Unification of Italy

Unification of Italy ended the Bourbon Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and joined most of the peninsula in a single kingdom, but the novel presents that achievement as both a revolutionary transformation and an uneasy political accommodation. Giuseppe Garibaldi’s victories helped bring down the old regime; the later intervention against him by the new state’s own troops showed how quickly the cause of unity could require the containment of its most celebrated liberator.

Background and the weakening of Bourbon rule

When the novel opens, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies is approaching its end. Ferdinand II has just died, and the book’s historical frame sets the impending change against the prospect of a peninsula united in one state for the first time since the fall of the Roman Empire. Unification is not presented as a sudden turn: the Italian unification movement had gathered force after the Napoleonic Wars, when Austria occupied the north, and had already reached a crisis in 1848.

Leadership had shifted principally to Piedmont, the Kingdom of Sardinia, ruled from Turin by Victor Emmanuel II, with Cavour as prime minister. This concentration of political leadership matters to the shape of the transition: national unification is pursued not only by popular revolutionaries but also through the authority and institutions of an existing monarchy. The movement’s aims thus bring together forces that do not share the same methods or political expectations.

Garibaldi’s campaign in the south

In early May 1860, acting against Cavour’s wishes, Garibaldi sailed from near Genoa with a thousand volunteers for Sicily. The Garibaldini landed at Marsala and defeated Bourbon troops at Calatafimi. Within three weeks they had occupied Palermo. The speed of the campaign gave the expedition an extraordinary momentum: Garibaldi, hailed as dictator of Sicily, gathered further volunteers, crossed to the mainland, advanced up the coast, and entered Naples in triumph.

The campaign did not by itself settle the peninsula’s political future. In the autumn, Bourbon armies were defeated on the Volturno, while Piedmontese forces besieged Francis II in Gaeta. Garibaldi then handed southern Italy over to Victor Emmanuel II and withdrew from public life. The transfer marked the passage from a volunteer-led conquest to the authority of the monarchy: the revolutionary gains were incorporated into a larger state, but the man who had won them did not become its ruler.

Plebiscites and the unfinished settlement

Plebiscites were held across the peninsula, and every state agreed to join the new Kingdom of Italy except the Papal States. Those remained outside the union while troops of Napoleon III occupied them for reasons of French domestic politics. The political map was therefore transformed without being immediately completed. The declaration of Rome as the capital in 1870 would become the official culmination of the movement, but the intervening years included a sharp conflict between Garibaldi’s revolutionary aims and the government that had inherited the results of his southern campaign.

The novel also makes the language of national achievement sit beside the practical fragility of the new state. At a later gathering, Don Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina, hears Colonel Pallavicino praised for his conduct at Aspromonte. The praise carries more than social meaning: Pallavicino’s action had helped preserve a compromise between the old order and the new. The scene brings the political settlement into the room as a memory that the assembled aristocrats can admire, interpret, and turn into a display of manners.

Aspromonte and the containment of revolution

In 1862 Garibaldi tried to force the unresolved Roman question by marching on Rome. On the slopes of Aspromonte in Calabria, Piedmontese troops routed his men and wounded him. This was not simply an encounter between the new government and an external enemy. The troops belonged to the political order created by unification, and their action ended the revolutionary phase of the movement even as it prevented Garibaldi from pursuing his own route to Rome.

Pallavicino’s account complicates the public image of the clash. He explains that he had written orders to open fire, but says the danger of French and Austrian intervention and the possible collapse of the Kingdom of Italy weighed on the decision. He also considers the followers surrounding Garibaldi a threat to the new state and to Garibaldi himself. In his interpretation, the shots helped free the general from followers whose purposes he regarded as inept, and Garibaldi’s private thanks afterward suggested that he understood the intervention in that light. The episode therefore reverses the expected roles: a royal officer wounds and captures the revolutionary hero, yet presents the act as a service to the unity Garibaldi had helped achieve.

The new kingdom and its unsettled future

Pallavicino’s reflections at the gathering extend the conflict beyond the battlefield. He describes a country more divided after reunification: Turin resists losing its position as capital, Milan considers the administration inferior to Austrian rule, Florence fears for its works of art, and Naples laments the loss of its industries. In Sicily, he anticipates the return of red-shirt movements and the recurrence of unrest under different banners. His anxieties make the national settlement look less like the resolution of division than its reorganization under a new name and government.

The novel’s account of the aftermath also places political modernization beside its visible limits. At Donnafugata, the palace continues to dominate a landscape of severe poverty. Under Don Calogero Sedàra’s modernizing administration as deputy and mayor, foundation stones are laid for schools and public proclamations promise sewers; the account distinguishes those gestures from completed improvements. The juxtaposition gives the new political order a local, material scale: official change reaches the commune, but its benefits remain uncertain even as the old aristocratic setting endures.

Unification consequently remains double-edged in the novel. It brings down the Bourbon state and establishes a national kingdom, yet its revolutionary energy is checked by the government formed in its wake, its territorial settlement is initially incomplete, and its promise of cohesion is shadowed by regional grievances. The eventual declaration of Rome as capital supplies an official endpoint; the remembered violence at Aspromonte and the later predictions of renewed unrest keep that endpoint from seeming like a final resolution.