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.

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.