“We are gods”

“We are gods” is the decisive phrase in Don Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina’s reply to Cavaliere Aimone Chevalley di Monterzuolo’s appeal for political and social reform. It turns a claim of divine status into an ironic diagnosis: in Don Fabrizio’s account, Sicilian self-satisfaction is so complete that misery itself cannot persuade people they need to change.

Occasion and Setting

The phrase comes within Don Fabrizio’s account of a visit made by British naval officers two or three days before Giuseppe Garibaldi entered Palermo. The officers had heard that Don Fabrizio owned a house by the shore whose rooftop terrace overlooked the hills around the city. From there, they hoped to understand the movements of Garibaldini, who were said to be operating nearby; Giuseppe Garibaldi was already at Gibilrossa.

The officers admired the landscape and the force of the light, but were appalled by the squalor, decay, and filth in the surrounding streets. When one asked what the Italian volunteers had come to do in Sicily, Don Fabrizio answered in English: ‘They are coming to teach us good manners!’ He followed with the declaration, ‘But they won’t succeed, because we are gods.’ The grandeur of the view and the degradation of the streets thus meet in the same anecdote: beauty does not, in Don Fabrizio’s telling, produce a desire for improvement.

From Anecdote to Argument

The British visitors laugh and leave without, Don Fabrizio says, understanding his answer. He then makes the story answer Cavaliere Aimone Chevalley di Monterzuolo directly: Sicilians do not want to improve because they believe themselves perfect. Vanity, he argues, outweighs misery. The phrase is therefore not a claim that Sicilians possess literal divine power, but a pointed formulation of their imagined completeness and resistance to correction.

Don Fabrizio extends the argument from the volunteers’ proposed lesson in manners to invasion and reform more broadly. Any outsider—or Sicilian with an independent spirit—risks disturbing what he calls the illusion of perfection and the people’s satisfied waiting. Repeated subjection by foreign powers, in his account, has not made Sicilians receptive to change; instead, they imagine an imperial past that entitles them to a grand funeral. The gods image sharpens this contradiction: a people who regard themselves as already exalted can accept deterioration without treating it as a reason to act.

Historical Recurrence and Significance

The declaration belongs to a longer pattern in Don Fabrizio’s reply. He asks whether Cavaliere Aimone Chevalley di Monterzuolo is the first reformer to hope to draw Sicily into universal history, and lists earlier would-be guides, from Moslem imams and King Roger’s knights to Swabian scribes, Angevin barons, jurists of the Most Catholic King, Spanish viceroys, and the reforming functionaries of Charles III. Their projects, he suggests, have vanished while Sicily has continued to sleep despite their appeals.

“We are gods” condenses that repeated contrast between reformist intention and local resistance. Its force is also limited by its speaker: Don Fabrizio presents Sicilian pride as blindness and concludes that, for the foreseeable future, nothing can be done and he cannot enter politics without being bitten. The phrase carries both an explanation of the resistance Cavaliere Aimone Chevalley di Monterzuolo confronts and Don Fabrizio’s own justification for withdrawal.