Agostino Depretis (31 January 181329 July 1887) was an Italian statesman and politician. He served as Prime Minister of Italy for several stretches between 1876 and 1887, and was leader of the Historical Left parliamentary group for more than a decade. He is the fourth-longest serving Prime Minister in Italian history, after Benito Mussolini, Giovanni Giolitti and Silvio Berlusconi. Depretis is widely considered one of the most powerful and important politicians in Italian history. He was a master in the political art of Trasformismo, the method of making a flexible, centrist coalition of government which isolated the extremes of the left and the right in Italian politics after the unification. Early life and Italian Unification Depretis was born at Bressana Bottarone, near Stradella, which at the time was a province of the French Empire of Napoleon and now is in the province of Pavia, Lombardy. After Napoleon's defeat and restoration of the Kingdom of Sardinia, Depretis graduated in law and started working as lawyer. From early manhood he was a disciple of Giuseppe Mazzini and affiliated with the La Giovine Italia. He took an active part in the Mazzinian conspiracies and was nearly captured by the Austrians while smuggling arms into Milan. Elected deputy in 1848, he joined the Left and founded the newspaper Il Diritto, but he held no political offices. In the same period he strongly opposed the policies of the Piedmontese Prime Minister Camillo Benso di Cavour and voted against the main reforms that he presented, including the bill regarding the Piedmontese participation to the Crimean War. Despite their struggles, after the annexation of Lombardy by the Kingdom of Sardinia in 1859, Cavour appointed Depretis governor of Brescia. In 1860, Giuseppe Garibaldi sailed with his Expedition of the Thousand toward Sicily. The Expedition was formed by corps of volunteers led by Garibaldi in order to conquer the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, ruled by the Bourbons. The project was an ambitious and risky venture aiming to conquer, with a thousand men, a kingdom with a larger regular army and a more powerful navy. The expedition was a success and concluded with a plebiscite that brought Naples and Sicily into the Kingdom of Sardinia, the last territorial conquest before the creation of the Kingdom of Italy on 17 March 1861. The sea venture was the only desired action that was jointly decided by the "four fathers of the