Page 571 - The Rough Guide of Sicily

astonishing speed. Four days after disembarking, he defeated 15,000 Bourbon troops

at Calatafimi, closely followed by an almost effortless occupation of Palermo. A
battle at Milazzo in July decided the issue: apart from Messina (which held out for
another year), Sicily was free of Spain for the first time since Peter of Aragon
acquired the crown in 1282.

A plebiscite was held in October, which returned a 99.5 percent majority in favour

of union with the new kingdom of Italy under Vittorio Emanuele II. The result,
greeted by general euphoria, marked the official annexation of the island to the
Kingdom of Savoy. Later, however, many began to question whether anything had been
achieved by this change of ruler. The new parliamentary system, in which only one

percent of the island’s population was eligible to vote, made few improvements for
the majority of people. Attempts at opposition were met with ruthless force,
sanctioned by a distant and misinformed government convinced that the island’s
problems were fundamentally those of law and order. Sicilians responded with their
traditional defence of omertà, or silent non-cooperation, along with a growing
resentment of the new Turin government (transferred to Rome in 1870) that was even

stronger than their distrust of the more familiar Spanish Bourbons.

The “southern problem”

A series of reports made in response to criticism of the Italian government’s failure to
solve what was becoming known as the “southern problem” found that the lot of the

Sicilian peasant was, if anything, worse after Unification than it had been under the
Bourbons. Power had shifted away from the landed gentry to the gabellotti, the
middlemen to whom they leased the land. These men became increasingly linked with
the Mafia, a shadowy, loose-knit criminal association that found it easy to manipulate
voting procedures, while simultaneously posing as defenders of the people. At the end
of the nineteenth century a new, more organized opposition appeared on the scene in

the form of fasci – embryonic trade-union groups demanding legislation to protect
peasants’ interests. Violence erupted and the Italian prime minister, Francesco Crispi
– a native Sicilian who had been one of the pioneers of the Risorgimento – dispatched
a fleet and 30,000 soldiers to put down the “revolt”, while also closing newspapers,
censoring postal services and detaining suspects without trial.

Although there were later signs of progress, in the formation of worker cooperatives

and in the enlightened land-reform programmes of individuals such as Don Sturzo,
mayor of Caltagirone, the overwhelming despair of the peasantry was expressed in
mass emigration. One and a half million Sicilians decided to leave in the years
leading up to 1914, most going to North and South America. Many had been left

homeless in the wake of the great Messina earthquake of 1908, in which upwards of