Sicily is a crucial link in Casper Gutman’s account of the Maltese Falcon’s long and disputed journey. Though the bird’s route to the island is uncertain, Gutman presents its Sicilian presence as fact and makes the island the setting for its transition into the possession of Victor Amadeus II.

Place in the Falcon’s History

Gutman’s account first connects the bird to Sir Francis Verney, an English adventurer associated with the Algerian buccaneers. He acknowledges that Verney’s family memoirs say nothing about the bird, and that Verney was apparently penniless when he died in a Messina hospital in 1615. Those details make Verney’s possession difficult to establish; nevertheless, Gutman maintains that the Falcon went to Sicily.

Victor Amadeus II

In Gutman’s chronology, the bird was in Sicily before it came into the possession of Victor Amadeus II, sometime after he became king in 1713. Gutman invokes the historian Carutti, author of Storia del Regno di Vittorio Amadeo II, as authority for the claim that Victor Amadeus possessed the bird and gave it to his wife when they married in Chambéry after his abdication. The account thus links Sicily not only to the Falcon’s passage but to its emergence as a dynastic possession.

A Route Still Uncertain

Gutman allows that Victor Amadeus and his wife may have taken the bird to Turin when he attempted to revoke his abdication, but presents this as a possibility rather than a settled fact. The distinction matters within his larger narrative: Sicily is asserted as a definite stage, while the bird’s subsequent movements remain partly conjectural. From there, Gutman traces it to a Spaniard connected with the army that took Naples in 1734, beginning another stretch of the Falcon’s history whose links depend on reported ownership and inference.