The sensuous warmth of a June evening in Palermo was exacerbated by an intense heat radiating from flaming torches that lined the Marina, past the Porta Felice to La Cala. Nobles with wealth enjoyed the night air from the ostentation of their carriages; a nod or a wave to those that mattered was sufficient to ensure their presence had been acknowledged. As the crowds filtered through the imposing stone gate named after Donna Felice Orsini, a former Viceroy’s wife, groups of people congregated, exchanging gossip and opinions. These flambeaux in the summer of 1808 were a rare sight for young Benjamin Ingham from Yorkshire.
Flames from the torches illuminated the face of sixteen-year-old Estina Fagan, the Anglo-Italian daughter of Robert Fagan, portrait painter, archaeologist and, later, British Consul-General of Sicily. Benjamin from Ossett was captivated. The twenty-four-year-old Ingham cultivated the image of a dandy, styling his hair in the fashionable ‘first consulate’ manner which required a feathered fringe to fall loosely over his eyebrows and lengthy sideburns to brush his cheeks. His urbane appearance however hid a flinty, matter-of-fact character; Ingham was no poet but a hard-headed businessman. His efforts to court the beautiful Estina included excursions with the Fagan family to the orange and lemon groves of Bagheria and Monreale but would go no further due to her family’s desire for a wealthier match. They had already chosen William Baker, whose grandfather was Governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company and director of the East India Company, the heir to a kind of wealth that young Benjamin could only dream of attaining.
Despite the fact that he came from a prosperous Yorkshire family, by 1806 — two years prior to his first glimpse of Estina Fagan — Ingham had lost virtually everything, both in love and business. As well as working as a representative for the family business, he had been carrying on his own trading ventures, but owing to the vagaries of Georgian sea travel had seen his investment sink to the bottom of the ocean when the ship carrying precious cargo was caught in a storm. His romantic life followed suit when his fiancée Anne Brook broke off their engagement, perhaps not wanting to marry a luckless merchant. The city of Leeds and his family home in Ossett, a market town near Wakefield, no longer held the promise and fascination of former years. When the opportunity arose to travel to Sicily with the intention of selling cloth on behalf of the family business, he did not hesitate.
Ingham’s arrival coincided with feverish British activity on the island in a bid to keep the Mediterranean open for naval operations during the Napoleonic Wars. By 1806, British troops had landed, a move welcomed by many of the local aristocrats and by the royal family, who had fled to Palermo from Naples after Napoleon deposed King Ferdinand (styled both Ferdinand III of Sicily and Ferdinand IV of Naples) and installed his own brother as king. These were tumultuous times but, for the quick-witted entrepreneur, there were many opportunities. English trader John Woodhouse had become a fortified wine baron after establishing a winery in Marsala on Sicily’s west coast. Admiral Nelson’s favourite sherry was off-limits due to the Napoleonic blockade and Woodhouse’s Marsala ably filled the gap. It was not long before Benjamin Ingham visited Marsala and saw the huge potential that the product held for future business.
In 1812 Ingham set up his own winery, known locally as a baglio, in direct competition with John Woodhouse, after sending his brother Joshua on a clandestine fact-finding mission to Spain to copy the best techniques used by the sherry houses. Ingham had no desire however to live in provincial Marsala and he decided that the only place for a man of his would-be stature was Palermo. John Woodhouse, on the other hand, portrayed himself as a man of strict morality, despite rumours of repressed homosexuality; he saw the Marina with its flambeaux, fêtes and festivities as the height of depravity, especially when the torches were extinguished after midnight creating, as contemporary travel writer Patrick Brydone noted, an ambience ‘better to favour pleasure and intrigue’.
The most titillating affair of all was the relationship between Admiral Lord Nelson and Emma Hamilton, the wife of Ambassador William Hamilton. Emma was a noted beauty who had achieved a certain succès de scandale. Pryse Lockhart Gordon, an author and former acquaintance of Lord Byron, arrived in Palermo when the famous couple were resident. After docking he went immediately from the harbour to be presented to Nelson and to William Hamilton; however, he was somewhat keener to meet the Admiral’s mistress, as his account indicates:
Our introduction to the fascinating Emma Lady Hamilton was an affair of more ceremony, and got up with considerable stage effect. When we had sat a few minutes, and had given all our details of Naples, which we thought were received with great sang-froid, the Cavaliere retired, but shortly returned, entering by a porte battante, and on his arm or rather his shoulder was leaning the interesting Melpomene, her raven tresses floating round her expansive form and full bosom.
Gordon took apartments in the Palazzo Patrollo, off the Marina, and was delighted with the ‘extended terrace forty feet wide and sixty in length, looking full on the bay’. His Personal Memoirs return again to Lady Hamilton during one particularly eventful ambassadorial dinner. A Turk who had fought at the Battle of the Nile, a famous victory of Nelson’s, claimed in a drunken slur that he had despatched many Frenchmen with the sword he was currently wearing to the dinner, and duly produced the blood-encrusted weapon. Emma Hamilton took the sword from his hand, kissed it, and passed it to Nelson. Gordon was shocked by such a brazen act, as was the Consul-General’s wife who fainted at the scene.
British writers of the time were both fascinated and shocked by Sicilian attitudes to sex and marriage. The Hamilton ménage-à-trois would have provided little novelty to an aristocracy used to such arrangements. The Reverend Brian Hill in his 1791 book, Observations and Remarks, gives us this somewhat pious opinion on the state of Sicilian marital relations: ‘The crime of adultery is so common that no Dame of rank is thought the worse for being guilty of it.’
Benjamin Ingham’s love-life, although not worthy of Gordon’s pen, was also far from straightforward. As his business interests flourished and Estina became a distant memory, he integrated further with the island’s high society. By 1819 he had formed a relationship with Alessandra Spadafora, the Duchess of Santa Rosalia (1778–1851), who became his mistress. Alessandra already had four sons from her marriage to the Duke Pietro Ascenso, who was to die at sea in a battle against the Turks in 1821. From the chronology, we can see that an affair had already begun before the unfortunate Duke’s death. Only one of the Duchess’ children was in a stable financial position, having married an heiress. The others were spendthrifts, who would come to rely on the largesse of Ingham. He was not noted for suffering fools gladly, but was surprisingly indulgent with Alessandra’s sons; such generosity did not extend to his own nephews employed in the business.
Alessandra, in the way of many Sicilian aristocrats, had a string of titles to her name. In addition to being a duchess, she was Princess of both Venetico and Maletto, Marchesa of San Martino and Roccella, and also the Baroness of Mazara. A photographic portrait exists of an aged Alessandra wearing a voluminous black dress and a very dour expression. Raleigh Trevelyan, the author of Princes under the Volcano, an invaluable resource for anyone interested in the history of the Ingham-Whitakers in Sicily, says that Ingham’s wider family considered the Duchess ‘a tartar’ whose formidable temper was equal to that of her lover. She was always trying to manoeuvre her sons into a favourable position that would see them inherit some of Ingham’s wealth. Naturally, Benjamin’s blood relations looked upon such machinations less than sympathetically.
The first of Ingham’s nephews to arrive in Sicily was William Whitaker (1796–1818), ostensibly summoned to work in the family firm as Ingham had initially, although it was clear his uncle was grooming him to take on responsibilities in his expanding business empire. William was pitched into the rocky economic territory of post-Napoleonic War Sicily. In the recession of 1816, Ingham was trying to juggle more than just the various facets of wine production; he had been dealing in olive oil and sumac, and had also diversified into the more traditional Yorkshire rag trade and bill broking. He would go on to pull many other operations into his all-encompassing vortex, including sulphur and shipping. William would have found Ingham at his home in Via Bara, neighbouring the Lampedusa family who would spawn Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, the author of The Leopard, a novel that captures the twilight of Sicilian aristocracy during the Garibaldi invasion.
The house in Via Bara All’Olivella, to give the street its full name, was both a home and a headquarters — a complete contrast from the as-yet-to-be-constructed pleasure palace of the Palazzo Ingham which would become the ‘Grand Hôtel et des Palmes (The Palms)’. Modern-day Via Bara is a relatively constricted thoroughfare bisecting the main avenue of Via Roma. Rather than being tarmacked, it is diagonally paved with substantial stones worn smooth with the passing of much traffic, both pedestrian and vehicular. In places, the street narrows to such an extreme that two cars travelling in opposite directions would be likely to clip wing mirrors or meet in a stand-off. The several storeyed, once grandiose, buildings face each other, balcony to balcony, their paint peeling and plaster flaking.
Lampedusa remembered Via Bara as a squalid and poor area but, as Raleigh Trevelyan points out, it must have been a rich and mercantile address in the days of Benjamin Ingham. A sense of the Ingham era can be felt where the street intersects with Via di Lampedusa. The Palazzo Branciforte has been renovated to become an exhibition centre, and its elegant white façade with ochre trim and imposing entrance archway, complete with mock portcullis, speaks of the power once wielded by the Branciforte family. Opposite is the less imposing, but equally smart, Palazzo Lampedusa. Little remains of the interior captured so beautifully by Lampedusa in his memoir, Places of my Infancy. During our initial visits in the first decade of the twenty-first century, the palazzo was in a very sorry state. An American bomb during World War II had reduced it to ruin with little hope of revival. It took savvy property developers to resuscitate the exterior, the price being its conversion into apartments. A quick search on the internet will show that these are currently for sale, at doubtless exorbitant prices.
Benjamin Ingham sent William Whitaker forth from Via Bara to negotiate on behalf of the firm. One of his first assignments was to investigate two firms in Naples with which Ingham was doing business, and which were in financial difficulty. Much to the irascible Ingham’s ire, William disappeared for longer than was expected. His eventual apology and explanation revolved around a complicated power of attorney and a desire not to worry his uncle. The truth of the matter, however, had more to do with the attractions of a raven-haired Neapolitan beauty called Clotilde. Sadly, just as the young man was settling in to his Italian routine and adjusting to life with his uncle, he was struck with a fever and died in November 1818.
Ingham is famously quoted as having written to his sister saying that ‘Your son is dead. Send me another.’ This apocryphal request seems incredibly harsh, even for the blunt Yorkshireman; the actual letters concerning his nephew’s death show a far more tender appreciation of a life so prematurely cut short. The replacement was William’s brother Joseph Whitaker (1802–84), a man perfectly suited to the job of administrative functionary for a demanding boss. He had a scrupulous hold on the purse strings, both for the firm and his own household. Sophia, his wife, is said to have remarked, rather wistfully, after Joseph had died, that she would have loved to have owned a brooch. The delights and fripperies of Palermo society held no attraction for Joseph, who would beaver away at the office, putting in all the hours required. When he returned home for dinner, he demanded complete silence whilst eating his food, so an acquiescent Sophia would sit demurely to one side as the paterfamilias digested his meal. There must have been some highlights in the marriage, however, as they had twelve children in regular succession.
As we know, even the taciturn Ingham allowed himself the best that Palermo had to offer. He became fluent in Sicilian, not just the standard Italian used for business across the peninsula, and through the good auspices of his Duchess he was able to participate fully in the island’s aristocratic life. He made the sound decision early on to trust the locals in business, an attitude conspicuous by its absence in the majority of expatriate merchant circles. Consequently, he was accepted as an equal by even the haughtiest of Sicily’s nobility.
Despite such assimilation, one area in which he refused to compromise was religion. Surrounded by Catholics, he remained a staunch Protestant. The Ingham family had a proud ancestry in matters spiritual. His namesake Benjamin Ingham, born in 1712, was a preacher attracted to the Moravian Methodist philosophy who wrote A Discourse on the Faith and Hope of the Gospel. His followers were known as Inghamites and they set up chapels in his name — some still exist today. Although our Benjamin did not go to these extremes, he was always happy to meet and greet Protestant clergy.
The theologian, poet and Anglican priest John Henry Newman (1801–90) who would, ironically, go on to convert to Catholicism, gives us an insight into Ingham’s kindly attitude and lifestyle at the time. Cardinal Newman, as he would become, had made the mistake of travelling alone through Sicily’s interior. He was struck down with illness near to the central city of Enna and recuperated at one of the town’s inns. Before these trials and tribulations, he had made his way to Palermo where he was invited to dine with Ingham. Newman did not record his opinion of Alessandra Spadafora, but was much taken with the ‘splendid’ food, in addition to indulging his priestly palate with ‘two or three glasses of wine’.
Newman returned to Palermo after his enforced sojourn in Enna, only to find that he could not return home to England because there was no vessel available. Raleigh Trevelyan is sure that the intervention of Ingham provided a passage on a French ship going to Marseille. Even then, the vessel was becalmed for a week between Sardinia and Corsica, providing the cleric ample time to write his famous hymn, Lead Kindly Light.
Sicily did not feature heavily on the Grand Tour itinerary, unlike its sister in the Bourbon monarchy, Naples. However, a few intrepid and less holy Grand Tourists made the trip, especially after the Scotsman Patrick Brydone had published his successful journal, A Tour through Sicily and Malta, in 1773. Part of the attraction was the road less travelled and an escape from gawking fellow countrymen who were wickedly satirised by the Irishman Thomas Moore in his 1819 poem, ‘Rhymes on the Road’: ‘And is there then no earthly place, / Where we can rest, in dream Elysian, / Without some cursed round English face, / Popping up near, to break the vision!’
That being said, the few aristocrats who crossed the Tyrrhenian Sea were relieved to find hospitality offered by Ingham and his fellow merchants, even if their hosts were touched by the indignity of having to work for a living. The advantage of a meal with Ingham was the entrée he could provide into Sicilian society. Such connections were deemed important, as well-to-do Sicilians had become somewhat wary of travelling nobles, precisely because Brydone, a travelling companion to the idle rich, had revealed too many of their secrets in print. Most of those from the higher echelons of British society who bothered with the island left little in the way of written impression; one notable exception was John Butler, titled Lord Ossory and later the Second Marquess of Ormonde. Ingham was rather scathing of the young buck’s tendency to overindulge in late-night carriage rides up and down the Marina, forgetting his own early fascination with the spectacle.
Ormonde’s 1850 Sicilian memoir, An Autumn in Sicily, published years after his travels, paints a vivid picture of early nineteenth-century Palermo and gives an insight into his own stereotypical bias. He stayed in the Hotel Marletta on Via Toledo, which is now Via Vittorio Emanuele; it was a comfortable residence but did not reach the heights of The Palms during the Belle Époque:
The Toledo attracts attention from the number of very long latticed balconies on each side, belonging principally to religious establishments, who add to their means by letting them to spectators of the great religious processions which annually take place. The royal palace stands at the inland end of the street Il Cassaro, a name derived from the Arabic al kasr (the palace). The thoroughfares are full of mendicants, whose appeals for charity are vociferous and unceasing; and the bustle in them caused by the antagonism of real business and determined laziness and lounging, though amusing at first, becomes wearisome when curiosity is once satisfied. Along the sea runs a very fine promenade, La Marina, whence there is a fine view of the bay, and which forms the favourite resort of all the rank and fashion of the town.
Signor Marletta’s hotel, where we found a very good accommodation, is situated at one end of the Toledo. Adjoining it is a large prison, which is somewhat of a drawback to its comfort, as, independently of the disagreeable importunity for charity of those confined in it, to which the inmates of the hotel are subject every time they appear in the street, the nightly hailing of the sentinels to each other every half-hour is tiresome in the extreme, and renders it desirable to secure a bed-room as far removed as possible from their neighbourhood.
Unfortunately, Ormonde never tells us if he secured a residence which he would have considered more befitting his station, but he does elaborate on the entertainments he enjoyed with the city’s beau monde. Although he thought the opera to be inferior to that of Naples, he was more than happy to attend regularly, specifically visiting the box held by the Principessa Partana whom he considered to be at the centre of Palermo’s social whirl. According to the Marquess, the society ‘was agreeable and easy’.
He also met Baron Pisani, a fascinating character, who typified the fact that some Palermitani used their position in society for more than mere fripperies. Pisani had created la Real Casa dei Matti, a home for those suffering with mental health problems that was a world away from the grim asylums of the day. This is Ormonde’s description of a meal taken at the institute: ‘We saw them all at dinner, which consisted of soup, meat, bread, grapes, and a small allowance of wine, served in a most comfortable way. All possible liberty is allowed to them, and the old-fashioned methods of restraint are nearly unknown.’
Pisani’s method was so innovative that esteemed publications in North America were commenting on his vision and practice. The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal of 1835 had this to say:
This plan of treatment, so efficacious and humane, for the cure of insanity, is a proof of the superior mind of him, under whose directions it has been carried into effect; and although it would be very difficult to find such an estimable person to superintend similar establishments, the plan here described will be found more and more advantageous and satisfactory, as it is judiciously employed. The labors [sic] and ingenuity of the worthy Baron may thus, in some measure, be imitated; but who, we may ask, will imitate the indefatigable constancy with which he has pursued his painful and arduous undertaking?
The Baron even encouraged the therapeutic use of music and theatre, in addition to the advantages of gardening, as Ormonde noted. The patients tended the plants which included some rare species such as the papyrus reed, more commonly associated with Syracuse in the south-east of the island. It is perhaps no coincidence that it was the Boston medical press who came to hear of Pisani’s revolutionary approach to mental health. There were strong connections in the business world between Palermo and Boston, many of which were fostered by Benjamin Ingham himself.
In 1823 Benjamin had called yet another nephew, Joseph Ingham (1803–33), to Palermo. His namesake, Joseph Whitaker, was productively ensconced in the office at Via Bara and his uncle needed someone to look after his interests in Marsala. However, the sombre Joseph Ingham was not suited to the atmosphere he found in the town and soon found himself severely criticised by his sharp-tongued uncle. Joseph was summarily packed off to Boston to look after the company’s North American interests, which included the transportation from Sicily of sumac, pumice, cloth and, of course, wine. In return, his nephew was to arrange for the export of American wood to be made into wine casks. Sadly, only a few years later Joseph Ingham’s American odyssey came to an end when he shot himself in a New York hotel. He was said to have been suffering from depression, or melancholia, as it was termed in the nineteenth century.
During Joseph’s Boston years, his two younger brothers had also decided to make long-term futures in Palermo. Benjamin Ingham Jr., fortunately known as Ben, and Joshua Ingham saw the family firm as gainful employment. Although an adopted Palermitan at heart, Ben would be the one chosen to ping-pong between America and Sicily, after he was sent to Boston initially to sort out the complications that had arisen over Joseph’s will. Raleigh Trevelyan reports that Ben stayed for many months to further the business and was so successful that he became an itinerant frontman for the company.
The arrival of two more nephews and the strength of the North American arm were both factors in the consolidation of the business during the 1830s. Benjamin Ingham Senior’s thoughts now turned to his relationship with the Duchess of Santa Rosalia. Some mystery surrounds the legalisation of his liaison with Alessandra. Did he actually marry her? It was known in the family that Uncle Benjamin had intentions of formalising his partnership, much to their dismay. Nothing is known of the ceremony and, given she was Catholic and he was Protestant, it was likely to have been a civil arrangement. The non-existence of any record means that the legality of the marriage has been called into question. Historians have made the point that he did not take any of her titles, which would have been useful assets on an island so heavily populated with abundant principi and baroni, although he did become the Baron of Manchi e Scala, an estate he owned in central Sicily.
Further intrigue revolves around a comment made many decades later by Tina Whitaker, the wife of Joseph Whitaker Jr., who was the son of Benjamin’s nephew, Joseph. Tina had a side-line in writing and penned a pamphlet on Ingham’s life entitled Benjamin Ingham of Palermo. Rather casually, she made the claim that Benjamin had ensured that Alessandra sign away any claim on his fortune before their marriage took place. If this is to be believed, such a document would be a very early example of a ‘pre-nup’. Once again, no record exists and the family were still clearly worried about their chances of inheritance after Alessandra supposedly became Mrs Ingham.
Whether or not Alessandra achieved official status, she seems to have participated more fully in the required social aspects of Ingham’s business affairs after their formalised relationship. She was, however, anything but punctilious and was, in that respect, a polar opposite of the regimented Ingham, who liked deadlines to be met and meetings to take place at their allotted time. Alessandra had the laissez-faire attitude of an aristocrat used to taking life at her own pace, and on one specific occasion, being dilatory actually worked in her favour.
In 1840, to appease Alessandra, who hated visiting Marsala, Ingham had bought a country estate nearby, called Racalia. The surrounding countryside, during periods of scarcity, was infested with bandits. One of Sicily’s wealthiest men travelling with his noble wife would have been fair game and a prize beyond belief. The robbers had heard whispers in Marsala that the party would be making the short journey to Racalia and, therefore, had decided to lay in wait. Alessandra was running so late that she delayed their departure for days. Baking under the sun in the flatlands behind the port with eyes constantly focussed on the track, the mind-numbing tedium and frayed nerves finally got the better of the would-be highwaymen and they decided that even the Englishman’s riches were not worth the wait.
Racalia was not the only property that Ingham would reside in after the pseudo-marriage. The couple finally moved from Via Bara, leaving it to Joseph and Sophia Whitaker, and settled in Piano di Sant’Oliva to the north-west of their old residence. The new Villa Ingham was elegantly balanced and designed to match its Palermitan neighbours. The area stretches from Piazza Castelnuovo by way of Piazza Sant’Oliva, along Via Carini to Via Porta Carini. The house on Castelnuovo no longer exists and has been replaced with a glass-fronted commercial block which looks towards the bandstand built by Joseph Whitaker’s son. The nearby triangular Piazza Sant’Oliva is more verdant, softened with a neat hedge-lined park planted with oleander. The paths of this small public garden lead to the bust of Giuseppe Pitrè, the Palermitan professor and folklorist who was born in 1841, just as the Inghams were finding their feet in a new district. Pitrè would go on to write Sicilian Fairy Tales, Stories, and Folktales and even set up a department for folklore at the University of Palermo.
The professor, in his capacity as a collector of the island’s fables, would have been aware of the many stories attributed to the hardship of the sulphur industry. The workers, known as zolfatari, suffered dreadfully with lacerations on their sallow skin and deteriorating eyesight, all the more heartbreaking when we learn that some were mere children. In our literary guide to Sicily, we discussed the written representations of such mining, foremost of which was Nobel Laureate Luigi Pirandello’s ‘Ciaula scopre la luna’ (‘Ciaula discovers the moon’). In this short story Ciaula, a young miner’s helper, develops a fear of natural darkness above ground, being more used to the enveloping gloom of the mineshaft.
Another representation of mining which helps us to appreciate the sheer desperation of such an occupation comes from the pen of Giovanni Verga, the renowned Catanese realist who was born a year before Pitrè. In his short story ‘Rosso Malpelo’ (‘Nasty Redhead’), taken from Novelle siciliane (Sicilian Stories), the eponymous protagonist with the flaming hair is institutionalised in the mine, along with the poor animals who accompany him:
… he seemed perfectly adapted to that line of work, even in the color [sic] of his hair and those mean cat’s eyes which blinked if they saw sunlight. It’s the same with the donkeys that work in the pits for years and years without ever coming out again; they’re lowered by ropes into those passages where the entrance shaft is vertical, and they remain there as long as they live.
Ingham must have been aware of the appalling conditions endured by the miners, but it seems not to have affected his decision to invest in sulphur. In the first half of the nineteenth century, Sicily had a virtual monopoly on the world’s supply of the mineral. This 1840 text, Review of the Neapolitan Sulphur Question, rather suspiciously anonymised with the authorship attributed to ‘A British Merchant’, details the extent to which the British had begun to monopolise the sulphur trade, owing to a boost in demand from northern industry:
In 1825, the import duty on sulphur, in Britain, was reduced from £15, per ton, to 10s. per ton… These circumstances gave at once an immense impetus to the demand for sulphur, in branches of manufacture in which it had not previously been employed; chiefly, however, in the production of alkalies [sic] for the use of the soap and glass makers. Thus, in the case of soda, by the addition of sulphuric acid to common salt, a crystallizable [sic] sulphate of soda is produced ...
The ‘Concern’, as the Ingham-Whitakers called their company, was riding this wave of expansion until the King of the Two Sicilies, Ferdinand II, gave in to French pressure and in 1838 granted an exclusive licence to the French firm of Taix, Aycard from Marseille. This marked an end to the favourable terms experienced by merchants from Britain and had an immediate and detrimental effect on trade. The following year, Westminster sent the Secretary of the Board of Trade to the Neapolitan court to ‘catechise and coerce’ the King. His argument stated that Ferdinand had broken the Treaty of Commerce signed in 1816. Sicilian sulphur was making big news in the House of Lords as can be seen from this speech by Lord Lyndhurst, reported in the Review of the Neapolitan Sulphur Question:
The terms of the contract with Taix & Co. he contended, was in direct violation of the treaty of 1816, as it compelled the British merchants settled in Sicily either to sell the produce of their mines to Taix & Co. or in the event of their choosing to export it on their own account, they had to pay a duty to the Neapolitan Government.
The Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, now exchanged furious notes with Ferdinand, and the British fleet was sent to blockade Naples in an attempt to stop any sulphur passing through the port. The British navy used the rather sneaky technique of flying the colours of a third nation, only to reveal the Royal Navy ensign when they boarded the Neapolitan vessels to check for the mineral. By way of response, the King sent 12,000 troops to Sicily. The so-called ‘Sulphur War’ was beginning to escalate to such a degree that there was a danger of conflict. Our anonymous merchant shows the disdain felt by the English in Palermo for Ferdinand and his advisors:
The argument of such persons, as maintained, in reply to all this vituperation, that the King of Naples had, as an independent Sovereign, the unquestionable right to devise and promulgate whatever fiscal regulations he thought advisable with respect to his own dominions, continued to be treated with the utmost scorn and contempt.
Ingham was one of the ‘settled merchants’ referred to by Lord Lyndhurst, and he must have been extremely relieved when the French government intervened to try and broker a solution. The Taix contract was cancelled and the monopoly rescinded. However, the British Consul-General, in late 1841, was still noting considerable discontent amongst mine owners and merchants due to the fact that the punishing duty had been left in place. A petition was sent to Naples, although as the Consul-General notes, the only British name amongst the irate Sicilians was none other than Benjamin Ingham.
Ingham distracted himself from the sulphur crisis by dabbling in pepper importation. It was in his ship Elisa that the first cargo of pepper ever to be transported directly from the East Indies to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies arrived in Palermo. Prior to the success of this venture, all trade in the spice had involved third parties and other countries. Ingham was fêted by Palermitan society, and the King temporarily put aside his ill-concealed dislike for the British and invested Benjamin with the Order of Saint Ferdinand.
Pepper was much more common than it had been in the Middle Ages, yet it was still a luxury item around which there was much mystique. Aside from its obvious use as a flavouring and a condiment, it was thought to have healing properties. Black pepper was put to use in treating everything from constipation and insomnia to abscesses and toothache. One of its more unusual medicinal applications was in the calming of sunburnt skin, something the northern aristocracy who had started to visit Palermo would no doubt have appreciated if caught unawares by the strength of the sun. Contrary to the badge of honour the modern holidaymaker gives to a bronzed body, a pale complexion was favoured by anyone who considered manual labour under the sun as beneath them.
Although not attracted by the summer’s excessive rays, the nobility were starting to see the winter’s relative heat as a tonic. The local circles in which Ingham moved were set alight by the arrival of the Tsarina Alexandra in 1845, after her physician had recommended warmer climes. By this stage in her life, the already-frail Tsarina was suffering from a nervous twitch which developed into convulsions of the head. Although Tsar Nicholas I was reluctant to have his wife spend so many months in Sicily, he conceded, on the premise that he would pay a brief visit. It is endearing to think that his reluctance was due to the romantic notion of a husband missing his wife, but less so when we learn that he could not bear to leave for Sicily without taking his mistress along for the journey.
Alexandra stayed in the Villa Butera in Bagheria, now a twenty-minute car ride from Palermo. In the nineteenth century Bagheria was the key destination for the villeggiatura — the annual escape from the city favoured by the nobles and their families. Many built splendid villas amongst the orange and lemon groves. A large percentage of these aristocratic holiday homes have survived but are now hidden by the chaotic urban sprawl of concrete, traffic and decaying industry. The most renowned of all Bagheria’s villas is the one that once belonged to the Prince of Palagonia, whose sister was the first wife of the Duke of Santa Rosalia, the former husband of Benjamin Ingham’s Alessandra.
Palagonia surrounded his villa with a high wall that he decorated with hundreds of chimerical statues which gave rise to its local nickname, the Villa of the Monsters. Hunchbacked gnomes follow human-headed horses ridden by cherubs and the twisted body of an effete musician looks towards a writhing, contorted gargoyle. Surely these must have been born from a very disturbed mind, although the Comte de Borch in his Lettres sur la Sicile et sur l’île de Malthe (Letters on Sicily and Malta) found the Prince ‘just and correct in his reasoning about everything’. Not so the two Hamburg psychiatrists Helen Fisher and Wilhelm Weygandt, who, according to Giovanni Macchia in his book, Il principe di Palagonia, posited the theory that he built the monstrous statues in a bid to exorcise his own ugliness.
Interestingly, the author Rosanna Balistreri has seen method in the madness. Her 2008 book Alchimia e archittetura (Alchemy and architecture) suggests that the Villa Palagonia subscribes to an alchemical pattern. She has noticed the proliferation of musicians on one side of the central building and chimerical statues on the other. Looking over this progression is the god Mercury, who represents the transmutation of matter, the heart of alchemy. Balisteri’s theory concludes that this is a search for harmony, starting from the ethereal nature of music and finishing with a tangible subject.
Such a unique and fascinating building has not failed to draw the attention of writers and poets, and both Patrick Brydone and Wolfgang Goethe brought the Villa Palagonia into the consciousness of northern Europe. The architecture promotes passionate responses whether negative or positive. Goethe, steeped in the classicism of Greece and Rome, was affronted by the monstrous abandon; however there is an unsubstantiated rumour that Salvador Dalí, the Spanish surrealist, had once declared a desire to buy the villa for vacations in Sicily. It certainly would have suited his theatricality. Fortunately, the villa remains partly inhabited by locals and is open to visitors. Ingham and his nephews would have visited the gardens and house on numerous occasions; sadly, they have left no record of their impressions amongst the plentiful letters housed in the family archives.
By 1851 Benjamin Ingham was beginning to reduce his personal involvement in the Concern. He nominally retired, although in practice he was never able to completely relinquish the reins. He had more time for leisure, but the fripperies of Bagheria were never enough to tempt him to build in the environs. Ingham and the Concern had survived through turbulent times including a cholera outbreak, the sulphur debacle, brigandage and even the 1848 uprising against the Bourbon monarchy, the precursor to events in 1860 that would change Italy forever. It was time for Benjamin to enjoy his wealth a little. Villa Ingham in the Piano di Sant’Oliva was now witness to some incredibly lavish parties attended by the upper echelons — everyone from the powerful General Filangieri to the Valguarnera, Lampedusa, Butera and Niscemi families, many of whom, in the way of close-knit aristocracies, were related.
Filangieri was the officer who had led Ferdinand II’s troops into Palermo to finally quell the 1848 uprising. The Ingham-Whitakers had feared greatly that he would employ the slash-and-burn tactics he had used in villages on the outskirts of the city. However, he was more prudent in the capital and directed his attention towards those intent on wanton destruction. In the years to come, he would also prove to be one of the few Neapolitan administrators liked by the Sicilians. The reason behind Filangieri’s invitation to the Duchess of Santa Rosalia’s social functions was, as indicated by Raleigh Trevelyan, her desire to achieve a pardon for her son. Carmelo Ascenso, now the Marquess of Roccella, had swapped sides during the revolution and become a colonel of the Sicilian forces, defending the castle of Taormina.
Post-conflict parties were grandiose affairs, often requiring the men to be decked out in full regimental regalia and the women to elegantly style themselves in the voluminous skirts of silk ballgowns. A glimpse of the setting for such occasions can be captured by turning to Lord Byron’s former publisher, John Murray, who had been producing a series of travel handbooks. Little remains in print of these extravagant balls, but the villa is mentioned in A Handbook for Travellers in Sicily, written by George Dennis (1814–98) and published by the aforementioned Murray. The guide briefly describes the art hanging on Ingham’s wall:
The Palazzo Ingham, on the Monte di Santa Rosalia, contains a very fine picture by Pietro Novelli, one of the latest from his hand, and formerly in the possession of the Prince of Maletto. It represents the Trinity commanding the archangel Gabriel to announce the mystery of the Incarnation to the Virgin.
Maletto was Alessandra’s brother and she had inherited all his furnishings. It is not clear whether Dennis had mistakenly upgraded Villa Ingham to a palazzo – itself a question of semantics – or if he was referring to the palazzo that Ingham commissioned in 1856.
Deciding that Sant’Oliva was now too small, Ingham bought a parcel of land from the Prince of Radali who, like him, was a foreigner acclimatised to the island. Radali was Ernst Wilding, the Earl of Königsbrück, who hailed from a branch of the Hanoverian Wilding family that had previously married into the Sicilian Buteras. Money for the land exchanged hands in England and Ingham set about building his new home, the future Palms Hotel. There is no historical record to confirm whether the site already contained a building, but we do know that Ingham’s palazzo had two storeys with seven balconied windows – fewer floors and windows than the current configuration. It also boasted the famous glasshouse that would be removed when the architect Ernesto Basile was asked to renovate the building in the early twentieth century.
The edifice fronts Via Roma and is sandwiched between Via Mariano Stabile and Via Principe di Granatelli. The area outside the entrance used to be known as Piazza Ingham or even, in the mouths of rough-and-ready Palermitani, English Square. Abutting the structure was Via Ingham, a nomenclature that has long since disappeared. However, a wider search of the map reveals that Benjamin Ingham is still commemorated with a street name in the Roccella district of Palermo. It is a far cry from the salubrious surrounding of The Palms, being a long strip of road bordered by rather tedious commercial and industrial outlets; although perhaps this is fitting for such a business-minded individual.
Stepping from the hotel today, the visitor is presented with a view that is a world apart from its original outlook. The square once had a plethora of tropical trees and plants, including the ubiquitous, eponymous palm and the more exotic monkey puzzle. Ingham had moved a short geographical distance from the Marina of his twenties where he had gazed in fascination on the lamp-lit amorous assignations of local nobles, but had made a huge leap in his personal and professional status. When people spoke of banking and business in Sicily, they spoke of Benjamin Ingham. As late as 1957, Ingham was still being touted as a man of consequence in Harvard’s Business History Review, where Irene D. Neu wrote about his life in the article, ‘An English Businessman in Sicily’.
Throughout the 1850s revolutionary ideas continued to circulate, as did the dreaded cholera, killing approximately 24,000 people in Palermo in 1854. Eventually, the epidemic subsided but notions of liberation from the Bourbon yoke did not. In the last year of the decade, Ferdinand II died and was succeeded by Francis II whom Tina Whitaker, in her book Sicily and England, calls ‘vacillating, weak and priest-ridden’. The high-society gatherings were increasingly a cover for meetings of a different kind where plots were hatched and war materiel hoarded. The time had come for Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807–82) and his ‘spedizione dei Mille’ (Expedition of the Thousand). Maybe Ingham thought that this uprising would be one more failed attempt at upsetting the status quo, as Neu describes: ‘… old Benjamin Ingham, in Palermo, unaware that he was seeing the end of an era, closed the shutters of his house, prepared to wait out what he was sure would be just another unsuccessful revolution.’
Garibaldi landed with his thousand rebels, the so-called ‘Redshirts’, in Marsala in May 1860. Guiseppe Cesare Abba, one of the General’s contingent, wrote his account of the military manoeuvres in The Diary of One of Garibaldi’s Thousand. His description of the troop disembarkation and exchange of fire is very evocative:
All of a sudden, there was a cannon shot. What’s that? ‘Only a salute,’ said Colonel Carini, smiling. He was dressed in a red tunic with a great broad-brimmed hat on his head, with a feather stuck in it. A second explosion and, with a roar, a large cannon ball came bouncing between us and the seventh company, throwing up the sand as it went. The street-urchins throw themselves to the ground, the friars bolt — as well as they can with their gross bodies, waddling along in the ditches. A third ball crumples up the roof of the near-by guard-house. A shell falls into the middle of our company and lies smoking ready to explode. Beffagna, the Paduan, rushes to it and draws the fuse. Bravo! But he neither hears nor cares.
Abba noticed that some of the bagli and villas of Marsala were flying foreign flags, mostly English, in an attempt to inform both sides of their presence, thus avoiding destruction from the shelling. Ingham’s warehousing and properties escaped serious damage, as did his interests in Palermo, although it was a close-run thing, as this report from British officer Lieutenant Wilmot demonstrates. Wilmot had been sent to the Palazzo Ingham by Admiral Rodney Mundy, whose ship Hannibal had entered Palermo harbour on a mission to assess the situation and to protect British interests:
With much difficulty I found my way to Mr Ingham’s house, which is situated on the western outskirts of the town, near the English gardens. The damage done throughout this district is very great, especially in the neighbourhood of Garibaldi’s headquarters … The shells were still falling, and several times I had to shelter myself in a doorway till they exploded. It was also very unpleasant crossing the Toledo and streets facing the Palace and Mint, as the troops were constantly firing down them with musketry and field-pieces. Close to Mr Ingham’s house there had evidently been a severe struggle. I saw several Royal artillerymen and horses dead, and still remaining where they had fallen.
As Garibaldi had moved from Marsala to Palermo, he had picked up bands of local supporters on the way. Momentum was shifting in favour of the Redshirt rebels. As Algernon Sidney Bicknell relates in his contemporary account In the Track of the Garibaldians Through Italy and Sicily, the time was over-ripe for a lasting revolution: ‘That which enfeebled the Bourbon government so much as to cause it ultimately to collapse before a mere handful of desperate men, was the spirit of disaffection kept alive in the servants of the state by the perpetual insurrectionary outbreaks of the Sicilians.’ His retelling of the events in Palermo chimes alarmingly with Wilmot’s account above, as the besieged Bourbon troops sought a bitter form of refuge in certain key buildings:
In an instant, the whole city was an enemy’s camp for the garrison; no valour in the streets, even if they had displayed it, could have availed them now; some retreated to the Palace and others to the Castle. Then ensued from the guns of both these places a murderous bombardment of the defenceless town, while ships of war, anchored off the Marina, threw shells indiscriminately in every direction, crushing the houses and burying whole families in their ruins.
In advance of Garibaldi, the island had already been infiltrated by certain key supporters of the Risorgimento, amongst whom was Francesco Crispi (1818–1901), who had been exiled from Ribera, a town in the south-west of Sicily. Crispi would go on to spend much time in The Palms espousing his political philosophy to willing acolytes; however, for the time being, Garibaldi’s advance meant that at last he could divest himself of the ludicrous disguises he had adopted as a covert agent. The New York Times reported that he had been able to obtain counterfeit passports matching his spurious identities, one of which was a Latin-American tourist complete with bandido beard and glasses.
Crispi was a friend of both Garibaldi and Giuseppe Mazzini, one of the key activists in Italian unification, in addition to being a shrewd political operator. When he saw that the wind was changing direction in favour of unification, he abandoned the notion of a completely independent Sicily and took up the cause of Italian nationalism. Many Sicilians saw a unified country as a means of obtaining a degree of autonomy via separation from the hated Bourbons. The poor of the countryside were more inclined to view the revolutionary fervour in terms of an opportunity to shake off the remnants of feudalism and obtain some degree of land reform. Whether any of these goals met the giddy heights of expectation is open to question. A large percentage of modern Sicilians feel they have swapped one distant master for another, thereby repeating the seemingly endless cycle of the island’s history.
To avoid the conflict, Benjamin’s nephew Ben Ingham and his wife slipped away to England en route to America. The Whitakers took advice from the British navy and boarded a ship anchored in Palermo harbour. The now-aged Benjamin was however less inclined to move from his residence, preferring to sit out the shelling. Bicknell tells us that the British consul had to endure nineteen hours of missiles flying over his roof; his house was directly in the line of fire between the port and the palace. An armistice was called, after which the Neapolitans officially yielded to the invading troops. Crispi cobbled together a government and Garibaldi turned his focus towards the mainland. The foreign merchants were left in limbo, reliant on the decisions of the fledgling administration.
One effect of the power vacuum was a reassessment of religion. In Naples, a certain Padre Gavazzi dressed himself in extravagant raiment and proceeded to rename churches at will to equate the new movement with the rising of Christ. He was eventually chased off by an angry mob; nevertheless, the British Bible Society saw an opportunity to evangelise and set up wooden stalls along the length of the city’s Via Toledo, selling Italian translations of the Bible and giving away pamphlets full of Protestant content. They had very few takers, apart from curious and concerned priests who would occasionally pick up a leaflet in order to judge the opposition. We have found no reference to the Society performing a similar task in Palermo, although it would be easy to envisage the same evangelists attempting to roll this very large stone uphill towards Monte Pellegrino, Palermo’s most imposing landmark. Bicknell was under no illusion that such interventions were futile: ‘I do not know whether the Society sent the brochures as well as the books, but they were about the last things in the world calculated to do any good in a Catholic country, being vulgar in title and violent in language.’
Despite the proto-government’s attempts to plan for a new future, the immediate concern was security. Previous uprisings had led to aimless disorder when troops were disbanded and the Risorgimento was no different. Palermo suffered from considerable lawlessness but the worst incident occurred in Bronte, the Duchy inherited by Nelson’s family. Nelson never visited the town, being just one more absentee landlord, a situation with which the island was so familiar. Lady Bridport, the incumbent during Italian unification, had also left a bailiff in charge. The peasants saw the victory of Garibaldi as a chance to improve their lot and grab some land. During a demonstration, matters descended into chaos and lasted for days. Rioters lit fires and murderous gangs turned on property owners leaving a trail of corpses in their wake. Garibaldi, who wanted to keep the English on side, sent his fearsome right-hand man, General Nino Bixio, to put down the revolt — which he achieved through casual brutality.
History has not viewed Bixio’s behaviour well and it has proved an embarrassment to Garibaldi’s efforts. The town theatre and municipal archives were lost in the firestorm of retribution and the final insult was a kangaroo court with summary executions of the supposed ringleaders, the latter event earning Bixio the title ‘the Butcher of Bronte’. Ingham, however, with his hard-headed business sense, was in no doubt about the efficacy of the general’s approach — a method he felt should be adopted in other provinces, and said as much in a letter to the British consul John Goodwin.
Benjamin Ingham’s final years were spent in an environment of violence and unrest, a backdrop common to much of his life on the island. Considering that there were several periods during which business activity was all but suspended, it is remarkable that he was able to accrue such enormous wealth. His attitude to Bixio highlights the cold tenacity required to survive and thrive in such turbulent times. The family was all too aware that Ingham’s demise must be imminent, although he was showing no signs of illness, and they were jostling for position in the high-stakes game of his last will and testament. The Duchess continued to push forward her own sons, whilst Joseph Whitaker’s considerable brood felt their familial bloodline should hold sway, not to mention Joseph himself, and his cousin Ben. The other nephew in the firm, Joshua Ingham, had died in 1846.
Il barone, the grand old man of Sicilian business, finally died on 4 March 1861 at the age of seventy-six, most probably of a heart attack. Raleigh Trevelyan details the machinations and peculiarities that followed his death. It seems that Ingham may have had a last-minute change of heart with regard to his will. Trevelyan tells us that he threatened to nominate as his heir a new candidate, the marvellously named Theophilus Hastings Ingham, who hailed from the religious wing of the family back in Yorkshire; however, Theophilus, inexperienced in Sicilian matters, was not to inherit. An altered will was never found and so the bulk of the inheritance went to William Ingham Whitaker, the son of Joseph. The now bald and be-wigged Duchess of Santa Rosalia was allowed to live at the firm’s expense in the Sant’Oliva house and her sons had all their considerable debts repaid. Joseph Whitaker continued in his position at the head of the firm, having been left the banking enterprise and the house in Via Bara.
Joseph’s son, known by all as Willie, could not take advantage of the entirety of his inheritance until he reached the age of twenty-five or until he married — craftily, he was to marry before that age. There is a mystery in the will with regard to the Palazzo Ingham because it receives no mention whatsoever. Trevelyan gives the plausible explanation that the land acquired by Benjamin was, at the time, purchased in the name of his nephew, Ben. This supposition is based on the fact that Ben and his wife, Emily, took up residence soon after the Baron’s demise.
Ingham was originally buried in the Lazzaretto Acquasanta cemetery until it was closed down, after which his remains were removed to the Protestant Cimitero Acattolico ai Rotoli, otherwise known as the Vergine Maria. It can be found to the north of Arenella on the south-east coast of Sicily. His grave, under the shaded protection of a venerable tree, is topped by a monument that carries a circular urn with a central cross embellished by filigree floral relief work. This cylinder sits on a hexagonal plinth which bears the inscription: ‘In memory of Benjamin Ingham Esquire, Cavaliere del Real Ordine di S. Ferdinando e del Merito, who departed this life March 4th A.D. 1861 aged 76 years’. Fittingly, the wording is both in English and Italian.
The burial ground had been a gift from Garibaldi to James Rose of the British community in recognition of his support during the uprising. Although the Protestants now had a consecrated cemetery, they were still worshipping at the British Consul-General’s residence, and it took the collective decision of Ben and Joseph to change this situation. In 1871 they announced their decision to jointly fund the building of an Anglican church for residents and visitors. The site chosen was opposite the Palazzo Ingham across the piazza, now rechristened Square Emilia in honour of Ben’s wife. Other Protestant residents also made financial contributions and the architect William Barber, later assisted by Joseph’s son-in-law Henry Christian, was appointed to make the design.
The building, begun in 1872, took three years to complete and is characteristic of Anglican churches of the period. An enormous rose window, the key decorative feature, looks out over the arched doorway towards the square. The offset bell tower rises sharply to a point and is topped with a wrought iron cross. Italian texts on the churches of Palermo draw attention to the building’s lack of adornment, and when one considers the golden interiors of La Martorana, the Palatine Chapel and the Cathedral at Monreale, La chiesa della Santa Croce (the Holy Cross church), stands out for its simplicity.
The Ingham-Whitakers were keen to reach their new place of worship without having to sully themselves by crossing the busy thoroughfare in front of the Palazzo. The solution was a secret passageway connecting the church to their residence. The corridor still exists and is hidden behind a large gold-framed mirror in The Palms’ Blue Room (Sala Azzurra). Needless to say, this concealed conduit was used for more urgently clandestine purposes during World War II.
Whitaker family members were administrators for the church right up until 1962 when control was completely handed to the Diocese of Gibraltar in Europe — the Anglican Church’s largest administrative area which covers not only continental Europe, but also Morocco, Turkey, parts of the Soviet Union and even Mongolia. Documents relating to the history of the building, however, are held by the Fondazione Giuseppe Whitaker, the Palermo foundation instituted in 1975 in honour of Joseph ‘Pip’ Whitaker, Joseph’s ornithologist son.
Sadly, Ben Ingham was never able to appreciate the completed church or the finished renovations to the Palazzo which he had commissioned for his wife, Emily. Ever the itinerant businessman fashioned by his Uncle Benjamin, he was in Paris during October 1872, dining at the Hotel Meurice, when he began to choke. In a few short hours he was dead at the age of sixty-two. It would not take Emily long to re-marry, choosing to accept a proposal from Giacomo Medici, famed for his role in capturing the South Tyrol from the Austrians. At the time he was Palermo’s Prefect, one who was keen to apply his militaristic bent to law and order. He was also convinced that infrastructure was the key to Sicily’s development. He oversaw the laying of much rail track and it was during his rule that the Palermo to Trapani train line was opened.
The new Signor and Signora Medici chose not to live in Palazzo Ingham, making the decision to sell the property in 1874, the year after Giacomo relinquished control of the Prefecture. The buyer was Enrico Ragusa (1849–1924), son of Salvatore Ragusa, the legendary proprietor of the Hotel Trinacria. The Trinacria, still extant but no longer catering for tourists, is situated in Via Butera. Prior to The Palms, it was the city’s premier hotel and the site of Garibaldi’s 1862 speech declaiming ‘Rome or death’. A plaque on the wall reads: ‘Giuseppe Garibaldi al grido di “Roma o morte” partì per l’impresa che pur troncata ad Aspromonte ravvivava la fede affrettava gli eventi’ (‘Giuseppe Garibaldi, to the cry of “Rome or death” set out on the mission which, although cut short at Aspromonte, would revitalise belief and hasten events’). It commemorates the Battle of Aspromonte that saw Garibaldi injured and stopped in his first attempt to march on and capture Rome for the newly unified Italy.
The Trinacria was also chosen by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa as the location for the death of the Prince of Salina in his book The Leopard (see chapter 5). Salina sits on the hotel balcony looking out to sea and breathes his last in metaphorical waves, a complete contrast to the inert Tyrrhenian Sea before him. In reality, the hotel was a favourite of British officers and those spirited enough to venture south from Naples on their own more contemporary version of the Grand Tour. Trevelyan mentions a Mr and Mrs Moens accompanying a party of voluble Americans from Marseille in 1865. They headed for the Trinacria and were relieved to find that Salvatore Ragusa was well-tuned enough to the needs of fussy northern Europeans to turn away from his table d’hôte an unfortunate Sicilian who ‘expectorated incessantly’.
In more recent years, part of the former hotel was converted into a convention centre. It was at a 1992 conference about the judicial system that the two anti-mafia judges, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, leant towards each other, smiling, in a private fraternal moment. The affecting tableau was caught on film by the photo-journalist Tony Gentile, and has become an iconic image in light of their heartbreaking assassination by the mafia within a few months (see chapter 6). A mural reproduction of this photograph now adorns the wall of a building overlooking the Palermo yacht marina — just a stone’s throw from the Trinacria.
The Ragusa family were obviously steeped in the hospitality industry and it is clear that Enrico wanted the chance to forge his own path in the trade. The sale of Palazzo Ingham was the perfect opportunity to make his own mark in the city and create an establishment with even grander pretentions than those of his father. The reported price was 20,000 lire, a mere drop in the ocean when we learn that Ingham’s Italian estate on his death amounted to more than £8,000,000. This is a considerable figure in itself today, but would be eye-watering if converted to a modern-day value. Nevertheless, it was a significant sum for Enrico, especially as he was not content with the basic configuration and immediately spent more money adding to the layout, a task he would repeat in 1882 with a further expansion. The garden of the Palazzo provided the perfect inspiration when it came to naming his new establishment. He opted for cosmopolitan French, baptising it the ‘Grand Hôtel et des Palmes’, a protracted title quickly shortened by the Palermitani to the delle Palme, and known in English as ‘The Palms’.