cided with the establishment of a Sicilian Chamber of Peers based on the British model. This happened during the king's sojourn in Palermo, along with thousands of British troops, during the Napoleonic occupation of Naples. It was seen as compensation for the loss of feudal perquisites.
In 1860, Sicily became part of the Kingdom of Italy with the help of a rigged referendum allegedly "confirming" that 98 out of every 100 eligible male voters favored annexation. By then, the old nobility had lost much of its traditional power. A new bourgeoisie was rapidly emerging as an important social force, and with it a new criminal class.
Giuseppe Di Lampedusa's book, The Leopard, described these historical events at some length. Nobody could have predicted that his novel, written almost a century after the unification war of 1860, would top bestseller lists on both sides of the Atlantic. If nothing else, the book's popularity indicates that there was still some interest in the Sicilian nobility long after its demise.
The Italian Senate, consisting almost entirely of titled aristocrats, was appointed by the king. In Sicily, the nobility still exercised a certain amount of political and economic control until the early 1900s. In terms of social prestige, perhaps, the nobility remained the most important class. In some ways it still is.
The Constitution of the Italian Republic did not abolish the use of noble titles, but established that they would not be recognized for use in legal documents after 1948. Furthermore, the Consulta Araldica, the government agency which regulated the use of titles of nobility, was abolished.
The Royal Family of Italy (the House of Savoy) still exists, of course. Prince Vittorio Emanuele di Savoia, son of the last King, Umberto II, lives in Switzerland, while his son Emanuele Filiberto, resides in Rome. Prince Carlo di Borbone (de Bourbon), the head of the House of the Two Sicilies, heir of the dynasty that ruled Sicily and most of southern Italy until 1860, divides his time between Rome and Monaco, with occasional visits to Naples and Palermo. His dynasty serves as a point of reference for the Sicilian nobility, and two royal residences in Palermo (the Chinese Villa) and Ficuzza (the Royal Hunting Lodge) are a silent testament to the family's past presence here. Both dynasties maintain the tradition of chivalry by bestowing honours in orders of knighthood.
The twenty-first century descendants of the Sicilian nobility comprise a fraying, loosely-woven tapestry of their caste. Membership in their club in Palermo, the Circolo Bellini, is reserved to descendants of titled noble families, but the aristocracy itself has suffered the effects of modern social ills; divorces and unwed births are not unknown, and many children of aristocratic families behave in a profligate, even promiscuous, way that makes them indistinguishable from "everybody else." The effects of such behavior are especially obvious since most of the noble families have lost the other trappings that formerly distinguished them from the middle classes - their great homes, for example.
A few noblemen have preserved some vestige of traditional dignity as knights of the chivalric orders, which are still largely aristocratic organisations, but little else remains of their former grandeur. Even coats of arms, which in times past distinguished noble families from ordinary ones, can now be created and sold. At fairs, they are even printed using computers and sold to the general public, so that anybody coincidentally named Lanza can hang an image on his wall implying that he is a descendant of the Lanzas who were Princes of Trabia. (And so vast is the market in bogus titles of nobility that one can never be certain whether the man introduced as a count really is one.)
To some extent, it is a sense of historical memory, if not continuity, that distinguishes Sicily's aristocratic families from others, but here we are reduced to generalities. For example, most noblemen did not support the revolution of 1848 or the arrival of Piedmontese troops twelve year