Memories of Resistance

In 1860, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, whose capital was Naples, was overthrown by a combination of local Liberal revolutionaries and soldiers from the northern kingdom of Piedmont. The local peasants were faced with worsening labour conditions, the theft of common land and its integration into the property of the powerful, increased taxation, and the conscription of nearly all young men, the previous exemptions for fathers and only sons being abolished.
In defiance of the increased oppression and the martial law imposed upon them, many men and women took to the forests and the hills as bandits and brigands.
Central and Southern Italy already had a long tradition of resistance to Power. Its outlaws were famous even amongst the European intelligentsia of the era, many of whom, looking for something a little exotic on their Grand Tours of Italy, would visit the fearless outlaw Gasparone, locked up for forty years in a gaol in Civitavecchia. In the Lazio region, he was a legend, famed for robbing the rich and giving to the poor. Others, such as Stefano Pelloni, the Smuggler, Fra Diavolo, and Domenichino were equally famous. Nowadays their names mean little or nothing, but in their day they were often the protagonists of poems and ballads that sang of their misdemeanors as if they were epic deeds. These ballads were passed down the generations, the collective memory of a community expressed in song and popular verse, stories of the forest and the brigands who lived there.