Sicilies, Kingdom of the Two

The Napoleonic wars of the early nineteenth century divert the attention of the maritime powers from suppressing what they derogatorily call piracy, but when peace is restored to Europe in 1815, Algiers finds itself at war with Spain, the Netherlands, Prussia, Denmark, Russia, and Naples.

In March of this year, in what becomes the Second Barbary War, the United States Congress authorizes naval action against the Barbary States, the then-independent Muslim states of Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli.

Commodore Stephen Decatur is dispatched with a squadron of ten warships to ensure the safety of United States shipping in the Mediterranean and to force an end to the payment of tribute.

After capturing several corsairs and their crews, Decatur sails into the harbor of Algiers, threatens the city with his guns, and concludes a favorable treaty in which the dey agrees to discontinue demands for tribute, pay reparations for damage to United States property, release United States prisoners without ransom, and prohibit further interference with United States trade by Algerian corsairs.

No sooner has Decatur set off for Tunis to enforce a similar agreement than the dey repudiates the treaty.

The next year, an Anglo-Dutch fleet, commanded by British admiral Viscount Exmouth, delivers a nine-hour bombardment of Algiers.

The attack immobilizes many of the dey's corsairs and obtains from him a second treaty that reaffirms the conditions imposed by Decatur.

In addition, the dey agrees to end the practice of enslaving Christians.

Domenico Barbaia, who was born in Milan, began his career by running a coffee shop, and made his first fortune by creating (or at least taking the credit for creating) a special kind of coffee with frothing milk, the "Barbajada", probably the first "cappuccino."

This drink, and a variation with hot chocolate like Bicerin, had become so popular in Milan that the erstwhile waiter had benable to open a string of coffee houses in the city that all featured his novel concoction.

Barbaia has made his second fortune by buying and selling munitions during the Napoleonic wars.

Also, after the French re-allowed gambling as they advanced southwards in Italy, he had become involved in the operations as a card dealer at the La Scala opera house, but had quickly achieved the position of sub-contractor to run the entire gaming operation of the house in 1805.

With his eyes on controlling gambling opportunities further south in Italy as the French armies advanced, taking over the concession in Naples had quickly beome his preoccupation.

Arriving in the city, in 1806, he is successful enough by 1809 to take over the royal Teatro San Carlo, the major opera house, as well as the second royal theater, the Nuovo.

The Congress of Vienna restores the Spanish Bourbon king Ferdinand to the Neopolitan throne in 1815.

Giaoachino Rossini, having established himself as the idol of the Italian opera public by the age of twenty-one, had continued to write operas for Venice and Milan during the next few years, but their reception had been tame and in some cases unsatisfactory after the success of Tancredi.

In 1815 he retires to his home in Bologna, where Domenico Barbaia, the impresario of the Naples theater, contracts an agreement that makes him musical director of the Teatro di San Carlo and the Teatro del Fondo at Naples.

He is to compose one opera a year for each.

His payment is to be two hundred ducats per month; he is also to receive a share from the gambling tables set in the theater's "ridotto", amounting to about one thousand ducats per annum.

This is an extraordinarily lucrative arrangement for any professional musician at this time.

The contract will last seven seasons, and the composer will obliged with ten operas, including Otello, Armida, Mosè in Egitto, Ermione, La donna del lago and Maometto II.

The Kingdoms of Naples and Sicily are finally united to create the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies shortly after the end of the brief Neapolitan War, waged unsuccessfully by Joachim Murat against Austria.

Although the two kingdoms have been ruled by the same king since 1735, the formal union will not happen until 1816.

King Ferdinand IV of Naples and III of Sicily will become King Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies.

Meanwhile, the Austrians consolidate their gains in Northern Italy into the Kingdom of Lombardy–Venetia.

Although Murat fails to save his crown, or to start a popular nationalist movement with the Rimini Proclamation, Murat ignites a debate for Italian unification.

Indeed, some will come to consider the Rimini Proclamation as the start of Risorgimento.

The intervention of Austria only heightens the fact the Habsburgs are the single most powerful opponent to unification, which will eventually lead to three wars of independence against the Austrians.

The Austrian armies unite near Calvi soon afterwards, and began the march on Naples.

Murat is forced to flee to Corsica and later Cannes disguised as a sailor on a Danish ship, after a British fleet blockading Naples destroys all the Neapolitan gunboats in the harbor.

Neapolitan Generals Pepe and Carrascosa sues for peace and concludes the Treaty of Casalanza with the Austrians on May 20, bringing the war to an end.

On May 23, the main Austrian army enters Naples and restores King Ferdinand to the Neapolitan throne.

Murat, meanwhile, will attempt to reclaim his kingdom.

Murat returns from exile, landing with twenty-eight men at Pizzo in Calabria on October 8, 1815.

However, unlike Napoleon months earlier, Murat is not greeted with a warm welcome and is soon captured by Bourbon troops.

Five days after he lands at Pizzo, he is executed in the town's castle, exhorting the firing squad to spare his face.

This ends the final chapter of the Napoleonic Wars.

Rossini’s Otello premieres in 1816 in Naples, where the newly restored monarch combines his kingdoms of Naples and Sicily to create the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, which he rules as Ferdinand I.

Gioachino Rossini premieres La Donna del lago (The Lady of the Lake) in Naples in 1819.

Based on the French translation of The Lady of the Lake, a narrative poem written in 1810 by Walter Scott, whose work continued to popularize the image of the romantic highlands, it is the first of the Italian operas to be based on Scott's romantic works, and marks the beginning of romanticism in Rossini's work.

The Carbonari participate in the 1820 liberal uprising in Naples under Guglielmo Pepe against Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies, who is forced in July to make concessions and promise a constitutional monarchy modeled on the Spanish Constitution of 1812.

This success inspires Carbonari in the north of Italy to revolt too.