Two decades later, when Prince Carlo succeeded his elder half-brother to the Spanish Throne, he ceded the Neapolitan and Sicilian Crowns to his son Ferdinando, who became Grand Master of the Constantinian Order. King Ferdinando I of the Two Sicilies (as his realm was called after 1816) reigned until 1825 and his successors to the Throne, King Francesco I and King Ferdinando II also held the office of Grand Master of the Constantinian Order. The Order was bestowed in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies until 1861, when the forces of King Francesco II (left), the son of King Ferdinando II and Queen Maria Cristina of Savoy, were defeated by invading troops at the Angevin fortress of Gaeta, on a cape midway between Naples and Rome.
The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was annexed (following that of Parma, Tuscany and Romagna) to the newly created Kingdom of Italy. As a result of the loss of the King’s realm, relations between his dynasty and that of the newly created Italian Royal Family were poor. King Francesco II lived in exile in Rome and following the annexation of the Papal States to Italy in 1870 to Trent, where he remained until his death in 1894. His consort, Queen Maria Sofia, younger sister of Empress Elisabeth (“Sissi”) of Austria-Hungary, lived for many years in Bavaria, which her family had once ruled, and later died in Paris in 1925. The remains of the last King and Queen of the Two Sicilies are interred, with those of their daughter (who died in infancy), in 1984 in the Royal Chapel of the Basilica of Santa Chiara in Naples.