The Sicilian patriots received pay, while the enthusiastic North Italians, who came to help, had not received a farthing, and did not expect to receive anything.
The native militia wore their brown fustian suit, which is generally worn all over the country, and is so alike that it made a very good uniform.
Not two months after the last disarmament took place, it was astonishing what a quantity of guns seemed to be still in the country. They were, for the most part, short guns, looking rather like old-fashioned single-barrelled fowling pieces than muskets. Most of them were percussion, however, and only a few with the old flint-lock. The longing for arms was extraordinary.
It might be said of Sicily, at that time, as was said of Piedmont in central Italy about the same time, by a writer in Turin:
"There is no pen able to describe, nor imagination strong enough to conceive, the nature of the present Italian movement. It is a nation in the struggles of its second birth. Half the youth of the towns are under arms; young boys of 12 or 13 break their parents' hearts by declaring themselves, every one of them, irrevocably bent on becoming soldiers. There are fourteen universities, and at least four times as many lyceums in the North Italy kingdom, and all of them are virtually closed, for nearly all the students, and many of the professors, are under arms. Those scholars whom mature age unfits for warlike purposes, either sit in parliament, or go out to Palermo to lend a hand to the provisional Italian government. They are everywhere organizing themselves into committees, instituting clubs, or 'circoli,' and other political associations, inundating the country with an evanescent but not inefficient press. There is a universal migration and transmigration. Venetia and the Marches pour into the Emilia and Lombardy. The freed provinces muster up volunteers for Sicily. From Sicily ghost-like or corpse-like state prisoners—the victims of Bourbon tyranny, the remnants of the wholesale batches of 1844 and 1848, the old, long-forgotten companions of the Bandiera, the friends of Poerio, the adventurers of the ill-fated Pisacane's expedition—creep forth from the battered doors of their prison, stretch their long-numbed limbs in the sun, gasp in their first inhalations of free air; then they embark for Genoa, where the warm sympathy of an applauding multitude awaiting them at their landing greets their ears, still stunned with the yells and curses of the fellow galley-slaves they have left behind. Such a sudden and universal swarming and blending together of the long-severed tribes of the same race the world never witnessed. Under the Turin porticoes you hear the pure, sharp Tuscan, the rich, drawling Roman, the lisping Venetian, the close ringing Neapolitan, as often as the harsh, guttural, vernacular Piedmontese."
GARIBALDI'S PROCLAMATIONS ESTABLISHING
A PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT, ETC.
"Italy and Victor Emanuel!
"Joseph Garibaldi, Commander-in-Chief of the National forces in Sicily, etc., considering the decree of May 14, on the Dictatorship, decrees:
"Art. 1.—A governor is instituted for each of the 24 districts of Sicily.
"Art. 2.—The governor will reside in the chief place of the district, and wherever circumstances may require his presence in the commune that shall be deemed by him best adapted for serving as a centre of his operations.