An Armchair Traveller's History of Apulia

by Seward, Desmond

  Under his firm rule, the South prospered. Despite lower taxes than other Italian states, it had more money in circulation than any, with the biggest gold reserves; 443 million in gold lire in 1859 compared with Piedmont’s 27 million. In the same year the Royal Navy of the Two Sicilies included ninety-five steam ships, far more than Britain’s Royal navy, though admittedly most of them were tiny. His government built the first Italian railways, steamships, electric telegraph and lenticular lighthouse. Dockyards at Naples and Bari were the most modern in the peninsula. So were the new roads. “Anybody who avoided subversive politics enjoyed complete freedom and could do what he liked”, Giacinto De Sivo wrote in 1868. “Countless foreigners prospered so much that they settled here”, he adds bitterly: “Then Gladstone came and ruined us... unbelievable calumnies were repeated in newspapers all over the world.”

  The men of the Risorgimento had once hoped Ferdinand would become King of Italy, but he refused, from respect for the rights of other Italian sovereigns, especially for those of the Pope. Had he lived longer and, however unwillingly, granted a constitution and Sicilian autonomy, the South might have been much happier. But he died at forty-nine from a mysterious disease – probably diabetes – which, characteristically, he ascribed to the Evil Eye.

  In June 1859 the French defeated the Austrians, who ceded Lombardy to Piedmont. Then the central Italian duchies turned against their Austrian-backed rulers and by March 1860 the Piedmontese were in possession of Tuscany, Parma and Modena, besides occupying part of the Papal States. Yet Piedmont had no intention of invading the Mezzogiorno.

  In April, however, Garibaldi landed in Sicily where Palermo had risen in revolt. The late king had put down an earlier Sicilian rising and would certainly have known how to deal with this one, but his twenty-two year old son, Francis II, did not. He had already disbanded the Swiss regiments who had been his best troops. After Garibaldi overran Sicily in May, Francis granted a constitution, only hastening the regime’s collapse.

  Many Southerners lost confidence in their inexperienced young king. When Garibaldi landed on the mainland in August, a handful of liberals tried to start risings, supported by a few business men eager for new markets in the North and by peasants who hoped naively that the great estates would be shared out. Foggia declared for Garibaldi, but in Bari and other Apulian cities royalist mobs routed similar demonstrations.

  In September King Francis abandoned Naples to Garibaldi, withdrawing to the fortress city of Gaeta to concentrate his troops. Piedmont, saddled with an astronomical national debt, realised that it could take over the rich Southern kingdom. In October, a Piedmontese army invaded the Regno, occupying Naples and besieging Gaeta, bribing generals and officials. Even the most loyal despaired and at the end of the month, in a carefully rigged plebiscite, Apulians voted with the rest of the South for ‘unity’.

  The Risorgimento must be judged by its fruits, and for Apulia they were very bitter indeed. Far from improving conditions, the destruction of the ancient Regno made them much worse, just as de Sivo claimed. Here is how a recent historian, Roger Absalom, describes the impact of ‘unity’:

  To most southerners the experience was indistinguishable from harshly rapacious colonisation by a foreign country, which introduced a totally new set of laws and regulations governing every aspect of civil society, in the name of free trade substituted shoddy and over-priced imports for the familiar products local handicrafts and industry had previously provided, imposed ruinous and unaccustomed levels of taxation, conscripted the young men into its army and added insult to injury by the promulgation of contemptuous attitudes towards them.

  Few dreams have ended in such disillusionment as the Risorgimento did for the Mezzogiorno. Too late, Southern Italy realised that, far from being liberated, it was the victim of another Northern conquest, by arrogant invaders who sneered that “Africa begins south of Rome.” The Duke of Maddaloni (head of the great Carafa family) protested in the new Italian parliament, “This is invasion, not annexation, not union. We are being treated like an occupied country.” That was what the death of the Regno meant for Apulia.

  If brought up to date politically, the Borbone monarchy could have offered the Mezzogiorno a chance of becoming a self-governing, prosperous Southern Italy. Instead, the Risorgimento handed over the South to Northern asset-strippers, to be misgoverned from a far away capital. What had been a prosperous country soon became an economic slum in which the Apulians suffered as much as anybody. Some of them, however, were not going to give up without a fight.

  55

  The Brigands’ War

  We swear and promise to defend, with our blood

  if need be, God, the Supreme Pontiff Pius, Francis II,

  King of the Two Sicilies, and our column commander.

  Sergeant Pasquale Romano

  ON 13 FEBRUARY 1861, King Francis sailed into exile. Gaeta, his last stronghold, surrendered to the Piedmontese besiegers and the Borbone army was disbanded. It was the end of the seven hundred year old Regno.

  The Piedmontese tried to win over the Borbone officers, giving over 2,000 of them commissions in the new Italian army or paying pensions to those who preferred to retire, but in March Constantino Nigra, a senior Piedmontese official at Naples, reported they were angry and resentful. As for the other ranks, “we have a horde of Borbone soldiers, disbanded without work or food, who will take to the mountains when spring comes.” He adds that the clergy are hostile and the aristocracy “in mourning for the Borboni.” Farini, governor of ‘The Neapolitan Provinces’, openly admitted that not even a hundred Southerners wanted a united Italy.

  Even if the Southern leaders who now emerged were peasants and sometimes criminals, what the Piedmontese called ‘The Brigands’ War’ was none the less a genuine civil war. For a decade 120,000 Piedmontese troops were needed to hold down Southern Italy. Between April 1861 and April 1863 nearly 2,500 “brigands” were killed in combat, over 1,000 shot after surrendering and another 5,500 taken prisoner. These figures are for the Mezzogiorno as a whole – no breakdown is available for Apulia alone – and does not include casualties among the handful of die-hards who went on fighting.

  Some of the leaders were former Borbone NCOs, discharged without pensions unlike their officers. Their sole hope was Francis II’s return and they were fighting for his restoration. Large numbers took an oath of loyalty to him, some men continuing to wear the Borbone army’s blue tunic and red trousers, others using as a badge a silver piastre coin with the king’s head. Afraid of losing their pensions, Borbone officers dared not join them openly, but instead organised committees at Trieste, Marseilles and Malta to smuggle guns. Money and more guns came from Rome, where King Francis had established a government in exile, since the Two Sicilies was still recognised by the Papacy and Austria. Papal officials turned a blind eye to gun-running over their frontier and frequently gave shelter to brigands who were pursued by Piedmontese troops.

  Bases were set up in the hills or in the Apulian ravines, where self-appointed leaders recruited ex-soldiers returning penniless to their villages. Mounted and flying the Borbone flag, they ambushed enemy troops or, after cutting the telegraph wires, galloped into isolated cities to shoot the sindaco and his officials. They were aided by landowners and former Borbone officials, by priests and peasants. In the opinion of the Peasants, Hare noted, “brigands were always poveretti [poor things], to be pitied and sympathised with.”

  In April 1861 Carmine Donatello Crocco, a huge man with a black beard down to his waist, made a triumphant entry into Venosa at the head of a brigand army. On hearing the news, nearby Melfi, led by its most respected citizens, promptly hoisted the Borbone flag. Three days later, however, General Crocco hastily retreated at the approach of Piedmontese troops.

  Throughout the summer the Capitanata was terrorised by bands like Crocco’s, all flying the old royal flag. The governor of Foggia reported that masserie were being raided daily, their owners or managers abducted and held to ransom.


  When in July Luigi Palumbo seized Vieste with 400 men, welcomed by shouts of “Viva Francesco II!” the new Italy’s supporters were rounded up and shot, their masserie sacked, their corn and wine shared out among the peasants. Warned that an enemy force was on its way, Palumbo rode off to occupy Vico del Gargano, where he had a Te Deum sung to celebrate the restoration of Borbone authority. When the Piedmontese arrived, he and his men took refuge in the Foresta Umbra.

  All over Apulia brigands were entering large towns with impunity, buying food and medical supplies. They had spies every-where, including a group of ex-officers at Bari, together with agents and depots. Persuaded that the entire South was going to rise for him, in early autumn 1861 King Francis sent a veteran Carlist general, José Borjès, to Calabria to take command. Unfortunately, as a Spaniard, Borjès found it impossible to assert his authority over the Calabrians and moved to Apulia, where for a time he joined Crocco in the western Murgia. Towards the end of 1861, however, after two months spent hiding in woods and caves, he despaired and with his small Spanish staff and a few brigands made for the Papal States. “On their being surrounded just before reaching the frontier, they surrendered without a fight, in the confident belief that their lives would be spared”, writes Ulloa, prime minister of the Borbone government in exile: “Otherwise they would have fought to the death. But they were at once disarmed, and sent before a firing squad.”

  By then, in Apulia and indeed all over the South, it had started to look as if the Piedmontese troops were winning the war. A bitter winter set in. Disheartened by the cold and damp of their miserable lairs in the ravines, many Apulian brigands gave up what had become a merciless conflict.

  Among those who lost hope in the ‘Brigands’ War’ was General Crocco, who fled to Rome, abandoning his mistress, Maria Giovanna of Ruvo. His career was extraordinary yet far from untypical. Although he had deserted from King Ferdinand’s army in 1851, after killing a fellow soldier, at the Risorgimento he had become the brigands’ leader in western Apulia and Basilicata. In 1872 he would make the mistake of returning to Basilicata, to be caught and sentenced to life imprisonment.

  At the close of 1861, the journalist Count Maffei, an enthusiastic supporter of the new Italy, was genuinely convinced that the brigands were beaten, “reduced to a few wretched wanderers, hunted like wild beasts.” He was wrong. The war had only just begun and, despite its initial successes, the Piedmontese army would suffer more casualties then it had during all the battles of the entire Risorgimento, many of them killed in Apulia.

  56

  “A War of Extermination”

  Piedmontese troops occupy all Southern Italy, only because of savage

  and merciless enforcement of martial law... Those who will not submit

  are slaughtered .. in a war of extermination, in which ‘pity is a crime’.

  When an insurgent is captured by the Piedmontese he is shot.

  P Cala Ulloa, “Lettres Napolitaines”

  NORTHERN OCCUPATION, heavy new taxes and rising inflation had enraged the Southerners. Conscription into the Italian – formerly Piedmontese – army fuelled their resentment, partly because all the NCOs were Piedmontese who spoke an incomprehensible dialect, and many unwilling conscripts preferred to join the brigands instead. Sometimes there were other reasons for joining. New farm-managers, imported to run confiscated royal or church estates, often raped the labourers’ pretty daughters, threatening the parents with eviction if they complained, so a brother or male cousin would knife the rapist, and then go off to be a brigand.

  As has been seen, the wooded Murgia dei Trulli around Alberobello was perfect bandit country. Among the brigands’ friends here were the Gigante, a prominent Alberobello family. (Their Masseria Gigante, now an hotel, is just outside the town.) Both the priest Don Francesco Gigante and his brother Luigi, who was in the National Guard, were in touch with the famous Sergeant Romano. During the night of 26 July, 1862 Romano led twenty-six picked men into Alberobello, crept up on the Guard House and took it at bayonet point; the plan, instigated by Luigi Gigante according to a captured brigand, was to kill six pillars of the new government at Alberobello, including the mayor. But the local National Guard commander happened to look out of his window, saw the brigands and alerted the town by firing his revolver. Romano and his men ran off, taking thirty rifles. When charged, the Gigante brothers bribed the police who came from Altamura to investigate, and the magistrate at Bari, who secretly loathed the new regime, found that there was no case for them to answer.

  Pasquale Romano was the best known capobanda (leader) in this part of Apulia. An educated man and a devout Catholic, he wrote of his hatred for “the treacherous, invading usurpers who are trying to hunt us down.” He survived in the woods of the Murgia dei Trulli longer than most brigands because of his many friends among the peasants, who fed him and warned of the enemy’s approach. Sheltering by day in the little stone huts in the olive groves, he travelled long distances by night, to organise 150 followers in two main groups divided into sections. He attempted to give his comitiva military discipline, calling it “The Company of the Sergeant from Gioia.” Looting was forbidden and his men had to at-tend Mass on Sundays, often in the chapel of the Masseria dei Monaci near Altamura, a service that was known by locals as ‘The Brigands’ Mass’. Even so, embittered by the Piedmontesi’s deliberate murder of his fiancée Lauretta, he never took prisoners.

  However, the odds were growing much greater. The new rulers had started to buy the support of Southern landowners, just as they had bought the Borbone officers by guaranteeing their pensions. At first, a fair number of the galantuomini (gentlemen) had encouraged the brigands, sheltering them, even providing supplies and ammunition; they disliked being bullied by Piedmontese and had feared that their estates would be confiscated. Now however, the regime guaranteed their property, encouraging them to raise private armies and fight the brigands. They cowed their peasants, who stopped helping the men in the forests and grottoes.

  During 1862, “a regular battle was fought near Tàranto, when twenty-six brigands were killed, and eleven shot the next day in the market-place”, Janet Ross was told twenty years later. “After that the Tarentine gentlemen could visit their masserie without the fear of being held up for ransom, or having to take a body of armed men to protect them.” Many brigand leaders were caught between December and the following June. Giuseppe Valente – known as ‘Nenna-Nenna’, a deserter from Garibaldi’s army – was captured near Lecce and swiftly given forced labour for life. ‘Il Caparello’, operating between Santeramo and Gioia del Colle, was killed in January, and Cosmo Mazzeo, an ex-Borbone soldier from San Marzano di San Giuseppe, was taken prisoner in June, to be shot in November.

  On 5 January 1863 Sergeant Romano attacked his home town of Gioia del Colle with 28 men. The National Guard and a troop of Piedmontese cavalry proved too strong; 22 were killed and the rest were captured and shot. Among those who fell in the battle was Romano himself – despite begging for a ‘soldier’s death’ by a bullet like the others, he was bayoneted in cold blood. From a diary found on his body, it is clear he knew that some of his men were no better than “bandits.” Even so, they had been “bound to obey all orders given by me to further the cause of our rightful king.” Also found was a copy of the oath he made them swear to King Francis and “our column commander.” The sergeant is still a hero at Gioia del Colle, where a street was named after him in 2010.

  Cosimo Pizzichiccio took over command of Romano’s comitiva. During a battle with Piedmontese troops – in June 1863 at the Masseria Belmonte, east of the Statte-Crispiano road – he lost thirty-seven men killed, wounded or taken prisoner, although he himself got away with the remainder of the band to the woods in an area bounded by Mottola, Martina Franca and Alberobello. From here he continued to rob masserie and take hostages for ransom. His brother was caught in July while what was left of the comitiva were ambushed in a wood a few days later, but managed to escape. Like Romano, Piz
zichiccio was blamed for fewer murders than most capobande. In October, however, he kidnapped a black-smith, Giuseppe Marzano, who unwisely boasted he would eat his captor’s brains ‘like a sheep’s head’. Pizzichiccio promptly cut him down with a cavalry sabre.

  Throughout, the soldiers from Piedmont retaliated with the utmost savagery. Admittedly they were under enormous pressure, constantly ambushed, besides knowing that they would be tortured and murdered if captured. They were also decimated by malaria – at one point, out of each company of a hundred men only thirty-five were fit for service. A former British Foreign Secretary, the Earl of Malmesbury, commented with some exaggeration that “The cruelties of the Piedmontese armies to the Neapolitan royalists were unsurpassed in any civil war.”

  Undeniably, it was a horrible war, with reports of men being burned alive or crucified by both sides. Hundreds of Apulian non-combattants were killed, many others fleeing to the cities, leaving their farms deserted or their shops boarded up. Most of the towns and the masserie were ringed by trenches and stockades. It was impossible to travel anywhere without a heavily armed escort, while Bari was cut off by land. The only reasonably safe people were those landowners who, like the old feudal barons, had recruited private armies.