* The word was not commonly used in the 1860s and in any case it meant different things to different people. Individuals of the era often identified as mafiosi include agents of absentee landowners in the latifondi, gangsters running protection rackets in the lemon groves of Palermo, and newly rich men who had enclosed the common lands after 1860 and held on to them by force. Some people even then regarded the Mafia as different from other criminal organizations, as a secret society with its own rituals and arcane rules. Discussion of the Mafia and how to deal with it was for a century hindered by the refusal of many Sicilians to admit that it and its ‘men of honour’ even existed.

† 419,846 from a population of 21.8 million in 1861 (i.e. without Lazio and Venetia); of these, 57 per cent (barely one-hundredth of the population) exercised their right to vote. A reform bill of 1882 increased the electorate to just over 2 million, and another in 1913 introduced universal male suffrage – five years before Britain. Italian women could not vote until after the Second World War, when they greatly assisted the christian democrats.