21. EYES SOUTHWARD
The Italian peninsula had been divided for a decade by the Confederation in the North and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in the South. Industrialized, liberal and internationally recognized the former, reactionary, agrarian and isolated the latter. In 1859 Ferdinand II died of septicemia leaving the kingdom to his son Francesco II who inherited a backward and obscurantist kingdom, in which the first industrial and social progress had been frozen by the decade of reaction to the riots of '48 and Sicilian independence, in distinct disadvantage compared to the Italian Confederation. The young king understood the gravity of the situation and from the first moment he tried to find a solution to the stalemate of the kingdom by raising taxes and expropriating land from the church and landowners, making them resent the central power in Naples.
As the king tried to bring the kingdom into the modern age, the city elites were already plotting against the Bourbon monarchy: the unification of the North had raised great hopes for a future unity between the two nations, fueled by the liberal ideas of Italian nationalism propagated by the Confederation. These bourgeois had already made first contacts with their counterparts in Turin, finding the favor of the Count of Cavour who saw the destiny of the Confederation in the unity of Italy and thus the first seeds of rebellion were planted in the south.
Naples was the crown jewel of the Two Sicilies,
The other thorny issue was the continuous stay of Pius IX in Gaeta who, for ten years now, had refused to return to Rome, transferring the papal see to the south. For the Confederate peoples, the Pope's refusal was just another proof of his greed and desire to rule on earth as a sovereign not as a shepherd of Christian souls and consequently the Siccardi laws, although not adored, were accepted by the population as necessary as the Pope seen as one of the many reactionaries opposed to the unification of Italy.
Cavour had spent the previous years modernizing and preparing the North for the eventual conquest of the South: he knew that the region was lagging behind and would have been much more so after the social and industrial developments that the Confederation was experiencing. The Prime Minister's final goal was to complete what started in 1848 and unite the peninsula under a single government that would allow her to become the Great Power that Italy should be. So it was that the count contacted the only man capable of destabilizing the Bourbon kingdom: Giuseppe Garibaldi, currently general of the Roman and Confederate armies. Between the two there was no good blood especially because of political ideas but the two men both had the same goal: the unity of the peninsula and so it was that, after some discussions, Garibaldi agreed to start sowing the seeds of rebellion in the south to give the Confederation a casus belli to intervene and restore order.
Garibaldi, accompanied by Nino Bixio and nearly a thousand volounteers coming from both the Confederation and in form of exiles from Two Sicilies who would be the spearhead of the plan. The irregulars crossed the border between the Confederation and Two Sicilies in April 1860 and started spreading across the kingdom, using the contacts with liberals and anti-bourbon rebels that Cavour had carefully crafted after the London Conference. Among them the men delivered arms and started ro make plans for a general insurrection in the summer, expanding the network and preparing themselves for the general revolt.
When summer came, the efforts of Garibaldi and his men payed off as in July a general insurrection, stroked by the heat and inability of the government to cope with the troubles of the kingdom, erupted in the major cities and in the coutryside, led in the former by liberals and in the latter landowners alienated by the taxes that Francis had to impose in order to reign in the finances of the kingdom. Quickly the army was occupied with putting down the rebellion that had devolved in street fighting in Naples where Garibaldi's mastery of guerrilla warfare payed off as the volounteers and insurrectionists defeated the garrison and forced to flee the city, with the urban elite establishing a regency council under the protection of Garibaldi and invited the Confederation to restore order to the south that was rebelling. The news of the first successes of the expedition spread rapidly throughout the peninsula, while Europe watched without interfering: the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies had very few friends and of these nobody was willing to threaten an intervention to preserve their territorial integrity.
An expert in guerrilla warfare and insurgency, Garibaldi was the best men to stir up chaos in Two Sicilies
Seeing that his plan was successful, Cavour gave orders to the Confederate armies (two Sardinians and one Roman) to cross the border with the south to restore order in the kingdom that was collapsing into total chaos due to the revolt. The Confederate army advanced along the Adriatic and Tyrrhenian coasts, finding little opposition as the army of the Two Sicilies was deployed within the kingdom to counter the riots. At the head of the army was Vittorio Emanuele II who was warmly welcomed by the population, of Naples where he met Garibaldi and the regency council offered him the crown of the kingdom, which Vittorio Emanuele accepted.
When Francis II learned of the Piedmontese invasion he understood that there was nothing more to do and, together with his wife Maria Sofia of Bavaria, he took refuge in Bari where, together with a small group of loyalists, he embarked on a steamer to Zara, in the Austrian Empire, where Maximilian I, married to Maria Sofia's sister Elizabeth, would offer him protection in his exile.
Having all but taken over the kingdom, Cavour started making plans to split the kingdom in smaller entities but this proved to be too much for Vittorio Emanuele which dismissed Cavour after two weeks of debate, ending the first Cavour government and replacing him with Rattazzi who agreed on preserving the integrity of the kingdom but argued for reduced centralization in order to export the Confederate model in the south. In the meantime, while the authorities met with notables, liberals and republicans, the army would occupy the region bringing back the order that had vanished at the time of the fall of the royal power, especially in the mountainous regions where gangs of bandits terrorized the population and slowed down the Confederate efforts.
Pius IX was arrested in Gaeta, unable to flee anywhere, and brought back to the Papal Palaces in Rome from where he declared to be a prisoner of Italy, but his statements fell on mostly deaf ears in the rest of Europe. For the first time since the Roman Empire the Italian peninsula was united under a single banner and at last the goals of 1848 were reached.