The news of the removal of the bust of the Piedmontese General Enrico Cialdini from the historic “Sala delle grida” of the Chamber of Commerce of Naples in Piazza Bovio, better known among the Neapolitan people as Piazza Borsa, is from these days. The Piazza took its name from the Palazzo della Borsa of Naples, which was among the liveliest stock exchanges in Europe even in the nineteenth century. The competent Superintendency will express its opinion on the relocation of the Bust to another site, while the Municipality of Naples has already revoked about a year ago the Honorary Citizenship granted to the general who massacred southerners during the Savoy repression of the insurrections in the South. The general was also the predestined winner in Gaeta, bombarded day and night by his long-range rifled cannons.
And in Gaeta, on February 13, 1861, history underwent a sudden acceleration, following the convulsions of Garibaldi's advance from Sicily to Teano. But the stage of history was reserved primarily, if not exclusively, for the Savoy army. An army that needed a great victory to legitimize the new dynasty ruling over Italy, united by force of arms. It had been chosen based on precise, externally directed strategies—known or unknown to the protagonists themselves—for the division of areas of political influence in the Mediterranean and in Italy, also in view of the opening of the Suez Canal, which would restore Naples to a central role. The Neapolitan army, holed up in the fortified citadel of Gaeta for weeks, had been resisting strenuously, but increasingly exhausted.
Meanwhile, the Court of King Francis II of Bourbon Two Sicilies remained barricaded with the army in the fortress with all the cavalry, which counted on just a thousand war horses. Victory now seemed certain for the Savoy army.
It was only a matter of time. To accelerate the disintegration of the defenses of the besieged, the command of the siege had been entrusted to General CIALDINI, coming from the territories already conquered by Giuseppe Garibaldi, who in the meantime had become a living myth, so much so as to be inconvenient to the Savoyard Court. And Cialdini, after having started the siege, proceeded in his own way with incessant bombardments with long-range rifled cannons, beyond the range of the old Neapolitan cannons.
During the siege, the Savoyard command was contacted by high-ranking Neapolitan officers, who requested asylum at least for the Neapolitan cavalry, which, confined within the fortress, was suffering greatly from the scarcity of fodder and water. But Commander-in-Chief Cialdini refused to grant the request. Thus, the horses—most of them Persian breeds, once the pride of the Neapolitan cavalry known as the White Devils, also prized by Napoleon Bonaparte—starved and battered, began dying by the dozens in the citadel, now reduced to shapeless piles of dusty, smoking rubble.
After the Hundred Days' Siege ended with the surrender of the besieged, some of the defeated survivors from the fortress reported seeing horses desperately gnawing at wooden doors and window frames in a vain search for something edible. The resigned King Francis II and his courageous wife, Queen Maria Sophie of Bavaria, were allowed to leave the fortress and board a French warship to go into exile in Rome, guests of Pope Pius IX. As the ship set sail, the Bourbon soldiers' final shout of "Evviv' 'o Rré!" was heard from land. Shortly thereafter, the Italian flag flew over the ramparts of conquered Gaeta. Thus was consummated the traumatic erasure of the oldest and largest Kingdom in Europe, founded on Christmas Day 1130 by the Normans. But in the territory of Southern Italy, after the surrender of Gaeta, a widespread and disorderly phenomenon of rebellion and "insurgencies" in towns, cities and entire rural areas had developed.
The protest spread throughout the South and was branded by the new rulers with the term "Brigantaggio". The rebels' uprisings were then suffocated in about a decade of ferocious repression carried out with one hundred and twenty thousand soldiers.
Real occupation troops under the command of General Cialdini, who was the main responsible for indiscriminate, often unjust, plundering, as well as countless deaths. The new Italy thus saw the light In a bloody and extensive fratricidal saga, which had nothing epic.
Federico LI Federico
EDITORIAL TEAM
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