Mariano d'Ayala (14 June 1808 – 26 March 1877) was a Sicilian-born soldier, writer and, after 1848, an activist-politician and member of parliament.
Biography Provenance and early years Mariano d'Ayala was born at Messina at the height of the Napoleonic Wars, and only 25 years after the earthquake which had destroyed the city. Lt. Col. Raimondo d'Ayala, his father, was an Artillery Officer, originally from Spain, who served the Bourbon army loyally. His mother, born Rosaria Ragusi, was from a Sicilian family. He grew up in Messina, where his father became commander at the fort, but was only nine when his father died. He and his mother were both keen that he should follow his father into a military career, and he was still not yet a teenager when his mother took him to Naples and enrolled him at the prestigious Nunziatella Military School. As the orphaned son of a “worthy officer”, he was able to enrol without payment being required.
Military academy He graduated in 1828 with the rank of an ensign/ensign and was sent to join a regiment a short distance up the coast at Gaeta. There were no significant wars to be fought in the immediate term, and d'Ayala was given the opportunity to travel in Italy and further abroad, and to build some important friendships, within and beyond the military community, notably with Francesco Ricciardi, Florestano Pepe and Carlo Troya. He was recalled to Naples, where alongside his military duties he accepted a teaching position back at the Nunziatella as a “teacher of artillery”. In 1836 he was appointed to teach Ballistics and Descriptive geometry. To support his teaching he produced translations of works on physics and on analytical and physical geometry by Jean-Baptiste Biot and Charles-François-Antoine Leroy, but the college authorities rejected his use of these, insisting that he should instead teach using the traditional and well respected texts of another French scholar, Sylvestre François Lacroix. A couple of years later he was the only representative from the south to take part in the preparatory work for the Congress of Italian Scientists held under the presidency of Ranieri Gerbi in 1839 and Pisa (Tuscany). At the congress he was entrusted with oversight of the physical sciences and mathematics sections.
In 1840 Mariano d'Ayala married Giulia Costa, the daughter of a survivor from Murat’s army and of the 1820 insurrection. The family connections indicated and reinforced through the marriage indicate that as the so-called Kingdom of the Two Sicilies grew ever more entrenched in conservative tradition, leading to growing tensions between the government in Naples and growing numbers from the educated middle class, inspired by ideas disseminated by the French Revolution and under the First French Empire to favour a transition towards liberalism and even a measure of democracy, Mariano d'Ayala was on the liberal side of the debate. That was also apparent, by 1840, from the company he kept. In addition to those already mentioned above, his Naples friends included his bride’s father, Gaetano Costa, Alessandro Begani, and Emanuele Taddei.
During the early 1840s d'Ayala raised his public profile in Naples with the publication of some of his written work, including a “Military Franco-Italian Dictionary” (1841), a “Lexicon of Artillery” (subsequently reworked and republished in 1854 as a 450-page “Bibliography of Artillery”) and a “Proposal for a College for Artillery Mechanics and Constructors” (‘’” Disegno di una scuola per macchinisti e costruttori per l'artiglieria”’’, 1841). On account of the company he kept and, perhaps, some of his overheard comments, d'Ayala was already coming under government suspicion: there was a concern that he might be turning into a liberal. The king, despite having been viewed as a potential champion of constitutional liberalism during the early years of his reign, was by the 1840s inclined to see liberalism, as threatening to his own position (Liberalism was increasingly becoming intertwined, for a new generation of influential and mainly northern risorgimento nationalists such as Giuseppe Mazzini, with the dream of a united Italy). An article of d'Ayala’s was published during 1843 in a compilation volume, inspired by an inspection visit he had undertaken to a metal-based manufactory in Calabria. He had taken the opportunity to visit places associated with the former king, Murat, who had been executed for treason in 1815 following abrupt regime change. Murat was feted in Italy during his lifetime, and even more so after his execution, as a champion of liberal and nationalist ideals. Through his wife, d'Ayala already had family connections with Murat’s final army, and the eulogistic tone of his article on Murat’s final journey to military defeat and execution on the orders of the king’s father was, at best, tactless. During 1843 d'Ayala was obliged to resign his army commission and leave his post at the Nunziatella Military School. Suspected and on occasion accused of “plotting against the state” he found himself subjected to sometimes intrusive police surveillance. He was arrested on at least two occasions. During 1844, in the aftermath of major riots at Cosenza which greatly alarmed the government, he was imprisoned for several months. In 1846, returning from an academic conference in Genoa, he was stopped and searched by police, who found that he was carrying publications by d'Azeglio, Balbo and Gioberti, men who might be viewed as moderate progressives in Turin, but they were men from the north, and their ideas alarmed the authorities in Naples. D’Ayala was back in prison in September 1847, following serious rioting in Messina and Reggio. On his release three months later, it was apparent that further incarceration had not tamed his political opinions. Indeed, throughout the middle 1840s, when not in prison, d'Ayala continued to share his insights and beliefs with friends and, on occasion, in print: he did not trouble to conceal his risorgimento aspirations.
1848 By some criteria, the 1848 revolutions which spread across Europe were ignited in Sicily. It is also possible to see the Sicilian uprising of 1848 as a continuation and intensification of the rioting that had led to d'Ayala's imprisonment during the last four months of 1847. During December 1847, following his release, it was D’Ayala who, together with Francesco Paolo Bozzelli and Carlo Poerio, took a lead in focusing the continuing street protests to persuade the king to accept a written constitution. A constitution for Sicily, heavily influenced by British ideas of the time, had originally been accepted by a previous king as far back as 1812, and then revoked by the current king's grandfather following the restoration of 1815. The idea was now returned to the table in response to serious continuing street unrest: a constitution was accepted by the king at the end of January 1848 and then promulgated on 10 February 1848. As introduced it owed much to the so-called Charter of 1830 implemented in France under the relatively “constitutional” July Monarchy of 1830–1848. Implementation in Sicily proved far from straightforward, and by the end of the year the document drafted by Bozzoli had been superseded by subsequent events. In retrospect the short-lived Sicilian Constitution of 1848 (sometimes identified in sources as the “Fundamental Law”) attracted criticism both from those who felt it left the king with too much power and from those who said that by emasculating the king's powers it threatened to generate further social and economic dislocation and impoverishment. Nevertheless, its acceptance by the king in February 1848 represented at that time a significant achievement for d'Ayala and those who shared his vision for the future development of Italy. Revolutions of 1848 in the Italian states would come to be seen after 1860 as an important milestone along the path to unification.
Following the promulgation of the constitution there followed three months during which the king ruled – at least in theory – subject to a democratic constitution. Three presidents of the council of ministers (i.e. prime ministers) served in quick succession. The third of these, and probably the most effective, was the historian-politician Carlo Troya, a medievalist with a strong personal commitment to the cause of Italian unification. Troya led the government for seven weeks between 3 April 1848 and 15 May 1848. It was Troya who sent d'Ayala to Aquila as "Intendant" (loosely "regional governor") for the province of Abruzzo Ultra ("Further Abruzzi"), in the far north of the kingdom. This kept him far away from Naples and the continuing political ferment there, an arrangement which evidently suited his temperament well enough. His governance was reportedly both wise and firm. He devised and enforced an end to a long-standing dispute between the Jesuits and the school authorities in Aquila, thereby ensuring that a locally important secondary school could re-open. But his governorship was short-lived.