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.

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).

The family connections 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.

In addition to those already mentioned above, his Naples friends included his bride’s father, Gaetano Costa, Alessandro Begani,[7] and Emanuele Taddei.

Indeed, throughout the middle 1840s, when not in prison, d'Ayala continued to share his insights and beliefs with friends and, on occasion, in print: he did not trouble to conceal his risorgimento aspirations.

During December 1847, following his release, it was D’Ayala who, together with Francesco Paolo Bozzelli and Carlo Poerio, took a lead in focusing the continuing street protests to persuade the king to accept a written constitution.

The idea was now returned to the table in response to serious continuing street unrest: a constitution was accepted by the king at the end of January 1848 and then promulgated on 10 February 1848.

Nevertheless, its acceptance by the king in February 1848 represented at that time a significant achievement for d'Ayala and those who shared his vision for the future development of Italy.

It was Troya who sent d'Ayala to Aquila as "Intendant" (loosely "regional governor") for the province of Abruzzo Ultra ("Further Abruzzi"), in the far north of the kingdom.

A couple of days before 15 May 1848 the government journal announced the creation of 50 new peers who would sit in the non-elected upper house of the new bicameral parliament.

By the end of the day the liberal rebellion had been crushed and a captain of the Swiss guard had appeared before the deputies of the newly elected parliament and ordered them to disband.

Pausing only long enough to issue a short but powerful statement of what had happened, and undertaking to reconvene when the situation made it possible, the parliament suspended their session “only because forced to do so by brutal violence”.

Instead, during or before June 1848, he fled over the mountains to Rieti, from where he made his way to Florence: the revolution in Tuscany was less polarised and his belief in risorgimento liberalism, seen by many in northern and central Italy as the desirable alternative to the Grand Duchy's existing status as a semi-detached quasi-colonial territory of the Austrian empire, resonated with a widely shared sense of Italian identity.

His essay “Degli eserciti nazionale”, which sought to address the perceived intrinsic tensions for maintaining armed forces in a state ruled under a constitution, was published in 1850.

[1][5][13][14] The Unification War of 1860/61 drew d'Ayala back to political engagement and public service, though this time round his involvement was generally restricted to background roles.

He tried to encourage contacts in the military to abandon the discredited Bourbon monarchs and throw in their lot with Garibaldi's still growing volunteer army approaching across Sicily.

D'Ayala had already issued a pamphlet from Florence before his arrival in the south, robustly addressing the same pro-Garibaldi message to members of the Neapolitan army.

[15] Garibaldi arrived in the city with his large volunteer army on 6 September 1860 and d'Ayala was appointed to the position commander of the National Guard.

[1][3][16] There are some indications that following his return to Naples in 1860, d'Ayala encountered dome difficulty in gaining the confidence of fellow risorgimento believers.

Mariano d'Ayala was elected a member of parliament, representing the Avezzano (Abruzzi) electoral district on behalf of the minority Centrist-left parliamentary grouping of Urbano Rattazzi.

When the opportunity arose, as on several occasions it did, he voted in favour of amnesties for Giuseppe Mazzini who had collected a couple of death sentences, and through most of the 1860s remained in exile in Switzerland or England in order to minimize the risk of execution.

[1][3] In 1870 most of Rome was annexed to the rest of Italy by military force; and on 3 February 1871 the city acquired the status and role of a capital in place of Florence.

• There were proposals for administrative decentralisation • Electoral law should be “partially expanded” • Regulation of party candidate lists should include scrutiny in order to discourage and undermine habits if “clientelism” – the corrupt peddling of political influence by members of parliament, whereby wealthy and powerful minority groups might obtain political or material benefits at the expense of the wider public interest.

• Reimbursement of reasonable expenses incurred for members of parliament The “Plebiscito” proposals gained little traction nationally, and indeed in the General Election of 1874 d'Ayala failed to secure re-election.

[1][3] Like most of the Risorgimento true believers, Mariano d'Ayala was a freemason and in the aftermath of unification following his return from Turin he became well networked in Naples.