Sidney Sonnino - Life and Career

Life and Career

Sonnino was born in Pisa to an Italian father of Jewish heritage (Isach Sonnino, who converted himself to Anglicanism) and a Welsh mother. He was raised as a Protestant.

In 1876, Sonnino traveled to Sicily with Leopoldo Franchetti to conduct a private investigation into the state of Sicilian society. In 1877, the two men published their research on Sicily in a substantial two-part report for the Italian Parliament. In the first part Sonnino analysed the lives of the island's landless peasants. Leopoldo Franchetti's half of the report, Political and Administrative Conditions in Sicily, was an analysis of the Mafia in the nineteenth century that is still considered authoritative today. Franchetti would ultimately influence thinking about the Mafia more than anyone else until Giovanni Falcone over a hundred years later. Political and Administrative Conditions in Sicily is the first convincing explanation of how the Mafia came to be.

In 1878, Sonnino started a newspaper (La Rassegna Settimanale), which changed from weekly economical reviews to daily political issues. In 1893, after working in several governmental positions, he became Finance Minister of Italy and tried to resolve the Banca Romana scandal. Sonnino envisaged to establish a single bank of issue, but the main priority of his bank reform was to rapidly solve the financial problems of the Banca Romana, as well as to cover up the scandal which involved the political class, rather than to design a new national banking system. Regional interests were still strong; hence the compromise of plurality of note issuance.

He worked in the opposition after the fall of his party from power as a result of the lost Battle of Adwa. He served twice briefly as Prime Minister, in 1906 and again from 1909 to 1910. On April 16, 1909 Sonnino and Wilbur Wright went on a flight at Centocelle field, Rome, making Sonnino one of the earliest of statesmen to fly in an airplane.

After the events in 1914, Sonnino was initially supportive to the side of Germany and Austria-Hungary, but after becoming foreign minister in November 1914, he sided with the Allied forces, and signed the Treaty of London in 1915. Italy consequently declared war on Austria-Hungary on May 23, 1915.

When his territorial ambitions towards Austria-Hungary were shattered during the Paris Peace Conference, his party lost power again, and Sonnino retired from politics.