Giuseppe Emanuele Ventimiglia was born in Palermo in 1766, the first son of Prince Vincenzo and his wife Anna Maria Cottone di Castelnuovo.
At an early age he was sent to Rome to study in the Collegio del Nazareno and then took a grand tour of Europe, going through Italy, Switzerland, the German Empire, Hungary and Poland.
He joined the fight to protect the Accademia Palermitana degli Studi, threatened by King Ferdinand who wanted to clear it of liberal influences and hand it back to the Jesuits.
Among these privileges was one that Ventimiglia considered intolerable: a fixed donation to Naples not sustained by any formal right and that more resembled a medieval donatio; he proposed its replacement with a land tax, to be eventually integrated with indirect taxation only if the former were to be insufficient.
He openly sustained Louis Philippe, Duke of Orléans, brother in law of the king, and asked the Queen to dismiss the Neapolitan ministers (especially Medici).