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.