A map of the new nation.

The unification of Italy makes increasingly possible, though not easy, those [statistical] studies to which the past opposed so many obstacles. The government itself participates in these researches and is anxious to communicate the results to the public. Reciprocally, the economic revolution, which necessarily follows every political revolution, is awakening all national forces and energies, and thus opening a new space to the spirit of enterprise which has been asleep for too long. These words from the Annuario di economia sociale e di statistica pel Regno d'ltalia, by two Piedmontese commentators, P. Duprat and A. Gicca, are indicative of the hopes shared by liberal sectors of public opinion in the early 1860s, after the proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy. They express a still optimistic view of the future that awaited the new nation, and of its capability to mobilize “national forces and energies”, as well as of the possibilities offered by the new state institutions to the development of that most stately and national of all forms of knowledge, statistics. In the newly proclaimed Kingdom of Italy, the process of construction of a liberal order was to receive many benefits from the “social institution” of statistics – to use an expression recurrent in the vocabulary of the official and unofficial publications in those years. It is known that the newly established Direzione di Statistica (Directorate of Statistics) put a special effort into the immediate production of the basic statistics of the nation, namely the population census. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]