The Piedmontese who came uninvited in 1860 felt they had arrived not in another country but in another continent. Accustomed to the straight gridded streets of Turin, they were disgusted by Spaccanapoli, the heart of old Naples, a warren of dark, intimidating alleys thronged with urchins and card-players and hostile lazzaroni. They were familiar with Baroque churches – they had them at home – but theirs were restrained, almost classical structures situated logically on sober streets; they were not like these weird creations, almost obscene in their extravagant curves and their lavish ornamentation. The architecture of Piedmont had little use for majolica tiles, so profusely and meretriciously flaunted in Naples on floors and benches and even up pillars. Nor had it been tempted by guglie, those colossal marble obelisks set in the middle of small squares, follies bursting with a promiscuous mass of cherubs, mermaids and coats of arms, with scrolls and fruit and scallop shells, with popes and saints and dedications to the Virgin. To northern eyes they were the summit of bad taste.
Naples has changed much in the last 150 years. The street-urchins have gone, and so have most of the monks; motor-cars have come, along with car-horns and lawless driving. Yet it is still a city with nuns and child accordionists, a place of plaster saints and nativity scenes, of pizza and the Camorra, of lines of washing strung across its alleys, of pavement stalls and tiny food shops that seem to have strayed from the souks in Tunis. The old palaces, built on such narrow streets that you can hardly see their façades, are still inhabited, though not by the families that built them. A representative example of an unrestored palazzo in Spaccanapoli today will have a courtyard of peeling plaster cluttered with motorbikes and small businesses: a hairdresser’s, a travel agency and a jeweller’s repair shop; on the first floor you will find a notary and a dancing school and, further up, below the residential flats at the top, an oculist and a bed and breakfast. Outside, the little streets still have life and bustle, yet they also emanate a sense of death and unchanging religious custom. Black-edged funeral notices are ubiquitous, announcing that Anna or Maria, the widow Mazzella or Fassari, has died, her ‘dear existence extinguished’ in the same serene manner in which she had lived her life. Little shrines dedicated to the Virgin are still illuminated in the angles of tiny lanes, Mary and Jesus bedecked with glittering crowns above vases of fading lilies and fake dahlias.
For the Piedmontese the nutritional prospect must have seemed as foreign as the rest of Naples: the profusion of tomatoes and their sauces, the anchovies fried in oil, the sea bass and the sea-urchins, the street vendors with their cauldrons of steaming pasta. It was all so different from the stews and sausages of their native land. Politically the conquest of the south may have seemed a victory of polenta over pasta, of the Bolognese mortadella over the Neapolitan maccheroni. But in culinary matters the southerners resisted with success. One Neapolitan chef achieved renown with a pizza of tomato and mozzarella, which he named after Queen Margherita, the most gracious and elegant member of the Savoia dynasty, who accepted the honour. Eventually the southern cuisine went on to the offensive and was victorious across Italy and further afield. Just as olive oil has defeated butter almost everywhere except in the Cisalpine redoubts, pasta has vanquished polenta, that yellow maize porridge with a vitamin deficiency that causes pellagra disease and is now used chiefly as an accompaniment to calves’ liver.
In 1860 few northerners knew much about southern Italy and even fewer foresaw any difficulties they might have in governing their new acquisitions. They realized it had not recently been prosperous but thought this was a temporary problem, a consequence of Bourbon misrule, which they would soon be able to fix with parliaments, free trade and efficient administration. They had read about Magna Graecia and Campania Felix, they remembered what Virgil and more recently Goethe had written, and they believed the land was so fertile that southerners could afford to be lazy. They knew about the luxuries of ancient Sybaris, which was said to have invented the chamber pot as well as the ‘Turkish’ bath,1 but they had not visited its site in Italy’s instep and thus did not realize that the place could no longer support a sybaritic existence. They seemed quite unaware of drought and erosion and the other climatic and geographical disadvantages suffered by the south.
Ignorance was accompanied by the contempt of northerners from Italy and beyond. In the early nineteenth century one French traveller, Augustin Creuzé de Lesser, announced that ‘Europe ends at Naples and ends there quite badly’; Sicily, Calabria and the rest belonged to Africa. Fifty years later, another Frenchman, Alfred Maury, described a journey south as if he were in a time-machine going backwards: in Turin and Milan you were in modern society, in Florence you were with the Medici, by the time you reached Rome you were in the Middle Ages, in Naples you had gone back to the pagan era, and further south you found customs that had ‘all the naive simplicity of ancient times’.2 Most observers found the southern landscape magnificent but its people squalid; it was ‘a paradise inhabited by devils’ and governed by them too. Southerners were spineless, idle, corrupt and so carnally sensuous that the Marquis de Sade – of all people – found them ‘the most degraded species’ in the world.3 Yet they were also seen as savage, violent and irrational, perhaps taking after their earthquakes and volcanoes. Such prejudice was buttressed by historical example, pseudo-science and primitive anthropology. Racial differences, it was claimed, made southerners more likely to be corrupt than northerners, though it was accepted that not all southerners were the same. One theory, occasionally still uttered, held that western Sicilians have been mafiosi because they are descended from Arabs, whereas eastern islanders, especially the inhabitants of Syracuse, have been less violent and more civilized because their ancestors were Greeks.4
A politician who typified these attitudes was Cavour’s first viceroy of Naples, Luigi Carlo Farini, the man who compared Neapolitans unfavourably with the bedouin. To the interior minister in Turin, he described the people as ‘swine’ living in ‘a hell-pit’ and their lawyers as ‘tricksters … law-twisters, casuists and professional liars with the conscience of pimps’; what a pity, he added, that Piedmont’s civilization forbade floggings and ‘cutting people’s tongues out’. Farini began to have doubts about the wisdom of unification soon after he arrived in Naples at the end of 1860, but it was too late to go back. The ‘entire Italian question’, he believed, now revolved around Naples: ‘to succeed there [was] to create Italy’.5
It soon became clear that few southerners were eager to help in the creation. Neapolitans from the poorer districts could sometimes be heard shouting ‘Viva Garibaldi!’ or even ‘Viva Francesco!’, for they much preferred the old Bourbons, who had spoken their dialect and possessed the common touch, to Victor Emanuel, a foreign king who did not conceal his disdain for his new subjects and referred to them as ‘canaille’. Giacinto De Sivo, a local historian, railed against the nationalists’ misnomers: the destruction of his country should not be called a ‘risorgimento’; the northern oppression should not be called ‘liberty’; ‘this servitude to Piedmont, the servant of powers beyond the Alps’, should not be called ‘independence’. ‘Piedmont cries Italy,’ he exclaimed, ‘and makes war on Italians because she does not want to make Italy – she wants to eat Italy …’6 Other people held milder views yet still regretted the result of the plebiscite in which they had been voting less for Victor Emanuel than for Garibaldi, who was popular even though he was a northerner. They remembered that the Bourbon government had been often incompetent and sometimes irksome but they began to wonder if they really preferred to be ruled by an alien dynasty in distant Turin.
Since the summer of 1859 Azeglio had been warning it would be a disaster if the Piedmontese attempted to ‘swallow down Naples’. Two years later, after the swallowing had been done and the swallowed were in revolt, he suggested that the Neapolitans should be asked ‘once and for all whether they want us there or not’.7 Cavour was by then dead but he had already decreed that the Neapolitans would not be asked. Bixio ha
d told him that southerners were ‘a bunch of orientals’ who understood ‘nothing but force’, and he had agreed with Bixio. He was determined, he told the king, ‘to impose unity on the most corrupt and weakest part of Italy’, and to do so by force if necessary. Disorder would not be tolerated, nor would political opposition or even a free press. However much the Neapolitans disliked the prospect of unification, they were going to be unified anyway: it would be better to have a civil war than the ‘irreparable catastrophe’ of a break-up of the new nation.8 It did not apparently occur to Cavour that, if southern Italy were denied liberty and social justice, its inhabitants might wonder what they were going to gain from unification.
Even northern populations resented the imposition of Piedmontese laws: the Tuscans, for example, had no desire to bring back the death penalty which they had first abolished in the eighteenth century. Yet the insensitivity of the Piedmontese in the south, and the arrogance of their assumption that they knew what was best for southerners, made their policies even more damaging in the former Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Back in the twelfth century, at the Assizes of Ariano, King Roger of Sicily had wisely proclaimed that, as there were so many different peoples and cultures in his kingdom, they must be allowed as far as possible to retain their own laws and customs. Such wisdom was denied to Cavour, who would not permit the Neapolitans to keep a legal system they were rightly proud of. He certainly paid no attention to Giuseppe Ferrari, a federalist deputy from Lombardy, who informed him in parliament that the laws of the southern kingdom compared well with those of other civilized nations and were probably the best in all Italy.
The officials of the new government were too blinkered to notice certain basic and important features of Neapolitan history. They seemed unaware that the capital had no town hall, no parliament building and no medieval traditions of self-government. It was a royal city dependent on a court and a bureaucracy; such prosperity as it had would therefore decrease when its status declined from national capital to provincial city. Nor did they realize how disastrous a doctrinaire application of free trade would be to industries which depended on tariffs and state orders to protect them from northern and foreign competition. Equally crass was their failure to anticipate the effect of high taxes on people unaccustomed to paying them, especially those directed at the poor such as the grist tax. Increased taxation was required primarily to build a national army and navy, institutions the south did not want or care about. It was also needed to service Piedmont’s large national debt, which was now shared with all the annexed territories. Naples, where the Bourbons had accumulated impressive gold reserves, was thus forced – on top of everything else – to help pay Piedmont’s debts.
Another cause for resentment was the treatment of the Bourbon army after its defeats in 1860 and 1861. A number of senior officers, especially those who had deserted or fought badly against Garibaldi, were welcomed into the Piedmontese forces. Yet about 60,000 men were disbanded and left without jobs and pay, and 13,000 of Francesco’s most loyal soldiers – those who had fought to the end at Capua, Gaeta and elsewhere – were kept as prisoners and incarcerated in Alpine fortresses. Conditions in the northern jails were so appalling that many of them died there of hunger, cold and disease.
In the south fighting continued for years after the arrival of Garibaldi. Within weeks of Francesco’s departure – and just after the proclamation of united Italy – an anti-Piedmontese revolt broke out in Basilicata; within a few more weeks it had spread throughout the southern mainland, up to the Abruzzi and down to Apulia and Calabria. The rebels did not attempt to form an army but remained divided among several hundred armed bands; their tactics were guerrilla – consisting mainly of killings, kidnappings and ambushes – and their victims were the soldiers and officials of the new regime. The previous year Cialdini had dismissed resisters as ‘brigands’, and the label stuck: the enemies were not considered normal enemies but brigands and outlaws who could be treated as such. Historians followed suit, with the result that a civil war lasting five years became known as il brigantaggio or ‘the brigandage’.
Some later historians, often marxists, regarded the revolt as a social insurrection and the rebels as freedom fighters defying a foreign aggressor. Like the earlier interpretation, this was simplistic because it ignored multiplicity of motive. Rebels may have shared the same target – the new regime – but they had diverse reasons for attacking it. Many were indeed brigands, the kind of men who had been around for many years and who had been encouraged to fight the French by both the Bourbons and the British half a century before. But there were many former soldiers as well, men loyal to the old monarchy who had been disbanded by the Piedmontese and who now joined the guerrillas in the hills. Other recruits included peasants fleeing conscription or refusing to pay the new taxes. As they moved around the interior, the rebels received support from the villages, from Bourbon loyalists and devout Catholics outraged by Piedmont’s recent anti-clerical policies. Some of the bands obtained assistance abroad from Bourbon supporters and Francesco’s exiled court in Rome.
The northern generals followed Cavour’s instructions to use force and received statutory support for this from a new law which empowered them to employ repressive measures in ‘those provinces declared by royal decree to be infested with brigands’. General Della Rocca, the future sluggard of the second Battle of Custoza, informed the prime minister that he had ordered his men ‘not to waste time taking prisoners’, and in his autobiography he boasted of the number of summary executions he had carried out; when told by the government to reduce the number and shoot only the capi (the chiefs), he and his commanders responded by calling all captured rebels capi and shooting the lot of them.9 Other generals took a more Old Testament approach, urging their soldiers to show no mercy in ‘purifying the countryside by fire and sword’. In August 1861 the inhabitants of Pontelandolfo, a large village north-east of Naples, were so overjoyed by the arrival of a band of brigands that they murdered the local tax collector and sang a Te Deum to King Francesco in the parish church. A small detachment of bersaglieri, which rashly went to see what was going on, was then wiped out by a force of armed peasants. Cialdini’s response was predictable: Pontelandolfo and a neighbouring village were to be reduced to ‘a heap of rubble’, and their adult male inhabitants were to be shot. Some 400 people, a good number of them neither male nor adult, were killed on the day of the consequent slaughter.
By 1865 the Italian army had contained the revolt, though some fighting stuttered on for another five years. The number of rebel dead, those executed or killed in combat, is difficult to calculate, and assessments vary from under 6,000 to over 60,000. Whatever the true figure, unification had provoked a civil war of such atrocities and such dimensions that most of the Italian army was dispatched to the south to deal with it. It was so appalling a way to begin life as a ‘united’ kingdom that the government tried to suppress information about what was happening. Members of parliament hissed and shouted if a brave soul uttered the words ‘civil war’: no, no, they cried, it was a punishment of brigands. They were equally outraged when a Neapolitan parliamentarian compared the Piedmontese in Naples to the conquistadors in Mexico and Peru. Foreigners could also be hostile to those among them who doubted the sacred nature of Italian unity. One MP at Westminster risked unpopularity by dismissing the idea of brigandage and speaking of ‘a civil war, a spontaneous popular movement against a foreign occupation’. In a debate in 1863 Benjamin Disraeli wondered why Parliament was allowed to consider the condition of Poland but not the situation in Naples. ‘True,’ he observed, ‘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.’10
SICILY GOES DOWNHILL
As violence faded on the mainland, it flared up in Sicily, a large-scale revolt in 1866 following a smaller one three years earlier. Taking advantage of the withdrawal of the island’s garr
ison (sent north in the summer of 1866 to fight the Austrians), armed bands emerged from the hills and occupied most of Palermo. The composition of the bands was similar to that of the Neapolitan ‘brigands’, a mixture that included criminals, peasants, deserters and other former soldiers. As usual the government failed to consider whether it might have been responsible for the revolt; instead of perceiving the outbreak as a social insurrection provoked by the policies of Turin, ministers blamed the Mafia* and sent in the army. Once again force was the policy adopted by the government and carried out by generals who believed that Sicilians were too barbarous to understand anything else. While the navy bombarded Palermo, the army went on the rampage, arresting and executing islanders.
The Sicilian desire for autonomy was not a new passion. It had reached insurrectionary point on many occasions over the previous six centuries and four times already in the previous fifty years; it remains an important political issue even though the island today enjoys an autonomous status. Cavour had taken note of this sentiment and promised he would satisfy it if Sicilians voted for annexation; after they had done so, he changed his mind and pressed ahead with ‘piedmontization’. The islanders had also been promised a redistribution of land, but this too was revoked. Like the common lands, the former Church estates might have been utilized in some scheme of agrarian reform to benefit the poor; in the event they were sold cheaply to prototype mafiosi from the middle classes, and the peasants received nothing. Although Sicilians had been told they would benefit from annexation, the advantages must have been difficult for many of them to discern. As in Naples, the poor were often left unemployed by the consequences of free trade, they were conscripted by an army they regarded as an enemy, and they were forced to pay taxes that seemed specifically aimed at them: why else were heavy dues imposed on their beasts (donkeys and mules) and lighter ones levied on the landowners’ cattle?
The Pursuit of Italy Page 30