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.

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.