656 Chapter XXVII
ways shone with some magnitude in historical literature. It produced the best re-
membered book to come out of the Italian triennio, Vincenzo Cuoco’s Saggio
storico, of which more will be said. At the end of the nineteenth century Benedetto
Croce, before turning to the philosophy of history, began his career by writing his-
tory itself, and chose the Rivoluzione napoletana for his subject. The idyl of Lord
Nelson and Lady Hamilton, dallying in Mediterranean palaces while war raged
about them, kept an interest in these events alive in England. Of all the sister-
republics the Neapolitan is apparently the only one on which a book has ever been
written in the English language.^26
The Kingdom of Naples, embracing the southern half of the Italian peninsula
and the island of Sicily, had belonged since 1735 to a branch of the Spanish Bour-
bon family, represented at the end of the century by King Ferdinand IV. His queen,
Maria Carolina, was a Hapsburg, one of the many royal offspring of the Empress
Maria Theresa, and hence a sister to the late Marie Antoinette of France, and an
aunt to the reigning Austrian Emperor, Francis II. The loathing of the royal pair
for the French Revolution was implacable, and exceeded if possible only by their
dislike of republicans in their own country.
Naples and Palermo were among the largest cities in Europe, huge aggregations
of the underemployed and the wretchedly poor, locally called lazzaroni, for whom
the future held no promise since population was far out of proportion to economic
development. Many small and ancient cities dotted the kingdom. As in the Papal
States, and in contrast to northern Italy, the rural land was worked by primitive
methods, but it was owned in large tracts by men who lived in Naples or the
smaller cities, of which they formed the hereditary patriciates. Something re-
mained of the manorial and seigneurial systems, but the condition of the kingdom
was not especially “feudal.” In the landowning classes, along with an older nobility,
were numerous persons who in recent generations had applied the profits gained
in the law, government office, or trade, to the acquisition of rural estates, which
they used for income without troubling to develop them. Between peasants and
townspeople, or between the lower and upper classes in the towns, there was less
contact than in northern Italy or western Europe. Peasants and lazzaroni were not
only illiterate, but spoke no language except dialects which varied from place to
place, so that they were shut off from the great world, and even from each other.
From the outside world they were reached only by their priests, to whom they were
likely to be devoted without actually being very religious. Isolation, poverty, and
social disorganization were so great, according to the most recent historian of Ca-
labria, that the peasants had little awareness of belonging either to the Kingdom of
Naples or even to the Catholic Church.
26 V. Cuoco, Saggio storico sulla Rivoluzione napoletana del 1799 (Milan, 1801), reprinted at Bari,
1913, from the second edition of 1806; B. Croce, La Rivoluzione napoletana del 1799 (Bari, 1926), first
published about 1895; C. Giglioli, Naples in 1799: an Account of the Revolution of 1799 and the Rise and
Fall of the Parthenopean Republic (London, 1903). For somewhat more recent works see N. Rodolico, Il
popolo agli inizi del Risorgimento nell ’Italia meridionale, 1792–1801 (Florence, 1925); A. Lucarelli, La
Puglia nel Risorgimento; II, La Rivoluzione del 1799 in Commissione provinciale di archeologia e storia
patria di Bari, Documenti e monografie, XIX (Bari, 1934); C. Cingari, Giacobini e Sanfedisti in Calabria
nel 1799 (Messina, 1957).