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.
