At the outset Bonaparte's racial sympathies were warmly aroused for the liberation of Italy; and though his judgment was to be warped by the promptings of ambition, he never lost sight of the welfare of the people whence he was descended.

In his "Memoirs written at St.Helena" he summed up his convictions respecting the Peninsula in this statesmanlike utterance: "Italy, isolated within its natural limits, separated by the sea and by very high mountains from the rest of Europe, seems called to be a great and powerful nation....

Unity in manners, language, literature ought finally, in a future more or less remote, to unite its inhabitants under a single government....

Rome is beyond doubt the capital which the Italians will one day choose." A prophetic saying: it came from a man who, as conqueror and organizer, awakened that people from the torpor of centuries and breathed into it something of his own indomitable energy.
And then again, the Austrian possessions south of the Alps were difficult to hold for purely military reasons.

They were separated from Vienna by difficult mountain ranges through which armies struggled with difficulty.