Camillo Paolo Filippo Giulio Benso, Count of Cavour, Isolabella and Leri, generally known as the Count of Cavour or simply Cavour, was an Italian politician, businessman, economist and noble, and a leading figure in the movement towards Italian unification. He was one of the leaders of the Historical Right and Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Sardinia, a position he maintained throughout the Second Italian War of Independence and Giuseppe Garibaldi's campaigns to unite Italy. After the declaration of a united Kingdom of Italy, Cavour took office as the first Prime Minister of Italy; he died after only three months in office and did not live to see the Roman Question solved through the complete unification of the country after the Capture of Rome in 1870.

The unification of Italy, also known as the Risorgimento, was the 19th-century political and social movement that resulted in 1861 in the consolidation of various states of the Italian Peninsula and its outlying isles into a single state, the Kingdom of Italy. Inspired by the rebellions in the 1820s and 1830s against the outcome of the Congress of Vienna, the unification process was precipitated by the Revolutions of 1848, and reached completion in 1871 after the capture of Rome and its designation as the capital of the Kingdom of Italy.