I have been researching and collecting materials on brigandage for years and I could continue for years without finishing, given the enormous amount of documentation on these figures.
I chose to deal with the three borders between Basilicata, Campania and Puglia, because they represented for the bandits a triangle of easy crossing for ambushes, escapes and shelters.
In the period between 1860 and 1866 alone, there were thousands of brigands in this territorial triangle, living on the run, quickly moving from one region to another.
If I had to indicate in which path to insert these stories about bandits, I think of the temptations of a world that I want to cross to grasp something that belongs to me
The figures of this extreme artistic choice communicate cruelty and poetry: a complexity far from romantic fascination and cynical and negative judgment.
I will not deal with the most famous brigands, those that the news, rather than history, has catalogued, controlled, mythologized and therefore emptied of any political motivation, thus causing them to fall into oblivion.
Among the hundreds of stories of bandits that I have known, I have chosen three.
The first story is that of the traitor Giuseppe Caruso, a career brigand in the gang of commander Crocco and then a spy who went over to the Piedmontese army to destroy Crocco and his men. Caruso, by betraying, managed to destroy Crocco’s gang but Crocco gives him no peace and at night while he sleeps he mocks him: “Crocco comes to visit me at night while I sleep, laughs in my face and goes away.”
The first time Caruso finds himself before the eyes of Commander Crocco, he is so excited that he cannot say hello: “I wanted to say hello, but my voice wouldn’t come out, I would stiffen and tremble.” His was an accelerated career; Crocco respected him: “in every operation I always stood out, there was always something that distinguished me from the others and Commander Crocco always noticed it.” Made deputy, with his own small gang, he is part of Crocco’s large gang of over two thousand men. In this way he comes to know all the hideouts and confidants: information that is useful at the time of betrayal: “I finally managed to destroy Crocco’s gang; General Pallavicini wanted to reward me, he made me a sergeant of the mounted forest rangers.”
The second story concerns Pilone, a bandit from Campania, an idealistic and naive Bourbon soldier, betrayed in Naples by his friend. Pilone, for a living, modifies stones and upon the arrival of Garibaldi, he enlists with the Bourbons; defeated, he returns to his hometown, Boscotrecase, but his fellow villagers consider him a dangerous Bourbon stray who goes around armed. Mayor Antonio Oliva gives him no peace, so Pilone, as a fugitive, forms his own gang, made up of disbanded soldiers, delinquents, hungry people and even a hermit. Pilone felt important among all those people, also because he saw his name on all the wanted posters. With his gang, he attacked the national guard to recover weapons; he fought to re-establish a local Bourbon government; he was awarded a Cavaliere and leader of his army by His Majesty Francis II. Pilone always went around with photos of HM Queen Maria Sofia, and HM Francesco II, with the dedication on the back: “To Cavalier Pilone with esteem and admiration”. While he carries out attacks and raids to re-establish the Bourbon order and asks for ransoms from various local nobles, he is betrayed and arrested; but Pilone does not remember anything, only that he saw a lot of blood: “I learned that my body was exposed at the police station and that everyone could finally see up close, without fear, the infamous brigand Pilone disarmed, obedient and forever silent”.
The third story is that of two of the fifty-four villages razed and burned by the Piedmontese, after having massacred all their inhabitants. Pontelandolfo and Casalduni were meant to represent the lesson to be given to those who did not accept the Piedmontese: General Cialdini ordered his men to leave no witnesses and above all not to leave “stone upon stone”.
The task of the theater is to know the complexity of a world to bring it to its own dramatic poetics. As an act of unfaithful love, the theater transfigures and invents situations that are still close to our memory and our life today.
