Sergeant Romano From the book "Terroni" Pino April
the South were the robbers, the Piedmont eliminate them (thanks, eh?). That's what I always believed and I was taught, but almost in passing, and reluctantly, even at school, as was the case not to renew an ancient shame. And I did not mind: I had seen the sepia photos of the bodies of miscreants and their women, naked as a savage (but stripped from the civilizing) the severed heads to be sent to researchers Lombroso character and appearance of the perfect villain (Southern, of course, for nature). The film had touched the villain. We feel we schoolboys of the South, the hassle of having responded to Garibaldi's glorious epic, with a band of robbers and pickpocket, from cone hats, such as witches, and gun a trombone in the shoulder: a high troglodytes and fifties, with dark skin and black hair, low forehead, eye and grim off (it happens, if you photograph the dead), a bit 'Barabbas, a little' Judas (31 crowns in a Moreover, the buyout was that a united Italy gave the southern partisans, when they released her, because she needed more). Would you put him? An armed Jesus Christ, the blond hair in the wind of the winners, with the eccentricity of the poncho, white horse, golden beard and blue eyes that aims beyond the horizon, then the future flag illuminated by reflections of his sword (the weapon of knights) bet against the ... sun. What is a man! And if the history book asks you which way you want to be, that you say are South as the robber or "Italian" as God?
Yet, long before I could understand how things really were, because there was no condemnation and shame in the tone in which my father showed me the place where he had been exposed to Gioia del Colle, the body of Sergeant Romano, our neighbor. It seemed almost to tell of a hero, not a robber, and I did not understand the value of that inconsistency. I did not question, I was so far away from the idea that there was something to add or correct as to what we had been given as truth. Neither my father said no more: he was reluctant to talk about things grim. Of war, concentration camp, say, told me a few things only a few years before his death.
It was not wrong on Sergeant Romano. I discovered when reading non-school history they know me also that the unification of Italy at the expense of the South did not eradicate the "banditry", but it generated, which bloom of opportunistic criminals in a period of great confusion and illegality; as a civil war among the peasants robbed of free public land cultivable and gentlemen who had usurped, and as a former guerrilla military Neapolitan patriots and citizens who do not accept the end of freedom, welfare and rights (and even critical in quality, as always, everywhere) enjoyed under the Bourbon kings of the Two Sicilies and replace by a regime of terror, looting and arbitrary: that "blood system," according to Nino Bixio, Garibaldi's deputy, "opened in the South" by occupants who spoke French or dialects ever heard.
Soldiers of the King of Naples, Legitimists subjects, impoverished peasants and real robbers ended up together and this made them, for the invader and its history books, all bandits. It was considered that anyone suspected of sympathy, knowledge, consanguinity (bandit him? Brigante's father, the mother robber, brigand, the son of her sister, the robber as well ...). Why not kept separate soldiers and thieves? In 1979, for a report, I reached the Khmer Rouge guerrillas in the jungle. At lunch "official" with the government on the run by the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia, I was beside the Minister of Science and Technology: former businessman, had been the Lambs or Moratti of his country. His whole family had been suppressed by the communist-terrorists and the government at the table with him. "But how can he stay there?" I asked. "The alternative is that the Vietnamese exterminate what remains of my people, after the massacre carried out by the person who killed my," said (in perfect Italian, above).
"Until now we had the bandits," wrote Vincent Padula, a reporter at the time, liberal, in favor of the enterprise unit, in Calabria. Before and after the unification, "now we have the brigandage of one or the other word runs great divide. We have robbers when the people do not help him when he steals to live or die with a full stomach (but that did not occur only in the South), "and when you did the robbery because the robber is the cause of the people." And if not, the rebel does not last, observed in 1865, a legitimate, Thomas Cava de Guevavi (the report Francesco Mario Agnoli in Brigantaggio Dossier): In 1849, a month, Garibaldi and was left alone on the run, in Papal States; Pisacane and his three hundred young and strong were torn to pieces by the people with pitchforks and pruning hooks; the Bandiera brothers and comrades, were in four days before the firing squad. And the quality of the robbers, the Marquis de Cavour Villamarina warned that "the masses" were guided by 'the officers and noncommissioned officers' Bourbon. (For two hundred former military Neapolitans had made "Team Ciccone, who remained elusive for eight years, in 1868, a massive training Piedmont, surrounded and exterminated.)
Sergeant Romano was on the verge of becoming a Garibaldi down It was welcomed as liberators in the city that wins, defeating national guards, police and soldiers Piedmontese military was able to frame, at his command, the main formations of irregular beat Puglia, and led operations with those of other regions, under his command ( about bandits) Michele Clericuzio were, for years an instructor in the Bourbon Palace, and many others from the dissolved weapons Neapolitan soldiers of the line, hunters, grenadiers, real gendarmes, dragoons, lancers. At first, only Roman enlisted former comrades, but knew he could not choose his men, the company that tried, and almost succeeded, was to transform the brigands in real civil war and legitimacy. In his journal, says that "one day you introduced me thirteen robbers' self-styled" defenders of Francois II and of the Holy Church. " Unless discover that "it also allowed the thefts to do without my knowledge where I ordered to go in an orderly and military education," and that muttered: "We are called thieves and we steal." Him to take to the bush, spending his savings: a thousand pieces.
The occupants had to spend thousands among soldiers, policemen and national guards, to be able to isolate the former officer, capture and kill him. A reporter of the 'Gazette de France told, months later: "A Joy, a farmer showed me the place where the winners exhibited with pride, for eight days, his body torn to pieces. All the villagers took one last time to contemplate the remains of the heroic bandit unrecognizable, we went there as a pilgrimage to holy martyrdom, men find themselves, women knelt, almost all crying: he carried to the grave condolences and admiration of his countrymen. "
The people did not believe his death. There were those who swore to having met him in the woods: "It's alive. He'll be back. " How King Arthur. The legend says that to die was another: he was invulnerable and immortal, for mandatagli special medal from the Pope, as he wrote to his parents, Charles Gaston, who deserted the army of Piedmont to join him (he was not alone "soldier blue "to go with the" apache ") and became secretary-best friend and lieutenant. From the pleadings of the time we learn that "imagination exalting the crowds," Sergeant Romano "would live for many years still, the occult, and solitary wanderer. " And my father must have heard about in those terms: to be messiah, not criminal. To him, people close to the facts narrated the courage of a man, to me, history textbooks, the disgrace of too many villains and people who expressed them. From pride to shame. Increasingly, the South, those that trace this river backwards, to find, with the truth about the origin of their history unit, the reason to be proud of. And get out of the minority. [...]
Romano was 21 when his country was invaded, a beautiful and proud portrait shows him in uniform, beard treated, thick hair. Son of a wealthy farmer of the Murgia, the army grew in culture, style, degree. It was a decent man and recognized him even the compilers of the bulletins of war in Piedmont. The Bourbon army's behavior was exemplary and that of citizens 'Italian', after the conquest of Southern Piedmont, was not inferior: his criminal record was spotless, in a time when a weak enough enthusiasm for the new king to find himself in prison, without being accused of something. So much so that the historian Anthony Lucarelli, his main biographer, writes that among the "rabble" of the other armed opposition to the invasion, the Sergeant was distinguished by "natural talent, tenacious will, enterprising nature" but also "to some rudimentary culture and no criminal record "(Sergeant Romano. Brigantaggio political Puglia after 1860). From
partisan, it was clear, courageous and ruthless, if needed. In 1862, in Brindisi, two squadrons of the National Guard of Cellino San Marco San Pietro Vernotico and a platoon of policemen intercepted the "bandits" and went to the assault. Unless escape, just saw that it was the Sergeant Romano. A dozen were taken and "processed" by the former official Bourbon, who had a very efficient network of informants ("Joseph Mauro, you had four pugs a day as a spy, under Francis, and now I have three under Vittorio Emanuele." Guns) . A soldier, Vitantonio Donadeo, invoked Our Lady of Mount Caramel and the weapon that had to finish it jams. "Get up, you're safe 'pardoned him Romano, who was also a devotee of Our Lady of Mount Caramel, for which he wrote prayers.
was skillful in the open field, but more in shares of command. The civic guards of Alberobello, "patrolling the bordering forest," found its powder magazine, the confiscated, seized the warden. He, with thirty of his men, attacked the barracks, he freed the prisoner, he recovered the ammunition seized, carried away flags, drums and weapons of the guards. And the guards. Who delivered outside the country. Astonishment gave birth to a bang in the report of the prefect: all "in a quarter of an hour."
But the company revealed that it had the skill and daring was the recapture of Gioia del Colle, twenty thousand inhabitants. A country, his (and mine), hidden furies (today, it seems, and fortunately, sedated). Every sixty years or so, the political passion you gave birth to a massacre intestine. Lucarelli, who was born in a neighboring country, he writes that the inhabitants of Joy come to the slaughterhouse, to "resolutely in character, intolerance to abuse (...) impetuous and rebellious impulse of the soul" and "maintain their principles and their faith with fierce vigor. " In 1799, the clash between Jacobites and was Sanfedists, a leader of the opposition parties, two brothers, Pasquale (jurist and scholar) and Cesar Soria: opponents have searched house to house, looting, killing, people burned alive, dancing assassins. A sabbath of blood. In 1861, the opposition was between the capacity of Bourbon and unified, with all the nuances of the case: many supported the idea of \u200b\u200bItaly one, we were disgusted when they saw that was reduced to robbery and oppression of the South ("Beautiful is 'national union, "had the misfortune to say aloud the mild Gianantonio Molignani baron and lawyer," but we will be beggars of a united Italy. "And he earned the prison).
After killing a corporal of the National Guard, the Security Committee of Joy decided to do away with Romano and his men, along with the prefect, he joined forces (soldiers and armed citizens) with those of four other populous centers and moved to the forest valley. The Sergeant knew everything at once, thanks to his intelligence service. And, pressed by his own, instead of running away, attacked Gioia, bypassing the column that the hunted. The country was well defended, even by a gun that fired a machine gun, but the company failed and the people followed the Liberator to the cry of "Viva Francesco II! Vittorio Down. " On the other hand, especially professionals, owners, craftsmen, even priests who were holding guns. He fought street by street, more or less: against bourgeois peasants.
The worst happened in the rear: the oppressed of yesterday went hunting their peers and neighbors become oppressors or assumed. Garibaldi Youth and National Guards were taken from their homes and lynched in the street. An orgy of violence, albeit limited in numbers, saw what happened next: seven were slaughtered by the crowd. But to Joy, now converging on the city and coming from the capital, hundreds of reinforcements to the besieged men: police, soldiers, local militia, citizens of good will and good rifle. The Sergeant was able to slip, with her, the bite that occurred when troops closed down the country.
of what happened later, the History tells us little because they did the winners, but the figures may be enough: the orgy began, with aggressors and victims in reversed roles, the military rifle on a mere indication of the public, in batches of tens or individual, other "civilians" were provided alone (while in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was not only the sacred right to defend the accused, but nearly one hundred years there was already a requirement for the judiciary, to give reasons for their judgments). Those seven people were lynched by revenge from the rest of the people, with some excess, if at the end of slaughter, with more than one hundred and fifty bodies. Retaliation twenty to one: not even the Nazis at the Fosse Ardeatine.
