The Sicilian Vespers

In 1266, the French King Charles I took hegemony over Sicily.  By then, the island of my ancestors had been overrun by just about any band of marauders with steel blades and sharpening stones: The Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Vandals, Byzantines, Saracens, Normans, you name it.

How Charlie came to subjugate the Sicilians is a tale in itself.  It all began when the Hohenstaufens, who ruled Germany, started stomping around in the north of the Italian boot.   Between the Germans up north and southern Italy (all of which was called Sicily at the time) lay the Papal States.  Pope Innocent (sic) IV was seriously displeased with the Hohenstaufen Emperor Frederick II, and Il Papa said so in 1245 by declaring Freddy deposed.   Frederick failed to step aside on the Pope’s say so, but a higher authority intervened in 1250, and Frederick died.  The Pope might have rejoiced at that, but as it happened he was nearly as ticked off with Conrad, who succeeded when his daddy Big Freddy died.  You might think the Almighty was taking sides, because Conrad only lived another four years.  When Conrad kicked the bucket, turmoil ensued.

Lurking in the background the whole while was Manfred, a son old Frederick fathered without benefit of marriage.  While the political scene was boiling in Germany, Manfred saw his main chance and seized control of the Kingdom of Sicily.

By then, new Popes had taken over, first Urban IV and then Clement IV, neither of whom liked Manfred.  They cast around for help getting rid of the bastard.  The papacy eventually installed Charles of Anjou.

Charlie was a happy guy.  He had his sights set on becoming the Emperor of Byzantium, and what better geography could he have as a jumping off point than Sicily.

 But the Sicilian noblemen were peeved when Charles left them out of the goodies he had to distribute.  They got no lucrative foreign posts.  Instead he taxed them and all the Sicilian people to the hilt to bankroll his adventures in Byzantium and elsewhere.  The local population tagged him for what he was, a foreign tyrant who was bleeding them dry.  Charles should have known better than to piss off an island full of people who had already endured centuries of ever escalating oppression.

Charles’s rival, Michael VIII Palaeologus—the current Byzantine Emperor—spotted unrest among the Sicilians and found an opening.  He sent his agents provocateurs into the mix.  Insurrection was their aim.

The Sicilians got out their own whetstones.  The Sicilian Vespers ensued.

 At sunset on the eve of Easter Monday 1282, at the Church of the Holy Spirit, just outside Palermo, they began to slit throats and otherwise do away with the French interlopers and their supporters.  Over the next six weeks, they massacred thousands of French inhabitants.

Eventually, the Pope tried to lend the French a hand, but all attempts to retake the island were repulsed.

Michael VII in his autobiography tried to claim he was God’s instrument in releasing the Sicilian people from tyranny.  But most historians conclude that the Sicilian people freed themselves.

The very best thing to come out of all this, to my way of thinking, is Giuseppe Verdi’s opera I Vespri Siciliani, of which I leave you a taste here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=529zk5-32qM

Annamaria Alfieri

Crime Writer in Italy:Week Two

Assisi is simply splendid!

Through the ages, all of its inhabitants have left their mark on it.  The site it occupies speaks of the Etruscans who built their stronghold towns on the tops of the steep thumbs of land that stick up high over the surrounding area, giving them a vantage point to warn them of an approaching enemy.

The Romans came next and built their town on the Etruscan site.  The Roman remains are visible in the temple of Minerva in the Piazza del Commune.  As with many other Roman temples all over Italy, this one was preserved by incorporating it into a Christian church.

Piazza del Commune

Closer look at the Temple of Minerva

But the Assisi one sees today is a medieval city.  It even lives within its old walls.  Its aspect makes sense since it owes its modern fame to St. Francis who was born there in 1182.  The son of a well-to-do draper, he literally gave up his goods to feed the poor.  His love of all living things pervaded the work of his followers and today makes him the patron saint of and his birthplace a mecca for environmentalists and peace movements.

The artists who came shortly after his death to build the basilica in his honor based their work on his reverence for nature, and in doing so they transformed western art.  The Renaissance reached its peak in Florence, but its seeds were first planted here.

The Rocca Maggiore, Assisi's medieval castle

Typical medieval hill street

The view from our room.

The Basilica of San Francesco

The cloister of the monastery attached to the basilica

The nave of the upper basilica

The upper basilica, looking toward the entrance

The Church of Santa Chiara

Detail of the facade of Santa Chiara, here because I love lions

Interior of Santa Chiara

Did I say that one eats extremely well in Assisi's restaurants and trattorias?  And its narrow streets are lined with marvelous shops with specialize in local sausages, salamis, and every form of the delicious black truffles of Umbria.  One sweet shop displays huge masses of chocolate that look like mortadella or gigantic Perugina kisses, but my favorite was this one--the Meteorite of the Mayans.  I assume the world did not end on 12-21-12 because the meteorite that was to have destroyed the planet was made of chocolate.  I bought a piece to take home.  Would it be too much to say that the Meteorite of the Mayans is to die for?

We arrived at home to see the full moon shining over the
Palazzo dell Signoria.  Here's the terrace view of it.

By the time you see this, I will have left for Rome.  Tuesday begins a three day sojourn there, only an hour and a half from Florence by fast train.  Stay tuned.

The Other Side of My Story

Today I want you to meet Carlo Pisacane, Duke of San Giovanni, Italian patriot, one of the first socialist thinkers and writers, and my ancestor.

Frequent readers of this blog have heard me go on rhapsodically about my Sicilian heritage and brag that, while I am not the coal miner’s daughter, I am the coal miner’s granddaughter. You have also met my grandfather on my mother’s side—Gennaro Pisacane, grower of a fig tree in New Jersey and guardian angel of my early childhood. Shortly before he died, he told me that there was a statue of his grandfather in Rome. I pictured something that looked like Caesar in a toga.

Carlo, who was either Gennaro’s grandfather or great-grandfather, was something akin to an Italian Patrick Henry, a patriot famous within the country, but unknown outside of it. A poem about him, La Spigolatrice di Sapri by Luigi Mercantini was translated as The Gleaner of Sapri by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The poem is written as a first person account by a woman who saw a boat carrying revolutionaries coming to free her people.

Carlo Pisacane was born in Naples of an impoverished noble family, words that equally apply to Gennaro. Carlo attended The Nunziatella military academy and served in the Neapolitan army. He became imbued with the ideas and ideals of Giuseppe Mazzini and devoted the rest of his short life to bringing to a unified Italy a liberal, classless, anti-authoritarian society with freedom and justice for all.

After a brief stay in England and France, where he served in the French army in Algeria, he returned to Italy to take part in the 1848 revolution and the ephemeral Roman Republic. Mazzini proposed an expedition aimed at overthrowing the Bourbon monarchy in the Kingdom of Naples. Pisacane, a son of that part of the peninsula, volunteered to lead the expedition. Their thought was that even a small invading force would inspire an insurrection among the oppressed and impoverished underclass. On the 25^th of June 1857, the Cagliari sailed from Genoa carrying Pisacane and twenty-two other, like-minded revolutionaries. En route to the south, they stopped at the island of Ponza the Bay of Naples and freed 300 political prisoners who joined them.

Unlike Garibaldi who came a few years later, Pisacane was more of writer and thinker than a military leader. He and his men landed at Sapri on the Bay of Policastro, 120 miles south of Naples. The uprising he had hoped for did not take place. In the Cilento hills near the town of Padula, they were overwhelmed. Some say Carlo was stabbed by locals who mistook him for a gypsy out to steal their food. Others say that, in the face of being taken by the Bourbon Militia, he turned his pistol on himself. He was not quite 39 years old.

He had by then published three books, all about freedom and the greater social good. My favorite quote from him: “Ideas result from deeds, not the latter from the former, and the people will not be free when they are educated, but educated when they are free.”

Here are the last lines of the poem as translated by Longfellow:

"They were three hundred and they would not fly,
They seemed three thousand, and they wished to die,
But wished to die with weapons in their hand....
... they were three hundred, they were young and strong,

And they are dead!"

“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.” Volume V, book 1 of Les Miserables by Victor Hugo (published in 1862):

Annamaria Alfieri