Kingdom of the Two Sicilies

The largest state in Italy before unification, the poorest afterwards, and the origin of a division that Italian politics has not closed. The kingdom was the union of Naples and Sicily, formalised under that name in 1816, though the two had shared a Bourbon dynasty since 1734 and before that had passed through Norman, German, French, Aragonese and Spanish hands. Naples was among the largest cities in Europe and the kingdom held around nine million people, more than any other Italian state. It was also among the most conservative: Ferdinand II bombarded his own city of Messina to put down the 1848 revolution and earned a nickname for it, and Gladstone described the government's prisons in terms that damaged it across Europe. Sicily rebelled repeatedly and resented rule from Naples. In 1860 Garibaldi landed in Sicily with about a thousand volunteers, defeated a far larger army, crossed to the mainland and took Naples within months, then handed the entire kingdom to the king of Piedmont. The plebiscites that followed were not credible. What came next was a decade of insurgency in the south that the new state called brigandage and suppressed with more troops than the conquest had required. Northern tariffs and taxation damaged southern industry. Mass emigration followed. The kingdom left behind the palace at Caserta, a World Heritage site, and Europe's oldest opera house still in use. The kingdom covered all of Italy south of the Papal States plus Sicily. Naples was the capital and Palermo the Sicilian one. It existed under that name from 1816 to 1861. Its first railway opened in 1839, the earliest in Italy.

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