Sigismondo Castromediano’s long life seems to have been taken straight from the pages of one of the many historical novels about the period. After serving time under the Bourbons as a political prisoner, he was elected to the first Italian Parliament. His attitudes while a member of that body toward banditry, the tobacco industry in his native region, and his controversial attempts to eliminate the “decime” or land taxes from which his family had benefitted for centuries are all documented in Giannone and D’Astore’s volume. So too are Castromediano’s efforts on behalf of cultural institutions in his region.
The book’s essays include a thorough survey by Ermanno Paccagnini of Risorgimento memoirs, especially those by Luigi Settembrini and Silvio Pellico, from whose well-known work Castromediano is at pains to distinguish his own. Giannone then puts Castromediano’s writings into the context of memoirs by specifically southern writers. He also describes how the Duke and other political prisoners, when sent by ship to exile in the United States, were able, thanks to help by Settembrini’s son, to redirect the ship to Ireland, disembark, and make their way back to Italy. D’Astore reviews the circumstances of the decades long composition of the Memorie, providing, among other things, some passages not included in the printed version. His article is followed by an essay by the Turinese scholar Maria Alessandra Marcellan that provides an overview of the political and literary salons in Turin at the time of Castromediano’s residence there following his return to Italy. She pays particular attention to the salon presided over by the Baroness Olimpia Savio, whose daughter, Adele, was to fall in love with Castromediano and whose correspondence with him lasted for more than thirty years.
Salvatore Coppola treats Castromediano’s activities as a member of the first Italian Parliament. His essay provides interesting information about such matters as the pervasive banditry of the period by individuals the Duke considered communist-inspired, though at the same time he notes (p.168) that they were greeted in many villages with “luminarie” or candle-lit welcomes, all as part of what he called the “diffuso malessere sociale” of the era. This essay also details the Duke’s position on the cultivation of tobacco in his native region and touches on the attacks he suffered from his one-time friend and then political enemy, Beniamino Rossi. This subject is developed further in the succeeding article by Emilio Filieri, who discusses the two men’s differing attitudes toward the “decime” or land-taxes prevalent since feudal days in the region and that the Duke wanted to see abolished.
The remaining essays in the book deal with the Duke’s philanthropic activities, in particular his efforts to reform the “educandato” or girls’ school Vittorio Emanuele II, as well as his unselfish activities in favor of the archeological museum at Lecce, his translation into the local dialect of a story by Boccaccio, the current state of the Castromediano family archives, a reconstruction of the Duke’s now mostly dispersed library, and a report on a recently discovered manuscript of the Memorie.
All of the essays are of an erudite nature, written mostly by local scholars and carefully documented with references to archival sources as well as to printed books and articles.
One hopes that the work presented in this and other publications by the Centro Studi will inspire someone to write a thorough and careful biography of this extremely colorful and important protagonist of some of the more dramatic events of the Risorgimento in the south of Italy.
A critical edition of the correspondence between the Duke and Adele Savio would also be welcomed by those interested in this period and by historians of the relations between patrician men and women during the late Romantic period to which Castromediano’s life and writings belong.
[Recensione a Giannone, Antonio L., Fabio D’Astore. Sigismondo Castromediano: il patriota, lo scrittore, il promotore di cultura, a cura di A. L. Giannone e F D’Astore. Galatina, Congedo, 2014, in “Quaderni di Italianistica”, Canadian Society for Italian studies, vol. 37, n. 2, 2016, pp. 251-254]
