Ask a Frenchman.

[Conrad_Jalowski]

As far as Medieval Italy. Pope Alexander Sextus, was probably the first to truly attempted to unify Italy, for the first time since the days of Justinian.

I must disagree with this particular comment. The Regnum Langobardorum though not consolidating its rule over the entire length of Italy attempted to unite the peninsula. The Langobards reached the apex of their political rule under their monarch Aistulf (Ruled from 749-756) in which the Byzantine controlled city of Ravenna was captured in 751 CE. In addition, Istria, Ferrara and Comacchio were wrested from the Byzantines which extended Lombard territory south to Perugia. In Langobardia Minor, Aistulf increased his own hegemony in the duchies of Spoleto and Benevento. The decline of Langobard fortunes and the unraveling of Aistulf's conquests occurred with the intercession of the Franks in which Ravenna was captured and bestowed to the Papacy while the Regnum Langobardorum was reduced somewhat to the status of a Frankish protectorate.

During the Carolingian occupation of the Italian Peninsula, the entirety of the peninsula excluding the semi-autonomous principality of Benevento and Byzantine controlled Italy in Calabria was subject to the Rex Francorum et Rex Langobardorum Charlemagne. The partitioning of the Italian Peninsula occurred in the Pax Nicephori in which the Byzantines under Basileus Nicephorus I Logothetes (Ruled 802-811) received Venice, Istria and the Dalmatian coast while their territories in southern Italy, Sardinia and Sicily were secure. The Carolingian Franks under Charlemagne (Ruled 768-814) continued to occupy Rome, Ravenna and the Pentapolis.

After the reign of the Roman Emperor Justinian I the Great (Ruled 527-565), the unification of the Italian Peninsula was seriously attempted by the Lombard monarchs. After the collapse of the Byzantine controlled Exarchate of Ravenna in 751 CE, the Lombards nearly dominated the entire Italian Peninsula.