Garibaldi's landing in Sicily

Garibaldi's landing in Sicily, specifically at Marsala, marks the start of a political upheaval that Don Fabrizio says was set in motion without the old governing class's consent. Recalled during his refusal to enter politics, the landing becomes more than a military arrival: it is the point from which he measures the new authorities' demands for cooperation against what he sees as Sicily's entrenched pride, exhaustion, and resistance to reform.

Landing and Political Context

Speaking to Cavaliere Aimone Chevalley di Monterzuolo, Don Fabrizio distinguishes between supporting the new Italian State and participating in its political work. He says that, in the six months since Giuseppe Garibaldi landed at Marsala, too many changes had begun without consultation with members of the old governing class. He declines to judge all those changes in the conversation, though he says he considers many of them bad; his immediate objection is to being asked to help develop and carry through a transformation already undertaken without his class's involvement.

The landing thus serves as a temporal and political dividing line in Don Fabrizio's account. He recognizes the need to avoid an appearance of disunity before foreign states, and is willing to support the new State in that limited sense. But he rejects the assumption that this outward support obliges him to take part in its political program. The distinction turns the event's aftermath into the central issue: the new order seeks the cooperation of the very governing class it has bypassed.

The Approach to Palermo

Don Fabrizio places the landing within the movement of Giuseppe Garibaldi's forces toward Palermo. Two or three days before Garibaldi entered the city, British naval officers whose ships were in the harbor to watch events asked to visit Don Fabrizio's house on the shore. From its rooftop terrace, they could see the hills around the city and hoped to understand where the Garibaldini were operating, since the view from their ships had not given them a clear picture. Don Fabrizio says that by then Garibaldi was already at Gibilrossa.

The officers admired the view and the intensity of the light, but were appalled by the squalor, decay, and filth in the surrounding streets. Their visit connects the military campaign to a sharply contrasting image of the city: from above, the landscape is expansive and striking; at street level, the visitors encounter visible urban poverty and deterioration. Don Fabrizio says he did not explain to them the connection he believed existed between those conditions and the Sicilian character he describes to Chevalley.

Don Fabrizio's Interpretation

When one officer asked what the Italian volunteers had come to do in Sicily, Don Fabrizio answered that they had come to teach the Sicilians good manners, but would not succeed because the Sicilians considered themselves gods. He recounts that the officers laughed, though he doubts they understood what he meant. In the conversation with Chevalley, he makes the anecdote an explanation for his refusal to collaborate: in his view, Sicilians regard themselves as already perfect, and their vanity outweighs their misery.

Don Fabrizio links this self-image to a long history of outside rule. He describes Sicily as having endured successive civilizations and rulers from elsewhere, and says that this history has left its inhabitants exhausted and convinced of an imperial past that entitles them to a grand funeral. In his reading, each new outside intervention threatens the illusion of achieved perfection and disturbs a settled expectation of waiting rather than acting. The landing at Marsala therefore initiates a change of government without, in his judgment, changing the deeper habits that make reform difficult.

Refusal and Historical Consequence

Chevalley urges Don Fabrizio to help relieve the people's material and moral suffering, warning that if honest men withdraw, unscrupulous and shortsighted figures such as Don Calogero Sedàra will gain the field. Don Fabrizio acknowledges Chevalley's sincerity but rejects his premise that the Sicilians must want to improve. He argues that repeated efforts by foreign rulers and reformers to draw Sicily into universal history have come to nothing because, as he sees it, Sicily has wanted to sleep despite their appeals.

His refusal is consequently not a denial that the landing and the ensuing political changes have occurred; it is a rejection of the claim that the old elite can make those changes succeed by joining the new administration. The landing begins a sequence of political initiatives that Don Fabrizio says were undertaken without consultation, while his account of the officers' visit reveals the interpretive barrier between outside observers and the island's inhabitants. The episode crystallizes his pessimism: military arrival can alter who governs, but cannot by itself dislodge the pride and inertia he regards as the deeper sources of Sicilian stasis.