Capture of Palermo (1860)

The Capture of Palermo (1860) is recalled in the novel through an anecdote Don Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina tells Cavaliere Aimone Chevalley di Monterzuolo. Rather than narrating the fighting or the city’s seizure, the episode looks toward Giuseppe Garibaldi’s entry from the days just before it: British naval officers seek a view of the revolutionary forces, while Don Fabrizio interprets their arrival through his bleak account of Sicilian pride and historical resistance to change.

Approach to the City

Two or three days before Giuseppe Garibaldi entered Palermo, British naval officers came ashore from warships stationed in the harbour to watch events. They had heard that Don Fabrizio owned a house by the sea, with a rooftop terrace from which the ring of hills around Palermo could be seen. Unable to form a clear picture of the situation from their ships, they asked to visit. Don Fabrizio accompanied them to the roof, where they admired the light and the view but were appalled by the decay, filth, and squalor of the surrounding streets.

The officers’ visit fixes the campaign in a sharply limited perspective. The novel supplies no account here of the military operations or the actual capture; it places the approaching event in the observers’ effort to understand what is happening from outside the city. From the terrace, the landscape is spectacular, but the streets below expose conditions that Don Fabrizio regards as inseparable from it.

Don Fabrizio’s Account of the Revolution

When one officer asks what the Italian volunteers have come to do in Sicily, Don Fabrizio answers, “They are coming to teach us good manners!” He adds, “But they won’t succeed, because we are gods.” The officers laugh, apparently without understanding the full force of the reply. In the conversation with Chevalley, Don Fabrizio presents it as an answer not only to the visitors but to the hope that political intervention can reform the island.

His explanation turns the impending entry into a test of competing interpretations. The officers see misery that should be corrected; Don Fabrizio sees a population whose vanity and sense of perfection, in his view, outweigh its misery. He argues that successive invasions have failed to make Sicilians accept reform, because each new external authority unsettles a settled belief in the island’s own superiority. The capture thus becomes, in his retrospective account, another arrival in a long history of outside attempts to redirect Sicily.

Local Expectations and Political Realignment

The account is set against signs that the old political order is already weakening. Don Pietro Russo tells Don Fabrizio that his sympathies lie with the bold young men, while claiming that he himself is not taking the risks. He predicts liberty, security, lower taxes, and better trade after the upheaval, but also reassures the Prince that Villa Salina will be safe and that the new rulers will pay their respects. Don Fabrizio recognizes the self-interest beneath these assurances: Russo is trying through intermediaries to buy the Argivocale estate. Political change and private advancement are already entangled.

The Prince’s sense of his diminished standing sharpens the irony. Russo describes him as protected by local friends and values him partly as Tancredi Falconeri’s uncle and guardian. Don Fabrizio feels reduced from an authority in his own right to a dependent of those who expect to prosper under the new order. His earlier expectation that there will be negotiations and limited shooting before things become “the same though all will be changed” complements the later recollection: the approaching revolution is real, but local actors are already preparing to turn it toward familiar interests.

Aftermath and Significance

The novel connects the military upheaval to the later public ratification of political change at Donnafugata. Don Fabrizio casts his vote for the new order, and the announced plebiscite tally is 512 votes cast for Yes and none for No, out of 512 votes recorded. The episode does not establish that this result followed directly from the capture, but it shows how the revolution’s consequences reach beyond the campaign into local political ceremony and the reorganization of allegiance.

The event’s significance lies in the contrast between the promise of national transformation and Don Fabrizio’s expectation of Sicilian continuity. The British officers’ view from the terrace, the Prince’s sardonic answer, Russo’s calculations, and the later unanimous tally present different faces of the same transition: observers seek to interpret it, local interests adapt to it, and the old elite discovers that its influence is no longer secure. Palermo’s capture is therefore evoked less as a military climax than as the threshold of a change whose meaning remains contested.