Cairoli, Benedetto

(1825–1889)

   The eldest son of a family of patriots, Benedetto Cairoli’s four brothers all died fighting for Italian unification. Benedetto himself was one of the “Thousand” who sailed with Giuseppe Garibaldi to Sicily in 1860. He was elected to Parliament in 1861, but returned to the battlefield to fight for the liberation of Rome in 1867. Romantic and quixotic, he could not match the political acumen of Francesco Crispi or Agostino Depretis. He nevertheless became prime minister three times between March 1878 and May 1881. Cairoli’s governments were largely composed of politicians from northern Italy (he himself was from Pavia) and came to ignominious ends. His first government collapsed following an assassination attempt on King Umberto, the second as a result of the French occupation of Tunis. Cairoli was opposed to Depretis’s style of government and allied with Crispi, Zanardelli, Nicotera, and Alfredo Baccarini to form the so-called Pentarchy, which led the parliamentary opposition to Depretis. Cairoli died in Naples at the villa of King Umberto in August 1889.