ottocento

   Italian, literally "eight hundred," it refers to the 1800s — the nineteenth century, and is often used to refer to Italian art of the period. It was the age of nationalism throughout Europe. Italy during the ottocento, after centuries of regional fragmentation and foreign domination, became a united political entity. The political struggle for unification was known as the Risorgimento, meaning to rise up again (evoking similarly powerful alliterative words like renaissance and resurrection). The term was chosen because Italians hoped that their land might overcome internal political divisions and regionalism to regain the prominent place in Western Civilization it had enjoyed during the Roman and Renaissance times, when the Italic peninsula had been a rich and vital center.