Napoli, Corfù e le Isole ionie. Incroci e connessioni in età napoleonica

Between 1797 and 1814, Naples and the Ionian Islands crossed paths multiple times and in different ways. As the last bastion of the Venetian maritime state, the archipelago had represented, throughout the 18th century, a stronghold for the entire Italian peninsula towards the Balkans. It is not surprising, therefore, that at Campoformio, the court of Naples tried – unsuccessfully – to take advantage of the Venetian collapse by asking the young General Bonaparte for the Ionian Islands in exchange for the island of Elba and the Tuscan Presidii. An appointment, that between the kingdom and the islands, only postponed. In 1806, at the dawn of the French Decade, a Neapolitan subject of Albanian origin and resident in Corfu, Michele Gicca, assumed the role of secret consul for the Kingdom of Naples. Following the Treaty of Tilsit in 1807, which marked the transfer of the Ionian archipelago to France, it was Napoleon himself who placed the islands under the control of his brother Joseph, King of Naples. However, it was not a political control but a military one: the islands were an integral part of the empire, but Joseph, as commander-in-chief of the Neapolitan army, assumed their management. The archipelago thus became a strategically important point for France, managed under a sort of military regime through a general governorship, with César Berthier and François-Xavier Donzelot succeeding each other in this role. Napoleon's abdication in 1814 and the advance of the British in the Ionian space closed this phase, opening a new path for the archipelago, no longer tied to the Italian peninsula, but to the Greek one.