Le memorie umane e politiche di Emanuele Paternò di Sessa

After the failure of the independence that Sicily had conquered with the 1848 Revolution, many leaders of the anti-Borbone movement were forced to emigrate to the Kingdom of Sardinia, to France, to London, to Malta. The Paternò di Sessa family (nobles of Aragonese origins), whose members had had an active part in the insurrection against the Kingdom of Naples, left Palermo in 1850 and settled in Novi Ligure. Emanuele, a young member of the family, was one of the Italian exiles who found refuge there. Apart from Novi Ligure, he spent his childhood in Genova, Malta, Egypt, and, waiting for a new insurrection, he wrote a long diary about that period where he described the conditions of the Sicilian refugees and the difficulties he met in a general situation of extreme indigence.

During Garibaldi's expedition (1860) and before the annexation of Sicily to the Kingdom of Italy, the family returned to Palermo, where Emanuele, despite their extreme poverty, thanks to his efforts and hard study, got important targets: he became Professor of Chemistry and Chancellor of Palermo University, Mayor of the City, Senatore del Regno d'Italia, member of the most important scientific academies. His Diary, never published before, was written in order to teach the young readers how, even starting from a situation of financial difficulties, thanks to willpower, perseverance, honesty, the citizens of the new Italy could get to very high positions. Moreover, it offers the historian material to study and understand what happened, between the years 1848 and 1860, to the Sicilian refugees and to analyze the first stages of the participation of the Sicilians in politics and in the scientific progress of the new Kingdom of Italy. [Publisher's text].