#brigands

Daniel ‘Dany’ Henrotin — Super Tintin Brigands (1987) Source

A pair of brigands

"WORTH ONE BRIGAND

The Sacchetiello gang, which operated in Calabria around 1870, is not among the most famous. It is made up of only three men, each with his woman, one of whom is Rosa Reginella (in the photo). Reginella, however, is worth as much as a man because she knows how to use weapons with great ease and participates in the attacks. Three months after her arrest she gave birth to a son in the prisons of Catanzaro."

In Italian the term brigante referred not only to bandits in the pure sense of the word but also included those with social and political motivations.

Most notably, the word brigand has been employed to describe individuals and groups in Southern Italy, who combatted with troops of the new Kingdom of Italy during the Italian unification process, which was, in reality, an annexation by the House of Savoy. Not just isolated skirmishes, the revolt took on the form of a Southern Italian movement, particularly between 1861 and 1865, and is called the Grande Brigantaggio or the Great Brigandage.

History books, as we know, are written by the victors, so rest assured, most “evidence” of criminal activity in the archives will be detailed and well documented, at least from the official point of view. In Southern Italy, the vast majority of the accused never had an opportunity of defending themselves. This is not to say that every brigand was a saint; however, in the years following unification, there was a cause, and much of the activity could be characterized as falling somewhere between an uprising against an oppressive takeover and basic survival. Brigands included humble people and former soldiers. They were encouraged and aided by the Bourbons in exile as well as the Catholic Church.

The brigand business provided equal opportunity for women in a time when opportunities were non-existent. Female brigands, called brigantesse, were important figures who contributed substantially to the brigand story in Italy.

It's also important to to emphasize that the brigante and the mafioso are two different individuals entirely. Their association is a gross misconception. For southerners, the brigand is a folk hero, a Robin Hood figure in defense of his people. They were popular, locally and all the way up to an international level, with a distribution of their images on souvenir cards of photos taken at their capture, both dead and alive, as propaganda against them.