stabbers’ conspiracy, although the balance of evidence currently suggests that he was not. What is certain is that the conspiracy came from within the institutions. Either it was dreamed up by interests in Palermo as a way of convincing the national government to put more power in their hands; or the national government was using terror tactics to try to create panic, accuse the opposition of the crimes, and generate the climate for a clampdown. Later in Italian history this move would be called the ‘strategy of tension’.
The year after the first stabbings, another episode cast further suspicion over the authorities. The political climate at the time—late in 1863—was fiery even by the standards of post-unification Sicily because a brutal campaign was being conducted to round up the estimated 26,000 deserters and draft dodgers at large in the island. In late October an opposition journalist went to follow up a story about a young man who was being held against his will in the military hospital in Palermo. The journalist found workman Antonio Cappello bedridden, with more than 150 small circular burns on his body. Doctors claimed that the burns were part of Cappello’s treatment, and their highly implausible theory was later backed up by a judicial inquiry.
The truth was that Cappello had entered the hospital a well man. Three military doctors from northern Italy had starved, beaten, and tortured him by placing red-hot metal buttons on his back. Their aim was to get him to confess that he was a deserter.
In the end, Cappello managed to convince the doctors that he had been a deaf-mute since birth and was not faking the condition to avoid conscription. Soon after he was released on 1 January 1864, photos of his tortured body were circulating in the streets of Palermo with a caption written by the journalist, accusing the government of being barbarians. Within three weeks, on the prompting of the Minister of War, the prison doctor was awarded the Cross of Saints Maurice and Lazarus by the King. At the end of March it was announced that the torturers would face no charges.
For a decade and a half after the unification of Italy, the authorities repeatedly lurched towards a blindly repressive response to the unruly island, only to stagger back towards decent principles that they were unable to uphold, or to sink into complicity with shady local enforcers. This toing and froing helped them pull off an extraordinary feat of political image-making: the Italian state managed to look brutal, naive, hypocritical, incompetent, and sinister all at the same time.
It is hard not to have some sympathy for the government’s plight as it faced a number of huge tasks: building a new state virtually from scratch while also dealing with a civil war on the southern Italian mainland, crippling debt, the prospect of an attack by Austria, and a population of which over 95 per cent spoke a variety of dialects and languages other than Italian. To a government so starved of credibility, the notion that there might be a devilish secret conspiracy against it was manna. So it was that a government conspiracy theorist gave the world the first written use of the term ‘mafia’.
On 25 April 1865, two years after the torture of Antonio Cappello, the recently appointed prefect of Palermo, the Marquis Filippo Antonio Gualterio, sent an alarming secret report to his boss, the Minister of the Interior. Prefects like Gualterio were key officers of Italy’s new administrative system; they were the eyes and ears of the government in the cities, with responsibility for monitoring opposition and supervising the maintenance of law and order. In his report, Gualterio spoke of ‘a serious and long-standing lack of understanding between the Country and the Authorities’. This breakdown resulted in a situation that enabled ‘the so-called Maffia or criminal association to grow more daring’. During the periodic revolutions in mid-nineteenth-century
The year after the first stabbings, another episode cast further suspicion over the authorities. The political climate at the time—late in 1863—was fiery even by the standards of post-unification Sicily because a brutal campaign was being conducted to round up the estimated 26,000 deserters and draft dodgers at large in the island. In late October an opposition journalist went to follow up a story about a young man who was being held against his will in the military hospital in Palermo. The journalist found workman Antonio Cappello bedridden, with more than 150 small circular burns on his body. Doctors claimed that the burns were part of Cappello’s treatment, and their highly implausible theory was later backed up by a judicial inquiry.
The truth was that Cappello had entered the hospital a well man. Three military doctors from northern Italy had starved, beaten, and tortured him by placing red-hot metal buttons on his back. Their aim was to get him to confess that he was a deserter.
In the end, Cappello managed to convince the doctors that he had been a deaf-mute since birth and was not faking the condition to avoid conscription. Soon after he was released on 1 January 1864, photos of his tortured body were circulating in the streets of Palermo with a caption written by the journalist, accusing the government of being barbarians. Within three weeks, on the prompting of the Minister of War, the prison doctor was awarded the Cross of Saints Maurice and Lazarus by the King. At the end of March it was announced that the torturers would face no charges.
For a decade and a half after the unification of Italy, the authorities repeatedly lurched towards a blindly repressive response to the unruly island, only to stagger back towards decent principles that they were unable to uphold, or to sink into complicity with shady local enforcers. This toing and froing helped them pull off an extraordinary feat of political image-making: the Italian state managed to look brutal, naive, hypocritical, incompetent, and sinister all at the same time.
It is hard not to have some sympathy for the government’s plight as it faced a number of huge tasks: building a new state virtually from scratch while also dealing with a civil war on the southern Italian mainland, crippling debt, the prospect of an attack by Austria, and a population of which over 95 per cent spoke a variety of dialects and languages other than Italian. To a government so starved of credibility, the notion that there might be a devilish secret conspiracy against it was manna. So it was that a government conspiracy theorist gave the world the first written use of the term ‘mafia’.
On 25 April 1865, two years after the torture of Antonio Cappello, the recently appointed prefect of Palermo, the Marquis Filippo Antonio Gualterio, sent an alarming secret report to his boss, the Minister of the Interior. Prefects like Gualterio were key officers of Italy’s new administrative system; they were the eyes and ears of the government in the cities, with responsibility for monitoring opposition and supervising the maintenance of law and order. In his report, Gualterio spoke of ‘a serious and long-standing lack of understanding between the Country and the Authorities’. This breakdown resulted in a situation that enabled ‘the so-called Maffia or criminal association to grow more daring’. During the periodic revolutions in mid-nineteenth-century
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