Machiavelli’s Prince drew on foreign, not Italian, unification experience.

Evidence

This function can be seen in Machiavelli too, though Machiavelli attempted to turn it to national ends (without success and without any appreciable result). The Prince, in fact, was a development of Spanish, French and English experience during the travail of national unification-which in Italy did not command sufficient forces, or even arouse much interest. Since the representatives of the traditional current really wish to apply to Italy intellectual and rational schemas, worked out in Italy it is true, but on the basis of anachronistic experiences rather than immediate national needs, it is they who are the Jacobins in the pejorative sense . — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 582