In the first week of June, Cavour's first envoy to Sicily, Giuseppe La Farina, landed at Palermo, and began actively to work for annexation. La Farina had long since abandoned his early sympathy for the radical Unitarians. He had been converted to the ‘artichoke’ policy, that is to say to Cavour's programme of peeling off the unredeemed provinces slowly and singly, instead of courting disaster by staking the whole process of unification on a single throw. From La Farina's point of view,

It was on the whole a fair criticism; but in practice this ex-Mazzinian, like so many converts, had become surprisingly bitter against his late comrades. These differences of view were now a fundamental question in dispute between patriotic Italians. What was needed was someone to reconcile, not to aggravate, their disagreements.

Between 1857 and 1859 La Farina had effectively co-operated with Cavour in planning the consolidation of northern Italy, but his influence in Sicily during 1860 was less happy. This was the year of the ‘party of action’, from which La Farina was estranged. Garibaldi regarded as a positive hindrance people who believed that independence and unity were a Utopian condition which Italy could move towards but hardly hope to attain in the foreseeable future.