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.