Rome.
After years of stagnation, the harbor had grown lively once more. Cargo ships flying the Austrian flag lined the docks.
People tirelessly hauled crate after heavy crate of goods. Most contained food, while the rest held building materials, clothing, fabric, and various daily necessities.
The residents of Rome had gone a long time without a full meal. The military provisions brought by the Austrian army had at least eased the city's immediate crisis.
Before the Austrian army had besieged Rome, people had starved to death in the city every day.
The Fourth Roman Republic had wrecked its own economy. Then, with its maritime traffic cut off, its death sentence had effectively been pronounced.
So when the Austrian envoy entered Rome, it was easy for him to win over the city's residents.
As the saying went, people would die for wealth just as birds would for food. That was more or less the situation.
But if Pius IX couldn't resolve Rome's food crisis, he would sooner or later be driven out of the city again.
Even a cornered rabbit would bite, let alone the hundreds of thousands of living, breathing people in the city.
There were two ways to solve Rome's food problem. One was to bring in supplies from elsewhere and relieve the capital's immediate crisis.
But it was a year of poor harvests, and the provinces had little food to spare. On top of that, the "Italian Crusade" and the Italian Allied Forces, who had swept through like locusts, had eliminated any chance of the Papal States weathering the crisis on their own.
The other solution was to suppress the people by force: pay the army in full, then let the men with guns solve the problem.
That would cost the least in the short term, but in