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An
Italian
version of that is La spigolatrice di Sapri [The
Gleaner of Sapri] by Luigi Mercantini. It is one of
the most noted poems from the Risorgimento,
the movement to unify Italy in the 19th century.
(The poet, Mercantini, also wrote the text to the Hymn of Garibaldi,
one of the best known of all Italian patriotic songs
of that period.) The
Gleaner of Sapri
was written in 1858. It is written in the first
person, a woman working in the fields in Sapri (120
miles south of Naples in
the Gulf of Policastro). She
sights the approach and landing of a ship bearing
Carlo Pisacane and 300 men who set out from Genoa in
the summer of 1857 to liberate the Bourbon Kingdom
of Naples. The invasion was a disaster but was at
least a precursor in spirit to Garibaldi's successful
invasion three years later. Besides the poem,
there are other reminders of the event. Many Italian
cities have streets named for Carlo Pisacane, and
the town of Sapri has a festival each year and has
not only a statue of Pisacane but even a sculpture
of the Gleaner, herself, perched on the rocks and
looking out to sea (photo, above). In the poem, the narrator follows the landing of Pisacane's band at Sapri and their passage into the local hills where they are overwhelmed by a superior force. The verses of the short poem are broken up by the refrain, "Eran trecento, eran giovani e forti, e sono morti!" ["They were three hundred, they were young and strong, and they are dead!"] It is the most cited line from the poem and has become proverbial—that is, if you say "Eran trecento...", any Italian will be able to finish the line for you. In his English translation (contained in the Supplement of the Poets and Poetry of Europe, published in 1866), Longfellow says of the poem, "The following striking and simple poem...has reference to the ill-fated expedition of Carlo Pisacane, on the shores of the kingdom of Naples in the summer of 1857, in which, says, dall'Ongaro, 'he fell with his followers like Leonidas with his three hundred.' " (Dall'Onagro was a 19th-century Italian poet. Leonidas was the Spartan hero who with a scant 300 men held off the hordes of Persia at Thermopylae in 480 BC). Longfellow's translation of The Gleaner of Sapri starts: "They were three hundred, they were young and strong, and concludes "They were three hundred and they would not fly, This monument is located in Rome  Pisacane,
himself, was born in Naples in 1818. He attended the Nunziatella military academy
and then served in an engineer battalion building
railways in the kingdom of Naples. He was a totally
political thinker and, depending on the source, is
described as a liberal, socialist or even the first
Italian anarchist. He was, like many of his
generation, obsessed not just with unifying Italy but
with the principles that would sustain the
nation—liberal, classless, anti-authoritarian with
freedom and justice for all. Amen. He was involved
with the social and political unrest in Italy in 1848
and with setting up and defending the brief life of
the Roman Republic in 1849. As a result of such
activity, Pisacane was forced to flee into exile on
various occasions to England, Switzerland and France.
In 1853 an uprising against Austrian rule in Milan failed; Giuseppe Mazzini, the philosopher of the Risorgimento, then proposed an expedition to stir up a revolt in the kingdom of Naples to overthrow the Bourbon monarchy and help bring about a united Italy. It took a few years for the idea to ripen, but in 1857 Pisacane volunteered to lead the expedition. That was probably not a good choice. Unlike Garibaldi, Pisacane was not born to lead men into battle. He was born to think and write about politics; indeed, he wrote extensively about the Italian wars of 1848 and 1849 as well as about the ideal forms of just government for a new Italy. He was an intellectual in the role of a soldier and not prepared for that role. At least warrior Garibaldi, three years later, sailed out of Genoa with 1,000 men, many of them veterans of earlier campaigns; they were ready to fight and win battles, pretty much of a prerequisite if you are going to win a war. Temperamentally, Pisacane was more like his predecessor in Neapolitan revolutions, Eleonora Fonseca Pimentel, another intellectual who thought if you explained the justice of your cause to the people, they would rally to you. Pisacane
and
22 like-minded revolutionaries set out as paying passengers (!)
from Genoa on the steamer, Cagliari, on June 25, 1857. Once
at sea, they hijacked the ship and Pisacane
explained his mission to the passengers and crew and
invited volunteers to join him. It is not clear if
there were any takers. Off the island of Ponza, 50 miles NW of the Bay
of Naples, the ship feigned distress and was allowed
to land. Ponza was the site of a Bourbon prison that
held a number of political prisoners. Pisacane and
his men took over the prison, emptied the armory and
liberated and enlisted over 300 prisoners, about
one-third of whom had had military experience. They
landed
at Sapri where Pisacane
had anticipated that his arrival would spark
spontaneous anti-Bourbon uprisings throughout the
kingdom. They were met in Sapri, however, by apathy
and suspicion. Pisacane's plan was to head through
the Cilento hills towards Padula and turn north and
into the Campanian plain to Naples, by which time he
apparently thought his ranks would have swollen to
an irresistible force. At Padula, they were forced
to retreat back to the town of Sanza where Pisacane
was killed, most likely by locals convinced by
authorities that Pisacane and his men were marauding
bandits. (Some sources say that Pisacane, in the
face of certain defeat, turned his pistol on
himself.) His men then
met the main body of about 1200 Bourbon militia and
were defeated. The landing at Sapri had sparked no outbreaks of
sympathy from the populace much less been a signal
to pockets of organized anti-Bourbon resistance that
Pisacane had been expecting. The
aftermath:
In spite of what the poem says, the 300 did not all
go down fighting. Some of them did, yes, but some
escaped the battle. Many of them were recaptured and
put on trial together with those accused of having
either joined or assisted the invaders. All in all,
the Bourbon rulers put over 450 people on trial for
insurrection. The trial was in early 1858 in Salerno
and was widely covered in European papers of the day
with speculation that it might turn out to be a
repetition of the Bourbon blood-bath in the wake of
the failed Neapolitan Republic in
1799. That did not
transpire. Seven of the accused were sentenced to
death (of those, 3 sentences were commuted to life
in prison); 56 were released; 9 were sentenced to
life; others were sentenced to varying periods in
prison. (All of those
imprisoned were freed shortly thereafter by
Garibaldi.) Roberts [source, below] reminds us of historian G.M.Trevelyan's view that Pisacane's expedition was to the Italian Risorgimento as Harper's Ferry was to the American Civil War. The reasoning is that both John Brown and Carlo Pisacane led failed attempts to spark wider conflagrations in the name of grander causes. Both episodes, simply because they failed, thus had the potential to underscore the futility of violence and strengthen the hand of moderates. That is intriguing, but it is hard to think of cases where that has really happened. It did not happen in the United States or Italy; war quickly overtook moderation in both cases. There is, however, a comparison of rhetoric. Given the chance to speak to the crowd assembled to watch him hang for treason and insurrection, John Brown said:
Pisacane never stood trial, but one of his group was Giovanni Nicotera, sentenced to death (commuted by king Ferdinand to life in prison). When Nicotera was offered the chance to voice his gratitude in the tribunal by proclaiming, "Long live the king!" he said, "We don't fear prison or death...shouting 'Long live the king!' is like shouting 'Death to Liberty!' " Finally,
I really did find the following quote after (!) everything
above was finished. That is too spooky for me not to
include it. It is from volume V, book 1 of Les Miserables
by Victor Hugo (published in 1862): Victory, when it is in accord with progress, merits the applause of the people; but a heroic defeat merits their tender compassion. The one is magnificent, the other sublime... John Brown is greater than Washington, and Pisacane is greater than Garibaldi. sources: A
fine English-language source on Pisacane is Carlo Pisacane's La
Rivoluzione to index to history portal |
It has been a
while since I've looked at poetry in school books in
the English-speaking world. They used to contain
patriotic ditties—some
based on real events—meant
to inspire love of country in young minds,
especially if copious amounts were learned by rote!
(My own memory still holds bits of the galloping
dactyls of