Mariano d'Ayala
Mariano d'Ayala (14 June 1808 – 26 March 1877) was a Sicilian-born soldier, writer and, after 1848, an activist-politician and member of parliament. Biography Provenance and early years Mariano d'Ayala was born at Messina at the height of the Napoleonic Wars, and only 25 years after the earthquake which had destroyed the city. Lt. Col. Raimondo d'Ayala, his father, was an Artillery Officer, originally from Spain, who served the Bourbon army loyally. His mother, born Rosaria Ragusi, was from a Sicilian family. He grew up in Messina, where his father became commander at the fort, but was only nine when his father died. He and his mother were both keen that he should follow his father into a military career, and he was still not yet a teenager when his mother took him to Naples and enrolled him at the prestigious Nunziatella Military School. As the orphaned son of a “worthy officer”, he was able to enrol without payment being required. Military academy He graduated in 1828 with the rank of an ensign/ensign and was sent to join a regiment a short distance up the coast at Gaeta. There were no significant wars to be fought in the immediate term, and d'Ayala was given the opportunity to travel in Italy and further abroad, and to build some important friendships, within and beyond the military community, notably with Francesco Ricciardi, Florestano Pepe and Carlo Troya. He was recalled to Naples, where alongside his military duties he accepted a teaching position back at the Nunziatella as a “teacher of artillery”. In 1836 he was appointed to teach Ballistics and Descriptive geometry. To support his teaching he produced translations of works on physics and on analytical and physical geometry by Jean-Baptiste Biot and Charles-François-Antoine Leroy, but the college authorities rejected his use of these, insisting that he should instead teach using the traditional and well respected texts of another French scholar, Sylvestre François Lacroix. A couple of years later he was the only representative from the south to take part in the preparatory work for the Congress of Italian Scientists held under the presidency of Ranieri Gerbi in 1839 and Pisa (Tuscany). At the congress he was entrusted with oversight of the physical sciences and mathematics sections. In 1840 Mariano d'Ayala married Giulia Costa, the daughter of a survivor from Murat’s army and of the 1820 insurrection. The family connection s indicated and reinforced through the marriage indicate that as the so-called Kingdom of the Two Sicilies grew ever more entrenched in conservative tradition, leading to growing tensions between the government in Naples and growing numbers from the educated middle class, inspired by ideas disseminated by the French Revolution and under the First French Empire to favour a transition towards liberalism and even a measure of democracy, Mariano d'Ayala was on the liberal side of the debate. That was also apparent, by 1840, from of the company he kept. In addition to those already mentioned above, his Naples friends included his bride’s father,