o, 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 years later, and in many noble families a certain oral tradition of these facts has been passed down to descendants born in the twentieth century (at variance with the nationalist revisionism taught in Italian schools). This is the kind of historical knowledge less likely to be passed down in other families. It is also true that certain noblemen - being quite secure socially - don't share most Italians' obssession with the superficial; don't expect a nobleman to base his self-esteem or social status on possession of a Rolex watch. Today, the main distinction of Sicily's great noble families are their histories and the titles they bear.
One of the best general books on the history and traditions of the European nobility is Robert Lacey's Aristocrats (London, Boston, Toronto 1983), which describes titled families of five countries, including Italy.
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