Giovanni Corrao

Antonino Giovanni Francesco Currau (17 November 1822 – 3 August 1863), better known as Giovanni Corrao, was an Italian military officer and revolutionary.

In 1848 he abandoned his job to take part in the Sicilian revolution, during which he distinguished himself for his courage and skill; with the return of the Bourbons, after several years of imprisonment, he was forced to leave Sicily and wander around Europe; eager to have southern Italy annexed by the Savoys, he returned to Sicily in 1860 with his fellow citizen Rosolino Pilo, preparing the ground for Garibaldi's invasion. Appointed general by Garibaldi, following the meeting at Teano he joined the regular army, only to leave it in 1862 to follow Garibaldi again in the expedition against Rome, a enterprise that ended with the Battle of Aspromonte. Returning to Sicily, after being arrested several times by the local authorities for alleged involvement in certain criminal actions, he was mysteriously murdered in 1863 on the outskirts of Palermo.

A loyal follower of Garibaldi, Corrao represented a point of reference for the Sicilian radicalism milieu and managed to channel the discontent of various factions on the island, from Bourbons to clerics, into his movement until the day of his death, after which his friend Giuseppe Badia would take his place.

Biography

From caulker to artillery captain (1822–1855)

Giovanni Corrao was born in Palermo, the son of Giuseppe and Anna Maria Argento. Following in his father's footsteps, in his youth he worked as a caulker at the Port of Palermo. On 11 October 1842, he married Francesca Agnello; "uneducated, but bold and resolute", his life changed radically in 1848: Having always been opposed to the Bourbons, he was among the protagonists of the Sicilian revolution of that year, distinguishing himself for his exploits first in Palermo, then in Catania and Messina, where he "proved himself capable of building and repairing weapons, and also of using them with courage in combat." In the Messina battle, one of the actions that made him famous, carried out together with Bartolomeo Loreto and other revolutionaries, was the recovery under enemy fire of seventeen cannons of the Bourbon army, which had been buried under the rubble of the Arsenal wall.

The skills he showed on the battlefield earned him the rank and commission of Captain of Artillery, awarded to him on 23 September of that year by the House of Commons. When the fighting between the two sides resumed in April 1849, he was among the most determined in the extreme fight against the enemy, and with his troops he attempted to resist the army led by Filangeri to the last, from 7 to 9 May. As we learn from Giustino Fortunato's testimony, Corrao took part in the delegation that declared surrender to the Bourbon army when there was no longer any chance of success.

King Ferdinand II, who had already bombarded the city of Messina in September 1848, retook the whole of Sicily in May 1849 and Corrao was forced to take refuge in Malta; nevertheless he returned to his home town at the end of June, hoping for a forthcoming popular uprising; discovered by the authorities, he was arrested and through a police order was relegated to the island of Ustica, where he remained for three years. In May 1852, noticing a small boat left unattended by some young men, he attempted to escape with other relegated prisoners, but was caught and brought back to the island; this escape attempt, however, prompted the Sicilian authorities to transfer him to the citadel of Messina in August 1852, where he had Raffaele Villari as a fellow prisoner. After being transferred to the Grand Prisons in Palermo between May and August 1855, Corrao was released on condition that he left the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.

Exile and correspondence with Pilo (1855–1860)

Abandoning Sicily, Corrao disembarked in Marseilles in September 1855, from where he left for Genoa; he settled in the Ligurian city until the end of 1857, and then moved to Turin; however, his political extremism, combined with the fact that he practised the profession of doctor illegally, led the Savoy government to expel him; Corrao tried in every way to escape expulsion, which finally took place on 18 April 1858, the day on which he was forced to leave the Kingdom of Sardinia together with his friend Giuseppe Badia.

Beginning to harbour "a tremendous resentment against the Piedmontese government and Napoleon III", he was therefore forced to seek asylum in Malta, then Alexandria and then back to Malta in January 1859; meanwhile, during this period, he began the correspondence that would firmly bind him to his fellow-citizen Rosolino Pilo; after Felice Orsini's failed attempt on 14 January 1858, the two also began planning an assassination attempt on Napoleon III, which, however, was never carried out.

Corrao, however, while waiting to sell a piece of land he owned in Sicily, did not have enough money to join Pilo in England; Pilo provided him with money and the cavaliere Palermo, a man who was residing in Malta at the time, provided his passport, so that on 26 February Corrao was able to start his journey to England under a false name. The assassination attempt on Napoleon III was not carried out by the two Sicilians for "unspecified reasons"; Falzone speculates that "only the return to Italy, and the realisation of the possibility of other initiatives that had the revolution in Sicily as a programme, could induce Corrao to abandon the assassination project". In fact, Corrao moved to Modena in August to join Ignazio Ribotti's brigade, but was not enlisted. Deeply disappointed by this last experience and by the modest revolutionary spirit he encountered in central Italy, he decided to plan with a few trusted comrades a return to Sicily, from where the revolution was to start.

Forerunner of the Expedition of the Thousand (March–May 1860)

In March 1860, he and Pilo organised an expedition to Sicily that had Crispi's approval and Garibaldi's promise to intervene if successful. The two set off from Genoa aboard the Viareggini tartane Madonna del Soccorso captained by Raffaello Motto.

On the night between 9 and 10 April 1860, the two landed in Messina and went to Palermo, organising a thousand volunteers who clashed with the Bourbon troops at Carini, and awaiting the promised arrival of Giuseppe Garibaldi.

Colonel at Garibaldi's side (May–October 1860)

With the landing on 14 May of the Thousand at Marsala, he received orders from Garibaldi to carry out a diversionary manoeuvre with his volunteers, was attacked on 21 May by Bourbon troops and Pilo fell in combat near San Martino delle Scale, and Corrao withdrew the remaining volunteers to Montelepre. On the 27th, he attacked Palermo from the side opposite that of Garibaldi's troops.

Appointed by Garibaldi as colonel of the southern army on 17 July, he led a regiment in the Battle of Milazzo and fought with Garibaldi's troops for the entire duration of the campaign, and on 1 October was seriously wounded on the Volturno. He was appointed general by Garibaldi himself to replace Giuseppe La Masa in command of the Brigata Sicula on 29 October.

After unification and Aspromonte (1861–1862)

Main article: Battle of Aspromonte

After the unification of Italy, he passed with the rank of colonel in the Royal Army, from which he resigned shortly afterwards in line with his aversion to the government's policy towards Sicily, following Garibaldi to Aspromonte in 1862 with his Sicilian volunteers.

He later returned to Palermo and kept 400 of his volunteers in arms until the amnesty for the Aspromonte events.

Corrao's assassination and its aftermath

On 3 August 1863 — the eve of the anniversary of Aspromonte, — he was assassinated in an ambush on the outskirts of Palermo. He was involved in the anti-Savoy reaction of those days. The crime has always gone unpunished, but in the acts of investigation, the term mafia was used for the first time in the history of the Kingdom of Italy. On the other hand, it is widely believed that it was one of the first state crimes, based on information given to Carlo Trasselli, Corrao's loyal friend, by an elderly woman who lived a few metres from the place where Giovanni Corrao was killed. According to Trasselli, the woman told him that two carabinieri had been lurking in the area for the past few days, who had dressed as hunters on the day Corrao was killed, but that she had nevertheless managed to recognise them. However, after Trasselli had communicated to the magistracy the information he had recovered and had managed to have a trial opened, the woman changed her residence and denied every detail in front of the judge (which allows us to speculate that it was probably not the Mafia that killed Corrao, with whom he was supposedly on good terms and with whose help he was organising an insurrection against the newly-born Kingdom of Italy).

He is buried in the cloister of the church of San Domenico, in Palermo, after having been exposed for several years in the Capuchin Catacombs.

He was succeeded in the leadership of the republican movement by one of his comrades, Giuseppe Badia, who re-established contacts with the squadre dei picciotti (the peasant bands that had helped Garibaldi in 1860), then allied himself both with socialist organisations and with exponents of the Palermo nobility and the Catholic Church who were aiming for a Bourbon restoration. Although Badia was arrested in 1865, he was freed during the revolt of 1866.

Legacy

Corrao was accused as early as 1862 of being the head of the criminal organisation that was then beginning to be referred to as the maffia. However, Garibaldi's general was definitively branded as a mafioso from 1865, the year in which the prefect of Palermo Filippo Antonio Gualterio wrote a report, the first official document in united Italy to contain the term maffia, in which he denounced the relations that, according to his sources, Corrao and his successor Badia had had with this criminal sect:

It was also known to the undersigned that these relations [between the Garibaldian party and the Maffia] were first maintained by the well-known General Corrao, and then for some time it was known that he, without the Action Party even doubting it, had passed into the service of the Bourbon party. When he died, he was succeeded by a certain Vincenzo [sic] Badia, a wax smith, who had been his first instrument, and it was also known to the writer that he had followed in the footsteps of his turbulent master and had now placed himself at the service of the Bourbons.

Gualterio had been sent to Sicily by Giovanni Lanza, the new Minister of the Interior in the La Marmora government, as part of the complete reorganisation of the island's public security leadership. Born in Orvieto, Guaterio was dedicated "to information practices and the consequent espionage, infiltration, manipulation and diversion operations that they made possible".

The mayor's report, due to its historical importance and the effects it will have on the juxtaposition between certain Garibaldian partisans and the Mafia phenomenon, has been the subject of analysis by many historians, most of whom have identified an obvious political purpose in the document; Francesco Benigno argues that in his report Gualterio "bends the information in his possession to demonstrate the existence of a single red-black conspiracy manoeuvred by the Bourbons', following a procedure 'that knowingly mixes political struggle and criminal repression"; the same interpretation is provided by Paolo Alatri, according to whom the presentation that Gualterio offered of the relations between the exponents of radical democracy and the Bourbons was "very tendentious and inaccurate, [... deformed reality"; Giuseppe Carlo Marino confines himself to observing that the prefect had been "among the first to lucidly perceive the relationship between the Mafia and politics", while Antonino Recupero affirms that there had been "a short circuit between extreme left-wing opposition, Bourbon opposition and common criminality" and consequently "the archive sources are politically "loaded", and do not allow us to distinguish the faces of the members of the gangs that were also forming".

The same line of interpretation is also followed by Salvatore Lupo, according to whom Gualterio's words "uncover the mafia, but by accident, as far as it serves the demonisation of the opposition", and Giovanni Tessitore, who states: "he [Gualterio] resorted to the neologism to conceptually hold together [...] a multiplicity of factors — social malaise, criminal emergency, banditry and political opposition".

The figure of Corrao was for a long time associated with the mafia phenomenon, but when the reliability of Gualterio's report began to be doubted, a historical reappraisal of his figure was also initiated. The first and main author of this slow process was Gaetano Falzone, who in response to the devaluation of the Sicilian contribution to the Risorgimento enterprise, undertook to reappraise and exalt the figures of the Sicilians who played a leading role in the events that led to Italian unification, including that of Corrao:

Falzone fought vigorously in favour of Corrao [...], and although not always supported by Sicilian historians, he managed to have his body transported to San Domenico, Palermo's Pantheon, with a solemn ceremony during which he himself gave the celebratory speech on 21 May 1960.

Following Falzone's many studies, the figure of Corrao gradually detached itself from the Mafia, but never completely; even today, in the many descriptions of the general offered to us in various historical works, his figure often oscillates between the revolutionary and the criminal profile. Napoleone Colajanni defines him as "a man adored in the countryside and in the cities of Palermo, who had something of the Mafia about him, but who was noble and generous"; Orazio Cancila, on the other hand, maintains that the figure of Corrao, and with it the entire democratic-radical wing, was 'firmly connected' with Mafia delinquency, and that at times he "did not disdain to act as a link between it and the Bourbon party"; for Giuseppe Carlo Marino, General Corrao was the one who, more than anyone else, 'constituted the embodiment of the secular-revolutionary spirit of Garibaldianism in perfect and indivisible symbiosis with the mafia-like nature of a large part of Palermo's underclass'; he, Marino continued, could count on "the complicity and friendship of not a few troublemakers' but, despite this, 'was anything but a thug'.

References

Agnello, Luigi (1983). "Corrao, Giovanni." In: Dizionario biografico degli italiani, Vol. 29. Roma: Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana.

Alatri, Paolo (1954). Lotte politiche in Sicilia sotto il governo della Destra (1866–74). Torino: Einaudi.

Barberis, Luigia Laura (1961). "L'emigrazione politica a Genova dall'impresa di Sapri alla II guerra risorgimentale." In: Genova e l'impresa dei Mille, Vol. 1. Roma: Canesi Editore, pp. 293–319.

Benigno, Francesco (2015). La mala setta. Alle origini di mafia e camorra (1859–1878). Torino: Einaudi.

Cancila, Orazio (1988). Palermo. Roma-Bari: Laterza.

Colajanni, Napoleone (1900). Nel regno della mafia, dai Borboni ai Sabaudi. Palermo: Remo Sandron.

Consiglio comunale di Palermo (1898). Memorie della rivoluzione siciliana dell'anno MDCCCXLVIII pubblicate nel cinquantesimo anniversario del XII gennaio di esso anno, Vol. 1. Palermo: Società cooperativa fra gli operai.

Curato, Federico (1985). "Gaetano Falzone," Rassegna storica del Risorgimento, Vol. LXXII, pp. 45–50.

Fentress, James (2000). Rebels and Mafiosi: Death in a Sicilian Landscape. Ithaca, Cornell University Press.

Falzone, Gaetano (1975). "Il «general Corrao» (Con documenti inediti)." In: Archivio storico per la Sicilia, Vol. 1. Palermo: Società siciliana per la storia patria, pp. 169–87.

Giuffrida, Romualdo (1955). "Aspetti e problemi della rivolta palermitana del settembre 1866," Archivio Storico Siciliano, Vol. III, pp. 158–211.

Guardione, Francesco (1907). Il dominio dei Borboni in Sicilia dal 1830 al 1861: in relazione alle vicende nazionali. Con documenti inediti, Vol. 2. Torino: Società Tipografico Editrice Nazionale.

Guardione, Francesco (1917). "La spedizione di Rosalino Pilo nei ricordi di Giovanni Corrao," Rassegna Storica del Risorgimento, Vol. IV, pp. 810–44.

La Masa, Giuseppe (1850). Documenti della rivoluzione siciliana del 1847-49 in rapporto all'Italia, Vol. I. Torino: Tipografia Ferrero e Franco.

Lupo, Salvatore (1996). Storia della mafia. Roma: Donzelli.

Lupo, Salvatore (2011). L'unificazione italiana: Mezzogiorno, rivoluzione, guerra civile. Roma: Donzelli.

Marino, Giuseppe Carlo (2008). Storia della mafia. Roma: Newton Compton.

Monsagrati, Giuseppe (2003). "Gualterio, Filippo Antonio." In: Dizionario biografico degli italiani, Vol. 60. Roma: Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana, pp. 182–86.

Paolucci, Giuseppe (1899). "Rosolino Pilo — Memorie e documenti dal 1857 al 1860", Archivio Storico Siciliano, Vol. XXIV, pp. 210–84.

Recupero, Antonino (1987). "Ceti medi e «homines novi». Alle origini della mafia", Polis, Vol. XXIV, No. 2, pp. 307–28.

Riall, Lucy (2007). Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Ricciardi, Giuseppe (1875). Da Quarto a Caprera. Napoli: Stamperia del Vaglio.

Tessitore, Giovanni (1997). Il nome e la cosa: quando la mafia non si chiamava mafia. Roma: Franco Angeli.