SICILY

For Sicily, the experience of modernization was a complex and contentious experience. The Risorgimento in Sicily was characterized first by the old noble elite's struggle for autonomy from the Bourbon government in Naples, a struggle inspired in part by that government's attempt after 1815 to centralize, modernize, and generally improve the island's administration. Inevitably, this attempt threatened the traditional autonomy of the old elite and increased their resentment at, and opposition to, rule from Naples. Thus, the nobility's participation in the Sicilian Risorgimento was in many ways a defensive and conservative strategy. At the same time, however, a newly independent and sometimes conflicting movement emerged among less traditional groups demanding progressive and liberal reforms linked to similar liberal groups in Naples and elsewhere on the Italian peninsula. Finally, the island's politics also included revolutionary and conspiratorial groups. Some of these were inspired by Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–1872) and sought to establish a national unitary republic for the whole Italian peninsula, including Sicily. Others opposed Mazzini's leadership, and some were clearly socialist and anarchist. These political divisions were made more complicated by substantial regional differences, above all by a split between western Sicily (dominated by Palermo and by the autonomist movement) and eastern Sicily (centered on Messina and, increasingly, Catania, and more liberal), by the differences between these large coastal cities and the isolated villages of the interior and in the south of the island. While these disagreements provoked some of the most vibrant political and cultural debates in all of Risorgimento Italy, this lack of unity weakened the political effectiveness of opposition movements in Sicily.

This difficult political situation persisted after national unification in 1860–1861. Giuseppe Garibaldi's (1807–1882) famous invasion of Sicily with a thousand volunteers ("i mille") in the spring of 1860 was successful in overthrowing Bourbon rule in the island, and by the autumn in the whole of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies as well. By claiming Sicily for "Italy and Victor Emmanuel," he also endorsed a unitary solution, while helping to exclude the Mazzinians. None of this, however, did anything to resolve the political divisions within Sicily and these divisions, as before, undermined the ability of Sicily's political leaders to speak for or defend the island's interests within the new Italian kingdom.

economy and society

Sicily's economic problems were in part those of uneven economic development. These were, in turn, a product of the great physical variations within this small island and the difficulty of establishing effective internal communications. During the nineteenth century the market-gardening regions of the plain of Catania and the north and west coasts, producing citrus fruits, vines, and olives, saw a rapid commercialization that was linked to foreign demand and foreign investment. By contrast, the vast cereal-growing estates (latifondi) of the Sicilian uplands and interior saw little or no commercialization, and the growing problem of soil exhaustion and erosion probably led to a decline in yields. In this way, economic growth in the nineteenth century reinforced the existing distinction between the relative wealth and sophistication of the plains, foothills, and cities of the coastal regions and the barren arid uplands of the interior. Moreover, the potential wealth offered by the development of sulfur mining in the interior (and Sicily had a virtual world monopoly in this period) was never realized. The mines were exploited by foreigners (largely the English), who used the political weight of their governments to frustrate attempts to refine the sulfur in Sicily and instead exported it in a crude state, with more profit to themselves. The land around the sulfur mines was also devastated by pollution, thus increasing the scarcity of productive land in the interior.

To these economic problems was added the extreme poverty of the population. Although the Bourbon government had tried to improve the lot of the Sicilian peasantry, through education and especially through land reform, these reforms failed and may well have been counterproductive. Land reform (essentially an attempt to redistribute some of the nobility's vast landholdings and to parcel out former common land among the peasantry) probably increased land hunger. In the event, much of the land that was made available was taken over by a new gentry or middle class and they proved, if anything, less entrepreneurial and more exploitative than their noble predecessors. The desperate state of the Sicilian peasantry was then exacerbated by rapid population growth, which increased pressure on the land.

John Goodwin, the British consul at Palermo in the early nineteenth century, translated the following description of the peasants "up country" by his friend, Francesco Ferrara:

three fourths of the peasants, sallow, sickly and deformed, vegetate rather than live. Born to no other ends but to moisten the clods with the sweat of their brows, they feed upon herbs, clothe themselves in rags, and sleep huddled up together in smoky huts, amidst the stench of a dunghill. In winter they are shivering with cold; in summer they are burning with fever.

From a mood of relative acquiescence in the eighteenth century, the largely landless Sicilian peasants became, in the nineteenth, increasingly angry and rebellious. A great deal of their resentment was focused on land, on bad land which was rented out to them at high prices by unscrupulous landlords, and on land which had once been "common" and was now "usurped" (illegally seized and enclosed) by the same people. There was also growing discontent at the system of contracts and loans that were so designed to keep them permanently in debt to the landlord. The result was an explosion of violence in the Sicilian countryside, with the growth of banditry, land seizures, and destruction of property and, during the political revolutions of 1820, 1848–1849, and 1860, murderous assaults on the landlords and their representatives. Thus, to the political conflicts and economic difficulties of Risorgimento Sicily must be added the grave and growing problem of social unrest and crime.

continuity and change

Through its revolution in 1860 and Garibaldi's successful invasion, Sicily had played a crucial role in the unification of Italy. Thereafter, Sicily's new political rulers—mostly moderate liberals from northern and central Italy—were confident that they would be able to resolve the political, economic, and social problems that beset this part of their kingdom. However, few of them knew anything about the Italy south of Rome, and fewer still had ever been there. While those who ventured south after 1860 were pleased by a seemingly eternal summer and by the beauty of the landscape, they were also shocked by an encounter with an alien culture and language. This sense of difference was reinforced by outbreaks of peasant violence and crime and by a series of popular revolts in Sicily, notably the Palermo revolt of 1866. In the

years after unification the Italian south as a whole failed to develop economically at the same speed as parts of the north. Government reports from Sicily to the capital spoke of the "exceptional criminal tendencies" and "barbarism" of the local inhabitants. The situation in Sicily, according to one general, "was really something out of the Middle Ages"; both Sicily and the southern mainland were compared disparagingly to Africa and the rural poor to Bedouins. In this way, a distinctly racial edge crept into official discourse on the South, where it has remained—more or less hidden—ever since.

Italian unification accentuated southern Italy's internal divisions and made any kind of generalization more problematic than before. To Sicily, Italian unification brought greater administrative centralization, bigger police forces, better education, infrastructural improvements, free trade, and increased political representation. These changes affected the different regions and social classes of Sicily in different ways. Sicilian deputies were elected to a new national parliament, but the electorate was only 2 percent of the total population. Palermo suffered economically from a further loss of its administrative responsibility but Catania benefited greatly from the introduction of free trade and the construction of railways. In general, the areas of the economy based on export (market gardening and sulfur mining) expanded, while free trade damaged Sicily's grain producers. The nobility, for the most part, gradually ceded their position of political (if not cultural) predominance; a commercial trading elite became more powerful in cities like Catania, Messina, and Trapani; while the new rural middle-classes acquired still more land, this time from the church, and took hold of local government, using its responsibilities for public works, policing, and taxation to create an intricate web of patronage and clientelism in their communities. The peasants were left no better off than before, and indeed had new demands made on them through military conscription and increased taxation.

making italians?

From 1860 onward the Sicilian countryside was the scene of repeated cycles of revolt and repression. Between 1862 and 1868 the government organized six large-scale military operations to restore law and order, to enforce conscription and the payment of taxes, and to capture bandits and military deserters. Yet these operations were a failure and were marked by a refusal of the population to cooperate with the military. By the early 1870s crime and disorder reemerged once again. During the 1890s, amid widespread political and social chaos, Sicilian peasants formed agricultural unions (fasci) and began to win concessions from their landlords. However, the prime minister of Italy, Francesco Crispi (1819–1901), himself a Sicilian and an ex-revolutionary, saw the peasant unions as a threat to the government's alliance with the landlords. The unions were broken up and repressed with military force. Partly as a result of this failure, the Sicilian peasantry began to leave the land and to seek new ways of sustaining their families through emigration overseas.

In the early 1860s, moreover, the government found a new way of explaining and resolving the crisis in Sicily. In a letter of 1865, the prefect of Palermo claimed to have uncovered a conspiracy between political extremists and professional criminals. It was, he argued, this "so-called mafia"—an organization with its own laws, customs, and codes of behavior—that was responsible for the failure of government policy. Initially, this discovery helped justify government repression. Fairly soon, however, the government was to find an even better use for the criminals. From the late 1860s onward, the Palermo police began to use them as "middlemen," as a locally effective means of containing crime and maintaining order. After a change of government in 1876 (the "parliamentary revolution," whereby the Left came to power in Italy), the mafia emerged as a permanent shadow over public life in Sicily. The mafia assumed responsibility for negotiating compliance with government orders and for ensuring the success of government candidates in local elections, and they became involved in commercial activities as well, such as organizing labor markets and so on. Organized crime also provided a crucial link in the web of corruption and clientelism that increasingly characterized politics in Sicily, which tied this area of the Italian periphery to the central government in Rome. The mafia also came to dominate the public's perception of Sicily and its problems. Yet the origins of the mafia were largely political; they are to be found in the complex struggles of nineteenth-century Sicily and in the failure of liberal policy in the 1860s.

See alsoCrispi, Francesco; Emigration; Garibaldi, Giuseppe; Italy; Kingdom of the Two Sicilies; Mafia; Naples; Sicilian Fasci.

bibliography

Aymard, Maurice, and Giuseppe Giarrizzo, eds. La Sicilia. Turin, 1987.

Blok, Anton. The Mafia of a Sicilian Village, 1860–1960: A Study of Violent Peasant Entrepreneurs. Oxford, U.K., 1974.

Fiume, Giovanna. "Bandits, Violence and the Organization of Power in Sicily in the Early Nineteenth Century." In Society and Politics in the Age of the Risorgimento. Essays in Honour of Denis Mack Smith, edited by John A. Davis and Paul Ginsborg. Cambridge, U.K., 1991.

Smith, Denis Mack. A History of Sicily: Modern Sicily after 1713. London, 1968.

Riall, Lucy. Sicily and the Unification of Italy: Liberal Policy and Local Power, 1859–1866. Oxford, U.K., and New York, 1998.

——. "Elites in Search of Authority: Political Power and Social Order in Nineteenth-Century Sicily." History Workshop Journal 55 (2003): 25–46.

Lucy Riall