He tells a good deal about the brigandage that was then rife here, and the atrocities which the repression of this pest entailed. Soon after his arrival, for instance, four hundred soldiers were sent to a village where the chiefs of the brigand “insurrection” were supposed to be sheltered. The soldiers, he says, “poured into the streets like a torrent in flood, and there began a horrible massacre, rendered inevitable by the obstinacy of the insurgents, who fired from all the houses. This unhappy village was sacked and burnt, suffering all the horrors inseparable from a capture by assault.” Two hundred dead were found in the streets. But the brigand chiefs, the sole pretext of this bloodshed, managed to escape. Perhaps they were not within fifty miles of the place.
Be that as it may, they were captured later on by their own compatriots, after the French had waited a month at Longobucco. Their heads were brought in, still bleeding, and “l’identité ayant été suffisamment constatée, la mort des principaux acteurs a terminé cette sanglante tragédie, et nous sommes sortis de ces catacombes apénnines pour revoir le plus brillant soleil.”
Wonderful tales are still told of the brigands in these forests. They will show you notches on the trees, cut by such and such a brigand for some particular purpose of communication with his friends; buried treasure has been found, and even nowadays shepherds sometimes discover rude shelters of bark and tree trunks built by them in the thickest part of the woods. There are legends, too, of caverns wherein they hived their booty—caverns with cleverly concealed entrances—caverns which (many of them, at least) I regard as a pure invention modelled after the authentic brigand caves of Salerno and Abruzzi, where the limestone rock is of the kind to produce them. Bourbonism fostered the brood, and there was a fierce recrudescence in the troubled sixties. They lived in bands, _squadrigli,_ burning and plundering with impunity. Whoever refused to comply with their demands for food or money was sure to repent of it. All this is over, for the time being; the brigands are extirpated, to the intense relief of the country people, who were entirely at their mercy, and whose boast it is that their district is now as safe as the streets of Naples. Qualified praise, this. . . .[1]