Persuading the king to forgo 120,000 of his civil list, and his colleagues in the cabinet to relinquish part of their ministerial stipends, he effected savings amounting to 2,400,000, proposed new taxation to the extent of 1,600,000, and induced landowners to pay one year's instalment of the land tax in advance.

[1] A vote of the chamber compelled him to resign before his preparations for financial restoration were complete; but in 1869 he returned to the ministry of finance in a cabinet formed by himself, but of which he made over the premiership to Giovanni Lanza.

By means of the grist tax (which he had proposed in 1865, but which the Menabrea cabinet had passed in 1868), and by other fiscal expedients necessitated by the almost desperate condition of the national exchequer, he succeeded, before his fall from power in 1873, in placing Italian finance upon a sound footing, in spite of fierce attacks and persistent misrepresentation.

From 1873 until his premature death, he acted as leader of the Right (Destra Storica) and was more than once prevented by an ephemeral coalition of personal opponents from returning to power as head of a Moderate Conservative cabinet.

After the failure of an attempt to form a cabinet in May 1881, he practically retired from public life, devoting himself to his studies and his linen factory.