The Expedition of the Thousand is Giuseppe Garibaldi’s 1860 campaign to take Sicily from the Bourbons, a turning point in the Risorgimento that helped end the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and bring southern Italy under Victor Emmanuel II. In The Leopard, its swift military advance is also a test of how differently political change appears to the people who celebrate it, fear it, or expect it to leave their lives largely intact.

Background and Landing

The campaign unfolded as the Bourbon state of Naples and Sicily was nearing its end. The Risorgimento had gathered strength since the Austrian occupation of northern Italy after the Napoleonic Wars and had already reached a crisis in 1848. Its main political leadership now lay with Piedmont, the Kingdom of Sardinia, ruled from Turin by Victor Emmanuel II, with Cavour as prime minister. Garibaldi acted against Cavour’s wishes when he sailed from near Genoa in early May 1860 with a thousand volunteers bound for Sicily.

The volunteers, known as the Garibaldini or Redshirts, landed at Marsala. They defeated Bourbon troops at Calatafimi and, within three weeks, occupied Palermo. Garibaldi was hailed as Dictator of Sicily, gathered further volunteers, crossed to the mainland, and advanced up the coast toward Naples. The campaign’s speed made its initial landing more than a raid: it opened a sequence of victories that weakened Bourbon rule across the south.

News and Uncertainty in the Novel

Don Fabrizio first receives the news at home, after waking from an afternoon nap. A letter sent from Palermo by his brother-in-law Màlvica reports that the Piedmontese have landed and that Màlvica plans to take his family to a British warship. Don Fabrizio laughs at the panic and regards Màlvica as someone who has never understood events. His immediate practical concern is Palermo property: he decides that Paolo should stay at the palace, since an empty house could be lost.

The newspaper on the same tray gives a very different measure of the threat. It describes the landing at Marsala as piracy, reports a force of about eight hundred, and says that Garibaldi’s men are moving in the direction of Castelvetrano. Don Fabrizio is unsettled by Garibaldi’s name, but assumes that the king will be able to control him. The contrast between the newspaper’s language and the campaign’s actual progress establishes how the old order misreads a force already moving beyond its control.

By late August, Don Fabrizio has spent three months observing the upheaval in Palermo. He finds the public display of change tiresome: tricolour cockades, processions, speeches, and the political excitement of the streets. Earlier, wounded men and the treatment of former Bourbon police had lent the occupation’s celebrations a sharper immediate purpose; once that moment passed, the continuing noise seemed to him petty and aimless. He is nevertheless forced to acknowledge that nearly everyone appears pleased with the new situation. Màlvica has been arrested by Garibaldi’s police and spent ten days in prison; Paolo, discontented but more cautious, remains in Palermo involved in a plot.

The Campaign’s Effects on Salina Property

The expedition’s consequences reach the Salina household unevenly. Don Fabrizio is pleased to travel to Donnafugata, where he values the house, its people, and the surviving sense of feudal ownership. He has found Palermo’s political spectacle distasteful, but believes the underlying economic and social arrangements remain satisfactory. Don Pietro Russo has kept his promise, and no shots have been heard near Villa Salina.

The family has nonetheless suffered a material loss: a complete service of Chinese porcelain has disappeared from the Palermo palace. Don Fabrizio attributes this not to the Garibaldini but to Paolo’s carelessness. Paolo had the porcelain packed into two cases and left them in the palace courtyard during the shelling, making their removal easy. The episode gives the political crisis a domestic scale: upheaval threatens property, but the damage described here also arises from the old family’s own decisions.

Advance, Transfer of Power, and Aftermath

That autumn the Bourbon armies were defeated on the Volturno. Piedmontese forces besieged Francis II in Gaeta, and Garibaldi handed southern Italy over to Victor Emmanuel II before withdrawing from public life. Plebiscites followed; the states of the peninsula agreed to join the united kingdom, with the Papal States the exception. They were occupied by troops of Napoleon III for reasons connected to French domestic politics.

The revolutionary campaign did not end every conflict over unification. In 1862 Garibaldi attempted to march on Rome, but his men were routed by Piedmontese troops at Aspromonte in Calabria, and Garibaldi was wounded. The action ended the revolutionary phase of the Risorgimento; Rome was officially declared the capital of Italy in 1870. The expedition thus helped produce a unified state while leaving the new order’s political settlement to be completed through military action and formal annexation.

Historical Change and Sicilian Stasis

The campaign’s significance in the novel lies partly in the distance between a dramatic transfer of power and the Sicilian society Don Fabrizio believes it has changed. Six months after Garibaldi landed at Marsala, Don Fabrizio explains that the old governing class was not consulted before too many new measures were begun; he distinguishes supporting the Italian state from participating in its work. His objection is not simply to the campaign’s success but to the assumption that political action can remake Sicily.

He recalls that, shortly before Garibaldi entered Palermo, British naval officers visited his house on the shore and climbed to its roof to survey the surrounding hills. Garibaldi was already at Gibilrossa. Asked what the Italian volunteers had come to do, Don Fabrizio answered that they had come to teach the Sicilians good manners, then explained that Sicilians regard themselves as already perfect. For him, that conviction helps account for the island’s resistance to reform after centuries of rule by outsiders. The expedition changes who holds power, but his account makes its limits part of the event’s meaning: military victory and national unification do not, by themselves, dissolve the habits and expectations of Sicilian life.