Part XIII
54
To many it was as if the kingdom had disintegrated with Ferdinand II.
Sir Harold Acton, “The Last Bourbons of Naples”
KING FERDINAND OF THE TWO SICILIES died on 22 May, 1859, two months after his last visit to Bari. His death paved the way for the Risorgimento: the unification of Italy. Nowhere would he be more regretted than in Apulia where, like the Emperor Frederick and King Manfred, he had hunted in the forests. If he did not build castles, he keenly encouraged New Bari’s development, besides giving Apulian titles to three of his sons, the Counts of Bari, Trani and Lucera.
Nicknamed ‘Bomba’ for supposedly threatening to shell rebels into submission, a lie spread by enemies, Ferdinand was hated by liberals. He kept the absolute monarchy he had inherited, imprisoning his opponents. Mr Gladstone described his government as “the negation of God”, conveniently ignoring England’s own prison-hulks and record in Ireland. Yet no Southern ruler has been more popular. A big, bluff, virile man, he was a type whom the Mezzogiorno (southern Italians) understood, the perennial ‘capo’ or boss, constantly sticking cigars into deserving mouths. A Southerner to his fingertips, who spoke and thought in Neapolitan dialect, and whose staple diet was pasta, he always listened to petitions, granting generous pensions. If he was superstitious, making St Ignatius a field-marshal on full pay, so were his subjects.
Under his firm rule, the South prospered. Despite lower taxes than other Italian states, it had more money in circulation than any, with the biggest gold reserves; 443 million in gold lire in 1859 compared with Piedmont’s 27 million. In the same year the Royal Navy of the Two Sicilies included ninety-five steam ships, far more than Britain’s Royal navy, though admittedly most of them were tiny. His government built the first Italian railways, steamships, electric telegraph and lenticular lighthouse. Dockyards at Naples and Bari were the most modern in the peninsula. So were the new roads. “Anybody who avoided subversive politics enjoyed complete freedom and could do what he liked”, Giacinto De Sivo wrote in 1868. “Countless foreigners prospered so much that they settled here”, he adds bitterly: “Then Gladstone came and ruined us... unbelievable calumnies were repeated in newspapers all over the world.”
The men of the Risorgimento had once hoped Ferdinand would become King of Italy, but he refused, from respect for the rights of other Italian sovereigns, especially for those of the Pope. Had he lived longer and, however unwillingly, granted a constitution and Sicilian autonomy, the South might have been much happier. But he died at forty-nine from a mysterious disease – probably diabetes – which, characteristically, he ascribed to the Evil Eye.
In June 1859 the French defeated the Austrians, who ceded Lombardy to Piedmont. Then the central Italian duchies turned against their Austrian-backed rulers and by March 1860 the Piedmontese were in possession of Tuscany, Parma and Modena, besides occupying part of the Papal States. Yet Piedmont had no intention of invading the Mezzogiorno.
In April, however, Garibaldi landed in Sicily where Palermo had risen in revolt. The late king had put down an earlier Sicilian rising and would certainly have known how to deal with this one, but his twenty-two year old son, Francis II, did not. He had already disbanded the Swiss regiments who had been his best troops. After Garibaldi overran Sicily in May, Francis granted a constitution, only hastening the regime’s collapse.
Many Southerners lost confidence in their inexperienced young king. When Garibaldi landed on the mainland in August, a handful of liberals tried to start risings, supported by a few business men eager for new markets in the North and by peasants who hoped naively that the great estates would be shared out. Foggia declared for Garibaldi, but in Bari and other Apulian cities royalist mobs routed similar demonstrations.
In September King Francis abandoned Naples to Garibaldi, withdrawing to the fortress city of Gaeta to concentrate his troops. Piedmont, saddled with an astronomical national debt, realised that it could take over the rich Southern kingdom. In October, a Piedmontese army invaded the Regno, occupying Naples and besieging Gaeta, bribing generals and officials. Even the most loyal despaired and at the end of the month, in a carefully rigged plebiscite, Apulians voted with the rest of the South for ‘unity’.
The Risorgimento must be judged by its fruits, and for Apulia they were very bitter indeed. Far from improving conditions, the destruction of the ancient Regno made them much worse, just as de Sivo claimed. Here is how a recent historian, Roger Absalom, describes the impact of ‘unity’:
To most southerners the experience was indistinguishable from harshly rapacious colonisation by a foreign country, which introduced a totally new set of laws and regulations governing every aspect of civil society, in the name of free trade substituted shoddy and over-priced imports for the familiar products local handicrafts and industry had previously provided, imposed ruinous and unaccustomed levels of taxation, conscripted the young men into its army and added insult to injury by the promulgation of contemptuous attitudes towards them.
Few dreams have ended in such disillusionment as the Risorgimento did for the Mezzogiorno. Too late, Southern Italy realised that, far from being liberated, it was the victim of another Northern conquest, by arrogant invaders who sneered that “Africa begins south of Rome.” The Duke of Maddaloni (head of the great Carafa family) protested in the new Italian parliament, “This is invasion, not annexation, not union. We are being treated like an occupied country.” That was what the death of the Regno meant for Apulia.
If brought up to date politically, the Borbone monarchy could have offered the Mezzogiorno a chance of becoming a self-governing, prosperous Southern Italy. Instead, the Risorgimento handed over the South to Northern asset-strippers, to be misgoverned from a far away capital. What had been a prosperous country soon became an economic slum in which the Apulians suffered as much as anybody. Some of them, however, were not going to give up without a fight.