Palermo: The British, the Bourbons and Garibaldi’s Thousand

We ended our last post on a city turned inward: its Muslim population expelled under Frederick II, its Jewish population expelled under Spain, and its energies turned from trade towards the Church for the best part of two centuries. It took the arrival of Napoleon to shake Palermo out of that long quiet, and to set in motion the chain of events that would end, sixty years later, with Sicily becoming part of a united Italy.

A king returns, briefly

When Napoleon’s troops swept into Italy at the end of the eighteenth century, King Ferdinand and Queen Maria Carolina fled Naples for Palermo rather than risk the fate of other deposed Italian rulers of the period. They were brought to the island by Nelson, aboard the same ship as the British ambassador William Hamilton and his wife Emma, and it was the first time a king had set foot on Sicilian soil since close to the time of Frederick II. The royal couple reoccupied the Norman Palace, the same palace guests visit today on Esplora Travel’s small-group cultural tour of Sicily, though Maria Carolina reportedly complained it had an air of disuse about it. Ferdinand duly had her a more modern residence built instead, the Palazzo Cinese, a chinoiserie folly tucked into the Parco della Favorita beneath Monte Pellegrino, and still standing there today.

Sicily’s brief taste of a constitution

With Naples under French control, Sicily fell under British protection, and the Sicilian nobility seized the moment to press the Bourbons for a new constitution. The man who did most to bring it about was Lord William Bentinck, a younger son of the Duke of Portland, who arrived as British representative to the court of Palermo in 1811. Bentinck had little patience for the old order (Maria Carolina reportedly nicknamed him “la bestia feroce”, the fierce beast) and by 1812 had helped push through a constitution abolishing feudal privileges that had stood for seven hundred years. He was, by most accounts, also one of the earliest Englishmen to dream openly of a unified Italy, decades before the idea became fashionable. None of it lasted. Once Napoleon was defeated and the threat to Sicily had passed, Britain’s interest in the island’s internal affairs cooled, and in 1816 Ferdinand returned to Naples and revoked the constitution outright.

Wine, tuna and the British who stayed

Politically, the British moved on. Commercially, some of them never left. The Marsala wine trade, pioneered by John Woodhouse, who had negotiated a supply contract with Nelson’s navy, drew a wave of English merchants to western Sicily, among them Benjamin Ingham, who arrived from Ossett in Yorkshire in 1806 and went on to become, by some measures, the richest man in Sicily. His Palermo residence later became the Hotel des Palmes, its gardens once stretching across to the Anglican church opposite before Via Roma was cut through the neighbourhood at the turn of the twentieth century. Both Woodhouse and Ingham made their fortunes out at Marsala and in the Egadi Islands, yet chose, tellingly, to make their homes in Palermo rather than nearer their business. The Sicilian Florio family followed a similar path from the same trade, expanding from wine into tuna fishing, though their real rise in Palermo society still lay a generation ahead.

Cholera and the first revolution of 1848

Prosperity for a few sat alongside real hardship for many. The cholera pandemic that swept across Europe between 1826 and 1837 reached Palermo hard in its final year, killing an estimated 24,000 people in the city alone. Combined with decades of resentment at Neapolitan rule, a harsh policing regime, the island’s grinding poverty and the suppression of Sicilian autonomy more generally, it helped tip Palermo into open revolt. On 12th January 1848, Palermo rose up against the Bourbons, the first of that year’s wave of European revolutions, months before Paris, Vienna or Berlin followed suit. The result was a short-lived independent Sicilian state, governed from Palermo under Ruggero Settimo and flying, more than a decade before the fact, the Italian tricolour. It survived until May 1849, when the Bourbons retook the island by force. Settimo escaped to Malta, where he lived out his life in exile until his death in 1863.

Garibaldi’s Thousand

That short-lived state turned out to be a rehearsal. Giuseppe Garibaldi sailed from Quarto, near Genoa, on the night of 5th and 6th May 1860, aboard two steamers, the Piemonte and the Lombardo, with the volunteers who would become known as the Thousand. They landed at Marsala on 11th May, met the Bourbon army for the first time at Calatafimi near Segesta on 15th May, and reached Palermo on 27th May. The fiercest fighting took place at the Admiral’s Bridge, a Norman-era bridge over the river Oreto built for the admiral George of Antioch, a battle later commemorated in a painting by the twentieth-century Sicilian artist Renato Guttuso. From there the fighting turned into a running, street-by-street battle across the city, tactics Garibaldi, an old guerrilla fighter by temperament as much as training, knew well how to use. Even Benjamin Ingham, watching events from the sidelines rather than taking a side in them, recorded in his diary that the fighting had reached his own garden.

The Bourbon garrison, besieged in their fortresses, requested an armistice on 30th May, brokered by the British admiral Rodney Mundy, and surrendered the city on 6th June in exchange for safe withdrawal. Garibaldi took full, definitive control of Palermo on 21st June, went on to secure the rest of the island by July, and in October a plebiscite confirmed what the fighting had already decided. Sicily became part of the new Kingdom of Italy when it was proclaimed in March 1861, ending, for good this time, both Bourbon rule and Palermo’s centuries as someone else’s possession.

Peace, when it came, brought its own kind of gold rush, and nobody rode it further than the Florio family we met briefly above. Their story, and the brief, glittering age of wealth they helped build in Palermo, is where we’ll pick things up next.