[3] In 1876, Franchetti travelled to Sicily with Sidney Sonnino to conduct an unofficial inquiry into the state of Sicilian society.

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.

[6] He saw the Mafia as deeply rooted in Sicilian society and impossible to quench unless the very structure of the island's social institutions were to undergo a fundamental change.

He undertook the first land expropriations in 1893 with the vision that two million Italian peasants would settle down in Eritrea.

[9] Franchetti died of mysterious causes, perhaps suicide, after the dawn of the defeat in the Caporetto in World War I and left his estate to a charitable organization and his farm to the farmers who worked it.