Risorgimento

The Risorgimento is the movement for Italian unification that frames the novel’s passage from Bourbon rule to a new kingdom. Its military campaigns and plebiscites redraw the political map, but the Sicilian story measures change in more intimate terms: who gains land, influence, and office, and how those gains are made compatible with old forms of privilege. The movement ends one state and establishes another; within the novel, however, political revolution and social transformation do not proceed at the same speed.

Origins and the struggle for unification

The movement had gathered strength after the Napoleonic Wars, when Austria occupied northern Italy, and had already reached a major crisis in 1848. By 1860 its leadership lay chiefly with Piedmont, the Kingdom of Sardinia, ruled from Turin by Victor Emmanuel II, with Cavour as prime minister. The novel’s opening situates the action at the end of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies: Ferdinand II has died, and the old Bourbon order is approaching its collapse.

In early May 1860, Giuseppe Garibaldi sailed from near Genoa with a thousand volunteers, acting against Cavour’s wishes. The expedition landed at Marsala, defeated Bourbon troops at Calatafimi, and occupied Palermo within three weeks. Hailed as dictator of Sicily, Garibaldi gathered further volunteers, crossed to the mainland, and entered Naples. In the autumn, Bourbon forces were defeated on the Volturno, and the Piedmontese besieged Francis II at Gaeta. Garibaldi then handed southern Italy to Victor Emmanuel II and withdrew from public life. These events give the movement a swift military arc, but they also leave open the question that preoccupies the Sicilian characters: what, in daily life and in the distribution of power, will actually change?

Revolution as a change of occupants

Don Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina, reads the upheaval through local relationships rather than revolutionary slogans. Don Ciccio Tumeo’s fears for the young men going to war strike him as misplaced; he expects limited fighting followed by arrangements that leave much of society recognizable. His encounter with Russo, an ambitious dependent who favors the new order, sharpens that judgment. Russo speaks of liberty, security, lighter taxes, and opportunity, but is also maneuvering to purchase the Argivocale estate. The Prince recognizes that Russo’s political enthusiasm accompanies private economic ambition.

Russo’s reassurance that the rest will remain as before becomes, in the Prince’s interpretation, the key to the transition. The old elite will not necessarily be destroyed; instead, people with money and local influence will take its place, and the boundary between classes may become less visible as newcomers acquire titles and social connections. The Prince imagines his own ceremonial objects eventually displayed as heirlooms in another family’s house, while the Salina name survives. His reading is not that nothing happens, but that change can rearrange power while preserving recognizable habits and symbols.

The rise of Don Calogero Sedàra gives this process material form. A loan of a thousand ounces of gold enabled him to acquire an estate yielding five hundred ounces a year; he also bought land containing valuable stone and profited from grain sales during the confusion and famine after the landings. His income at Donnafugata was soon expected to rival the Prince’s, and he had become head of the local liberals, with prospects of election to Turin. The steward’s account makes political change legible as property and influence accumulating in new hands.

The plebiscite and the limits of political voice

The plebiscite at Donnafugata turns national incorporation into a local performance. Don Fabrizio walks to the Town Hall with Father Pirrone and Don Onofrio Rotolo, wearing the black frock coat in which he had visited Ferdinand II two years earlier. He submits a yes vote to Don Calogero. The Prince’s participation places him inside the new political procedure even as his thoughts remain divided about the old king and the meaning of the transition.

The announced result is exact and absolute: 515 voters, 512 voting, 512 yes votes, and no no votes. Yet the scene also registers who is missing from the formal expression of consent. Women are excluded from voting; several women appear in the square wearing tricolour ribbons in protest, are jeered at, and are forced away. A newspaper later reports their demonstration as warmly acclaimed, turning their exclusion into a story of patriotic approval. The contrast between the recorded unanimity and the silenced protest makes the plebiscite both an act of national incorporation and a compromised measure of public will.

Marriage, office, and the new elite

The alliance between Tancredi Falconeri and Angelica Sedàra shows how revolutionary change enters the aristocratic household through marriage and money. Don Fabrizio presents Tancredi to Don Calogero as ambitious, perceptive, and able to understand the times. Don Calogero responds with a detailed settlement: land at Settesoli, olive groves and vineyards at Gibildolce, and twenty sacks containing 10,000 ounces of gold each for the bridegroom. The scale of the offer astonishes the Prince, but Angelica’s beauty and Tancredi’s charm soften, without erasing, the financial calculation. The marriage joins old status to new wealth, rather than simply replacing one with the other.

The alliance continues in material and political life. Don Fabrizio oversees extensive restoration at Villa Falconeri, financed by Don Calogero; the work makes the estate habitable and relieves it of the threat of creditors and heirs. Tancredi, supplied with fresh funds, becomes influential while masking energetic political activity beneath an air of levity. Later, when Cavaliere Aimone Chevalley di Monterzuolo declines a Senate nomination, Don Fabrizio recommends Don Calogero instead. He argues that Sedàra possesses practical power, political usefulness, and the capacity to create public illusions. Chevalley remains silent, but the narrative notes that Don Calogero does enter the Senate ten years later. The new order’s route into high office runs through wealth, local authority, and adaptation as much as through revolutionary conviction.

Aftermath and historical memory

The formal revolutionary phase ends after Italian government forces rout Giuseppe Garibaldi’s attempt to march on Rome in 1862. The unification process culminates officially in 1870, when Rome is declared the capital of Italy. The novel’s account thus distinguishes the end of armed revolution from the completion of the national settlement.

The movement remains present decades later as memory and ceremony. At the preparations for the fiftieth anniversary of the Expedition of the Thousand, Angelica Sedàra—now a widow and nearly seventy—helps organize celebrations honoring Tancredi’s memory. She arranges for Fabrizio, her nephew, to march beneath a placard bearing the Salina name, and invites Concetta Salina to the reviewing stand. The planned procession is described as a joining of old and new in Sicily: a Salina paying homage to Garibaldi. Tancredi’s past in the movement, including the soldiers’ recollections of camping on the Volturno and around besieged Gaeta, gives the commemoration a personal as well as national history.

Across these episodes, the Risorgimento is neither dismissed as an illusion nor presented as a complete social break. It ends Bourbon sovereignty, creates a unified political framework, and supplies new occasions for public participation and remembrance. At the same time, the story follows how land, marriage, political office, and inherited names mediate its effects. Its central tension is between the scale of national transformation and the persistence of local power: the map changes decisively, while the social order absorbs that change by admitting new people into old forms.