Prisoners and the Italian Risorgimento

The suffering prisoner occupied a central place in Risorgimento Italy’s political culture, both during the formative age of Romanticism and during the period that followed the failed revolutions of 1848-49.  On stage, in historical novels and paintings, and in contemporary memoirs, Italian prisoners drew constant attention to the injustice they and their compatriots experienced at the hands of oppressive rulers.  The popularity of Silvio Pellico’s 1832 memoir, My Prisons, set off a publishing boom – and a commitment to document prison conditions – that lasted for several decades.  The result is an extraordinarily large and diverse corpus of Italian prison writings and documents from the middle decades of the nineteenth century. 

            Before the unification of Italy in 1859-60, Italian political prisoners and liberal public opinion in Europe could rally around the primary issue of oppression at the hands of various reactionary governments.  William Gladstone’s blistering exposé of prison conditions in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in 1851 made the “dungeons” of Naples an international cause célèbre; further evidence of cruelty and suffering in Austrian and papal prisons enabled exiled Italian nationalists and European liberals to contrast the antiquated and barbaric practices of certain states (in Italy and the world) with the new, Western European and American model of modernizing and humane prison reforms.   

            After Italian unification, the more complex reality of prison conditions in Risorgimento Italy slowly came to light.  The diversity of the prison population – not just the distinction between “political prisoners” and “common criminals”, but also the differences within these groups – punctured the image of uniform oppression and shared suffering.  In a variety of publications, political prisoners acknowledged the existence of divisions and rivalries, as the so-called ‘poetry’ of the heroic Risorgimento years gave way to the ‘prose’ of life in united Italy.