LA STRAGE DIMENTICATA / THE FORGOTTEN MASSACRE

One hundred and fourteen names that do not appear on any tombstone in Risorgimento are listed at the end of this book, one hundred and fourteen who fell in the 1848 uprising in Sicily. “Servants of punishment”- as the convicts were called in the bureaucratic papers of the time-killed by the Bourbon police not for any particular fault except, perhaps, that they associated with the insurgents. The authorities confused and concealed their fate, and no historian has ever dealt with them. The murderers and silent accomplices made their careers, first under the Bourbons and then in united Italy. The Forgotten Massacre draws those names from oblivion, traces the killers, reconstructs the motives. It reminds us, once again, how history that seeks the acrid, tragic and humble truth is more reliable than that of the tombstones.