Italian unification (Risorgimento)

Italian unification (Risorgimento) is the political threshold around which the novel tests whether a change of sovereignty can also change a society. The union brings new institutions, public ceremonies, and opportunities for advancement, but the story repeatedly shows old and new elites adjusting to one another rather than simply exchanging places. In the Prince’s view, Sicily’s enduring habits of pride and political passivity limit the force of reform; in the fortunes of Don Calogero Sedàra and Tancredi Falconeri, the new order nonetheless creates routes into power. The resulting history is neither stasis without change nor uncomplicated progress, but a transformation that preserves much of what it appears to replace.

Political Change and Social Accommodation

Early in the upheaval, Don Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina, interprets the local liberal movement through a conversation with Don Pietro Russo. Russo predicts trouble but reassures him that the estate will be safe and that the Piedmontese will pay their respects. He presents the Prince’s connection to Tancredi as another source of protection. The reassurance diminishes the Prince: he feels reduced to someone sheltered by Russo’s friends and valued chiefly as Tancredi’s uncle. His response registers the instability of inherited rank even before political power has formally changed hands.

A further remark from Russo brings the Prince a different kind of reassurance. He concludes that the local liberals chiefly want opportunities to improve their own position, and that most things will remain as they were. The Prince imagines the change as a gradual circulation of classes: the new men may take the old family’s place, and the families may be joined through marriage, while the Salina name survives. The courtly insignia of the old regime may be put away or become museum pieces, but the family might receive new recognition in the institutions of the emerging state. His thought is not that nothing will happen; rather, change may be managed so that the existing social order absorbs its challengers.

Don Onofrio Rotolo’s account of Don Calogero makes that adjustment concrete. A loan of a thousand ounces of gold enabled Calogero to acquire an estate yielding five hundred ounces a year after a mortgage fell due. He also bought land containing a valuable vein of stone and profited from grain sales during the disruption and famine following the landings. Rotolo reckons that Calogero’s income at Donnafugata will soon equal the Prince’s. Wealth is accompanied by political influence: Calogero leads the liberals in the town and surrounding districts and expects election to the assembly in Turin. The Prince recognizes that a change has occurred, but it is embodied less in abstract national ideals than in the rise of a local property-holder whose resources now rival his own.

The Donnafugata Plebiscite

The plebiscite brings the new national reality into the town’s public life. On Mount Morco, the Prince’s view of ants marching toward scraps of food recalls the recent voting at Donnafugata. That small natural scene leads him to reconsider a civic result that had seemed simple. Before the vote, he had sincerely advised people who came to him to vote yes, believing that acceptance of the new order was either necessary or the least dangerous course. Yet he had also noticed that some visitors did not take his advice at face value. They suspected irony, or took his support for the change as proof that he had become a turncoat or a fool. His counsel therefore entered a political culture in which words could be treated as clues to an opposite meaning.

The Prince had estimated that the affirmative result would be qualified by roughly forty negative votes. He had reasons to expect resistance among townspeople attached to the former regime, opposed for religious or personal reasons, or disadvantaged by the recent upheavals. Yet the official announcement reported 515 voters, 512 votes cast, 512 yes votes, and no no votes. The striking absence of dissent makes the result more than a measure of public opinion: it becomes a measure of how little the recorded total can explain about private convictions. The Prince’s earlier uncertainty is not resolved by the numbers; the numbers deepen it.

The day’s public signs sharpen this contrast. Groups of youths carry yes slips in their hats and sing La Bella Gigugin, while visitors from Girgenti proclaim the prospects of a renewed Sicily united with Italy. Local peasants listen without joining in. The Prince himself goes to vote at about four in the afternoon, accompanied by Father Pirrone and Don Onofrio Rotolo, wearing the black frock-coat he had worn two years earlier when paying his respects to King Ferdinand. The old garment links the ceremony of political transfer to the monarchy that the vote is meant to supersede.

After the booths close, Don Calogero announces the unanimous result from the Town Hall balcony. The public celebration includes applause, speeches, fireworks, and messages sent to the new King and to the General; Angelica Sedàra claps from her balcony. The scene gives the plebiscite a ceremonial ending, but the Prince’s response is inward and unsettled. He feels that someone or something has died in the popular conscience, although he cannot identify the loss. Italy is born at Donnafugata as well as in the larger cities, in his reckoning, but national birth does not guarantee that the new political life will be better in every possible form.

Sicily and the Limits of Reform

When Cavaliere Aimone Chevalley di Monterzuolo later explains that the Government in Turin hopes to nominate the Prince to the Senate, he presents unification as an institutional opening. The proposed senators are to be notable Sicilians, and the Prince’s antiquity, scientific distinction, prestige, and conduct during recent events have made him a candidate. The offer would place a representative of the old aristocracy inside the institutions of the new state. The Prince refuses the invitation, describing himself as ill at ease between the old and new worlds and unsuited to legislative work. In his judgment, political leadership now belongs to younger men who understand practical advancement and can present private interests in the language of public ideals.

Instead of consenting, he recommends Don Calogero Sedàra. The recommendation recognizes a transfer of political usefulness: Calogero has power and practical ability, and his actions during the May crisis have been useful to the authorities. The Prince also warns that Calogero may soon seek election to the Chamber of Deputies. The prediction proves apt: ten years later, Calogero does enter the Senate. The Prince’s refusal therefore does not halt the new order. It helps identify the kind of figure whom that order is prepared to elevate.

In explaining his refusal, the Prince offers Chevalley a broader account of Sicily. He argues that Sicilians regard themselves as already perfect, and that their vanity can outweigh their misery. Outsiders who try to direct the island into universal history threaten this self-image and its settled expectation of waiting. He recalls successive rulers and reformers, from Muslim imams and King Roger’s knights to later officials, as evidence that ambitious attempts to guide Sicily have repeatedly met the same resistance. In this account, foreign domination does not automatically produce reform: the island’s own sense of superiority turns pride into blindness and makes political intervention difficult to sustain.

This speech is the Prince’s interpretation, not a neutral verdict on every Sicilian. Its force lies in the tension between his broad diagnosis and the particular evidence of change around him. Calogero has acquired wealth and influence; new public institutions are being established; and the Prince himself has been invited to serve the state. Yet he believes that these changes cannot by themselves overcome the social habits that have repeatedly frustrated reform. His refusal is thus both a personal withdrawal from politics and an argument about the limits of political power.

Marriage, Money, and the New Elite

The engagement of Tancredi and Angelica Sedàra shows how unification’s changing social order is reinforced through private arrangements. When Don Calogero sets out the terms, he promises Angelica an estate of 644 salmi, or 1,010 hectares, at Settesoli, olive groves and vineyards at Gibildolce, and twenty linen sacks containing 10,000 ounces of gold each for the bridegroom on the wedding day. He presents the transfer as a father’s provision for his only child, but the scale and precision of the settlement reveal the financial basis of the match. The Prince sees that Tancredi’s prospects are larger than he had imagined; the alliance joins the old family’s standing to the new family’s resources.

After Tancredi and Angelica marry and travel through Europe, the same exchange becomes visible in the restoration of Villa Falconeri. Don Fabrizio oversees the work and Don Calogero finances it. The house’s furnishings do not conceal its ancient proportions, but the improvements help remove the threat of heirs and bailiffs that had hung over the property. Tancredi’s energy and new funds make him useful in political settings, where he works in a shifting area between opposing political positions and masks intense activity with apparent levity. The marriage does not simply admit new wealth into an old family: it gives that wealth access to an established name and gives Tancredi resources for political advancement.

Unification as Threshold and Continuity

The novel’s later view of Tancredi’s career confirms that the accommodation between old status and new power continues beyond the initial ceremonies. Still too young for a particular government office after his marriage, he nevertheless becomes influential through his money, energy, and political maneuvering. The elite is changing in its personnel and methods, even as family prestige and social performance remain valuable. This development echoes the Prince’s earlier expectation that a new class might take the place of the old without dismantling its forms of distinction.

Italian unification (Risorgimento) therefore functions as both historical rupture and mechanism of continuity. The plebiscite gives the national transformation a precise public form, yet its unanimous figures leave the Prince unsure what the population actually believes. The Senate offer confirms that the new state wants the cooperation of established figures, while the Prince’s recommendation of Calogero anticipates the rise of a different political type. Marriage, property, and political ambition bind the two groups together. The resulting order is changed, but not remade from first principles: in the novel’s account, unification opens new paths to power while Sicily’s ingrained habits and the social value of inherited prestige continue to shape where those paths lead.