Antonino di San Giuliano dies

On 16 October 1914 the Marquis Antonino Paternò Castello di San Giuliano, Foreign Minister of the Kingdom of Italy, died in Rome. He had long suffered from gout, and in October his condition deteriorated sharply. He died in the Palazzo della Consulta, the seat of his ministry, where he lived. He was 61.

A diplomat from Sicily

San Giuliano was born in 1852 in Catania into an aristocratic Sicilian family. He was mayor of his home town and then for more than twenty years a member of parliament. At the turn of 1905 and 1906 he briefly directed Italian diplomacy for the first time, and later he was ambassador in London and Paris. In March 1910 he again became Foreign Minister and remained in office in successive governments until his death. In March 1914 he kept his post in the new cabinet of Antonio Salandra. He had used the Moroccan crisis of 1911 to start the war with Turkey, in which Italy won Libya and the Dodecanese.

The architect of neutrality

In the summer of 1914 San Giuliano was one of the main architects of Italian neutrality. He argued that the Triple Alliance was a defensive alliance, and that Austria-Hungary, which had attacked Serbia without consulting Rome, could not demand Italian help. He therefore did not accept that a casus foederis, a situation obliging Italy to enter the war, had arisen. At the same time he did not close the door to either side. He conducted cautious talks both with Vienna and Berlin and with the Entente powers, hoping that Italy would obtain as much as possible for its neutrality or for entering the war, above all the lands inhabited by Italians within the borders of the Habsburg monarchy.

Successors

After San Giuliano’s death Prime Minister Salandra himself temporarily took charge of the ministry. On 18 October he addressed its officials and called on them to be guided solely by “sacred egoism” (sacro egoismo) for Italy. The words became a symbol of Italian policy during the period of neutrality. On 5 November, after a government reshuffle, Sidney Sonnino became Foreign Minister. He continued the talks with both sides until, in April 1915, he signed the secret Treaty of London with the Entente, which brought Italy into the war against Austria-Hungary.