The Invention of the Italian South: The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies

On Christmas night 1130, the antipope Anacletus II crowned Roger II of the Normans, King of Sicily.
The kingdom came to be known as the ‘Kingdom of the Two Sicilies’ and was derived from the idea that the royal dominion centred in Palermo looked beyond the lighthouse of the Straits of Messina towards the mainland and the ‘other Sicily’. The southern mainland consisted of the Norman-annexed County of Calabria and Duchy of Apulia. In 1137, the kings that made the Italian south absorbed Naples moving its capital to the city in 1266. Sicily and the southern Italian mainland were dominated for centuries by competing dynasties predominately from France and Spain: the Hohenstaufen, the Anjou, Aragonese, Habsburgs and the Bourbons all coveted this Mediterranean prize with the benedictory hand of the pope to the north keeping a close eye on his southerly neighbour. It was only from 1816 to 1860 that the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was restored only to be swept away by Garibaldi’s revolutionary forces and the emerging unified Italy.

James Hill returns to present two lectures on the Italian south. In the first, he explores the period from medieval times to the early modern era from the arrival of the Normans and the development of the kingdom both in its political capital Palermo and its intellectual one, Naples, through the context of its ruling dynasties and their patronage. In the second, he focuses on Naples and Habsburg-Bourbon rule from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth century. In both, a rich mosaic of art and building will rarely be far from our minds.