THE IMPENDING STORM

Pontone di Scala

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 fratelli d'Italia - '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 not 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.

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.