The imposition of liberalism upon Sicily seemed a good idea to Cavour and his colleagues: they were confident that everyone would benefit from a combination of free trade, representative government and anti-clerical legislation, and they were thus puzzled by the reluctance of the population to embrace it. In 1875 two perceptive young Tuscans, Sidney Sonnino and Leopoldo Franchetti, went to Sicily and afterwards explained why: Italian institutions on the island, they reported, were ‘based on a merely formal liberalism’ and had simply ‘given the oppressing class a legal means of continuing as they always’ had done. The oppressing class may have been changing, as hard-headed businessmen replaced a dwindling aristocracy, but the oppressiveness remained: as a leading Sicilian historian, Rosario Romeo, later observed, the new ruling class had simply appropriated the worst characteristics of the old.11
In 1955 an impoverished Sicilian prince, Giuseppe di Lampedusa, decided at the age of fifty-eight to forsake his idle existence and become a writer. Over the following two and a half years, before he died of lung cancer, he wrote incessantly, his production including two short stories, a memoir of his childhood and his great novel known as The Leopard or Der Leopard in German but published in Italian as Il Gattopardo (denoting a serval or ocelot though the author intended the animal to be considered a leopard) and translated as Le Guépard (a cheetah) in French and De Tijger Kat (a margay or tiger cat) in Dutch. Set in the years of the Risorgimento, with aristocratic decadence as its theme, the novel depicts a Palermitan atmosphere charged with the optimism of liberalism. One character claims that unification will bring ‘liberty, security, lighter taxes, ease, trade. Everything will be better …’ Yes, everything will be better, ‘the only ones to lose will be the priests’. But Lampedusa knew that very little had got better and that few people had won except the opportunists, the men of ‘tenacious greed and avarice’ who had made fortunes from the state’s seizure and subsequent sale of Church lands. Prince Fabrizio, the protagonist based on the author’s great-grandfather, remains undeceived by unification and the advent of liberalism. He knows that nothing much will change. The Sicilian Risorgimento would be little more than a change of dynasty (‘Torinese instead of Neapolitan dialect’) and the substitution of one class by another. All the rest would be a veneer, a superficial application of liberalism on a rough and brutal society that was plainly unready for it. In his book Lampedusa was quite charitable towards the Piedmontese in Sicily, satirizing their naivety rather than their ignorance of the south or the arrogance of their behaviour. More critical was he of the opinions and activities of his fellow islanders, although he sympathized with their anxieties about the future, about their feeling that they were a conquered people and that they would not really belong to the new state. Prince Fabrizio, like his creator, understands that antagonism towards the Bourbons had not required so drastic a remedy, that it was crazy for Sicilians to think that heavy rule from Turin would suit them better than loose control from Naples.
Sicilians and other southerners suffered a number of disadvantages, among them the ancient miseries of drought and unproductive land together with dismal transport to their potential export markets in the distant north. After unification they also had to endure the government’s ill-considered economic policies. The insistence on free trade at the time of independence had ruined heavy industry around Naples and silk and other textiles elsewhere in the south. So deluded had the government been that it thought it could inject the spirit of Manchester into southern manufacturers, men who had never been to Lancashire and had neither the capital nor the experience to adapt their industries. A generation later, the government itself repudiated the Manchester dogmas, and in 1888 the prime minister, Francesco Crispi, decided to pick a quarrel with the French by launching a tariff war so ruinous for Italy that its exports to France fell by two-thirds. Tariffs may have helped northern farmers and cereal growers in the south, who were not harvesting for export, but they were disastrous for the growers of fruit and vines. After the devastation of French vineyards by phylloxera in the years after 1875, southern Italian wine makers had invested in their businesses and had prospered with their exports. Yet they could not compete with the resurgent French vintners after the introduction of retaliatory tariffs in France. Nor were citrus growers able to export their produce when, in addition to transport costs, it was subject to import duties. The two regions most damaged by Crispi’s tariff war were Apulia and Sicily, his own island.
In the 1870s a small number of remarkable parliamentarians began to visit the south, report on its condition and propose remedies that the government should adopt. Subsequently known as meridionalisti, the first generation of these altruists included Sonnino, Franchetti and Giustino Fortunato, a liberal, enlightened but deeply pessimistic landowner from Basilicata. Their investigations were thorough and reliable, leading to devastating revelations of poverty, neglect, a dearth of public works and an almost complete absence of social, fiscal or economic justice. Perhaps they concentrated too much on the south’s most benighted areas and thus missed certain nuances that might have tempered their stark vision of the ‘two Italies’. Yet their findings were valid and their advice perceptive, and it was a tragedy for Italy that they failed to persuade governments to pursue policies that might have encouraged the south to feel it was part of the new nation.
In the Abruzzi Franchetti reported that agricultural workers were virtually slaves to the local landowners. In Sicily Sonnino concluded that the peasants were worse off than in any other part of Europe; they were even worse off than they had been before unification. Both men pointed out that liberalism was a meaningless notion in such coerced and impoverished societies; both also blamed landowners for showing such little interest in improving their land and building houses for their farmworkers. Estate owners, old and new, remained in control of enormous areas after 1860 and became even more powerful than they had been under the Bourbons. So weak was the new state in rural parts that they were effectively the government, the employers, the arbiters of justice, the selectors of members of parliament, and the providers of bridges and roads in places that suited themselves. Their position was secure because governments in Rome acquiesced in their dominance in return for their parliamentary votes. Projected reforms could thus be blocked or diluted whenever they wished.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century the wealth gap expanded in Sicily as it did in the rest of Italy and in much of Europe. In the west of the island the Florio family amassed a huge fortune from shipping, sulphur and wine; another bonanza was secured by an English family called Whitaker, whose profits from Marsala wine enabled them to build splendid villas and a palazzo in Palermo designed in Venetian Gothic. The capital’s exotic, partly eastern character attracted the royal families of northern Europe, and a procession of princes, including Kaiser Wilhelm and King Edward VII, turned up on holiday in their yachts. The society of Palermo’s Belle Epoque was no doubt frivolous, its members disporting themselves at balls and race meetings and fancy-dress parties, but it was majestic in its way, above all in scale, and glittering enough to attract the talents of Sarah Bernhardt and Giacomo Puccini. Yet its brilliance was brief, dulled by the squandering of fortunes and by the Messina earthquake of 1908, so that its style remained in the memory of its survivors as part of a transient golden age. Towards the end of his life the Duke of Verdura, who made his fortune as a jewellery designer in New York, recalled the garden parties of the epoch:
ladies in light colours with boas, veils under enormous straw hats, gentlemen with their boaters under their arms and a few cavalry officers thrown in. Lace parasols against a background of palm trees and cypresses and long tables covered with white cloths spread with pyramids of strawberries and every sort of ice-cream.12
Yet throughout the epoch Palermo remained a city of slums as well as sumptuousness. The capital and its provinces were lawless lands, places of private violence where men did not wait for justice from the state; the murder rate in Sicily was fourteen ti
mes higher than it was in Lombardy. Much of the violence was committed by the enigmatic Mafia, but a lot of it had social causes. In the 1890s there were frequent peasant riots against both the actions and the inaction of the government: against the scarcity of land, higher rents, higher food prices (a result of Crispi’s ‘corn laws’), and against unfair taxes, especially the grist tax, a symbol of repression since the rule of the Spanish. Social unrest led to the creation of a movement called the fasci, left-wing peasant leagues that encouraged strikes, the seizure of land and sometimes the burning of tax-offices. Like the fascists of the following century, they took their name from the Latin word fasces (a bundle of rods surrounding an axe and symbolizing ancient Roman authority), but the two movements had little else in common.
Crispi, who became prime minister for the second time at the end of 1893, saw the fasci as promoters of revolution. In a move that would have appalled his mentor, this former garibaldino thus declared martial law, banned the fasci, arrested their leaders and deported many of them to penal islands. Angst and memories of his radical past may have persuaded Crispi subsequently to propose a land reform that would have emasculated the latifondi, but it was sabotaged by landowners and other conservatives in parliament. This reverse marked the ultimate defeat of the south: over the next two decades millions of people from Sicily and the southern mainland gave up on Italy and emigrated to the continents of America.
Those who remained continued to feel estranged from the new state. With the south’s industry ruined, its agriculture in decline and its people so poor that many were forced to leave, what improvements were they able to see – apart from some new railways? Many southerners concluded that unification had been a mistake and, when confronted by nationalists who insisted it was their destiny, argued that at least it should have been done differently, that a federal system should have been established. Two of the greatest southern figures of the period pleaded early in the new century for such a system to be set up. Let the south grow, declared the Apulian historian Gaetano Salvemini, by letting it be autonomous of the central government. Leave us alone in the south, urged the Sicilian priest Luigi Sturzo, who became the inspiration for the future Christian Democratic Party.
Leave us in the south to govern ourselves, plan our own financial policy, spend our own taxes, take responsibility for our own public works, and find our own remedies for our difficulties … we are not schoolchildren, we have no need of the North’s concerned protection.13
In 1899 Giustino Fortunato, one of the wisest of Italian politicians, declared that it was ‘no accident that there are those who say – and I am quoting my father! – that the unification of Italy was a sin against history and geography’.14 He himself sometimes felt the same and, loyal patriot though he was, he privately admitted that unification had ruined the south and prevented its economic revival in the 1860s; for him the nation frequently seemed to be on the verge of breaking up. In the same era a gentleman from Piedmont presented the French novelist René Bazin with an intriguing image: ‘We are too long a country, signore. The head and the tail will never touch each other, but if they are made to do so, the head will bite the tail.’15
ROME AND PARLIAMENT
The new Italian capital was sometimes referred to as the Third Rome, distinguishing it from the Rome of the Caesars and the Rome of the popes. As the successor to such imposing forebears, politicians felt the need to refashion it with appropriate and equivalent splendour. Third Rome must have wide streets, imposing bridges and public buildings that were above all grandiose; it also required embankments to stop the Tiber from flooding.
Glorious as it still is, Rome lost a great deal during the transformation. Many convents and monasteries were pulled down, and old villas and gardens were flattened to make way for new development. The travel writer Augustus Hare complained in 1896 that old Rome had been ‘spoilt’, ‘destroyed’ and reduced by the Piedmontese ‘occupation’ to an ‘inferior mediocrity’.16 Some of the replacements are certainly monstrous, notably the huge Palace of Justice, a pompous and over-ornamented pile built on the banks of the river in 1893. As it was constructed without regard for the spring underneath it, subsidence in its foundations has brought it close to collapse. Another vast deformity is the Vittoriano, which commemorates the first king of united Italy and may be the largest monument to one person erected since the Great Pyramid of Giza. Often compared derisively to a wedding cake or a typewriter, it is the dominant symbol of the Third Rome. Its very position – blocking the view of Michelangelo’s palaces on the Capitoline – suggests its designers wanted themselves to be considered superior to the builders of the first and second cities. Not only is the monument bombastic and badly sited, it is also built in a material – bright white Brescian marble – that contrasts flashily with Rome’s local stone, the warm and lightly ochred travertine.
Apart from competing worthily with earlier Romes, Third Rome was intended to overshadow its rival and victim, Vatican Rome. One way of doing this was by building new streets near the papal enclave and naming them after pre-Christian Romans such as Scipio, Cicero, Pompey and the Gracchi. There is also a Piazza Cavour and a Piazza del Risorgimento, which adjoins the Vatican walls, though most martial episodes of unification (Solferino, Milazzo, Volturno etc.) are commemorated in streets further away, near the railway station.
Pope Pius IX reacted to Rome’s capture in 1870 by excommunicating ‘the sub-Alpine usurper’ (Victor Emanuel) and refusing to recognize united Italy. Yet in spite of hostile relations, the new state understood the need for Catholic support and made some early concessions in the hope of attracting it. The Law of Papal Guarantees of 1871 granted the pontiff the status of a sovereign, with foreign ambassadors accredited to him, and gave him a generous income and free ‘enjoyment’ of the Vatican. This munificence was not excessive but, even so, it may have been unwise because it permitted the formation of ‘a state within a state’, one that could denounce the larger entity with impunity for the next sixty years.
The pope, who liked to describe himself as ‘the prisoner of the Vatican’, was not mollified by the law. Still resentful of the conquest, the closure of convents and the loss of his territories, he refused to have any dealings with the government and continued to insist that he was the rightful ruler of the Papal States. His response to Italian nationalism and to much of the modern world was to lead the Church into zones of obscurantism unvisited by most of his predecessors. In 1854 he had asserted that the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception – the belief that the Virgin Mary herself was conceived without sin – had been revealed by God. Ten years later, the Syllabus of Errors had condemned eighty modern ‘errors’ and declared it impossible for the pontiff to accept ‘progress, liberalism and civilization as lately introduced’. More recently, in 1870, Pius had proclaimed the doctrine of Papal Infallibility, which asserted that the pope himself could make no errors when speaking, in his capacity as Bishop of Rome, on matters of faith and morals. Yet he and his four successors were curiously reluctant to exercise the power he had insisted upon. No pope claimed infallibility until 1950, when Pius XII declared that ‘the ever Virgin Mary’ had been ‘assumed in body and soul to heavenly glory’.
In 1864 the longest-serving of all popes had told Italian Catholics it was ‘not expedient’ to vote in parliamentary elections, a position he reiterated after the fall of Rome and one which was strengthened by his successor, Leo XIII, who in 1881 forbade any members of his flock to stand for parliament or vote in national elections. Not until the following century did a pope publish an encyclical allowing Catholics to vote in order to preserve social stability – that is, to prevent the emerging Socialist Party from dominating the country’s politics.
Many Catholics entitled to vote did so anyway, despite the papal pronouncements. All the same, the Vatican’s refusal to recognize the Italian state was fatal to the cohesion and consolidation of the new nation. Catholicism was the one thing shared by nearly all Italians, and the papacy was t
he only institution in the country that could claim both longevity and continuity. Pius could have been a unifier yet decided alas to be a disruptor. His outrage and hostility encouraged many people to question the legitimacy of the new state and thus weakened the loyalty of millions of its citizens. An alliance of nationalism and Catholicism could have made a powerful force, as it did in Ireland, Spain and Poland. Instead, the animosity between them within Italy led to a divide in an already fractured country that lasted until Mussolini’s Lateran Treaty of 1929. Devout Catholics were unable to play a commanding role in Italian politics until a christian democrat became prime minister after the Second World War.
The parliament of united Italy, chosen by an electorate of under half a million people,† had not begun auspiciously in Turin or improved much during its few years in Florence. Cavour’s predominance in the 1850s may have obscured the innate instability of a system that gave too much power to a capricious monarch: the new kingdom had six prime ministers in its first three and a half years. In Rome the turnover of governments slowed down for a while before speeding up again and carrying on at a similar pace (except under Mussolini) until the beginning of the twenty-first century. As for the Chamber of Deputies, housed in the huge but unlovely Palazzo Montecitorio, this institution never succeeded in becoming a focus of national pride or a repository of the people’s trust. Some of the blame for this situation should be assigned to Victor Emanuel, who despised parliament and told Lanza, one of his best prime ministers, that it had no business to discuss matters of high policy.
The Pursuit of Italy Page 31