The Aftermath

The central irony of The Leopard— and of Italian unification itself — is captured in Tancredi's famous line: “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” The novel shows how this paradox played out: the old aristocracy accommodated itself to the new order, the new class adopted the manners of the old, and the mass of Sicilians — the peasants, the workers, the poor — saw no improvement in their lives at all.

This was not just a literary observation. It was historical fact. Unification brought Sicily new flags, new officials, new taxes, and new masters — but the underlying structure of power remained essentially unchanged. In some ways, it got worse.

The Brigands' War

Unification triggered the bloodiest conflict in the history of modern Italy — and it was not fought against foreign powers but against the Italian state's own new citizens. From 1861 to 1865, southern Italy and Sicily were engulfed in what the government called “brigandage” (il brigantaggio) and what many historians now recognize as a civil war.

The brigands were a mix of former Bourbon soldiers, desperate peasants, and common criminals. But their ranks were swollen by ordinary people who had expected unification to bring land reform, lower taxes, and political representation — and got none of it. Instead, the new Italian government imposed conscription (the draft had been abolished under the Bourbons) and new taxes on basic goods like flour and salt. For a starving peasant, this was not liberation. It was a new form of oppression.

The government response was savage. Italy dispatched over 100,000 soldiers to the south. Whole villages were burned. Thousands of suspected brigands were shot without trial. The conflict killed an estimated 20,000 to 100,000 people — more than the entire Risorgimento wars combined. It was, as one historian put it, the “other side” of the Risorgimento — the war Italy fought against itself.

Economic Stagnation

Before unification, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies had its own economy — backwards by northern European standards, but functional. It had a navy, a merchant fleet, state-owned factories, and the first railway in Italy. After unification, these assets were transferred to the new national government in Turin, then Rome, and investment flowed north. Piedmont and Lombardy got railways, factories, and infrastructure. Sicily got tax collectors.

The new government also abolished the demani — the communal lands that had been shared by villages for grazing and firewood. These were privatized and sold off, mostly to wealthy landowners and speculators from the north. The peasants who had depended on them were pushed further into destitution. This is the background to the wave of Sicilian emigration that began in the 1880s and continued for decades — over a million Sicilians left for America between 1880 and 1930.

The Sedara Class

In The Leopard, the man who profits from unification is Don Calogero Sedara — coarse, cunning, and ruthless. He becomes mayor of Donnafugata, marries his daughter into the aristocracy, and accumulates land and power. This was not fiction. Across Sicily, the transition created a class of gabellotti — middlemen, leaseholders, and local politicians who acted as intermediaries between the distant government in Rome and the local population.

These men were the real beneficiaries of unification. They collected taxes, managed elections (which were routinely rigged), and controlled access to public offices. They were the link between the legal state and the informal power structures — patronage, favoritism, and what would later become known as the Mafia. The word “Mafia” itself first appeared in print in the 1860s, in the context of post-unification Sicily.

This is the reality behind Tancredi's famous paradox. The “change” was that new men took over the old positions of power. The “things that stayed the same” were the structures of exploitation — the great estates, the landless peasants, the corrupt local politics, the indifference of the powerful to the powerless.

The Aristocracy Adapts

What happened to families like the Salinas? Many adapted, just as the Prince knew they would. They married into wealthy bourgeois families (as Tancredi marries Angelica Sedara). They entered politics, the diplomatic corps, or the new national army. They kept their titles, their palazzi, and their social prestige — at least for a generation or two.

But the process was one of slow decline, not sudden collapse. By the early twentieth century, most Sicilian aristocratic families were struggling. Taxes, debt, and the impossibility of running profitable estates with peasant labor eroded their wealth. The great palazzi of Palermo fell into disrepair. The last Prince of Lampedusa — Giuseppe Tomasi himself — lived in a modest apartment and died nearly penniless. The world of the Salinas was not destroyed by revolution. It simply faded away, like a star going cold.