The Criscuolos cross 'the pond'

The next official record we find of the Criscuolo family at St Pancras is the entry of Antonio on the crew manifest for the Majestic in 1926. He was an 'assistant waiter' working the Southampton to New York route and, as is suggested later, there is a suggestion that this 18-year old stopped in New York for some time.

He next appears on the passenger manifest of the SS Montclare from Southampton to Quebec. The first thing that one notices is that he has been there before - between May and November 1929. He would have been 20 when he arrived and 21 when he went back to the UK.

We also find from that entry on the manifest that he took Canadian citizenship on that first trip because when he went back - on the 17th of April 1930 - he was admitted as a 'returned Canadian'. The obvious conclusion is that the citizenship was necessary to enable him to move and work freely in the country.

We know that he stayed in the Royal York Hotel on his 1929 visit and that he stayed only as long as he needed to in order to pick up his Canadian passport which was issued on 21 November 1929.

The passenger manifest also has him working at the (and I quote) "Grurva Club" in the employ of Mr C Collins. I am forced to the conclusion that 'Grurva' is a misspelling or a phonetic spelling. Groover? Grover? Groova? I have no idea and there is no sign that I shall find out any time soon. In any event, by the 29th of April 1929, he was back in Toronto.

On the 11th of June 1932, he was heading back to Liverpool on the Duchess of Atholl and, asked for is occupation, he professes to be a waiter ... presumably at the Groover or Grover Club or whatever it was called. We also see that he has given the USA as his last place of permanent residence. This is one mobile 24-year old.

On the 21st of June 1932 his younger brother, Luigi, was on the Empress of Australia heading for Quebec. A musician (saxophone being his instrument) he was apparently going to stay with Antonio at 90 Wellington Street, Toronto and one might reasonably conclude that he was going to work at the Grover Club or whatever the hell it was called.

I'm starting to lose track now 'cos I have no record of Antonio returning to Toronto after his trip back to London on the 11th of June but that doesn't mean that he didn't of course.

Luigi's entry on the passenger manifest is interesting. He was carrying £40 in his pocket (£1,336 in modern terms) and he was detained - arrived at Quebec on the 26th of June and released on the 2nd of July ... as in immigrant. But on the 11th of August he was heading back to London on the Alaunia. Did he not make it? Did he hate it? Did the club owner not like him? He was a decent musician like my grampa was. Not in Stan Getz' class but good all the same.

I'm afraid that I can't make head nor tail of it. Tony was an astute business man and left a substantial sum when he died in January 1954 so one assumes that he was up to something constructive here but I have no idea what.

Ten years later ...

By the time Pasquale's and Pasqualina's son Nicola (my great grandfather) was born on 21 December 1875 the rebellion was over. In the ten years between 1860 and 1870, the fight was knocked out of the rebels, freedom fighters, partisans, resistance, macquis of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Call them what you will but don't call them brigands or terrorists.

Nicola was named after an older brother born on 10 August 1869 who died at the age of 4 on 19 September 1873. His elder brother Luigi was now 10 and he had a sister, Trofimena who was now three.

At some stage in the 1890s he joined the Merchant Marine. He made a few coastwise journeys from Amalfi or Salerno to places like Taranto then on 24 January 1896 he transferred to the Royal Italian Army. Whether the transfer was voluntary or not I have no idea. I don't know whether he saw active service. There is no evidence of any such action but he was serving at the time (1895-1896) of the First Italo-Ethiopian War.

He would've looked smart though in his uniform. 1.85 metres (6 ft 3 ins) tall. Short chestnut hair. Chestnut eyes. Well trimmed handlebar moustache.

I imagine that when he married Rafaella Fraulo on 8 February 1900, he marched down the aisle in that uniform. The story that I was told was that they married in the cathedral in Amalfi - he was from Scala and she was from Minori. I have no idea whether it's true but it's a lovely image. Her in her grandmother's or great-grandmother's wedding dress and him in his uniform getting married in that beautiful arabesque cathedral.

On 2 March 1900 there is an entry in his Matriculation Booklet which reads (to the extent that I can read the handwriting) "I declare that there is no obstacle to the holder removing himself to London for the period of two years from today under obligation to return in the case of a call to arms ... under pain of denunciation and punishment as a deserter. Dated 2 March 1900, Captain of the port."

In the 1901 census of England and Wales, Nicola and his wife Rafaella Fraulo were safely ensconced in Carlisle Street in Marylebone and he was working, probably unsurprisingly, as an ice cream maker.

Just over two years after having left Pontone, they celebrated the birth of their first child, Pasqualino, obviously named after his parents.

I have no idea why he left. I supposed when I first started writing this story that he left because there wasn't enough land between them to support the siblings, there wasn't enough work or some other such reason but it was all pure supposition. It is entirely possible that what the newborn Italian government called the Brigandage was enough to drive him out of the country along with millions of his compatriots.

When he left Pontone in 1900, he was still 'under arms' under obligation to return in case of a call to arms.

At some stage in February 1908, Nicola packed his bags and took ship again for Naples. His grandparents, parents, brother and sister must have been delighted to have him back. His aunts, uncles, cousins, friends and neighbours will have come running round. What's London like? Are the streets really paved with gold? How's Rafaella? How many children have you got now? Will you stay there forever?

Now there's a question? He might have said 'no'. He might have said that he planned to return as soon as he'd made enough money to buy a house of his own and a bit of land. It is certain though that he would have sat round the table at lunch or dinner drinking vino paesano and answering an endless stream of questions and telling captivating tales of life in London ... the underground, the markets (he practically lived at Covent Garden Market), Bond Street, Oxford Road, the Strand ...

On 4 March, he and the Corp Commandant signed his certificate of indefinite leave from the Royal Italian Army (Regio Esercito Italiano). It says of Nicola that "during his time under arms, he has conducted himself well and served with faith and with honour."

It was signed by the mayor of Scala on 8 March 1908. I don't know how long he stayed. I don't know how often the ships sailed out of Naples to London. He might have stayed a week, he might have stayed a month.

Back in London were Rafaella, Pasqualino, Giolina, Marie and Amelia and Rafaella presumably ran the greengrocer's shop ... and looked after the kids - Pasqualino was only 6 and Amelia was only 18 months.

Six years later Europe was at war. Nicola and Rafaella had now had eight children and Pasqualino was two years dead. They appear to have come through the Great War largely unscathed. Italy had joined on the right side for this one.

The terror from Turin

By the time Pasquale and Pasqualina celebrated the birth of their first child, Luigi, on 17 August 1865, their world had been turned upside down. The thriving kingdom described by John Goodwin Esq. in his article of 1849 had disappeared. What had been the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies had been violently annexed to the King of Piedmont's new Kingdom of Italy.

The forces of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies had been slow to react to the Piedmontese invasion but they did react. Groups of soldiers who had been serving King Francis II when the northerners invaded put on their uniforms again, raised the Bourbon flag and took on the invaders from Turin.

Turin, King Victor Emanuel II and Count Camillo Cavour had set their sites on their unification of the Italian peninsula and nobody was going to be allowed to stop them. The Bourbon loyalists were branded as brigands, common criminals and thieves in order to justify the Italian governments reaction. A war against brigands had begun - the brigandage - which would last until the end of the decade.

Speaking in the Turin parliament in November 1862, the liberal deputy, Ferrari, said "You may call them brigands but they fight under a national flag; you may call them brigands but the fathers of these brigands twice restored the Bourbons to the throne of Naples ... What constitutes brigandage? Is it the fact, as the ministry would have us believe, that 1,500 men commanded by two or three vagabonds can make head against the whole kingdom backed by an army of 120,000 regulars? Why, these 1,500 must be demigods - heroes! I have seen a town of 5,000 inhabitants utterly destroyed. By whom? Not by the brigands."

The brigandage even raised temperatures in the palace of Westminster. On 8 May 1863 Mr Cavendish Bentinck said "the Brigandage is a civil war, a spontaneous popular movement against foreign occupation similar to that carried on in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies from 1799 to 1812 when the great Nelson, Sir John Stuart and other English commanders were not ashamed to enter into relations with the brigands of that day ... for the purpose of expelling the French invaders."

Even the redoubtable Disraeli threw in his tuppence ha'penny's worth saying "I want to know on what ground we are to discuss the state of Poland [which had been invaded by the Russians] if we are not to discuss the state of Calabria and the two Sicilies. True, in one country the insurgents are called brigands, and in the other patriots; but with that exception, I have not learned from this discussion that there is any marked difference between them."

Unfortunately for the Bourbon soldiers, the British government of the day had never forgiven the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies for its exploitation of the sulphur monopoly and it was happy to see Turin do what it wanted with the southern Italians and the Sicilians ... and it did.

Local Turinese military governors posted orders for the local population and the following is an example.

2nd - Every landowner, farmer or agent, will be bound, immediately on the publication of this notice, to withdraw from the said forests all labourers, shepherds, goatherds &c., who may be in them, and with them to withdraw their flocks: the said persons will also be bound to destroy all folds and huts erected in these places.

3rd - Henceforth, no-one can export from the neighbouring districts any provision for the use of the peasants, and the latter will not be allowed to have in their possession more food than is necessary for a single day for each person of their family.

4th - Those who disobey this order, which shall come into force two days after its publication, will be, without any exception as to time, place or person, considered as brigands and, as such, shot.

The measures adopted for the suppression of the brigandage, according to O'Clery, included:

(1) Shooting with or without trial all persons taken in arms.

(2) Sacking and burning disaffected towns and villages.

(3) Imprisonment, without trial or indictment, of suspected persons and "relatives of brigands".

(4) Treating as accomplices of brigands, and punishing with death or imprisonment all who:

(i) had in their possession arms without a license.

(ii) worked in the fields without a pass in any proclaimed district.

(iii) carried to the fields more food than was sufficient for one meal.

(iv) kept a store of food in their huts.

(v) shod horses without a license of or kept of carried horse-shoes.

(5) Destroying huts in the woods, walling up all out-lying buildings, taking the people and their cattle from the smaller farms and collecting all cattle in positions where they could be placed under a military guard.

(6) Refusing to allow anyone to stand neutral, and treating would-be neutrals as friends and accomplices of the brigands.

(7) Rigid censorship of the press.

According to the Italian journal, Il Commercio, published on 8 November 1862, in the fourteen months running up to November 1862, the Turinese (Italian) army had sacked and burned the following towns:

Guaricia (Molise) - 1,322 dead.

Campochiaro (Molise) - 979 dead.

Casalduni (Molise) - 3,032 dead.

Pontelandolfo (Molise) - 3,917 dead.

Viesti (Capitanata) - 5,417 dead.

San Marco in Lamis (Capitanata) - 10,612 dead.

Rignano (Capitanata) - 1,814 dead.

Venosa (Basilicata) - 5,952 dead.

Basile (Basilicata) - 3,400 dead.

Auletta (Principate Citeriore) - 2,023 dead.

Eboli (Principato Citeriore) - 4,175 dead.

Montifalcone (Principato Ulteriore) - 2,618 dead.

Montiverde (Principato Ulteriore) - 1,988 dead.

Vico (Terra di Lavoro) - 730 dead.

Controne (Calabria Ulteriore II) - 1,089 dead.

Spinello (Calabria Ulteriore II) - 298 dead.

In April 1863, the Neapolitan deputy Nicotera (a Garibaldian in favour of unification and so no friend of the Bourbon uprising) said "The Bourbon government had the great merit of preserving our lives and substance, a merit the present government cannot claim. We have neither personal nor political liberty. The deeds we behold are worthy of Tamerlane, Genghis-Khan, or Attila."

Napoleon III himself wrote to General Fleury saying "I have written to Turin to remonstrate. The details we receive are of such a kind, as to be calculated to alienate every honest mind from the Italian cause. Not only are misery and anarchy at their height, but the most culpable and unworthy acts are a matter of course. A general, whose name I have forgotten, having forbidden the peasants to take provisions with them when they go to work in the fields, has decreed that all on whom a piece of bread is found shall be shot. The Bourbons never did anything like that."

Pino Aprile (2010 - Terroni) asks "What does it take to kill one of our own?" Not a lot it seems. Giuseppe Santopietro was dispatched with a single shot of a rifle and his newborn son with bayonet in the stomach. For thirty women who had gathered around the cross in a market square, the charge of brave Bersaglieri did the job. Their prayers and rosaries were no match for the Bersaglieri blades. Those who took refuge in the church were stripped and raped in front of the altar. One of them, who had the temerity to try to defend herself and scratched the face of one of the Bersaglieri, had her hands chopped off before she was safely raped and dispatched.

Pasquale and Pasqualina, their friends, family were only 60 km from Eboli. 38 miles. The world in which they were born would never be the same again and a chain of events had been set in train that would separate their son Nicola and his descendants from Pontone for 99 years.

The arrival of the 'Redshirts'

By the time Garibaldi landed at Marsala with his 1,000 on 11 May 1860 with Royal Navy and Piedmontese navy ships protecting his landing to prevent any interference from the navy of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, Pasquale Criscuolo may well have been courting Pasqualina Rispoli.

Maybe they met up in the square in Pontone and walked along the narrow streets of the town hand-in-hand under the Mediterranean sun. Maybe they had their entire families walking twenty yards behind them just like Michael Corleone and Appolonia Vitelli. Maybe when they managed to turn a corner to grasp a few short seconds out-of-sight of the families they stole a fleeting kiss and laughed mischievously when they did. There are a million maybes but there is no reason to believe that they weren't happy. As I have said already, on the whole, life was good ... and improving.

They probably got married at the little church in the square in Pontone - San Giovanni Battista - and settled down to live life as it had been lived by hundreds of generations of their fathers before them.

They may have heard of Garibaldi's feats in Sicily as Calatafimi, Palermo and Milazzo fell. He may have heard of landing of the Garibaldian troops in Calabria. He almost certainly heard of the battle of Volturno and on October 21 1860 he will amost certainly have known about the plebiscite that was held 'ask' the people of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies whether they wished to be 'annexed' to the Piedmontese kingdom in the name Italy; to become 'brothers of Italy'.

Sir Henry Elliott (the British Ambassador at Naples) described the plebiscite in the following terms - "the vote is to be taken by universal suffrage, and although no avowedly by open voting, it is so arranged that what each man does will be known, and public opinion brought to bear on him. I do not apprehend that the proportion of negative votes would under any circumstances have been very large but with the present arrangement there is still less chance of it ... both the terms of the vote and the manner in which it is to be taken are well calculated to secure the largest possible majority for the annexation, but not so well fitted to ascertain the real wishes of the country."

O'Clery, having cited Sir Henry, goes on to describe the conduct of the plebiscite by the Piedmontese government and its troops - "On the day of the Plébiscite the votes were subjected to the force of public opinion in a very tangible form. The National Guard, with fixed bayonets, stood at the voting urns. One man who voted No at Monte Calvario was repaid with a stab for his boldness. All the Garibaldians, most of whom, as we have seen, were Northern Italians, were allowed to vote in the capacity of "liberators"."

The result, O'Clery records, was 1,303,064 in favour of annexation and 10,312 against in Naples (that meant the whole of Southern Italy not just Naples) and 432,054 in favour and 667 against in Sicily. He observes, wryly, that these results showed "... the same surprising unanimity that had been witnessed in Savoy, Nice, the Romagna, Umbria, the Marches and invariably on the side of the men whose troops held the country."

I want to say one thing here to put the record straight. Garibaldi was not the all-conquering hero that those who wrote the history books would have us believe. O'Clery records, very matter-of-factly, that "Sicily had been revolutionized, from Marsala to Messina, in less than three months - but Garibaldi had not done it. Cavour's agents had prepared the way and Cavour's fleet had supported the movement. Garibaldi had been justly called the enfonceur des portes ouvertes - the man who broke through open doors - and nowhere did he deserve the title better than in Sicily. He won three victories. The first was gained over a weak, incompetent man, at Calatafimi; the second, at Palermo, was fought against a traitor; the third, at Milazzo, and the third only, was a genuine victory."

Garibaldi went on to bang his head against a number of closed doors in the years that followed. He was a clown who succeeded only because he was backed at every turn by the devious, duplicitous and powerful man who was Count Camillo Cavour. Unfortunately, like Inspecteur Clouseau, he believed that it was down to the fact that he was a genius.

Such was life in Amalfi

The principal source (actually, it's the only source) for the story I am about to relate is a book published in 1904 called "La Prima Repubblica Marinara d'Italia - Amalfi", written by a gentleman called Umberto Moretti.

In what is described as 'il capitolo unico' (the only chapter) in the section headed 'Notes on Industry and Commerce' Moretti discusses the traditional industries of the area (both manufacture and agriculture). Unfortunately for me, much of his chronological referencing is obscure. It was clearly understood by his readers and I have sought the assistance of Google on more than one occasion but not always with any notable success.

His first stop is with the fishing industry which brought in, among other things, coral, tuna, mackerel and swordfish which were sold in the markets in Naples and Salerno. Coral fishing in Amalfi, however, had died in the 16th century and was, at the time when Moretti was writing, restricted to Torre del Greco (it is still one of the principal tourist souvenirs in the shops along the coast).

The agricultural muscle of the area (involving a third of the local population earning about 1.5 Lira a day per man - it's pretty much meaningless to me too and I can't find anything on the internet to convert it into a modern equivalent) is dedicated principally to the lemon groves (and still is it has to be said) and that is closely followed by the grape (God bless the grape) although Moretti notes that much of the land given over to vines was being 'converted' (if that's the right word) to lemon groves on account of the fact that the latter is, apparently, more productive than the former which presumably means that lemons were more profitable.

Much of the grape grown in Amalfi is sent to Naples where it finds its way to the table. The rest is used to produce "light wines of excellent quality" much of which is exported under the name Capri Bianco. The area also produced sufficient pulses and potatoes for the needs of the local population but no more than enough.

Moretti next turns to mourn the fact that "... the art of extracting the essential oil of the rose and producing that pleasant perfume ... sought by medieval gentlemen for its fragrant qualities." for which Amalfi was once a centre of excellence had entirely disappeared - the rose beds making way for lemon groves. Rose water was, apparently, demanded of tenants by their landlords by way of rent and the last recorded case was to be found in a tenancy agreement dated 1824.

The Amalfi silk industry, run predominantly by Jews, which had prospered, particularly in Amalfi, Ravello, Scala and Agerola, was short lived and it faded and finally died when, in the early 16th century Garcia Alvarez de Toledo, 4th Marquis of Villafranca del Bierzo and Viceroy of Naples chased the Jews from the area. Another case of commercial good sense being suppressed by religious zeal.

It was replaced by a wool industry when Alfonso the Magnanimous (what a wonderful epithet) introduced merino sheep into the area. Wool mills sprang up in Amalfi, Scala, Ravello and, above all, in Atrani. This wool found its way onto the markets of Calabria, Sicily, Sardinia, Capua, Benevento, Naples, Foggia and Melfi. As appears to be the way of things in Amalfi, however, this endeavour too met its end when the wool mills were converted to flour mills. Once again Moretti is left to mourn the disappearance of a promising and productive industry.

Moving on to the manufacturing efforts of the good burgers of Amalfi and the surrounding area, we are taken to the paper mills. Amalfi was, and is, famous for its paper. It boasted, and boasts, that it started producing paper in 1276 and Moretti states confidently that, in 1861, there were 38 paper mills in the town employing 270 workers, producing 2,000,000 kilos of paper and bringing in Lit 145,000 per annum. In 1904 Moretti counted no more than 15 mills employing 80 workers. One of these mills, a very significant edifice, can still be found hidden in the woods behind the town, its machinery mute. Cobwebbed. Sad.

Next on the list of things to do in Amalfi is the work in the pasta factories (I use the term factory loosely because it has modern connotations that are misplaced). Moretti describes it as the principal industry in Amalfi which continues to survive not because it has been able to modernize and keep up with the rest of the industry but because the workers are very poorly paid. Nevertheless, employing 1,800 workers, it produces 2,000,000 kilos of pasta a year worth Lit 800,000.

He finishes his journey through the forms of gainful employment available to the Amalfitani with a visit to the merchant fleet which, in the days of the Amalfi Marine Republic, had made it very rich indeed. It stretched in the middle ages to every shore of the Mediterranean from the Black Sea to the Western Mediterranean Basin. By the end of the 19th century, it was reduced to the coast of Southern Italy and Sicily. Amalfi's exports (by sea and not necessarily to places outside Italy) included lemons, salted anchovies, pasta, cheese, paper and fresh fruit. Almost nothing was moved by land because of the mountainous nature of the region.

This was the land of my Criscuolos. This was the land in which Pasquale grew up. Life was clearly hard but as John Goodwin Esq. made abundantly clear in his paper on the development of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, things were improving and could be expected to improve further.

The year was 1839 ...

... and the place was the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. The Spanish Bourbon King Ferdinand II was on the throne and, on the whole, life was good - relatively speaking. The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was no tin-pot, backwater state. The state of the kingdom was described in some detail by John Goodwin Esq. (Her Majesty's Consul for Sicily) in an article that he wrote in 1842 for the Journal of the Statistical Society of London.

The kingdom's population of about 8,000,000 had increased from approximately 5,000,000 some 100 years earlier and was defended by a standing peace-time army of 42,394 and a navy of 19 sail vessels, 3 steamers and 30 gunboats.

The kingdom traded (importing and exporting) with the Mediterranean countries, Great Britain and France (and their colonies), South America, Northern Europe, the Baltic states and, of course, the USA. Exports leaving the city of Naples alone in 1840 were worth £162,590 (£27,015,219 in today's money). Imports into the City of Naples in the same year were worth a staggering £1,526,845 (£67,333,864).

Its merchant fleet had gone from a total fleet of 8,000 tons in 1824 to 150,634 tons in 1837 (7,800 vessels). Goodwin notes that "[t]he Neapolitan and Sicilian masters, if less hardy and daring than the British, are more careful of their vessels and cargoes, upon which account they are often preferred by fruit merchants and others for voyages from the Mediterranean to the United Kingdom and the north of Europe."

The "chief products of husbandry", says Goodwin, are corn, wine, oil, cotton, flax, hemp liquorice-paste, silk and wool. The territory of Naples produced something in the region of 25,200,000 gallons of wine and 819,000 gallons of brandy. It exported 35,000 tons of oil a year, and about 500,000 tons of raw silk. Exports of wine from Sicily (predominantly Marsala) in 1838 amounted to some 3,150,000 gallons.

The "chief manufactures" are woolens, leather, silks, cottons, paper, soap, glass, earthenware, steel and iron. Exports included 120,000 lbs of organzine and sewing silk a year.

The territory of Naples annual iron production was in the region of 500 tons of pig iron and 1,500 tons of malleable iron - the best being produced, according to Goodwin, at the Satriano foundries in Calabria. The export of sulphur from Sicily had reached something like 75,000 tons a year by 1838.

In October 1839, the kingdom opened its first railway line from Naples to Portici and Goodwin notes that "... carriage roads have been constructed in all parts of the realm ...".

What's more, by 1842 when Goodwin wrote his article, there was also something approaching a system of universal education for both boys and girls.

Goodwin's conclusion on the effect of the Bourbon monarchs on the state of the kingdom are that "[i]f we examine what effect these changes have produced upon the condition of the people, we shall find that have in part wrought evil, but good upon the whole. If the result has been unfortunate in the release of the court from popular control both in Naples and in Sicily, it has in all other respects been happy. The nation is no longer divided into demesnal and feudal populations, but constitutes one people. The commons are no longer subject to nobles and churchmen, but are governed by a single ruler. Justice, no more dealt out by baronial dependents, is administered by the king's judges. Privileged order have ceased to exist, and civic equality prevails in full force. Voluminous states are compressed into a single code. The burthen of taxation, once thrown upon the middle orders, is now shared equally by all classes of society. We may therefore assert that the condition of the people is materially improved, and that the improvement bids fair to proceed, if it be accompanied by an amendment of the executive power, according to which its progress will be faster or slower."

It was in this world on the 27th day of March in the year of our Lord 1839 that Luigi Criscuolo and his wife Brigida celebrated the birth of their son Pasquale in the province of Principato Citra, in the District of Salerno, in the Comune of Scala in the Frazione of Pontone. This is where my story begins again ...

Back to an unknown beginning

I have almost finished reading Pino Aprile's 'Terroni' (2010 Edizioni Piemme, Milan) and it forces me to completely re-evaluate the beginning of the story of the beginnings of this Criscuolo diaspora.

I have to go back to Pasquale Criscuolo and Pasqualina Rispoli and maybe even to Pasquale's father Luigi and his wife Brigida; although I know very little about them. Having read Aprile's book, however, I know a lot more about the world they lived in and the reasons why Nicola and Raffaella left.

The first couple of pages of 'Terroni' make horrible reading (translated of course):

"I didn't know that the Piedmontese did in the south of Italy what the Nazis did at Marzabotto. Many times. For years.

They wiped out, for ever, many towns in 'anti-terrorist' operations like the Marines did in Iraq.

I didn't know that the reprisals brought the right to rape the Southern Italian women as happened in the Balkans during the 'ethnic cleansing'; like the Moroccan troops in the French army did in Ciociaria when they invaded from the south to rescue Italy from the Fascists ... .

I was unaware that, in the name of national unity, the 'Brothers of Italy' had the right to sack and pillage the towns and cities of the south, like the Landesknechte did in Rome.

That they tortured like the Marines in Abu Ghraib, the French in Algeria and Pinochet in Chile.

I didn't know that in Parliament in Turin an ex-Garibaldian Member of Parliament compared the ferocity and the slaughter carried out by the Piedmontese in the South to the horrors committed by Tamerlane, Genghis Khan and Attila the Hun. Another MP preferred to say nothing of "revelations that would horrify the rest of Europe". Garibaldi spoke of "things of the sewer".

Nor did I know that they interned the Southerners without charge, without trial and without conviction as happened with the Muslims at Guantanamo. There several hundred, defined as terrorists because they were Muslims; in southern Italy, hundreds of thousands defined as brigands because they were Southerners. If they were children they were precocious brigands. If they were women they were 'brigandesses' or wives or daughters of brigands ... or relatives of brigands (up to three degrees of relationship); or even just peasants and so suspected of being brigands. All sanctioned by the law, you understand; as with Apartheid in South Africa.

I believed that the brigands really were brigands, not ex-soldiers of the Bourbon army of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and patriots defending their country from invasion by the Piedmontese army.

I didn't know that the countryside in the south became like that in Kosovo with mass executions and mass burials, with towns that burned in the hills and columns of tens of thousands of refugees on the march.

I didn't want to believe that the first concentration camps and extermination camps in Europe were built by the Northern Italians to torture and kill the Southern Italians in their thousands, maybe tens of thousands (we shall never know because their bodies were 'melted away' with lime) like in Stalin's Soviet Union.

I had no idea that the Foreign Minister of United Italy searched for years for "a desolate land", looking in Patagonia, Borneo and other forlorn places for somewhere where he could deport the Southern Italians and make them disappear from the sight of prying eyes.

Nor did I know that, when they arrived from the North, the 'Brothers of Italy' emptied the rich Southern banks, palaces, museums, private houses (taking even the cutlery) to pay off Piedmont's debts and to create immense private wealth."

The book goes on of course ... for another 300 pages. In the light of this, I need to take out again all of the old papers that grampa inherited from his grandfather and read them all again. To review my story in the light of what I know now ... and I shall start that with my next post.

Lies and damned lies

I have just bought a book by a gentleman called Pino Aprile called 'Terroni'. It is a history of southern Italy - what used to be the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Having read Christopher Duggan's book 'The Force of Destiny - The History of Italy since 1796' I was sort of prepared for Pino's book but I wasn't really prepared for what he told me.

When Piedmont took over the peninsula they decided to make themselves feel good by making everyone else feel bad. The Bourbon Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was a well administered growing industrial state. They had no reason to want to be part of the new idealistic state of Italy. On the whole life was good.

After 1860, life became intolerable. Villages and towns were wiped off the map as part of a George W Bushesque war against brigands. Rape and torture were used as a weapons of suppression and hundreds of thousands were killed, executed and otherwise dispatched to meet their maker. It is estimated that this 'ethnic cleansing' led to the emigration of between 13,000,000 and 20,000,000 people from southern Italy.

The factories were stripped, the grand houses and museums were stripped, the entire kingdom was raped to pay off the debts of the north.

In Germany when the country was re-unified in 1990, the government poured money into the East in an endeavour to ensure that both 'halves' of the country would be put on a level playing field. In Italy, they've paid lip service to the idea of national unity.

Aprile challenges those who write the Italian history books to acknowledge the wrong done by the Piedmontese army in the name of the Risorgimento but this is a country in which Mustapha Akkad's brilliant film 'The Lion of the Desert' is still banned because it airs uncomfortable truths about the behaviour of the Italian army in Libya in the years before the 2nd World War.

I don't often borrow anything from the Yanks but ... "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights ..."

I am 100% Terrone ... and proud of it - buy the T-shirt at http://t-shirt.salentomania.it.

Now. Where was I ...

Since I last spoke in October last year, I've made the mistake of starting to read a brilliant book called 'The Force of Destiny - A History of Italy Since 1796' by a fella called Christopher Duggan. It's a superb book. Easy to read too. I'm the sort of anorak who can read history text books anyway but this one really is easy to read.

I bought it because I wanted to put Nicola's story into some sort of historical context. I've managed that alright but it's also raised all sorts of questions that I never knew existed.

Nicola was born into a state that had only been created fifteen years earlier - minus Veneto and Lazio which joined in (for want of a better word) in 1866 and 1870 respectively.

The country that Nicola left was, as it seems to me, an artificial construct. Italy had only ever been a geographical reference ... like the British Isles, and a few intellectuals had taken it into their heads to turn that geographical reference into a nation state. It's sort of like creating a nation state called Africa - albeit on a very much smaller scale.

It was the aggregation of a number of petty statelets each with its own language united only by a profound distrust of each other. The language chosen as the lingua franca of this new creation (it would be an extreme exaggeration to call it a nation) was the language of Tuscany, of Dante, Botticelli, Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Galilei, Puccini and Vespucci. To the vast majority of population it was a foreign language - an awful lot of the older generation in Italy still can't speak it.

All of a sudden, the languages of the peninsula - Emiliàn-Rumagnòl, Furlane, Ligure, Lumbard, Napulitana, Piemontèisa, Sardo, Sicilianu, Tarandine, Vèneto, etc. - were downgraded to dialects. You can't have more than one language in a nation state. If you have a look at these language versions of Wikipedia, you'll see what I mean. Go to the Italian version and you'll find the links at the bottom of the front page.

It was an accidental construct too. Cavour had only wanted an Italy north of Rome. He had no desire at all to include the south. A horribly distasteful place full of horribly distasteful people. The Bourbons could keep it ... and would've done if Garibaldi hadn't poked his nose in with his 'thousand' volunteers.

In the years after 1860, there had been any number of risings in the south against what they saw as occupation by the Piedmontese army in the name of a Piedmontese King (Vittorio Emmanuele II of Piemonte and of Italy who refused to style himself Vittorio Emmanuele I of Italy). These risings were crushed ... with a capital CRUSH. Hey. What's a few peasants between friends?

It was against that background that Nicola and Rafaella took ship in Naples bound for London early in 1900. They were just two people in a seemingly endless stream of people leaving Italy for America, Argentina, England ... and the Lord knows where else. Millions of them, as Christopher Duggan put it, voting with their feet.

So if that's the context in which they left Italy, why would they harbour any loyalty to the country they had left? Why was grampa so concerned to ensure that I didn't forget that I'm Italian? Why was his loyalty to Italy and not to its southern predecessor (the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies)? When Nicola left, Italy was barely one generation old. He was born Italian but did he feel it? Was it just a case of distance lending enchantment to the view? For hundreds of years the English have had a love affair with Italy. Were their memories of Italy coloured ... tinted ... tainted by the English?

I don't have answers to these questions and wish that I could put them to the people with the answers. What does all this make me? Does it make any difference? Does it matter? The answer to the first question is, of course, Marco Criscuolo and the answers to the others ought to be 'no' and 'no' but I can't help feeling a profound indignation at the inexcusable injustices that were heaped on Nicola's people in the name of the idea that was Italy.