This study looks at two Veronese daily newspapers - »L'Arena« and »L'Adige« - in the period following the unification of Italy with the aim of casting new light on the evolution of non-literary written Italian in the second half of the nineteenth century. The discussion proceeds on the traditional lines of linguistic inquiry but also focuses on a number of aspects that transcend morphological, syntactic and lexical analysis and are specific to journalistic language and the development of the written vernacular in the 19th century. The picture that emerges is characterised on the one hand by the introduction of new elements into standard Italian stemming from various sources (Manzoni, neologisms, special languages, colloquial language, dialect) and on the other by the evolution of a journalistic idiom that was to influence the development of Italian in the aftermath.