«Quando il tempo avrà scordato le presenti ingiustizie». le carceri borboniche nelle ‘Memorie’ di Sigismondo Castromediano

Abstract

In 1848, Sigismondo Castromediano was accused of ploting against the Bourbon monarchy and was arrested, because of having protested in defense of the constitutional freedoms threatened by King Ferdinand ii. When he was incarcerated, he decided to give written testimony of the experiences lived during his imprisonment and of the physical and moral pains that happened to him and his companions. Therefore he wrote Prisons and political jailes. Memories of Duke Sigismondo Castromediano, a work that falls within the genre of Risorgimento’s memorials and which, after a complex publishing story, was published in two volumes, between 1895 and 1896. The Memories of Castromediano illustrate different aspects of the reality of Nineteenth century South Italy and riveal the political prisoners’ inhuman conditions in the Bourbon jailes of Naples, Procida, Montefusco and Montesarchio, where the Duke was detained for over ten years. They had the purpose of destroying everything in which the patriots believed: they were forced to mingle with criminals including Camorra’s members, deprived of all their possessions, physically tortured and abandoned to bad hygienic conditions that weakened their health till death. Castromediano’s work hands down to posterity a precise and detailed testimony of a dark page of history, not yet sufficiently detailed.