Vittoriano
SERIES: From Rome to the rest of the world. Tales from a past that lives on - Under the aegis of Francesco Benigno, professor of Modern History, Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa
SPEAKER: Marco Meriggi
DATE: 26 October, 6pm
PLACE: Palazzo Venezia, Sala del Refettorio
On 24 June 1857 Carlo Pisacane sailed from Genoa with a group of patriots to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies with the aim of fomenting a popular insurrection that would overthrow the Bourbon regime. But on landing near Sapri a few days later, he was greeted not by the people he had dreamed of making the protagonists of what he called the Italian revolution, but a mass of hostile peasants who attacked him. Like many of the participants in his expedition, Pisacane died a few days later, not yet forty years old. This was the dramatic ending of a life spent entirely on the edge, both by his intense involvement as a libertarian socialist in the Risorgimento and his nonconformist life choices, which made him the supreme interpreter of Risorgimento Romanticism.
