Written sources on Lampedusa mostly tell recent history. The island was inhabited in prehistoric times and visited in the Roman era, as archaeological digs show, but from the Middle Ages it stood almost deserted.
A fief without inhabitants
In 1436 King Alfonso of Aragon granted Lampedusa and Linosa as a fief to Giovanni De Caro, of the barons of Montechiaro. In the early seventeenth century the islands appear in the will of Ferdinando Tomasi, son of the last heiress of the Montechiaro line. In 1667 Charles II of Spain gave the Tomasi family the title of Prince of Lampedusa – the same title later held by the twentieth-century writer Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, author of The Leopard.
Yet the Tomasi never founded a real settlement. Far from Sicily and undefended, the island became a refuge for pirates.
Maltese, French, English
Between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Maltese families settled on Lampedusa, then French and finally English ones. European navies knew its natural harbour well: in 1801 Royal Navy lieutenant William Swiney drew its plan, published in 1803 by the British Hydrographic Office.
26,000 ducats and a colony
For the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, the foreign presence was a risk: an island so close to Sicily must not become an English base. Crown research had cast doubt on the Tomasi claims, but King Ferdinand II chose to settle the matter quickly: in 1841 the treasury paid the family 26,000 ducats for Lampedusa and Linosa.
The colonisation was entrusted to Bernardo Sanvisente, a lieutenant of the Bourbon navy. It began on Lampedusa in 1843 and on Linosa in 1845. Sanvisente governed the island and in 1849 published a work about it that is still a valuable source today.
This is where the Lampedusa we know begins: the harbour, the settlers’ houses, the cultivated fields, the families who came from Sicily.
Sources. A. Nobili, Artiglierie da fuoco nelle acque di Lampedusa fra storia e ritrovamenti, Soprintendenza del Mare, Sicilian Region; charts from the Bibliothèque nationale de France and Royal Museums Greenwich.
