Since I began writing for this blog, my articles have dealt mainly with famous indigenous inhabitants of Southern Italy/Sicily. It behooves me to mention, though, since the destruction of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in 1861, the majority of the members of our ethnos were born outside the borders of the modern state of Italy in what I like to term “the Sicilian Diaspora”. I happen to be one of them.

The loss of our national identity (through conquest), plus the dispersal of so many of our people to the far corners of the world, have acted in many if not most cases to erase our ethnic identity as we become submerged in a greater “Italian” identity (though as second-class Italians, since we are, after all, “Southerners”).