Palermo: The Florios, the Belle Époque and a Fortune That Vanished

We’ve mentioned the Florio family twice now without quite stopping to tell their story: the golden age behind the wine and tuna trades in our post on the British in Palermo, and the boom already turning to bust as we opened our last post on the twentieth century. It’s time to go back and meet the family itself: three generations who built one of Europe’s great commercial empires from a Calabrian chemist’s shop, and then, within a single lifetime, lost almost all of it.

A chemist’s fortune

Vincenzo Florio was born in 1799 in Bagnara Calabro, and came to Palermo as an infant when his parents relocated in the aftermath of a major Calabrian earthquake. The family were spice merchants, and his uncle ran one of the city’s first apothecaries, closer to a herbalist’s shop than a modern pharmacy. When a harsh winter brought influenza to Palermo in 1799 and 1800, it was this shop Palermitani turned to for remedies. Vincenzo inherited it on his uncle’s death, trained as a chemist, and used the contacts his trade brought him to move into the sulphur business that was already enriching the city.

In 1832, on a patch of wasteland between the existing Ingham and Woodhouse wineries, he built the winery that still carries his name today: Cantine Florio, sold on since (Cinzano acquired it in the 1920s) but still producing Marsala and still one of the most respected names in the trade. In 1841 he took on the tuna traps at Favignana in the Aegadian Islands, and it was Vincenzo who pioneered preserving tinned tuna in olive oil, a piece of packaging innovation that made a local fishery into an export business. That same year he also took over the Oretea works, a small ironworks near the river Oreto founded the previous year by the Sgroi brothers, and turned it into the industrial foundry that supplied equipment to Sicily’s sulphur mines. He and his wife Giulia Portalupi had three children: two daughters and a son, Ignazio.

An empire in ships and tuna

Ignazio Florio took over on his father’s death in 1868, and expanded everything he inherited. In 1874 he bought Favignana outright, building a vast tonnara there, a purpose-built tuna cannery of over 32,000 square metres, alongside an elegant house for the family. He moved the business into shipping too, merging the family’s own line with Raffaele Rubattino’s Genoese company in 1881 to form the Navigazione Generale Italiana, which at its peak controlled close to a hundred ships, the maximum the Italian government would then permit any one operator. Ignazio was made a Senator of the Kingdom of Italy in 1883, and married the Baroness Giovanna d’Ondes Trigona. When he died in 1891, aged just 53, his eldest son, another Ignazio, inherited a business empire spanning sulphur, wine, tuna, shipping and iron.

Donna Franca and the golden age

Ignazio Florio Junior married Francesca Paola Jacona della Motta, a young noblewoman from an old but by then impoverished Sicilian family, in 1893. Palermo came to know her simply as Donna Franca, and she became one of the great socialites of Belle Époque Europe: the German Kaiser Wilhelm II reportedly called her the Star of Italy, and Villa Igiea, the family’s Palermo residence, hosted King Edward VII, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and Oscar Wilde among its guests. Ignazio bought Villa Igiea in 1899, a hundred years almost to the year after his grandfather Vincenzo had first arrived in the city, and had it rebuilt by the Palermitan architect Ernesto Basile, the same Basile whose Liberty-style additions gave the city the Teatro Massimo, still one of the stops on Esplora Travel’s escorted small-group tour of Sicily.

The glamour hid a harder story. Of Ignazio and Franca’s five children, two died young, a daughter of meningitis at nine and a son the following year at five, and friends said Donna Franca was never quite the same afterwards. It’s also said, with some justice, that Ignazio gave his wife a pearl for every infidelity: the enormous necklace in Giovanni Boldini’s celebrated portrait of her was, on that reading, a record of a difficult marriage rather than simply an ornament.

The Targa Florio

Not every Florio wanted to run the family firm. Ignazio Senior’s younger son, also Vincenzo, cared little for commerce and much for cars, and in 1906 he founded the Targa Florio, a road race through the Madonie Mountains that became one of the oldest and most notoriously dangerous motor races in the world. Drivers navigated hundreds of hairpin bends on public roads never designed for racing, refuelled moving cars in scenes that regularly ended in fire, and, on the darker side of it, sometimes crashed in spots so remote that help simply couldn’t reach them in time. The race outlived Vincenzo by decades, finally ending in 1977 once international safety rules made a closed, barrier-lined circuit of the old course impossible to keep running.

The fall

The forces that ended the Florio empire, the collapsing sulphur trade, a Marsala market losing ground to sherry and port, tuna catches thinning at Favignana, are the same ones we traced in our last post on Palermo’s harder twentieth century. What’s striking about the Florios specifically is how they went: rather than declare bankruptcy, Ignazio and Franca sold everything, piece by piece, to pay what they owed. Villa Igiea went to the Banca di Sicilia, the winery to Cinzano, Favignana itself, even Donna Franca’s jewellery. By 1924, with the sale of their last Palermo residence, the family had moved to Rome with nothing left of the fortune Vincenzo had built a century before.

Giulia’s courage

One story from the next generation deserves telling on its own. Giulia Florio, known in the family as Giugiù, married the Spanish nobleman Achille Afan de Rivera and settled in Rome’s Palazzo Costaguti, a building with a doorway opening directly onto the city’s Jewish ghetto. When the Nazis raided the ghetto in October 1943, deporting well over a thousand of its residents, Giulia and her husband hid dozens of people, by some accounts more than forty, in concealed spaces throughout the palazzo, feeding and clothing them on a single family’s rations. When German officers came looking for those unaccounted for at roll call, Achille answered the door in full uniform and sent them away. Both are honoured today among the Righteous Among the Nations, a coda to the family story that has nothing to do with wine, tuna or shipping, and rather more to do with what its members chose to risk when it mattered.

The Florio name still appears on Marsala labels, on the walls of the Favignana tonnara, and in the story Palermo tells about the brief, brilliant decades when it was, by some measures, the wealthiest city in Italy. Whether that was ever quite deserved, or whether, as some at the time claimed, the family’s fall owed something to a jealous mainland unwilling to see so much money in the south, is a question Palermo has never entirely stopped arguing about.