Page 570 - The Rough Guide of Sicily

along with Sardinia, was the only part of Italy not conquered by Napoleon, while the

Neapolitan ancien régime was further buttressed by the decision of Ferdinand
(brother-in-law of Marie Antoinette) to wage war against the revolutionary French.
He was supported in this by the British, who sustained the Bourbon state, so that when
Ferdinand and his court were forced to flee Naples in 1799, it was Nelson’s flagship
they sailed in, accompanied by the British ambassador to Naples, Sir William

Hamilton, and his wife Lady Emma. Nelson was rewarded for his services by the
endowment of a large estate at Bronte, just west of Etna.

The arrival of the British

Four years later, Ferdinand was able to return to Naples, though he had to escape
again in 1806 when Napoleon gave the Neapolitan crown to his brother Joseph. This
time he had to stay longer, remaining in Palermo until after the defeat of Napoleon in
1815 – a stay that was accompanied by a larger contingent of British troops and a

heavy involvement of British capital and commerce. Liberalism became a banner of
revolt against the king’s continuing tax demands, and Ferdinand’s autocratic reaction
provoked the British commander William Bentinck to intervene. Manoeuvring himself
into a position where he was the virtual governor of Sicily, Bentinck persuaded the
king to summon a new parliament and adopt a constitution whereby the independence
of Sicily was guaranteed and feudalism abolished.

Although this represented a drastic break with the past, the reforms had little direct
effect on the peasantry, and, following the departure of the British, the constitution was
dropped and Ferdinand (now styling himself Ferdinand I, King of the Two Sicilies)
repealed all the reforms previously introduced. Renewed talk of independence in
Sicily spilled over into action in 1820, when a rebellion was put down with the help
of Austrian mercenaries. The repression intensified after Ferdinand I’s death in 1825,

and the island’s fortunes reached a new low under Ferdinand II (1830–59), nicknamed
“Re Bomba” for his five-day bombardment of Messina following major
insurrections there and in Palermo in 1848–49. Another uprising in Palermo in 1860
proved a spur for Giuseppe Garibaldi to pick Sicily as the starting point for his
unification of Italy.

Unification

On May 11, 1860, Giuseppe Garibaldi landed at Marsala with a thousand men. A

professional soldier and one of the leading lights of Il Risorgimento, the movement
for Italian unification, Garibaldi intended to liberate the island from Bourbon rule, in
the name of the Piedmont House of Savoy. His skill in guerrilla warfare, backed by an
increasingly cooperative peasantry, ensured that the campaign progressed with