinand IV of the House of Bourbon to the Neapolitan throne,[1] particularly Britain.

[1] Most scholars attribute the text of the addresses to Pellegrino Rossi,[1][2] later Papal Minister of the Interior under Pope Pius IX.

It calls on the "good and unhappy Italians of Milan, Bologna, Turin, Venice, Brescia, Modena, [and] Reggio" to "come together in firm union" for "a Constitution worthy of the century and of you".

[11] Hearing of Napoleon's defeat at the Battle of Waterloo on 18 June 1815,[2] Murat fled to Corsica,[2][3][6] from which he attempted an impossible invasion of Calabria.

[1][5][6] In Il re lazzarone (1999), Risorgimento scholar Giuseppe Campolieti hypothesises that the Rimini Proclamation was only published on 12 May 1815, after Murat's defeat at Tolentino, and backdated to 30 March.

[1][3] The proclamation impressed poet Alessandro Manzoni, who wrote a song entitled Il proclama di Rimini  [it],[1] but he left it unfinished after Murat's campaign failed.