1861: ITALIAN UNIFICATION
THE END OF THE KINGDOM OF TWO SICILIES
ITALIAN RISORGIMENTO AND EMIGRATION
THE SOUTHERN QUESTION
THE UNTOLD TRUTH
ENGLAND AGAINST THE KINGDOM OF TWO SICILIES
NEO-BOURBONS:
A cultural association
to uncover the lost roots of Southern Italian
On the cold afternoon of December 27, 1894, in the town of Arco, province of Trento, Francesco II of Bourbon, the last king of the Two Sicilies, died. The Bourbon dynasty no longer governed Southern Italy after a reign of 126 years. The Piedmontese, with the self-interested complicity of the English and the French, invaded the peaceful Kingdom of the Two Sicilies which extended from Latium to Sicily over all of Southern Italy. Nhe Neapolitan army fought valiantly alongside its king and its heroic queen, Maria Sofia, who has barely nineteen. It surrendered after 93 days of siege in the fortress of Gaeta, at dawn on February 14. 1861.Thousands of heroic citizens of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies died on the battlefield. In the same way, thousands of men, women, and children were shot in the campaign against Southern Italy - they were called "bandits" or "brigands", but they were, in fact, the last soldiers and defenders of a history, a tradition, and a culture that would die with them forever.
THE SOUTHERN QUESTION
Contro l'oblio. Giorno della memoria per le vittime meridionali dell'Unità d'Italia
February 13, 1861. End of the siege of Gaeta. General Cialdini transforms the Piedmontese victory into carnage. The voices of the vanquished are thus buried. From Casalduni to Pontelandolfo, from Auletta to Bronte, massacres and forgotten massacres.
Pino Aprile fights for the establishment of a Memorial Day for the southern victims of the Unification of Italy. He returns a face to the defeated, humiliated, conquered and oppressed. Images, data and graphics accompany the writings of Pino Aprile, who however also tells the South of the 21st century: suspended between territorial inequalities and hopes for change. But there can be no nation without memory, unity without acknowledgment of its mistakes.
