Where there were no signs of improvement was in the government of the Two Sicilies.  King Ferdinand undertook a journey through several parts of the country, but as Lord Napier, the British Minister, expressed it:  ’Exactly where the grace of the royal countenance was principally conferred, the rebels sprung up most thickly.’  A revolution was planned to break out in all the cities of the kingdom, but the project only took effect at Messina and at Reggio, and in both places the movement was stifled with prompt and barbarous severity.  When the leader of the Calabrian attempt, Domenico Romeo, a landed proprietor, was caught on the heights of Aspromonte, his captors, after cutting off his head, carried it to his young nephew, whom they ordered to take it to Reggio with the cry of ‘Long live the King.’  The youth refused, and was immediately killed.  In the capital, Carlo Poerio and many patriots were thrown into prison on suspicion.  Settembrini had just time to escape to Malta.

The year 1847 closed amid outward appearances of quiet.

CHAPTER VI

THE YEAR OF REVOLUTION

1848

Insurrection in Sicily—­The Austrians expelled from Milan and Venice—­Charles Albert takes the Field—­Withdrawal of the Pope and King of Naples—­Piedmont defeated—­The Retreat.

On the 12th of January, the birthday of the King of the Two Sicilies, another insurrection broke out in Sicily; this time it was serious indeed.  The City of the Vespers lit the torch which set Europe on fire.

So began the year of revolution which was to see the kings of the earth flying, with or without umbrellas, and the principle of monarchy more shaken by the royal see-saw of submission and vengeance than ever it was by the block of Whitehall or the guillotine of the Place Louis XV.

In Italy, the errors and follies of that year were not confined to princes and governments, but it will remain memorable as the time when the Italian nation, not a dreamer here or there, or a handful of heroic madmen, or an isolated city, but the nation as a whole, with an unanimity new in history, asserted its right and its resolve to exist.

King Ferdinand sent 5000 soldiers to ‘make a garden,’ as he described it, of Palermo, if the offers sent at the same time failed to pacify the inhabitants.  These offers were refused with the comment:  ’Too late,’ and the Palermitans prepared to resist to the death under the guidance of the veteran patriot Ruggiero Settimo, Prince of Fitalia.  ‘Separation,’ they said, ‘or our English Constitution of 1812.’  Increased irritation was awakened by the discovery in the head office of the police at Palermo of a secret room full of skeletons, which were supposed to belong to persons privately murdered.  The Neapolitans were compelled to withdraw with a loss of 3000 men, but before they went, the general in command let out 4000 convicts, who had been kept without food for forty-eight hours.  The convicts, however, did not fulfil the intentions of their liberator, and did but little mischief.  Not so the Neapolitan troops, who committed horrors on the peasantry as they retreated, which provoked acts of retaliation almost as barbarous.  In a short time all Sicily was in its own hands except the citadel of Messina.