Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Additional informationNotes on contributorsMaria Sofia CorciuloMaria Sofia Corciulo is Emeritus Professor of History of Political Institutions at the Sapienza University of Rome, Italy. She is Past President of the International Commission for the History of Representative and Parliamentary Institutions (2007-2015). She is now Honorary President. She is member of the Commission of the Academy of Lincei for the publication of the Acts of Italian Constitutional Assemblies. She is Correspondent Member of Arcadia Academy. Her main research interests are related to the first decade of the nineteenth century in France and in Italy, particularly the Napoleonic domination in South Italy and the Neapolitan Constitutional Revolution of 1820–1821. Her recent publications include: Una Rivoluzione per la Costituzione. Agli albori del Risorgimento meridionale (1820-21) (Rome, 2017); ‘Political conflicts inside the Neapolitan Parliament of 1820-21’, in G. Karvunaki (ed.), Pre and post Europe revolutions and parliamentary institutions. The case of Greece on the occasion of the bicentenary since the war of independence (1821-2021), Proceedings of the 72nd Conference of the ICHRPI, Athens, 20–23 October 2021, Studies presented to the ICHRPI (Hors série, online), (Athens, 2022); ‘In tema di costituenti: Francia e Italia (1945-1947)’, in Nomos 3, 2022.

Simonetta Bernardi celebrated her 81st birthday on 23 January 2021. Unfortunately, she passed away a month later on 13 February. She was a member of the ICHRPI Italian Section since 1997, and she a...

SUMMARYThe Leopard (Italian: Il Gattopardo) is a novel by Prince Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa that chronicles the end of the Bourbons' kingdom and the beginning of the Savoy dynasty, the first sovereigns of the new Kingdom of Italy (1861). Published posthumously in 1958, it became the top-selling novel in Italian history and it is considered one of the most important novels in modern Italian literature. In 2012 The Observer named it as one of the ‘10 best historical novels’. The purpose of this article is to refute the negative image of the Risorgimento as presented in this novel. The Leopard, with its broad resonance, has strongly contributed towards distorting the historical judgement on the foundations of the Italian nation, above all by failing to do justice to Prime Minister Cavour's courageous and judicious political strategy in the choice of the leadership class – also Sicilian – in the newly created Kingdom of Italy (1860–61).

The 66th conference of ICHRPI was held in London, 30 June–3 July 2015 to mark the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta (1215). The theme of the conference was ‘Making Constitutions, Building Parliament...

In the many and crowded debates that characterised the 150th anniversary of Italian unity in 2011, the history of southern Italy attracted considerable attention, and not only from professional his...

I Parlamenti di Sardegna nella storia e nel diritto pubblico comparato (Sardinian Parliaments in History and in Comparative Public Law) was the first important scientific work written by Antonio Marongiu (1902–89) and was published in 1931 in the series of the studies of the Institute of Public Law and Social Legislation of the Faculty of Political Sciences of the University of Rome ‘La Sapienza’ (Istituto di Diritto Pubblico e Legislazione Sociale della Facoltà di Scienze Politiche dell'Università ‘La Sapienza’ di Roma). The facsimile reprint of the text was promoted in 2009 by Marongiu's family as a tribute to the memory of its great ancestor on the twentieth anniversary of his death. Maria Sofia Corciulo's article reproduces the preface to this reprint and is prefaced by a short note about Marongiu and his work.

At the initiative of Professor Johannes Helmrath, German National Convener, a conference was held in Berlin between 21–23 July 2010 at the HumboldtUniversität and at the Julius Lobe Building of the Bundestag, on the theme of ‘Parliamentary Cultures from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century – Speeches – Spaces – Visualizations’. It was organized by Professor Helmrath and Dr Jörg Feuchter of the Sonderforschungsbereich 640 of the HumboldtUniversität in collaboration with ICHRPI/CIHAE. Twenty-one papers were given. The Commission was represented by Professor John Rogister, Honorary President, who thanked the organizers at the conference dinner.

SUMMARY This article examines England's political/institutional influences on the rise and development of Neapolitan constitutionalism and the attitude taken by the English government toward the Neapolitan constitutional experiment in 1820–21. The Neapolitan Constitution of 1820 was lifted almost entirely from Spain's Cadiz Constitution of 1812. It called for a single-chamber system: a national assembly elected by three-degree universal suffrage, endowed with broad legislative powers only weakly checked by the sovereign. It was a model quite different from the British one, but the central role that the Parliament assumed during this constitutional experiment (it had to supervise both the political and administrative life of the Neapolitans, and to give them justice for the wrongs they had suffered) represented an important point of contact with British political customs. The Neapolitan Constitution was also a reaction against the centralist state that the Bourbon Restoration had inherited from the Napoleonic era. In this sense, England's self-government model was more present among the Neapolitans' desiderata than they themselves even knew. English public opinion was in favour of the Neapolitan Revolution, and the Neapolitans believed that there was a precise link between the enthusiasm with which British public opinion had welcomed the revolution and the political conduct of its government. That was not the case: the attitude of the English government was characterized right from the start by considerable ambiguity. It adopted an ambiguous policy of neutrality and offered no help to the Neapolitan revolutionaries in the difficult time when they were fighting the Holy Alliance's armies.

SUMMARY During the revolution of 1820–21 in the kingdom of the Two Sicilies, the revolutionaries adopted the Constitution of Cadiz (1812), which gave full guarantees for the principle of decentralization. Maria Sofia Corciulo analyses the principal criticisms levied by the Neapolitan press against the Napoleonic regime (1806–15) in the Mezzogiorno. The first criticism focused on the excessive centralization which had abrogated what the press called municipal authority; the second concerned the recruitment of an excessive number of persons to public office. Another fundamental criticism was addressed by the majority of the press to the French: it emphasized the fact that they had not introduced a constitutional form of government. Among the various publications, a leading role was played in this third attack by L'amico della Costituzione, which, although it underlined the autonomous origin of the revolution of 1820–21, recognized that without the ‘French Decade’ the Neapolitans would not even have had the idea of this constitutional ambition, which, thanks to the revolution, was at last on course to being achieved.

SUMMARY From 1848 until the Unification of Italy, a series of political trials followed one another in Naples which unravelled the thread of a vast and ramified revolutionary conspiratorial network. The climax of the series was the trial in 1855 of Nicola Mignogna and his closest collaborator, Antonietta De Pace, together with 12 other persons. Its interest lay both in the personalities of those arrested—above all, for the first time a woman was accused of conspiring against the state—and in the fact that as it developed, several of the most notable European daily newspapers became interested, including The Times, the Morning Post, the Journal des Débats, and Le Constitutionnel. Indeed, after Gladstone's denunciation in 1851 of the inhuman conditions under which political prisoners of the kingdom of the Two Sicilies were being held, a movement of public opinion developed in Europe—and especially in England—which was extremely critical of the Bourbon government. The terrible conditions of the political prisoners were often depicted by the above-mentioned English newspapers, which described with a wealth of detail the humiliating tribulations regularly inflicted on those shut up in the horrible Neapolitan dungeons, among whom were many soldiers and a few clerics. Precisely because of these strong external pressures, the accused were spared the serious penalties, including capital punishment, envisaged for their crimes. The pressures of foreign newspapers ensured that, despite the Procurator General having requested the death penalty for four of the accused (including Mignogna), the sentence was surprisingly mild: he was condemned to exile from the kingdom, and De Pace was acquitted for lack of evidence.

SUMMARY In the context of the history of Italy's Risorgimento and unification, Maria Sofia Corciulo recounts the adventurous life, the clandestine struggle, and the political significance of Antonietta De Pace (1818–1894), the leading figure among several women patriots in the kingdom of Naples during the period of pre-parliamentary republican struggle. Her trial after capture in 1855 caused an international sensation, and in 1860 she entered Naples with Garibaldi's triumphal army. She devoted her entire life to Italian unification, and her later years to improving the social, economic and cultural position of women. Her career suggests that, in the exceptional circumstances of independent women like her and the political turbulence of the age, nineteenth-century Italian society was prepared to allow a greater degree of equality to women than before.

In Naples from 1848 until the Unification a series of political trials took place which culminated (reached its peak) in 1855 with the one against Nicola Mignogna and his closest co-worker Antonietta De Pace (together with other 12 people), heads of a wide conspirator revolutionary network. The interesting aspect of this trial lies both in the personality of those arrested (also, for the first time a woman was accused of conspiracy against the government) as well as in the fact that some of the most famous European newspapers, such as the "Times", the "Morning Post", the "Journal des débats" and the "Constitutionnel" dedicated attention to it. Indeed, at the time, most of the European public opinion was indignant towards the harsh police repression carried out by the Borbone regime. But thanks to such external pressure the accused were spared the punishments reserved to their criminal acts, among which the death row.

SUMMARY In this article, Maria Sofia Corciulo analyses the political significance of the period of the Italian Restoration. The author suggests that the revolutions which took place in both Naples and Piedmont in 1820–21 affected the apparently static institutional tranquillity of the ‘restored’ Italy to such an extent that they represent a break from the preceding period—the Five-year Period, during which the Napoleonic institutions had been, anyway, partly retained. The revolutionary action which, as in Spain, was sparked by the military, was characterized by forms of participation and aims that constituted, at least where they could be fully expressed, the beginning of a new historical period, surely overshadowing that of Restoration: the Risorgimento. The Neapolitan Revolution was carried out under the banner of the most democratic principles of those years, as they had been sanctioned by the Constitution of Cadiz of 1812. Although the Italian revolutionaries of 1820–21 were defeated, the principles of the Cadiz Constitution remained vivid in the minds of the patriots, especially Neapolitans, in an intricate sectarian world, where even the participation of the most humble classes was welcome and accepted in the name of the egalitarian principles of the Carboneria. The article suggests that this Revolution spelled the de facto end of the Restoration, even it was to continue to exist de jure, in its limited dynastic sense. This is true not only for the Kingdom of the two Sicilies but also for the other Italian states, because so-called ‘public opinion’ became a reality in this period: the existence of political plots and conspiracies from a rising number of secret societies is clear evidence that Italy's Risorgimento was under way.

(2002). VITTORIO FROSINI (1922–2001) Parliaments, Estates and Representation: Vol. 22, No. 1, pp. 285-286.