It is well known that Italy was not unified until the 1860s/1870s and was a land of many dialects. In a Wikipedia article on the history of the language they state that in 1970 only 20%of Italians spoke fluent "Italian" in their day to day life, even though the Tuscan dialect was declared the official Italian language at the time of unification in 1861. Granted that the three greatest poets of Italy (Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch) were Tuscan, how did it come to be that the Tuscan dialect of Italian came to be accepted as the official version of Italian? The movers and shakers of the rebellion in the 1860s were not Tuscan and one might think that they would have supported their own regional dialect to be the official version.