Sicily

Sicily is the novel’s central setting and more than a backdrop: its landscape and history shape the political events of 1860 and the island society through which Don Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina, understands them. The narrative sets the end of Bourbon rule against an older pattern of foreign domination and local inertia. Sicily’s changing government therefore does not, in the Prince’s view, guarantee a transformation in the habits and outlook of its people.

Setting and Historical Background

At the opening, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies is nearing its end. Ferdinand II has died, and the peninsula is moving toward political union. The Risorgimento had gathered force after the Napoleonic Wars and had already reached a crisis in 1848. By 1860, leadership rested chiefly with the Kingdom of Sardinia, ruled from Turin by Victor Emmanuel II, with Cavour as prime minister.

In early May 1860, Giuseppe Garibaldi sailed for Sicily with a thousand volunteers, acting against Cavour’s wishes. His Garibaldini landed at Marsala, defeated Bourbon forces at Calatafimi, and occupied Palermo within three weeks. Garibaldi was hailed as Dictator of Sicily, recruited further volunteers, crossed to the mainland, and entered Naples. After the Bourbon armies were defeated on the Volturno, Francis II was besieged at Gaeta; Garibaldi handed southern Italy to Victor Emmanuel and withdrew from public life.

Plebiscites then brought the states of the peninsula into the new kingdom, with the Papal States the exception. French troops remained there because of Napoleon III’s domestic political circumstances. In 1862, Garibaldi attempted to march on Rome, but Piedmontese troops routed his men at Aspromonte and wounded him. The account presents this clash between revolutionary forces and the Italian government as the close of the Risorgimento’s revolutionary phase; the formal declaration of Rome as Italy’s capital followed in 1870.

Landscape, Climate, and Daily Life

The novel repeatedly gives the island’s physical environment a force beyond scenery. During a morning on May 13, Don Fabrizio looks down from a tower over the countryside, Palermo, the sea, and foreign warships in the harbor. The scene makes the political crisis seem subject to a larger power: the sun appears to keep Sicily in a state of immobility, while the city rests quietly around its monasteries. Don Fabrizio concludes that political leaders alone cannot readily undo this condition.

The hunting excursions around Donnafugata extend that sense of deep continuity. Don Fabrizio and Don Ciccio Tumeo move through scrub that the narration imagines as little altered since the Phoenicians, Dorians, and Ionians arrived. The hunters’ exertion, the dogs’ pursuit, and the habits of the land connect present-day life to an ancient past. After the hunt, the party rests beneath cork trees, shares food and wine, and feeds the dogs. These ordinary actions take place in a landscape that appears largely beyond human ordering.

From a hilltop, Donnafugata is barely visible in a fold of the terrain; sparse rows of vines are among the few signs of human settlement. The surrounding country is portrayed as dry, uneven, and difficult to organize into a legible pattern. This description contrasts with the cultivated image of prosperous estates and towns: for the Prince, the island’s less modified terrain offers a more fundamental picture of Sicily than its built environment.

The Prince’s Account of Sicilian Society

Don Fabrizio explains Sicilian habits through a combination of climate, landscape, and historical experience. He describes six months of extreme summer heat, unreliable water, and rainfall that can arrive with destructive force after periods of drought. In his account, such conditions make sustained exertion unusually costly and contribute to a society that resists the expectation of steady improvement. These are the Prince’s explanations, offered in conversation with the government’s emissary Chevalley, rather than a neutral statement that geography alone determines Sicilian character.

He also argues that Sicily’s past has been shaped by successive outside rulers. In his account to Chevalley, he recalls a succession of religious authorities, soldiers, officials, and foreign administrations, including Muslim imams, King Roger’s knights, Swabian scribes, Angevin barons, Spanish viceroys, and reforming officials under Charles III. He regards their attempts to direct the island toward a common historical course as repeatedly frustrated. Foreign power, he suggests, could impose obedience without winning understanding or lasting attachment.

The Prince locates resistance to reform not only in a history of subjection but in a powerful sense of local superiority. He tells Chevalley that Sicilians can regard themselves as already wise, civilized, and complete, making outside proposals for improvement seem like insults. He invokes Sicilians who leave the island while young as possible exceptions, but argues that those who remain become formed by its atmosphere and assumptions. His explanation is sweeping and self-implicating: as a member of the old ruling class, he recognizes that he too belongs to the society he criticizes.

Political Change and Narrative Significance

Sicily’s political transfer unfolds alongside images of persistence. In one episode, the hunters’ meal and rest are interrupted only by ants advancing toward scraps of food. The narration gives their organized movement an imperial cast, while distant military developments continue around Gaeta. The small procession and the larger political campaigns occupy the same landscape, making political conquest appear at once consequential and strangely continuous with ordinary cycles of appetite, labor, and survival.

The result is a setting in which change is unmistakable but its reach remains in question. Bourbon government gives way to a unified state; armies move across the island and beyond it; yet Don Fabrizio sees climate, inherited attitudes, and historical memory as forces that outlast changes of flag and administration. Sicily thus frames the novel’s central tension between political transformation and social persistence. The Prince’s account is neither a simple endorsement of reform nor proof that the island cannot change: it is the perspective of an aristocrat watching the old order decline while doubting that any new political arrangement can alter the deeper conditions he associates with Sicilian life.