Unification of Italy and annexation of Sicily into the Kingdom of Sardinia

Italian unification and the annexation of Sicily to the Kingdom of Sardinia mark a decisive political reversal: Bourbon authority gives way, but the island does not gain the autonomy its revolutionaries sought. Giuseppe Garibaldi’s campaign helps bring down the old regime; the state that follows extends its laws, taxes, and commercial arrangements southward without adapting them to Sicily. In the novel, the consequences are measured not only in proclamations and armies, but in blocked ships, requisitioned vessels, threatened treasury gold, and Vincenzo Florio’s conviction that one ruling power has simply replaced another.

Causes and political setting

Sicily’s vulnerability to changes in sovereignty precedes the unification campaign. During the Neapolitan Republic of 1799, the Bourbon rulers Ferdinand IV and Maria Carolina are driven to take refuge in Palermo, returning to Naples only in 1802 after the republic has been crushed. Later, Bourbon rule is consolidated across the two kingdoms. From December 1816, Neapolitans administer Sicily’s state offices and customs and serve as its military commanders. The loss of local power, heavier taxes, restrictions, and new constraints on trade bring an already struggling economy to a halt. The account establishes a recurring pattern: a change of regime is felt in the offices that collect duties and the rules that govern commerce as much as in the fate of rulers.

That pattern matters to the Florios because their prosperity depends on moving goods through systems they do not control. Their spices pass through customs warehouses, ports, and a network linking foreign colonial supplies with Mediterranean buyers. They rent guarded storage at Palazzo Steri, where import tariffs are paid when goods enter Palermo rather than while they remain in transit. Such commercial arrangements make administrative stability consequential: customs policy and a government’s command of the harbor can decide whether stock keeps moving or becomes stranded.

The wider political climate is also one of competing projects for Sicily’s future. Under Ferdinand II, the Bourbon state pursues infrastructure and technological development, including railways, military ships with metal hulls, electrical street lighting, and improved exploitation of sulfur deposits. Yet this modernization does not resolve the island’s political subordination. In 1848, Vincenzo Florio describes buying a large consignment of rifles in England on behalf of the revolutionary committee. The revolutionaries proclaim a Kingdom of Sicily and seek to revive the 1812 constitution, but cannot find a king willing to take the crown; British opposition to separating Sicily from the Bourbons further narrows their prospects. The episode shows a revolutionary government dependent on merchants’ resources even as its political future remains uncertain.

The campaign and the new kingdom

In 1860, Francesco Crispi persuades Giuseppe Garibaldi to support an external insurrection that would aid Sicilian rebels and ultimately unite Italy. He tells Garibaldi that an uprising has already begun in Palermo, referring to the Gancia revolt, which Crispi steered from April 4 to 18. Without the king’s explicit backing, Garibaldi and the Thousand sail from Quarto on May 5. They land at Marsala on May 11, reach Salemi on May 14, and there Garibaldi proclaims himself dictator of Sicily in the name of Victor Emmanuel II.

The expedition then advances on Palermo. On May 28, Garibaldi’s forces enter the city and are welcomed as liberators; by September 7 they reach Naples. The meeting of Garibaldi and Victor Emmanuel II at Teano on October 26 marks the beginning of the Kingdom of Italy. In this sequence, liberation from Bourbon rule and the unification of Italy are joined in a single campaign, but they do not amount to the same political settlement as Sicilian independence. The island’s revolutionaries had sought to free it from Bourbon subjection; the new national state instead becomes the authority that sets the terms of its incorporation.

Commerce, requisition, and state power

Political upheaval repeatedly interrupts the Florios’ work. During the formation of a provisional government, customs becomes chaotic and outgoing ships are blocked. Ignazio Florio learns of the stoppage from Ben Ingham and hurries to the Customs House, where merchants and sailors crowd the courtyard while soldiers hold them back at rifle point. The scene makes the economic cost of uncertain sovereignty immediate: goods can be requisitioned, vessels immobilized, and the commercial routines on which firms rely suspended by a change in administration.

Vincenzo’s 1848 purchase of rifles makes him an intermediary between the revolutionary cause and foreign supply. Yet the same upheaval threatens the enterprise that finances his activity. He tells Giulia Portalupi that trading has fallen by half since the revolt began. The Sicilian Steamship Company’s Palermo, once working at full capacity, has been taken by Ruggero Settimo’s revolutionary regime to transport troops. Vincenzo recognizes Settimo’s willingness to reason and his belief that Sicily is not ready for a republic, but he is also angry that the revolutionary authorities are using his money and ships to wage a war whose costs fall on his business. Political commitment and commercial exposure thus meet in the same ledger: his resources can make the revolution possible, but requisition can also consume what he has spent a lifetime building.

The transition of 1860 again places finance at the center of sovereignty. At the Royal Bank, Vincenzo orders all the cash and bank drafts transferred into the safe. As trade governor, he compares information and judges it prudent to secure liquid assets until the crisis passes, after which the money can return to circulation or be converted into the kingdom’s new currency. He cannot similarly protect the substantial gold ingots in the treasury. Garibaldi’s men are expected to requisition them within hours. The contrast between the cash he can move and the gold he cannot save gives the change of government a concrete financial shape: political authority includes the power to seize the resources accumulated under the previous order.

Annexation and its consequences

After unification, officials from the Kingdom of Sardinia extend their legislative, economic, fiscal, and trading system to southern Italy and Sicily without adapting it to local conditions or allowing compromise. The novel links that policy to widening discontent. The nobility lose privileges and cultural identity, while ordinary people remain caught in an economy operating under difficult conditions with little prospect of improvement. The promised national settlement therefore arrives less as negotiated integration than as an administrative imposition.

Vincenzo voices this grievance after Sicily’s annexation to the Kingdom of the Savoys. He says the new authorities behave not as sovereigns but as masters: they bring in their laws and officials and refuse to listen to those with greater experience of dealing with Sicilians. His anger is sharpened by his belief that the people might give generously if they were offered even a little consideration. For him, the problem is not simply that foreign officials govern the island, but that they rule without understanding the society they have taken under their administration.

In a later argument with Giulia, Vincenzo accuses the Piedmontese of turning Sicily into a colony. He claims that they have seized the Bourbon Crown treasury and carried it to Piedmont to cover the costs of annexation, which he calls a farce arranged between Naples and Turin. Giulia challenges his refusal to accept a larger Italian nation and asks what he makes of those who sacrificed their lives for that ideal. Vincenzo answers that even a Russian tsar could rule over them without changing his position: what he wants is for no one to touch his world. The exchange distinguishes his defense of Sicilian autonomy from a principled endorsement of independence for all. His resistance is bound up with the protection of Casa Florio and the commercial world he has built.

The narrative’s judgment is broader than Vincenzo’s personal grievance. It concludes that Sicily is once again a conquered land. The phrase binds post-unification rule to the island’s earlier experience of political subordination, while the events surrounding it show how conquest operates through institutions as well as force: taxation, customs, legislation, trade policy, requisition, and control of public wealth. Unification changes the sovereign framework, but for Sicily it does not erase the distance between those who make the rules and those compelled to live under them.