Ernesto de Marchi, Senior Scholar of St. Antony's College, Oxford, and editor of the Anglo-Italian review of politics Occidente, re-examines the view held by many historians of Italy that the achievement of Italian unity in 1860 was the planned result of concerted action on the part of her leading men. His talk, which analyses the part in Italy's unification played by Cavour, is suggested by the recently published study Cavour and Garibaldi: i860, by Denis Mack Smith.