AHC: Two Sicilies unite Italy

With a POD after 1750, how can Italy be united under the Catholic Sicilian Bourbons? How do you deal with the Papal States?
 
You can do this with a surviving Murat dynasty in Naples. Joachim's two sons both became left-nationalists politicians and both seem to have had some ability to pull something like this off. They would need some support from other countries and good advisors.

To do this with the Bourbons, you would have to ISOT a complete personality transplant into one of their rulers.
 
I've seen arguments that domestically Bourbon rule was not as bad as it has been portrayed in English language histories, that the problems in southern Italy were mostly due to Savoyard rule. I'm not sure how convincing these are. However, the Bourbons had absolutely no interest in putting themselves at the head of a nationalist movement to unite Italy.
 
I've seen arguments that domestically Bourbon rule was not as bad as it has been portrayed in English language histories, that the problems in southern Italy were mostly due to Savoyard rule. I'm not sure how convincing these are. However, the Bourbons had absolutely no interest in putting themselves at the head of a nationalist movement to unite Italy.

Convincing more or less as the argument about how the american civil war was not about slavery. While Savoyard management of the southern question was abysmal, the Bourbouns rulers were competent like the late Romanoff and had let their nation become basically a failed state
 
On paper, the more efficient way would be France and Austria allowed the Tuscany succession through the Farnese line, plus throwing a "blessed ruler" modifier on Charles (III). In 1737, Charles de Borbon, already King of Naples and Duke of Parma, becomes Grand Duke of Tuscany. He fights well in the Austrian Succession and gets the Milanese. He manages to marry the Massa heiress to his eldest son and forfeit the Spanish succession. He would be in good position both in the North and in the South of the peninsula. But, beyond an ASB protestant conversion of Italy or a French revolution-like event, the Papal states are still an obstacle to any political unification.
 
I've seen arguments that domestically Bourbon rule was not as bad as it has been portrayed in English language histories, that the problems in southern Italy were mostly due to Savoyard rule. I'm not sure how convincing these are. However, the Bourbons had absolutely no interest in putting themselves at the head of a nationalist movement to unite Italy.

It does not need to be a OTL nationalist unification. It could be along conservative Bismarckian lines. Perhaps everything except Lazio?
 
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