In the spring and summer of 1860, Giuseppe Garibaldi swept through Sicily and southern Italy. He overthrew Francesco II, the Bourbon King of the Two Sicilies, and incorporated these territories into a unified Italian kingdom ruled by the Piedmontese king Vittorio Emanuele II of Savoy. The great southern landlords had to choose a side.
These events form the backdrop to Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s 1958 masterpiece The Leopard. The novel’s protagonist, Prince Fabrizio Salina, chose loyalty and honour over power and wealth, refusing a position as a senator. Unlike the fictional prince, Baron Giovanni Barracco (1829-1914), owner of almost limitless lands in Calabria, joined the Piedmontese cause. Barracco became a member of the new Italian parliament in Turin after he and his family had financed Garibaldi’s bold enterprise. Like his ancestors before him, he made sure that the strict code of conduct implicit in a noblesse oblige attitude – that with his wealth and position came certain responsibilities – would not touch on his own progress and the acquisition of yet more possessions, while the shocking conditions of the Calabrian peasantry remained unchanged.
The baron was a cultured man, however, and he put some of his considerable wealth to use in the pursuit of knowledge. He had first-hand experience of archaeology, having taken interest in the excavations at Cuma, Sorrento, and other sites in Campania that were undertaken by his friend Leopoldo, Count of Syracuse, the liberal and artistic brother of the Bourbon king Ferdinando II. And, during his time as a politician in Piedmont, he studied Egyptology in Turin’s great Museo Egizio, which was at the time the recipient of major collections of pharaonic art acquired in Egypt.
V. G. Childe’s archaeological theory