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At the conclusion of the Napoleonic wars, the Italian Lombards, for centuries
govemed by the Dukes of Milan and then afterwards by the mlers of Spain, had
reverted to Austrian mle: the Austrians assumed control of the area as part of their
Lombardo-Veneto Kingdom. During the Italian insurrection of 1848, this new
reigning power became hostile to the Ticinesi, claiming they had smuggled arms to the
Lombard insurgents with whom they were sympathetic. The Austrian Field Marshall
Radetzky, then Govemor of Lombardy, closed the frontier with Switzerland and
expelled the Ticinesi from Milan and the Veneto. Ticino was faced with a flood of
workers returning to its valley and heightening the economic problems.^^ The
Napoleonic wars, in which French armies had invaded Switzerland, had also left Ticino
in a state of financial crisis, as the German-Swiss landlords had withdrawn from
Switzerland under the baimer of democratisation and taken their money with them.
They had left behind a people with a poorly organised and inexperienced govemment.
In 1850, Austria imposed a second blockade v^th Switzerland, resulting in almost
4,000 expulsions.^^ When cold weather and much rain brought about a series of crop
failures in 1851, the people's endurance was finally broken. The severely reduced food
supply threatened famine and people feared a retum to the conditions of 1815 when
survival meant a diet of cmshed carloni (a wild nut indigenous to the area), whole
walnuts, the outside bark of the beech tree, vine tendrils and hay and straw cut to make
polenta^* With high increases in the price of cereals and other food items, the people
began to seek more lasting solutions to their problems. The Italian people, in the midst
of the stmggle for Unification, also found their lives one of great uncertainty. In the
northem regions of Lombardy, Veneto (Venetia), Piedmont and Tuscany (ref figure
1), crop failures had resulted in poverty and famine. Neither the Italians nor the
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