Sea and Sardinia: Pax Britannica versus Vendetta in the New Italy (1870)

When the Risorgimento culminated in the Unification of Italy (1859–61), many British spectators anticipated that it would lead to the rebirth of the part of the world which had produced the Roman Empire and the Renaissance. But a sequence of events soon conspired to undermine this optimism. One of these incidents was the Zamponi affair, which drew British attention to Sardinia in 1870. When a local feud between rival Sardinian families in Terranova (Olbia) resulted in a vendetta against a British vice-consul, and when the Italian authorities failed to intervene, a Royal Navy gunboat was sent to the island, causing a brief upset in the normally amicable relations between Britain and Italy. Examination of the British reaction to the vendetta reveals how the island and its people were perceived by contemporary observers as barbarous and unruly, and provides evidence of how their high expectations of the new Italian state had already been disappointed within a decade of Unification. It also enhances our understanding of the role of British consular officials in Italy, and of the Royal Navy in the Mediterranean. In particular it exposes a tendency towards gunboat diplomacy during a period in which Britain is generally supposed to have avoided entanglements in European affairs. Above all, in the twenty-first century when the British government has sought through aggression to spread its values and institutional models to parts of the world for which they are not necessarily suited and where they are not necessarily desired, it is worthwhile looking at how Italy once succeeded in disappointing the exponents of this perennial British policy.