What is left of the Florios?
The story of one of the wealthiest and most powerful families of the 19th century as told by its latest generation.
The saga about the Florio family, The Florios of Sicily by Stefania Auci, has been a true literary success, with millions of sales in the last five years (in 2019, the first of the trilogy was the best-selling book in Italy). The novels also inspired a series on Disney+ released a few months ago, which rekindled interest in the family’s glorious past and history on a global level. When Alberto Paladino Florio, known as Chico, was approached by the publisher to organise the launch of the first bestseller at his family’s historic home in Palermo, the Tonnara Florio, he was thrilled. He had then read a draft of the manuscript and pointed out some fairly consistent flaws to the author, but also told her that he was happy to put the huge archive he inherited at her complete disposal. The author never agreed to do it, and then cut off all communication with Chico. Perhaps the last heir must not meddle.
Before delving into the grand yet complex history of the Florio family, it is necessary to do some serious genealogical tree activity. First of all, to answer the question: how do we get to Chico? He and his brother Alexej are the only ones to have kept the surname, and this slice of the story alone would be perfect material for another bestseller. The last generation we read about in the books, that of Ignazio (b. in 1868), whom we will call Ignazio Jr to distinguish him from his father, and Vincenzo (b. in 1883), Vincenzo Jr, to distinguish him from his grandfather, both reached the extreme peak of this family’s immense wealth and, in the space of a very short time, plunged into ruthless decadence. On the part of Ignazio Jr, of his five children only two survived and they were women, so of the some twenty and more heirs that can be counted today from that family branch, none bears the surname Florio. On the side of Vincenzo Jr, the situation is a bit more intricate. After being prematurely widowed by Annina Alliata di Montereale, who had given him no heirs, Vincenzo spent much of his time in Paris. He, an eclectic and artist, would hang out with Picasso, Dalí and the whole sophisticated clique from the twenties, and hopped from a house in Place Vendôme to another one in the Champs-Élysées. During one of his Parisian stays he met Lucie Henry, a charming French artists’ muse. The two fell in love and decided to live together in Palermo. Lucie already had a daughter, Renè, not recognized by her father and informally adopted by Vincenzo Florio. The very unexpected happened: since Lucie could not have children due to complications after her first pregnancy, it was decided – apparently, under general consent – that Vincenzo would have a child with Renè, his stepdaughter.
Yet another layer of complexity is added, as she was already married to a man named Giuseppe Paladino, who was a doctor of the family. The agreement between Vincenzo Florio and Giuseppe Paladino – written and registered by a notary – stipulated that Renè’s husband would consent to her having a child with Vincenzo and that the newborn would be raised in Casa Florio while retaining the surname Paladino, so as not to arouse any scandal. In return, Giuseppe Paladino allegedly received something like thirty flats in Palermo and a fair amount of cash. In September 1933, Vincenzo (Jr Jr), father of Chico, was born.
“In 1958 my grandfather Vincenzo left two documents to a notary, in which he recognised my father not only as his universal successor but also as his legitimate son. Unfortunately, he died a few months later and this deed remained in limbo of bureaucracy until 1998, when my mother received a phone call from lawyer Enzo Fragalà, whose father-in-law was the solicitor to whom Vincenzo Florio had entrusted the dossier for the recognition of my father as his son. He had found everything amidst the paperwork.”
It was a very long process, but after four years they were recognised – by ministerial and presidential decree – as Florio… by blood.
“Back to the family history, the author makes a first, glaring mistake in the account of Paolo Florio’s arrival in Sicily, in the late 1700s. We have traces of the family as far back as 1500, when they were carpenters and lived in the hinterland of Calabria. They will move to Bagnara Calabra, on the coast, more than a century later.”
Chico explains to me that the inhabitants of this village, the Bagnaroti, were already a sort of lobby at the time, monopolists of freight transport in the Mediterranean.
“Paolo and his brother Ignazio inherit four vessels from their father, who was a renowned shipwright – and for the time it was no small asset. Paolo was a skilled merchant and fifteen years before moving to Sicily, in 1799, he had already opened warehouses in Palermo and Messina, where he kept his goods. So, when he arrived to Sicily he did not arrive penniless and did not go and live in a hovel, as evidenced by both the book and the series. This is not a Cinderella story.”
His great foresight was to make a deal with the merchants of Bagnara Calabra: he would pay for all goods in advance, and in return they would have assured him of first choice on products, and they would have started distributing the rest to the other traders in Palermo at least eight days after he had put his selected goods on the market. This obviously gave him an enormous advantage, but at a time when ships often left and never returned it was certainly a high-margin investment, and this further proves their great financial availability at the very start.
“Then they opened the old aromateria, where they sold spices, herbs. They made a fortune with quinine, which was extracted from the bark of the cinchona, a tree that only grows in special conditions, where there is water around.”
The historical business signboard depicted a lion drinking in a stream surrounded by cinchona trees: the lion, which is usually a symbol of strength, suffers from malaria and is cured by drinking quinine-soaked water.
“His brother Ignazio stayed in Bagnara Calabra, serving as a mediator between Paolo and the merchants in Calabria, and will only go to Sicily when he finds out that his brother has fallen seriously ill. I was impressed to see how both in the book and in the series a large initial chunk is devoted to a non-existent love story, namely that between Ignazio and his sister-in-law Giuseppina, Paolo’s wife. There is no document to suggest the existence of this passion between the two, they do not see each other for sixteen years and there is no epistolary correspondence other than the letter Giuseppina sends him to warn him of his brother’s illness. I fully understand the importance of novelisation to make an editorial product more appealing, but with all that there is to be said about my family, to reduce it to love affairs – and by the way invented – is a shame.”
Paolo died shortly after his brother arrived in Palermo, and Ignazio began to take care of the business and of the education of his nephew Vincenzo.
“Ignazio had the intelligence to realise that it was of utmost importance that his nephew travelled, so he decided to set him off for England with his friend Benjamin Ingham, a well-known cloth merchant. Vincenzo will stay abroad at least three years, moving to Germany and then France. When he returned to Sicily, he was able to speak four different languages and this came in very handy. In those days, to deal with foreign countries, traders needed mediators, and sometimes very expensive ones. Vincenzo thus by-passed brokers.”
Vincenzo Florio modernised and diversified business activities. Thanks to his great economic strength, he was able to buy several companies on the verge of bankruptcy, such as the Tonnara dell’Arenella, an important tuna fishery, where Chico still lives today. There, the forward-looking business of tuna in oil began. Observing his mother, he noticed that she preserved food in oil and that this way the fish lasted a long time. The undersalt fish market had dropped considerably because of Scurvy, a disease resulting from a lack of vitamin C, and he had provided an excellent alternative, just in time. The Florios were the first to intuit the urge to create their own supply chain too, therefore, they used their own oil to store tuna, produced from olives grown on land bought specifically for this reason. Vincenzo Florio created an abysmal gap between him and the other traders. “With him it went from artisanal to industrial”, sums up Chico.
“But it will be his son, Ignazio, who bore his uncle’s name, to create the real empire.”
He too was sent abroad and stayed mainly in France, where he established business relations with prominent figures. He strengthened the assets and continued to diversify. He bought more tuna fisheries, including that of Favignana, in the Egadi Islands; he produced ceramics; he intensified the production of Marsala, a fortified wine that could be transported by ships without the risk of it becoming vinegar due to the waves, and he created a fully industrialised company in which a long cable car transported the barrels from inside the cellars to the place where ships were moored. It was also his idea to export sulphur. Ignazio Florio sold sulphur, that was essential for gunpowder, to countries that were at war with each other, and governments were willing to pay as much so that their enemies would receive smaller amounts. In addition, he kept buying ships, and not only sailing ones but also steam ships, which were a total new thing.
“That of the 99 ships and one entirely made of gold, which I have often heard, is a fairytale, but it is true that he had bought many and started building his own. In the family foundry, the Oretea foundry, he would build boilers to run the engines. He made Palermo the largest shipyard in the Mediterranean.”
And something leads me to say that he would have also passed an ESG test on governance with flying colours. Ignazio Florio changed working hours from 14 to 9, of which the ninth was to be compulsorily dedicated to studying, he introduced gender pay equality, he opened nurseries and schools within his companies where women could leave their children, he took care of transports and provided health care for its employees. Chico’s eyes really do light up with pride: “It was a family that gave so much to this region”.
The wind, however, turned quickly and unexpectedly. Ignazio Jr and Vincenzo Jr were born at a time when Sicily was facing a context of enormous historical transformation, at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. With the unification of Italy, the social, political and economic scenario of southern Italy in general changed drastically. Ignazio senior put on a good face and tried to come to an agreement with the Piedmontese, also becoming a senator of the Kingdom for a period. When he died, his son Ignazio was very young and found himself in a very delicate situation. Fortunately, he had been able to travel, study and learn a lot. Above all he had a vision: to expand its activities into the rest of Europe and not just to trade with the rest of Europe. But he soon had to deal with the post-unification manoeuvres aimed at dismantling southern industry.
As long as Francesco Crispi had been Head of government – who was, moreover, a lawyer for the Florio family – they had been discreetly protected.
“With Giolitti it was a carnage. If in the north he favoured trade union rights and universal suffrage, in the south he proved to be corrupt and authoritarian. Plus, he really did not go down well with the Florios. When Giolitti, before becoming head of government, was Minister of Treasury and Finance during the Crispi era, he began to have many disagreements with him and Ignazio Florio senior always supported Francesco Crispi. Plus, when articles, let’s say, not of his liking were published in the newspaper “L’Ora”, founded by Ignazio Jr, Giovanni Giolitti tried to thwart it. In one of his letters, he would intimidate him: keep your dog at bay, referring to Nunzio Morello, a journalist whose pen was so sharp that he got the name D’artagnan. It goes without saying that they ignored his epistles.”
The weakening project went step by step. At a time when Ignazio Jr was expanding his navigation business, a law was issued whereby no private individual could own more ships than the total number of ships registered in the Registro Navale Italiano. Altogether, there were about 200 ships, of which 99 belonged to the Florios and the rest divided between naval and commercial vessels. To get around the obstacle Ignazio founded the company Compagnia di Navigazione Generale, a parent company that acquired the shares of the smaller ones. It became Italy’s largest navigation company, and the Florios officially monopolised the commercial ship sector. With growing emigration to new worlds, Ignazio took the opportunity to start the as yet unexplored business of passenger ships. Until then, there were so-called “Combi” ships, namely cargo vessels in which only a small section was devoted to transporting people. Ignazio Florio embarks on a colossal project and starts building the eight largest passenger ships in the whole world. Eight 287-metre-long transatlantic liners, with luxury first and second class, still very comfortable third and fourth class, and the fifth one, where all immigrants used to be herded before into one single area, with dormitories for ten and one bathroom for every two cabins. The first of these ships to be launched was the Rex, which set a new record for the Atlantic crossing: seven days.
‘At the same time as this huge investment, they took a big hit, perhaps the biggest one. In the early 1900s, the Banca Commerciale Italiana was in great difficulty and was in danger of bankruptcy. As it was very important that it did not go bankrupt, for the traders with whom Ignazio had dealings, he decided to help. He hosted the Banca Commerciale Italiana in the branches of the Florio Bank, a bank that had been created by his father and was well-established at the time, with branches also in the United States and South America. Three years later, the bank failed anyway and everyone traced the failure back to the Florios, thinking – wrongly – that they had acquired the Banca Commerciale Italiana. Creditors had lost all their savings and thought Ignazio Florio was not honouring his debts, and to make up for the enormous damage to his image, he paid them all. He paid 4,800,000 lira in 1902. That corresponds to millions and millions of euros today. Of all this, I point out, no trace remained; the documents were sent to the scrap heap in the 1990s. I still retain the page from the newspaper “Giornale di Sicilia” that spoke of the scandalous destruction of all the Florio group’s papers from that period… However, coming back to the story, it did not end there. Ignazio had obtained a loan repayable over 45 years, for the passenger ships’ investment. Giolitti passed a law whereby, under the pretext of the impending crisis, all entrepreneurs who had received a loan from the Banca d’Italia had to pay back the money within two years. If Ignazio had not lost all that liquidity to repay debts – which were not even his – he could make it. Ignazio was forced to sell the shipping company’s shares to the bank, and jackals came from half of Europe to devour it. It was the war on the Florios.’
In such a context, Ignazio and his wife Franca lost three of their five children to health reasons. The hitherto close-knit couple begins to throw in the towel. Franca Florio, a figure of rare charisma, known as the queen of Palermo, called “l’Unica” (Italian for “the one”) by Gabriele D’Annunzio and “the star of Italy” by Kaiser Wilhelm II, gradually lost lucidity. She locked herself up, consumed alcohol and opium in an unregulated manner, and spent a lot of time alone on the island of Favignana. Ignazio, on the other side, became a serial adulterer.
“Luck - relatively, of course - was that my grandfather Vincenzo, younger brother of Ignazio, had grown in parallel with the absurdly fast decline of the family and had thus taken care of his personal estate. He had large real estate assets, including more than 200 properties between Sicily, France, Canada. Most of them were sold to help his brother. He will be the one to buy back at auction the family home, the Tonnara dell’Arenella, where I am speaking to you right now. Here he will welcome Ignazio and Franca when they lose everything.”
The house, often referred to as the “Palazzina dei Quattro Pizzi” because of the four spires that tower above it, is a mansion built in the Arenella port district of Palermo. The neo-Gothic style in contrast to the sea it overlooks made it one of the most charming houses in the city back in the days, to the point that when the tsarina of Russia, Aleksandra Fyodorovna Romanov, was a guest of the Florios – Chico tells me – she asked for the architect papers and commissioned an identical project for herself. Thus the “Renella”, named in honour of the Arenella of Palermo, was built in the middle of the countryside, in the Peteroff estate.
“The author describes Ignazio Florio as a man who was totally incapable in business, disgustingly spoiled from a very young age, arrogant, who cheated on his wife continuously and from the beginning. She does not allude to any of the political manoeuvring – which were tailor-made for the Florios – mentioned earlier. Ignazio was a brilliant man, and extremely” – he emphasises the adverb – “extremely, generous. Don’t forget that he was the one responsible for the commission of the city’s five major hospitals. In the book, he appears as just a victim of his own dissipation. It is unthinkable that such wealth could have been squandered only because of mundanities. And don’t forget especially one more thing: that the Florios never, ever formally went bankrupt, they returned everything to the last penny despite enormous difficulties.”
The author says that where history did not arrive, imagination took over. With an archive of more than 180,000 documents about the family that he himself had made available to her, for Chico such a statement is unwarranted and he does not deny that he greatly resented it. Nevertheless, he is grateful to her for the undeniable attention her writings have brought back to the history of the Florios.
“Too bad! I understand fictionalising, it’s just to make it readable and engaging, but there was so much to talk about… However, if I could have suggested an ending, it would have been this image: the two brothers, Ignazio and Vincenzo, sitting on the terrace, a blanket on their laps watching the sea at dusk. When the “Postale”, the ship, arrived in Palermo it would pass by the Tonnara Florio every single time and sound the sirens thrice. It was their way to greet the family. An old home master, the one who told me this story, returned the greeting by blowing a horn that we still keep. They admired and thought: these were once our ships.”
Truly interesting! Well done