# Giacinto de' Sivo

Giacinto de' Sivo (29 November 1814 – 19 November 1867) was an Italian politician, historian and journalist. De' Sivo was a leading legitimist historian after the fall of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and his books provided the main intellectual support in the struggle to undermine the legitimacy of the Kingdom of Italy.

## Biography

Giacinto de' Sivo in the southern Italian town of Maddaloni to a family of long loyalty to the House of Bourbon. His grandfather fought for the Sanfedisti in 1799. As a young man he frequented the most famous private school of the time at Naples, directed by Basilio Puoti. De’ Sivo served in various state positions in the Two Sicilies: a member of the Commission for Public Education, in 1848 he was appointed Councilor of Intendance of the province of Terra di Lavoro. In January 1849 he was appointed commander of one of the four companies of the National Guard of Maddaloni. On 14 September 1860 he was arrested for refusing to pay homage to Garibaldi. In 1861 he published his first historical essay Italy and its political drama in 1861 (L'Italia e il suo dramma politico nel 1861), in which he judged the unification process as elitist and distant from the interests of the people, led by gun violence and the spread of lies. As a result, and despite the risk of persecution and difficulty to find printers willing to publish his works, de' Sivo developed his most representative work, History of the Two Sicilies from 1847 to 1861 (Storia delle Due Sicilie dal 1847 al 1861), published in five volumes between 1862 and 1867, and reissued twice afterward.
In his works, he described the unification process as an assault against two sovereign states (the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and the Papal States), in violation of international law and in particular of the spiritual and civil values of the Italian nation. He challenged the victors' assertion that they had 'liberated' Italy: unification merely meant the conquest of Italy by the Kingdom of Sardinia, itself the servant of powers beyond the Alps; the maladministration of the new government had reduced the Neapolitans to misery and despair. De' Sivo's history offers valuable insights into the political crisis of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and the brigandage that followed the unification of Italy. The thought of de' Sivo was long the subject of ostracism, in spite of Benedetto Croce had highlighted his thickness as a scholar by writing a biography that was included in the work A family of patriots (Una famiglia di patrioti).

## Works

* Costantino Dracosa tragedia storica (in Italian). Naples: dai torchi del Tramater. 1841.
* Corrado Capece. Storia pugliese dei tempi di Manfredi (in Italian). Naples: tipografia Carluccio. 1846.
* L'Italia e il suo dramma politico nel 1861 (in Italian). Bruxelles. 1861.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
* Discorso pe' morti del Volturno (in Italian). Rome. 1861.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
* Sivo, Giacinto De' (1861). I Napolitani al cospetto delle nazioni civili (in Italian). Livorno.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
* Storia delle Due Sicilie dal 1847 al 1861, Vol. I, Rome, 1863; Vol. II, Rome, 1864; Vol. III, Verona, 1865; Vol. IV and V, Viterbo, 1867.