This book looks at the administration of Venice and Venetia as part of the multinational Habsburg Empire in the years between the collapse of the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy and the death of Francis I in 1835. It rejects entirely the 'black legend' of Austrian domination that long informed the traditional Risorgimento historiography. Instead, it presents a picture of an administration that was a hybrid of Napoleonic modernization and Habsburg bureaucratic practices, which offered the most effective and responsive government in Restoration Italy.
