In 1713 Austria acquired the duchy of Milan, even then the richest part of Italy, and after 1748 it extended its ascendancy over all the states of the Italian peninsula. Not only did they accept Austrian hegemony without resistance, but the Italians played a part in the administration of the empire. At the court of Maria Theresa Italians did not find themselves in an alien environment. The Vienna of that age, to use Franco Valsecchi's happy phrase, delighted in “the melodious culture of Italy.” Viennese operas were composed to Italian libretti. Mozart was hardly less an Italian than a Germanic composer. The empire drew on its Italian-speaking subjects to fill important posts in the administrative and diplomatic services and courts of law. During the later years of Maria Theresa's reign, sons of the conservative Milanese patriciate, imbued with the ideas of the Enlightenment and led by Pietro Verri, Cesare Beccaria, and their associates of the Accademia dei Pugni, cooperated willingly and fruitfully in planning the reforms that Maria Theresa carried out, even though those reforms were undermining the autonomy of their country. The Enlightenment developed simultaneously in Italy and Austria, and for a period the leaders of that movement in Italy looked to Vienna rather than Paris as the citadel of their intellectual and reformist conceptions.

In the course of his survey of Italian nationalism in the Austrian empire—an account written with scrupulous fairness—Professor Greenfield makes, it seems to me, three particularly important points. First, though he finds these matters hard to measure, he suggests that irredentist sentiment was probably less intense, universal, or consistent than prior studies implied. Second, he notes that Austria protected herself from irredentism more through diplomatic than through domestic policy and that this approach was for some time fairly effective. Third, he finds that the Italian population became more anti-imperial as it felt itself threatened by the nationalism of Germans and Slavs and by what seemed to be Vienna's preferential treatment of them. The Italians in the Habsburg empire thus contributed to its disintegration primarily after the empire came to be conceived of as a system of competing nationalities in which concessions to any one of them became a source of grievance for some other national group. At the same time, an empire of declining international power found diplomacy an inadequate restraint on its increasingly independent Italian neighbor.