A Sweet and Glorious Land by John Keahey Read Free Book Online

recruited the famous “Thousand,” actually, according to one source, 1,087 men who largely were northern Italians and nearly all students, young professional men, and artisans. Only about one hundred of these “red shirts,” so called because of the uniforms they wore, were southerners.
    These volunteers sailed from Genoa, landed in Sicily in May 1860, and, with rusty muskets and bayonets, took the island in the name of Vittorio Emanuele within two months. The Sicilians supported them, but started taking matters into their own hands. Garibaldi had to suppress a series of peasant revolts before he could set his sights on liberating Naples—and all the South—from the Bourbons in the name of the northern Italian king.
    In August 1860, Garibaldi, fortified by thousands of new volunteers, crossed the Strait of Messina and easily won a series of skirmishes against the Bourbons on the mainland. Three weeks after landing, he took Naples. Neapolitans welcomed Garibaldi as a hero because they did not like the Bourbons. The city’s largest square, in front of the main train station and now choked with cars and buses, is named for him, as are many main squares throughout Italy. But the Neapolitans were not enthusiastic about being part of a united Italy; they gave the king a lukewarm reception later that year.
    This ambivalence of the early Neapolitans is characterized by their reaction when Rome became the nation’s capital in 1870 after it had been wrested from the pope. Naples’ leaders changed the name of a main boulevard from the Spanish appellation of Via Toledo to Via Roma. People in that section of the city simply refused to use the new name. The old name, Via Toledo, now is back in favor, and contrary Neapolitans still often refer to the street as Via Roma, despite what the street signs and official maps say. It is typically Italian that they see no confusion in this juxtaposition that does much to confuse the casual visitor.
    So, in the 1860s and the immediate decades after, Naples and southern Italy played virtually no role in the unification process. The South was simply invaded once again, this time by idealistic northern liberals, and then turned over to “northerners who never wanted to rule the South, and who certainly had not fought for it,” according to Martin Clark, author of The Italian Risorgimento. The North “acquired it not because the Neapolitans themselves wanted that outcome, nor because of any feat of arms by the [northern] army, but because a great guerrilla leader and military genius [Garibaldi] so decides.”
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    And Naples over the decades lingered on, devolving into a third-world city filled with squalor and besieged by cholera well past the middle of the twentieth century. In the early 1970s, Robb tells us, nearly half of Neapolitan houses lacked bathing facilities, and only one-fifth had indoor toilets.
    The city today is fighting back, say my Italian and expatriate friends—some of whom still refuse to come here. But I wonder if the struggle is overwhelming. The Neapolitan crime organization, the camorra, is growing. Young people, like the ragazzo who yanked at my bag and picked my pocket, have few employment options. Meanwhile, as in troubled American cities, televisions blast messages of prosperity and images of material wealth into the crowded, shabby homes in Naples’ desperate center, showing the people how the rest of the world—and especially northern Italy—lives.
    There is prosperity “everywhere but in the South,” a young man told me during a brief, but revealing, conversation at a bus stop.
    Modern Italy has another danger as well: the automobile. It is distressing most everywhere along the peninsula, and in Naples, particularly so. Narrow, Neapolitan streets follow the course of Roman and, before them, Greek, roadways. In modern times, many of these streets remain only wide enough for two