The unification process took place in Italy during the nineteenth century and made history as the Risorgimento, was the natural result of developing a national identity began long before. In fact, the Italian nation, as a community of people united by language, culture, feelings of belonging to the same, albeit in the plurality of political communities on the divided peninsula begins to form in the Middle Ages. Christianity has contributed significantly to the construction of Italian identity through the work of the Church, its educational institutions and health care, setting standards of behavior, institutional forms, social relations, but also by a wealth of artistic activity: literature, painting, sculpture, architecture, music. Dante, Giotto, Petrarch, Michelangelo, Raphael, Pierluigi da Palestrina, Caravaggio, Scarlatti, Bernini and Borromini are just some of a line of great artists who, over the centuries, have made a fundamental contribution to training the Italian identity. Even the experience of holiness, that many have punctuated the history of Italy, contributed heavily to build that identity, not only in the specific profile of a particular realization of the Gospel message, which marked time in the experience religion and spirituality of the Italians (think big and expressions of popular piety), but also the cultural and even political. St. Francis of Assisi, for example, is also known for its contribution to shaping the national language; St. Catherine of Siena offers, although simple commoner, a powerful stimulus to the development of an Italian legal and political thought. The contribution of believers of the Church and in the process of formation and consolidation of national identity continues in modern and contemporary art. Even when parts of the peninsula were subjected to the sovereignty of foreign powers, it was thanks to this identity is now a clear and strong that, despite the long-term geopolitical fragmentation, the Italian nation could continue to exist and to be self-conscious. Therefore, the unification of Italy, realizzatasi in the second half of the nineteenth century, could not take place as an artificial construction of political identities, but as a natural result of a political long-standing national identity, to exist for some time. The nascent political community united at the end of the cycle Risorgimento was, ultimately, as the glue that held together the local diversity while still remaining, just the pre-existing national identity, whose shaping Christianity and the Church have made a fundamental contribution.
