Name: Camillo Benso

Surname: Count of Cavour



Camillo Paolo Filippo Giulio Benso, Count of Cavour, Cellarengo and Isolabella, known simply as Count of Cavour or Cavour (Turin, 10 August 1810 – Turin, 6 June 1861), was an Italian politician, patriot and entrepreneur. He was minister of the Kingdom of Sardinia from 1850 to 1852, president of the Council of Ministers from 1852 to 1859 and from 1860 to 1861. In the same 1861, with the proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy, he became the first president of the Council of Ministers of the new State and he died holding that position. He was a protagonist of the Risorgimento as a supporter of liberal ideas, of civil and economic progress, of the separation between State and Church, of national movements and of the expansionism of the Kingdom of Sardinia to the detriment of Austria and the pre-unification Italian states. In economics he promoted free trade, large industrial investments (especially in the railway field) and cooperation between public and private. In politics he supported the promulgation and defense of the Albertine Statute. Head of the so-called historical Right, he signed an agreement ("Connubio") with the Left, with which he carried out various reforms. He openly opposed Giuseppe Mazzini's republican ideas and often found himself in conflict with Giuseppe Garibaldi, whose revolutionary potential he feared. In foreign policy he skilfully cultivated the alliance with France, thanks to which, with the second war of independence, he obtained the territorial expansion of the Kingdom of Sardinia into Lombardy. He managed to manage the political events (riots in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, in the duchies of Modena and Parma and in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies) which, together with the feat of the Thousand, led to the formation of the Kingdom of Italy.

Autograph type: autograph document dated 15 January 1857