The unrest in the South begins

Inequity part of the DNA of the new nation

A critical look at the Italian unification (circa 1860).

Excerpt from Blood of My Blood of Richard Gambino, page 51 forward.  

Garibaldi’s scheme of Italian grandeur meant for the people of the Mezzogiorno (aka South) a worse political and economic deal than that suffered under the Bourbons. After a short time, they rose once again, this time against their “fellow-Italians” of Piedmont and Rome. 

The earliest eruption took place in Naples in 1862, where the Italian government had immediately reversed many of the reforms Garibaldi had initiated. 

With independence that still characterizes their Neapolitan-American descendants today, the people of the city and its surrounding region proudly proclaimed their equality with any Northerners. “Italian” at this time meant, for all practical purposes, Piedmontese. And the Neapolitans went as far as to declare in their newspapers that “we are Neapolitans first, and then Italians”.

The response of the Turin (Piedmont) government was harsh and rivaled that of the foreign oppressors of the past. 

During eighteen months, the police reported having summarily executed 1,038 people, most of whom were suspect merely because they were found carrying personal weapons, a common practice in Naples. 

Another 3,000 were imprisoned without any semblance of due process. A fight broke out in earnest. The government sent sixty battalions of bersaglieri (crack combat soldiers) to teach a lesson to the Southerners. Garibaldi appealed to Vittorio Emanuele II, king of Piedmont kingdom, now king of Italy, to moderate the repression, telling him that rulers from Piedmont were hated in Naples more than the Bourbons had been. In vain. 

The troops showed no effort at conciliation with the unyielding but poorly armed disorganized population. In about a year, they killed some 3,000 Neapolitan rebels. This severity merely escalated hostilities, and by 1865 the national government had a virtual army of occupation, 120,000 soldiers, in the Mezzogiorno.

Sicily, as all Southern Italy, was humiliated and mocked in that cursed 1861! It was not the date of Italian unification, but of military occupation by the northern Piedmont armies. This is a tragic history kept secret whose nefarious consequences reverberate until today.