Kingdom of the Two Sicilies

The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies is the Bourbon state of Naples and Sicily that is nearing its end when the novel opens. Its collapse supplies the political setting for the story and a decisive contrast: while the ruling order is being overturned across southern Italy, life inside Villa Salina still follows the forms and privileges of an older world.

Identity and Historical Setting

The Kingdom is presented as the state ruling Naples and Sicily under the Bourbons. King Ferdinand II of the Two Sicilies has just died, and the political crisis surrounding his death is part of a much wider movement toward Italian unification. The peninsula, the book’s historical introduction explains, is about to become one state for the first time since the fall of the Roman Empire. The Kingdom therefore stands not simply as a location but as a political order approaching its conclusion.

The Risorgimento had gathered strength after the Napoleonic Wars, when Austria occupied northern Italy, and had already reached a major crisis in 1848. By 1860, leadership of the unification movement lay chiefly with Piedmont, the Kingdom of Sardinia, ruled from Turin by Victor Emmanuel II, with Cavour as prime minister. The Bourbon state was thus caught within a national transformation whose leadership and momentum had moved beyond its control.

The Campaign That Overturns Bourbon Rule

In early May 1860, Giuseppe Garibaldi sailed from near Genoa with a thousand volunteers, acting against Cavour’s wishes and intending to take Sicily from the Bourbons. His Garibaldini landed at Marsala, defeated Bourbon troops at Calatafimi, and occupied Palermo within three weeks. Garibaldi, hailed as dictator of Sicily, recruited further volunteers, crossed to the mainland, advanced up the coast, and entered Naples in triumph.

The Kingdom’s military defeat continued that autumn. Bourbon armies were beaten on the Volturno, and the Piedmontese besieged the last Bourbon king, Francis II of the Two Sicilies, at Gaeta. Garibaldi then handed southern Italy to Victor Emmanuel II and withdrew from public life. These successive reversals mark the passage from a campaign to overthrow Bourbon authority to the transfer of the south to the new national monarchy.

Plebiscites followed, and every state in the peninsula agreed to join the united kingdom except the Papal States. Napoleon III’s troops occupied the Papal States for reasons of French domestic politics. In 1862 Garibaldi tried to force the unresolved issue by marching on Rome, but his men were defeated by Piedmontese troops at Aspromonte in Calabria, where Garibaldi was wounded. The confrontation ended the revolutionary phase of the Risorgimento; the unification process reached its official culmination when Rome was declared Italy’s capital in 1870.

The Kingdom Inside the Novel

The historical account gives the Kingdom’s approaching end a clear political chronology, but the novel also makes the old order legible through domestic life. At Villa Salina, dinner retains what the narration describes as the customary, slightly shabby grandeur of the Kingdom. Fourteen people gather at the table, including the family, governesses, and tutors. A fine but mended lace cloth, heavy silver, splendid glass, and surviving plates from different services combine inherited magnificence with visible wear. The silver bears the initials F.D., recalling royal munificence, while the room’s elaborate furnishings preserve the appearance of a world whose political foundations are already weakening.

The household’s ceremony does not mean that the crisis remains distant. A short time before, firing squads had sounded in a Palermo square; later, Father Pirrone reports fear of a Piedmontese landing near Sciacca and describes silent unrest among the population. He warns that a weakening of official control could bring looting and violence. Three of the oldest Jesuit Fathers have already left for Naples by packet boat, taking their archives. Their departure makes the danger concrete even as the Prince, absorbed in his own concerns, scarcely attends to the report. The contrast places political alarm beside aristocratic detachment without making the household’s composure proof that the Kingdom is secure.

Political Ending and Narrative Significance

The Kingdom’s end is part of the novel’s opening pressure: its institutions and habits remain present even as the military and political sequence that will replace them advances. The dinner table’s mixture of grandeur and repair gives domestic form to that tension, while the news carried by Father Pirrone connects the sheltered estate to a wider crisis of authority. The Bourbon state is thus both a historical power with a specific course of defeat and the vanishing order against which the novel’s social world is measured. Its fall is not instantaneous in the life of the household; old customs persist amid uncertainty, even as the unification campaign makes their political setting untenable.