He and his prime minister Count Camille Cavour were both keen to introduce railways in the interests of modernising and unifying Italy.
At the time Italy consisted of small states and many of these were under Austrian control but the King and his Prime Minister hoped to change this.
At the same time the construction of the various sections of the Ionian line (from Taranto to Reggio Calabria via Metaponto) was also carried out, which began in 1866 but ended in 1875 after the assignment to the Società per le Strade Ferrate Meridionali and direct financing by the state.
The Victor Emmanel company, for various reasons related to the placement of shares on the Parisian market and in a liquidity crisis declared itself unable to continue the work undertaken on the Calabria-Sicilian lines in a further convention of 17 November 1867 with the Government of the Kingdom.
The reason why foreign entrepreneurs (the capital was mostly French) were so interested in new infrastructure was determined by the fact that they could connect to sulphur-rich mining centres.
At that time, Sicily was the largest producer in the world of the mineral (a record that was to pass to Texas a few decades later) and it was important to be able to transport it to the ports of embarkation in Palermo, Porto Empedocle, Licata and Catania.
At the turn of the 1870s, the construction of the lines had halted, owing to the economic difficulties of the company, and the State had to intervene, with its own capital allocations, and entrusted the works to the Società per le Strade Ferrate Meridionali.
In total 220 km, built in Sicily with state funding (completed after the failure of the Victor Emmanuel company) by the Società per le Strade Ferrate Meridionali.
At the time of the inauguration of the first Sicilian trunk line, Palermo-Bagheria (28 April 1863), there were three steam locomotives named Archimede, Diodoro and Novelli, built by Ansaldo.