appease him with their cudgels. What is more, the camorristi were not content to send a deputy to Parliament, and then just watch over his behaviour from a distance. They kept a beady eye on what he did, and had his speeches read aloud to them—since they could not read themselves. If they were not happy with what they heard, they would greet their Member of Parliament on his return from Turin with a bestial chorus of whistling and shouting that would burst out suddenly under the windows of his house.
Clearly the Honoured Society had learned an important lesson from everything that had happened during the crisis of the Bourbon regime and the foundation of a united Italy: a lesson in wedding its own opportunism to the opportunism of the more unscrupulous politicians.
Where once the camorra had lurked, cockroach-like, in the seamiest corners of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, now it had begun to climb up through the cracks in the social structure and infest the representative institutions of the Kingdom of Italy. At the end of all the intrigues of Italian Unification, the camorra was no longer just a problem that lay where the state could not reach: it was a problem within the state itself.
In 1864, Marc Monnier, who had done so much to explain the camorra to readers across Italy, was awarded honorary citizenship following a recommendation by a friend and patriotic hero, Gennaro Sambiase Sanseverino, Duke of San Donato. San Donato had known prison and exile during the 1850s. He became a colonel in the National Guard under Liborio Romano in 1860. After the plebiscite, during Silvio Spaventa’s campaign against the camorra, San Donato was given charge of the city’s theatres; in the course of his duties, a camorrista stabbed him in the back outside the Teatro San Carlo. We do not know why the camorra tried to kill San Donato, but we can guess, because we have met the Duke already: he was the ‘Neapolitan gentleman’ and patriotic conspirator who told Monnier about his secret meeting with the camorra bosses in the 1850s. He was one of the minds behind the patriots’ deal with the Honoured Society. San Donato would go on to be mayor of Naples from 1876 to 1878, and was akey figure in the city’s sleazy machine politics until the end of the century. The camorra was part of his patronage network. San Donato became what the camorra’s redeemer, Liborio Romano, might have become had he not died in 1867.
Marc Monnier had passed through the intrigues of the 1850s and early 1860s with the serenity of an inert particle in a raging chemical reaction. After receiving his honorary citizenship there was little left for him to write about in Italy, so he sold the Hôtel de Genève and moved his young family to Switzerland. He could now finally realise his ambition to be a Genevan author rather than a Neapolitan hotelier. He went on to write a great deal more journalism (for money) and tens of plays (for literary immortality). None of his works has enjoyed anything like the lasting success of his book on the camorra.
Italy was governed between 1860 and 1876 by a loose coalition known as the Right. The Right’s leaders were typically landowning, conservative free-marketeers; they favoured rigour in finance and in the application of the law; they admired Britain and believed that the vote was not a right for all but a responsibility that came in a package with property ownership. (Accordingly, until 1882, only around 2 per cent of the Italian population was entitled to vote.)
The men of the Right were also predominantly from the north. The problem they faced in the south throughout their time in power was that there were all too few southerners like Silvio Spaventa. Too few men, in other words, who shared the Right’s underlying values.
The Right’s fight against the Neapolitan camorra did not end with Spaventa’s undignified exit from the city in the summer of 1861. There were more big roundups of camorristi in 1862. Late in
Clearly the Honoured Society had learned an important lesson from everything that had happened during the crisis of the Bourbon regime and the foundation of a united Italy: a lesson in wedding its own opportunism to the opportunism of the more unscrupulous politicians.
Where once the camorra had lurked, cockroach-like, in the seamiest corners of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, now it had begun to climb up through the cracks in the social structure and infest the representative institutions of the Kingdom of Italy. At the end of all the intrigues of Italian Unification, the camorra was no longer just a problem that lay where the state could not reach: it was a problem within the state itself.
In 1864, Marc Monnier, who had done so much to explain the camorra to readers across Italy, was awarded honorary citizenship following a recommendation by a friend and patriotic hero, Gennaro Sambiase Sanseverino, Duke of San Donato. San Donato had known prison and exile during the 1850s. He became a colonel in the National Guard under Liborio Romano in 1860. After the plebiscite, during Silvio Spaventa’s campaign against the camorra, San Donato was given charge of the city’s theatres; in the course of his duties, a camorrista stabbed him in the back outside the Teatro San Carlo. We do not know why the camorra tried to kill San Donato, but we can guess, because we have met the Duke already: he was the ‘Neapolitan gentleman’ and patriotic conspirator who told Monnier about his secret meeting with the camorra bosses in the 1850s. He was one of the minds behind the patriots’ deal with the Honoured Society. San Donato would go on to be mayor of Naples from 1876 to 1878, and was akey figure in the city’s sleazy machine politics until the end of the century. The camorra was part of his patronage network. San Donato became what the camorra’s redeemer, Liborio Romano, might have become had he not died in 1867.
Marc Monnier had passed through the intrigues of the 1850s and early 1860s with the serenity of an inert particle in a raging chemical reaction. After receiving his honorary citizenship there was little left for him to write about in Italy, so he sold the Hôtel de Genève and moved his young family to Switzerland. He could now finally realise his ambition to be a Genevan author rather than a Neapolitan hotelier. He went on to write a great deal more journalism (for money) and tens of plays (for literary immortality). None of his works has enjoyed anything like the lasting success of his book on the camorra.
Italy was governed between 1860 and 1876 by a loose coalition known as the Right. The Right’s leaders were typically landowning, conservative free-marketeers; they favoured rigour in finance and in the application of the law; they admired Britain and believed that the vote was not a right for all but a responsibility that came in a package with property ownership. (Accordingly, until 1882, only around 2 per cent of the Italian population was entitled to vote.)
The men of the Right were also predominantly from the north. The problem they faced in the south throughout their time in power was that there were all too few southerners like Silvio Spaventa. Too few men, in other words, who shared the Right’s underlying values.
The Right’s fight against the Neapolitan camorra did not end with Spaventa’s undignified exit from the city in the summer of 1861. There were more big roundups of camorristi in 1862. Late in
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