With the create of a unified national state, Italy entered a new cultural dimension, as the pace of industry and modernisation quickened and the nation's cultural institutions embarked on a course of extensive renewal. The unification could not be complete without the development of a national culture, which necessitated not only the general distribution of literacy (in 1861, 75% of the populace could not read or write Italian), but also the creation of a cultural tradition in which the contemporary liberal and anti-authoritarian ideologies that had fuelled the Risorgimento and supported industrial expansion could prosper. To these ends, state schools at all levels were reorganised, learned academies replenished, and new national libraries, museums and archives created. Liberal legislation guaranteed secondary schools and universities freedom of teaching and research; their structures were made uniform and their teaching staff expanded to incorporate prominent writers, scientists and intellectuals. But in spite of this new impetus to cultural activity, the project of a homogeneous national culture met with unsurmountable obstacles. The contradictions and disparities of an essentially impoverished and backward nation full of regionalisms, where traditional social, cultural and intellectual forms persisted, coupled with the ideological fragmentation among and within the various groups that fought the battles of the Risorgimento, made Italian cultural unification a difficult goal to realize.
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