l towns where several families emerged as local aristocrats as a result of their wealth and education. These families often remained in the countryside in spite of the exodus of the greater families from the country to the cities during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Rural mayors, town aldermen and other officials were often chosen from among such families.
In abandoning its affairs to surrogate managers, the greater aristocracy implicitly renounced much of the social power it had previously exercised in the countryside. In the Middle Ages, local lords (vassals) administered justice. By 1700, the stage was set for Sicily's rustic bandits to establish their own local power structure, though it took them decades to do so effectively.
At first, the absentee landlords entrusted management of their estates (latifondi) to trusted administrators, often members of the untitled noble families described above, but by 1800 many of the estates were managed by gabelloti, lesser-educated local men who hired farm workers and dealt with other day-to-day operation of the farms. Seen as little more than unrefined opportunists, the gabelloti were resented and disparaged by every social class but their own. In fact, their infiltration into rural society fostered development of the Mafia.
Until the abolition of feudalism, a man who purchased feudal property became the titular lord of that fief, usually a small barony. In this way, many gabelloti were ennobled in the late 1700s. It is for this reason that a degree of snobbery existed on the part of the greater nobility toward lesser nobles such as barons. This nouveau class exercised little real control in the Sicilian economy; usually, their fiefs were little more than large farms. Larger towns and villages usually appertained to princes, dukes, and the occasional marquis.
With the abolition of feudalism, the nobility lost its last important privileges, particularly the right, with royal consent, to tax the residents of feudal townships, but the abolition of feudalism coincided 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 Monac