Following the unification of Italy in 1861, the Minister of Education in the Menabrea government, Emilio Broglio, had to intervene to resolve Italy's linguistic situation. To do so, in 1867, he established a parliamentary commission to regulate and theorise the processes that would lead to the unification of the language, identifying an existing basis from which to build. Alessandro Manzoni, who had already made a name for himself thanks to the complex and varied linguistic modifications of The Betrothed, was appointed to head this commission, as well as the Milan subcommission alongside the Florence one. He had made his name with the aim of transforming the novel into a novel written in the spoken Florentine dialect.

As he did with his most famous novel, Manzoni established the contemporary Florentine dialect as the starting point for constructing a unified language, confirming once and for all the linguistic primacy of the Tuscan area over other Italian dialects. This process had been initiated by the so-called "Three Crowns" of Italian literature—Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio—through their illustrious works, and was then codified and theorised by Pietro Bembo in the sixteenth century. What changed in Manzoni's attitude compared to the theories already in place was precisely the shift in focus from literary to popular language, as the need now became clear: to create a language with which the entire country could communicate at every level and register.

To do this, the commission sent Minister Broglio the text "On the Unity of Language and the Means to Spread It," which was accompanied by the beginning of the drafting of the "New Vocabulary of the Italian Language According to the Use of Florence." The text produced by Manzoni's commission summarised the direction that the Italian language we all speak today would take from then on. This allowed a newly unified Italy, which had, according to the most generous estimates, 9.8% Italian speakers, to functionalize the school system and greatly boost literacy and the spread of Italian. For this reason, teachers from regions other than Tuscany were introduced to Tuscan, and a large body of textbooks and dictionaries aimed at teaching Italian in schools began to emerge, including the famous text "L'idioma gentile" by Edmondo De Amicis. All of this, combined with internal migration and the mass media of the 20th century, enabled the widespread Italianization of our country.