Cederno: School Principal Perocchio: “Space is given to the Five Martyrs of Geras in museums”

The letter was sent to the two main museums of the Italian Risorgimento, in order to give the “5 Martyrs of Gerace” a deserved place in their museums’ schedules.

gentlemen directors,

Ten years ago, writer and journalist Aldo Cazullo, recalling the work of Professor Vito Titi, an anthropologist from Calabria, reclaimed the advantage of changing the “dominant” historiography by addressing the book Viva for Italy! , a book published by Mondadori in in October 2010, the need to reserve a prominent place for the Risorgimento south. In particular, to claim the space worthy of the Calabrian vanguard who fought in Calabria for the unification of Italy. Reference is made to the “Five Martyrs of Geras”, who were shot on October 2, 1847 by a platoon of General Nonziant in the splendid city on the Ionian Sea and as a sign of contempt thrown into the “wolf”, a common grave. Meanwhile, the best young men were watching their blood for the ideal of a united, free and independent Italy, the then Bishop of Geracci, Luigi Maria Pirroni, informed the Bourbon authorities that the “horde of wickedness” had been exterminated and made an offer of complicity with the Doi of Bourbon from the pulpit of Norman Cathedral: “Our grief has turned into joy.”

This page of history, properly deepened in the School of Locride, I intended to resume work with the teachers and students of the institute I direct (the Comprehensive Institute “M. Bello.-G. Pedullà-Agnana” in Siderno, a school named after one of the Five Martyrs of Geras Michael Bello) on the occasion of the centenary of the Unknown Soldier. In this circumstance, it was necessary to give the children an overview of the Italian Risorgimento, because the First World War is closing the process of our national unification and the Unknown Soldier is the symbol of the sacrifice of the Italian people offered at the altar of the year. homeland.

From the controversy that arose between teachers and women – the men of culture who support the Locride School, even as retirees – the Friends of the School Museums Association presented “I Care!” Great contribution. – There was a need to make an appeal to two of the main museums of the Italian Risorgimento, so that a deserved place in their museum schedules would be given to “5 Martyrs of Gerace”: Rocco Verduci, Pietro Mazzone, Gaetano Ruffo, Domenico Salvadori and Michele Bello. This is a way, not only of restoring the protagonists of the novel to their rightful place in national history, but of removing the cliché, also fueled by the new anti-historic strands of Bourbon, about Southern and Calabria only the land of the ignorant peasants who welcomed it. The pitchfork of young Italians is inflamed with the spirit of Mazzinian. Calabria and the South, as well as other parts of the country, struggled a lot to understand that enlightened generation of the Italian bourgeoisie who managed to impose a modern and, above all, patriotic vision on our country. But putting in the corner, worse than concealment, those pages written with sacrifice and blood by the best young intellectuals of the time and formed in liberal Naples in the early nineteenth century, does not help to do justice to the memory and reconstruction of its history. Italy as a country.

I am sure that you will want to evaluate an application for placement in museums, under your guidance, the correct broad reference to this glorious page of the Italian Risorgimento written by 5 Martyrs of Gerace.

with a warm intimacy,

Said the director of the comprehensive institute “M. Latif. – J. Pedullà-Agnana “from Siderno

Vito Pericio