Common section

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 thecomitiva were ambushed in a wood a few days later, but managed to escape. Like Romano, Pizzichiccio 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.

All over Apulia men were imprisoned without trial simply be-cause some enemy had seized the opportunity of settling an old score, charges of collaboration with brigands being easily fabricated. Landowners whose masserie had not been raided fell under suspicion automatically while senior officials were often accused without any justification of supplying rifles and ammunition. Despite having shown slavish loyalty to the new regime, the sindaco of Alberobello was charged with taking bribes and with helping a notorious brigand, Giorgio Palmisani, to break out of prison. He was only acquitted after spending months under house arrest.

New brigand leaders were always emerging to fill the places of those who had been killed or captured. Among the most notorious were the psychopath Caruso, Crocco’s lieutenant ‘Ninco Nanco’ Coppa, a former Borbone soldier, and Varanelli, who was rumoured to eat human flesh. Lesser men included ‘Brucciapaese’, ‘Mangiacavallo’ and ‘Orecchiomozzo’, each one with a small band of followers.

Caruso, once a cowherd of the Prince of San Severo, possessed real military talent. By the end of 1862 he was leading the largest surviving comitiva in Apulia, 200 mounted men according to the Piedmontese garrison commander at Spinazzola. He never took prisoners, invariably killing enemy wounded. Having demanded bread, sheep and fodder from a peasant named Antonio Picciuti, after receiving them he seized Picciuti’s hand, laid it on a table and chopped it off, as a warning that he would need more next time. On another occasion he hacked off the arms and legs of a suspected informer before throwing him into a cauldron of boiling water. During the single month of September 1863 he is said to have personally killed 200 people. By then he had been driven into the Benevento where, after further atrocities, his band was wiped out. In December, accompanied by a sole surviving follower, Caruso was captured in the hovel of his sixteen year old mistress Filomena and immediately shot.

‘Ninco-Nanco’, a game-keeper formerly in prison for murder, operated with fifty horsemen in the Murgia between Altamura and Minervino, hiding in the ravines. During the terrible winter of 1863–4 his comitiva was hunted down and broken, ‘Ninco-Nanco’ being apparently killed in the storming of a masseria where he had taken refuge. But somehow he got away, escaping to the Papal States, from where he sent a defiant message, “Ninco-Nanco lives!”

Other brigands held out in the Abruzzi and the Piedmontese garrisons dared not relax. This explains Mme Figuier’s alarming experience in her locanda at Trani during the winter of 1865. She had observed some suspicious looking men muffled in cloaks standing round the stove when a young chamber-maid warned her that she and her husband were in the gravest danger, telling her how to answer questions she was going to ask in front of them.

‘”You are Spanish, surely Signora, aren’t you?’, the little servant girl asked me loudly. ‘You have never had a father, a brother or a fiancé who was a soldier, have you? Isn’t it true that you trust in the Virgin and that you think brigands are good men who earn a living by taking what the rich can easily spare?’” Realising that her husband had been mistaken for a Piedmontese officer – Piedmontese officers often spoke French among themselves – Mme Figuier hastily agreed. Knowing the brigands’ sympathy for the Carlist guerillas in Spain, she added that the bands in the Abruzzi were being joined daily by Spaniards. Smiling, the men doffed their hats, offering to protect the lady and her husband during their stay.

In 1865–7 the Piedmontese officials at Naples made certain of the co-operation of the Southern monied classes by allowing them to buy up the confiscated crown and church lands, producing the wretched social consequences that have been described in earlier chapters. As Francis II’s brother-in-law, the Austrian Emperor Franz-Joseph was understandably eager to see him restored, but in 1866 Austria’s defeat by Prussia and the new Italian state finally dispelled all hope of a restoration. The kingdom of the Two Sicilies degenerated into La Questione Meridionale (The Southern Question) – poverty stricken, despised Southern Italy.

The handful of Apulian brigands who survived in the Abruzzi fled across the Papal frontier. Whether genuine royalists like Sergeant Romano or psychopaths like Caruso, they had been the last defenders of the ancient Regno. Now that they were eliminated, theRisorgimento’s asset-stripping could be completed without any fear of interference. Nothing remained to deter speculators from investing in the ‘Apulian Texas’, and a new way of life lay ahead for the labourers on the Tavoliere.

Occasionally those who found conditions in the labour gangs beyond endurance still took to the ravines in the Murge, from where they raided lonely masserie, but by 1900, brigands who rode out from caves had been replaced by urban gangsters and were passing into folk-memory.

There is a bitter legacy. As a young man in Turin, Antonio Gramsci, one of the founders of the Italian Communist Party, met Piedmontese veterans of the Brigands’ War, and he always remembered the hatred they felt for their ‘Southern brothers.” Apulia, on the other hand, has neither forgotten nor forgiven its “liberation.”

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