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| Teasing a Sleeping Girl, oil on canvas, Gaspare Traversi (c. 1722-c. 1770), Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo by New York Scugnizzo |
"In seeking life, I created death." ~ Victor Frankenstein
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| Our Lady of Fatima, ora pro nobis |
"I shall come to ask for the Consecration of Russia to My Immaculate Heart…If people attend to My requests, Russia will be converted and the world will have peace.” ~ The Virgin Mary at Fatima (July 13, 1917)
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| Pulcinella, Neapolitan (Capodimonte) or Spanish (Real Fabrica de Buen Retiro), soft-paste porcelain, 1759-80, Giuseppe Gricci (ca. 1700-1770). Metropolitan Museum of Art. It is unclear whether this figure of Pulcinella was produced at Capodimonte in Italy or its successor factory at Buen Retiro in Spain. When Charles VII of Naples became Charles III of Spain in 1759, he moved the entire operation, including forty workers and five tons of raw material, from Capodimonte to the palace of Buen Retiro, outside of Madrid. The factory mark of a fleur-de-lis remained in use in the new location, and thus it is often difficult to distinguish wares and figures made in the last years at Capodimonte from the early products of Buen Retiro. Photo by New York Scugnizzo |
Seated beneath the polychrome statue of Santa Rosalia—Palermo’s 12th-century noblewoman who renounced marriage and courtly privilege to live as a hermit on Mount Pellegrino—I prayed and reflected on the recent deaths of loved ones.
Santa Rosalia, ora pro nobis
Clutching a cross in her hand, with a skull resting at her discalced feet, the statue embodies the medieval Christian motif of memento mori. More than a grim reminder of death, the image is a visual summons to contemplation, penitence, and sacred understanding.
In the stillness of Our Lady of Grace Church in Brooklyn, Rosalia’s figure stood as both warning and comfort—a testament to the inevitability of death, and an intercessor at the liminal threshold between life and the hereafter, offering prayers, guidance, and solace to souls crossing over.
Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them. May their souls, and the souls of all the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen.
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HRH was born in Rome, Italy on June 23, 2003 Photo courtesy of Real Casa di Borbone |
Venite adoremus Dominum
Nations are born and die like individuals; nations have fathers, in the literal sense, and founders ordinarily more famous than their fathers, although the greatest merit of these founders is to penetrate the character of the infant-people and place it in circumstances wherein it may most fully develop its powers.
Nations have a general soul and a true moral unity which makes them what they are. This unity is especially manifested through language.
The Creator has marked out over the globe the limits of nations, and St. Paul has spoken philosophically to the Athenians when he said to them: And (He) hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation (Acts, XVII, 26). These bounds are visible, and we always see each people tending to fill completely one of the enclosed spaces between these bounds. Sometimes invincible circumstances hurl two nations into one another and force them to mingle: then their constituent principles interpenetrate, and the result is a hybrid nation which may be more or less powerful and famous than if it were of pure stock.
But several national precepts thrown into the same receptacle may cause mutual harm. The seeds are squeezed and smothered; the men who compose them, condemned to a certain moral and political mediocrity, will never attract the eyes of the world despite a great number of individual merits, until a great jolt, starting one of these seeds germinating, allows it to engulf the others and assimilate them to its own substance. Italiam! Italiam! (1)
Sometimes one nation subsists amid a much more numerous one, refusing to amalgamate because there is not enough affinity between them, and retains its moral unity. Then, if some extraordinary event comes to disorganize the dominant nation, or prompts a great movement, we will be very surprised to see the other resist the general impetus and produce a contrary movement. Hence the miracle of the Vendée. The other malcontents of the kingdom, though in much greater numbers, could not have accomplished anything of this kind, because these discontented men are only men, whereas the Vendée is a nation. Salvation can even come from this, for the soul that presides over these miraculous efforts, like all active powers, has an expansive force that makes it tend constantly to enlarge, so that it can, in gradually assimilating what resembles itself and pressing out the rest, finally acquire enough supremacy to achieve a prodigy. Sometimes the national unity is strongly pronounced in a very small tribe; as it cannot have a language of its own, to console itself it appropriates that of its neighbours by an accent and particular forms. Its virtues are its own, its vices are its own; in order not to have the ridiculous ones of others, it makes them its own; without physical strength, it will make itself known. Tormented by the need to act, it will be conqueror in its own way. Nature, by one of those contrasts that it loves, will place it, playfully, beside frivolous or apathetic peoples who will make it noticed from afar. Its brigandage will be cited in the realm of opinion; at last, it will make its mark, it will be cited, it will succeed in putting itself in the balance with great names, and it will be said: I cannot decide between Geneva and Rome. (2)
Notes:
(1) <The keen vision of one J. de Maistre is not required to recognize with him the disadvantages of the excessive fragmentation of Italy. But the constant adversary of the Revolution, the honest and Christian politician, would with all his energy have disapproved of the methods of a Cavour and a Garibaldi. There was a way to unite the forces and resources of the brilliant peninsula while respecting its righis> [Count Camillo Benso di Cavour described by Benjamin Disraeli as "utely unscrupulous”—sometime Prime Minister of Piedmont-Sardinia, convinced King Charles Albert to revert to constitutional monarchy and to go to war against Austria, leading to the king's abdication; he also exacerbated the waning infuence of the Catholic Church by ordering the closure of half of the monastic houses within Sardinian territories. Garibaldi, general, popular hero, and intense anticlerical and social reformer, was privately supported and publicly opposed by Cavour in his expedition against Sicily, later winning Naples and ostensibly leading a private expedition against the Papal States, but with the secret complicity of the Italian government.]
(2) [For Maistre, in the world-historical struggle between the forces of secularism and those of religion, Geneva and Rome stand for the latter; yet Protestant Geneva is only nominally on the same side as Catholic Rome. In his Oeuvres, Maistre characterizes Protestantism as "le sans-cullottisme de la religion", and in Considerations on France, p. 73, states that Protestantism and the French Revolution partake of a common source.]
* Reprinted from Major Works, Vol. 1: Generative Principle of Political Constitutions, Considerations on France, Study on Sovereignty, Joseph De Maistre, Imperium Press, 2021, pp.174-175.
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| Concept logo by New York Scugnizzo |
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| Beata Teresa del Portogallo, ora pro nobis |
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| Terracotta hydria, Greek, South Italian, Campanian, red-figure, ca. 350-320 B.C., attributed to the Group of Naples 3227, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo by New York Scugnizzo |
This week, our family said goodbye to two extraordinary people. My Aunt Angie and Uncle Joey passed away just days apart, both after courageous battles with cancer. Surrounded by family and loved ones, they left this world together—and we believe, they entered the next together too—to receive their eternal reward after death.
Madonna and Child with the Poor and Forgotten
Souls in Purgatory by Luca Giordano
Their loss comes just a week after the passing of our dear friend Anna. It has been a time of deep sorrow, reflection, and remembrance.
We kindly ask you to keep them in your prayers.
Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them. May their souls, and the souls of all the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen.
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| HRH was born in Saint-Raphaël, France, on June 16, 1950 |
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| Viceroy Domenico Caracciolo by Gaetano Mangano |
“In 1780, when the Marquis Domenico Caracciolo became viceroy—an early forerunner of the deeds of the admiral from the same family—he began that extremely delicate process in which the politically valid forces of the island were shifted toward positions of such radicalism as to lead, in due course, to the fateful split, first emotional and then political, between Sicily and the Neapolitan mainland. Caracciolo, having spent a long time in Paris as a diplomat and deeply imbued with Enlightenment eclecticism (his friendships with the Jacobin intellectuals of the time are well known), came to Palermo with the conviction that a series of reforms and laws would suffice to bring the people ‘up to speed with the times.’ Demonstrating a remarkable capacity for action, he neglected the island’s historical, political, and social traditions, suppressed local religious orders and the Sicilian Tribunal of the Holy Office, promoted the construction of roads and the organization of convoys to make sea navigation—hindered by pirates—safer, increased the power of the police, and allied himself with the bourgeoisie in order to elevate it to a political class. His aim was explicitly to equalize all citizens in front of the authority of the State.”
Caracciolo’s attempt at modernization, undertaken without regard for the island’s historical rhythms, emerges not as visionary statesmanship but as a politically tone-deaf experiment, doomed to fail in the face of deep-rooted loyalties and social bonds.
“All this industriousness did not bring him popularity. Strangely enough, this earned him little, if any, sympathy—partly because he personally maintained a contemptuous attitude toward tradition, the aristocracy, and the culture of the Island. Before long, the antipathy he had stirred up turned into distrust and then into hostility, from the nobles who saw in him someone intending to diminish their political power, from the clergy alarmed by the suppression of religious orders, from the bourgeoisie closely linked by economic ties to the nobility, and from intellectuals who generally shared the views of the nobility and cultivated legal doctrines in defense of feudal rights and historical sciences that supported separatist arguments. He was eventually recalled.”
One of the article’s greatest strengths lies in its ability to balance political and cultural history. Ruta vividly conveys how the monarchy retained the loyalty of the Sicilian people not through coercion but through a complex web of historical memory, religious devotion, and aristocratic identity. He explains how, even in the face of Napoleonic aggression, the Sicilians did not merely defend a regime—they defended a worldview. His documentation of the popular resistance to French incursions, the failure of Jacobin propaganda, and the widespread abhorrence of Enlightenment radicalism is thorough and compelling.
“In Sicily, the French Revolution, despite the activities of emissaries and propagandists, did not give rise to subversive movements. It was rightly viewed as a seditious phenomenon. Writers such as Logoteta, l’ Ayala, the Controsceri, and Santacolomba encouraged Sicilians to remain faithful to religion and to their age-old devotion to the monarchy and thundered against ‘incendiary papers' while being pleased that their fellow countrymen were keeping themselves far away 'from the fire of an unbridled revolt...to overturn all the political ideas most solidly established by common sense and the experience of the centuries and to overthrow with one stroke the Church and the Monarchy under the lie of regeneration.’ These were clear ideas concerning the counterrevolutionary spirit, expressed by Antonino Pepi in his Discourse on the Natural Inequality Among Men.”
Furthermore, Ruta’s use of primary voices—such as Queen Maria Carolina and counter-revolutionary writers like Logoteta and Pepi—gives the article a grounded authenticity.
“How little the ideas from beyond the Alps suited the Sicilians was evident once again when the Neapolitan court moved to Sicily under pressure from the French army. In Sicily, Queen Carolina wrote to the Marquis Gallo, ‘THE VERY NAME OF THE FRENCH IS ABHORRED,’ while a lively polemic was underway, one in which Abbot Meli participated, against the "philosophers, Freemasons, know-it-alls, and politicians" from across the sea.”
The author’s recounting of the failed French military incursion at Mili and the noble-led popular resistance is as stirring as it is significant, highlighting the islanders’ willingness to defend their traditions with arms.
“The only military expedition attempted by the French against the Island ended in disaster: shortly after a division of 3,000 men under Marshall Cavaignac had attempted to establish a bridgehead, on September 18, 1810, at Mili (ten kilometers south of Messina), they were thrown back into the sea by a poorly armed populace led by the local nobles even before English troops under Campbell arrived.”
At a time when historical narratives often focus narrowly on revolutionary progress and liberal transformation, Ruta’s essay offers a welcome counterbalance. It challenges readers to reconsider the legitimacy of conservative and monarchist positions, not as mere reaction or inertia, but as coherent, deeply rooted worldviews worthy of serious engagement. Sicily, in Ruta’s hands, is not a backward province lagging behind modernity, but a conscious actor in European history, choosing continuity and faith over rupture and ideology.
“La ‘Vandea’ d’Italia” is a rich and thought-provoking contribution to the study of Sicilian history and counter-revolutionary Europe. By repositioning Sicily not as a passive backwater but as an active and conscious defender of the ancien régime, Salvatore C. Ruta offers readers a new lens through which to view one of Italy’s most misunderstood regions. This article is essential reading for historians of the Revolution, Monarchy, and the enduring power of tradition.
By Giovanni di Napoli, June 6th, Feast of St. Norbert
* Translations are my own
