Slips showing
Sir : I am sorry the wine merchants of Marsala were not satisfied by the flattering references to
them in my book Modern Sicily, I am also sorry they think my facts wrong (Letters, 25 October).
Your anonymous correspondent from the Florio Company denies that there ever existed a rumour about Vincenzo Florio either being connected with smuggling or being despised by the Sicilian aristocracy; and to prove the point he states that the Palermo nobility attended the. unveiling of Florio's statue in 1874. But the memoirs of the then Minister of Agriculture, who was present at the unveiling, record his embarrassment when the nobles boycotted this commemoration of a man whom they de- nounced to all and sundry as a pervenu and former contrabbandiere. Florio and Co also deny my statement that their Marsala estab- lishment ever had a British manager—thus easy is it to forget the great services to their family of Joseph Gordon, and Gordon's father before him!
Another correspondent from Sicily, Mr Whit- aker, says I make many mistakes about Ben- jamin Ingham, but his single factual quarrel with my references to this man is that I omitted to give a precise foundation date for Ingham's wine factory; and I may add that accounts differ. He boldly insists that no English wine merchant ever owned estates with crops. Ingham himself, however, in a well-known letter of 27 August 1860 to the British authori- ties, speaks of his extensive holdings and rents, and his hope that the British government might persuade Garibaldi to execute Sicilians who were stealing the crops. His fellow wine merchant, Mr Woodhouse, even demanded a British gunboat at Marsala, and one was sent to protect him from 'the natives.'
Your reviewer of my book (4 October)— also, I believe, anonymous—lists six further 'errors.' The only one I can accept is the mis- print of an 'e' for an 'i,' and 1 wonder if this deserved a whole paragraph of disparaging sarcasm. He reproaches me with saying that English cloth had an easy market in fifteenth century Sicily—which I neither wrote nor believe. He further says I am wrong in holding that some fourteenth century Sicilian nobles were moneylenders, because, as he strangely and confidently guesses, I must be referring to certain bankers from Pisa : but in this assump- tion he is wrong, and perhaps D'Alessandro's thorough researches are too recent to have caught his eye. He adds that Ugo delle Favare is an exception to my statement that many successive Viceroys were foreigners; but, of three Sicilians with this name, none ever held the august title of Viceroy. When he gratuit- ously asserts that Mr Rose in 1876 was the
single example of an English merchant being attacked by bandits, once again he is controvert- ing a remark I never made, and anyway he is forgetting that Mr Rose himself had already been kidnapped for his money in 1861. Finally, he claims that, because I refer to a bestial act of vendetta, I must therefore think Sicilians to be cannibals: in fact, I believe no such thing; but this particular story does not depend on just a single witness as he seems to think.
Mistakes are sometimes made in history, and they are hard to avoid altogether when survey- ing a thousand years of inadequately charted territory. Freeman's history of Greek Sicily includes a long list of errata, and my own much less detailed work may one day do the same, but your querulous correspondents have not helped me compile it. The worthy merchants of Marsala could better serve their adopted country by writing their own history. It might, for instance, throw light on the enigmatic world of western Sicily if we knew more about the relations of these firms with politics and the Mafia.
Denis Mack Smith White Lodge, Old Headington, Oxford
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