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The Revolt of the Neapolitan Fisherman Tommaso Aniello, known as Masaniello (1622-1647) in Naples by Giuseppe Mazza (Museo della scienza di Milano)
A lu tiempo de chisti scunfuorte
Masaniello è bestuto da muorto.
Dint’’a nicchia ’na capa cu ll’ossa
nce ha lassato ’na coppola rossa.
Chesta coppola dà ’na voce,
quanno ’a famme nun è doce,
quann’’o popolo resta ’ncroce,
quanno pave ’stu tributo
pure ’a tassa ’ncopp’’o tavuto.
A lu tiempo de chisti scunfuorte
Masaniello è bestuto da muorto.
Masaniello s’’o credono muorto… [1]
Gianandrea de Antonellis’ article Fra’ Diavolo vive ancora nello spettacolo “Voci, suoni e canti di Briganti in Terra di Lavoro” (Fra’ Diavolo still lives on in the show “Voices, Sounds and Songs of Brigands in Terra di Lavoro”) is a compelling reflection on the politics of memory. More than a historical survey, it is a corrective act: dismantling persistent distortions surrounding figures such as Masaniello and Fra’ Diavolo, and restoring them to their rightful place in Southern Italy’s cultural consciousness.
De Antonellis begins with a meditation on the necessity of heroes.
“Blessed is the people that has no need of heroes." The pacifist and egalitarian intent of whoever wrote that sentence is beyond doubt, but it can also be read in another sense: blessed is the one who has no need of heroes—or of money, or of food, or of anything else—because he already has them, not because there is no need for them.
A people—any people—needs heroes. That is why we are naturally drawn, from childhood, to the stories of historical or literary heroes: Hector and Achilles, Horatius Cocles and Mucius Scaevola, Attilius Regulus and Pheidippides, Lancelot and Gawain… In the Kingdom of Naples we can list the Great Captain, Ettore Fieramosca, Masaniello of Sorrento, and his Amalfitan namesake, Cardinal Ruffo, the Prince of Canosa…
This sets the frame: a people bereft of heroes is a people deprived of memory. De Antonellis shows how cultural tradition continually seeks to supply such figures, though later generations may distort their meaning.
Particularly striking is the article’s correction of Masaniello’s legacy. Popularized as a revolutionary icon, Masaniello in fact led a revolt that was explicitly anti-revolutionary.
Masaniello—who has (wrongly) become a revolutionary symbol (in reality his revolt was fully anti-revolutionary, because it aimed to restore the previous taxation, the respect for Neapolitan law, and, above all, it burst forth with the cry "Long live the King of Spain! Death to bad government!")—is thus seen as the incarnation of the Volksgeist, the "spirit of the people," ready to rise up in case of abuses by the (mis)rulers of the day…
Here, de Antonellis restores Masaniello as a figure of popular legitimacy rather than revolutionary rupture, reminding us that loyalty and protest were not opposed but intertwined.
If Masaniello has been miscast as a revolutionary, Fra’ Diavolo has suffered the opposite fate: reduced from a colonel and duke into a bandit or comic rogue.
Bust of the hero Fra' Diavolo
sculpted by Raffaele Mollo (2019)
But if, thanks to a deft historiographical falsification that is hard to kill, Masaniello has become a (wrong, I repeat) symbol of the revolutionary spirit, it is far more difficult to turn into a progressive a champion of legitimism like Michele Arcangelo Pezza (1771–1806), a guerrilla leader who became a colonel of the Neapolitan army, created Duke of Cassano by Ferdinand IV, universally known by the nickname Fra’ Diavolo.
Unable to enlist him ideologically, liberal culture diminished him through Auber’s opéra-comique (1830) and later through Hollywood parody, turning a model of fidelity into a theatrical thief. De Antonellis sharply unmasks this falsification, showing Fra’ Diavolo as a hero of incorruptible loyalty who refused French offers of rank and money: “Because when one has sworn, one has sworn!”
The review culminates in Claudio Saltarelli’s theatrical revival, which gives Fra’ Diavolo his true voice. Through Raimondo Rotondi’s performance in the Laborino dialect, [2] the insurgent emerges not as an artifact of the past but as a living exemplar of courage and fidelity.
And so, on 11 November 1806, Colonel Michele Arcangelo Pezza died. And with him, the Duke of Cassano also died. But Fra’ Diavolo did not die. Because Fra’ Diavolo is always reborn, in each of us.
The sabre of Fra’ Diavolo becomes the counterpart to Masaniello’s red cap, a symbol that can rally every stratum of society—soldiers, nobles, clergy, and common people alike—around the perennial cause of resisting oppression.
De Antonellis’ essay, and Saltarelli’s theatrical work, are acts of cultural reclamation. They remind us that heroes must not be abandoned to distortion, whether by ideological misreading or by the trivializing force of entertainment.
The closing exhortation is the article’s most powerful contribution:
Put it in your heads: the story of Fra’ Diavolo is your story. Whoever wants to make you forget it does not wish you well.
By rehabilitating Masaniello and Fra’ Diavolo, de Antonellis does more than narrate history—he defends memory itself. His work is a reminder that cultural truth, once recovered, can still speak with urgency to the present.
~ By Giovanni di Napoli, October 2nd, Feast of the Guardian Angels
* Translations are my own.
Notes
[1] Excerpt from the traditional Neapolitan ballad ‘O cunto ’e Masaniello, preserved in oral tradition and performed by the Nuova Compagnia di Canto Popolare on the album Li sarracini adorano lu sole (EMI, 1974).
[2] The “Laborino dialect” is the local speech of the historical province of Terra di Lavoro (covering parts of northern Campania and southern Lazio), closely related to Neapolitan but marked by distinct regional features.In the time of these hardships
Masaniello is dressed as a dead man.
Inside the niche, a skull with bones
has left a red cap there.
This cap gives a voice,
when hunger is not sweet,
when the people are left on the cross,
when it pays this tribute—
even the tax on the coffin.
In the time of these hardships
Masaniello is dressed as a dead man.
They think Masaniello is dead…
My father, with his older brother and sister, finding joy
in front of their "Charlie Brown Christmas tree"
“What the son wishes to forget, the grandson wishes to remember.”
~ Marcus Lee Hansen
I am a third-generation Duosiciliano (Southern Italian) American. My forebears—hailing from Campania, Sicilia, and Lucania—arrived at Ellis Island around the turn of the twentieth century. God only knows what hardships they endured. My parents and grandparents were mostly tight-lipped about their struggles and would probably bristle at me for airing our “dirty laundry.”
Yet a few stories slipped out, revealing just how poor they were—and how much our lot has changed, though not always in ways that brought greater happiness. My father once told me how, as a boy, he ran home from school, excited to show his mother a ballpoint pen.
“We were poor and didn’t know it,” he would say, “because everyone around us was poor too.” Then, with a sigh, he would add: “We had nothing, but we were happy; today we have everything and we’re miserable.”
He and his brothers would race to snatch up bits of coal falling from passing horse-drawn carts before other neighborhood kids could. In winter, they would wrap heated bricks from the potbelly stove in newspaper and tuck them under the blankets to stay warm.
One memory, though, haunted him his whole life. On his birthday, my grandmother took him to the local ravioleria for lunch. They could only afford three ravioli. His five siblings and my grandfather stayed home—just as he would always stay home on their birthdays. While sitting at the counter, my grandmother asked if she could have one of the ravioli. He refused. She said nothing and quietly watched him eat.
That moment's shame never left him. In many ways, he spent the rest of his life trying to make up for it—being generous almost to a fault, determined that no one under his care would go without. My grandparents lived with us until they passed, their presence a daily reminder of sacrifice and love.
Whenever I think of these stories, I feel grateful to have had such a loving family who passed down their traditions, even when they had so little. Nothing was ever promised to them—or to me. Maybe that’s why I find it hard to understand the sense of entitlement in many young people today.
It was less than seventy years ago. And judging by the way the economy is heading, and the decline of community, we will face hard times again—but this time without the close-knit families and strong communities that once helped people through hardship. In a low-trust society, dependent on an increasingly inept, corrupt, and overreaching nanny-state, survival may not be so easy.
The stories my father carried—and the silence kept by my grandparents—are not just fragments of the past. They serve as reminders that strength doesn't come from comfort, but from sacrifice. When tough times return, as they surely will, then perhaps what the son wanted to forget is exactly what the grandson needs to remember: that surviving is only possible when families and communities stand together in love, memory, and faith.
~ Giovanni di Napoli, October 1st, Feast of St. Remigius
October 1st is the Feast of St. Remigius, or Rémi, Bishop and Confessor. Bishop of Reims for over seventy years, he is best remembered as the “Apostle of the Franks.” Born around 437 in northern Gaul to a noble Gallo-Roman family, he was noted for his learning and piety from an early age. At just twenty-two years old, he was elected Bishop of Reims.
St. Remigius Baptizes Clovis I, by the
Master of Saint Gilles, C. 1500.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
His most enduring legacy is his role in the conversion of King Clovis I, the pagan ruler of the Franks. After Clovis’s victory at the Battle of Tolbiac in 496, and under the influence of his Christian wife, St. Clotilde, the king sought baptism. On Christmas Day of that year, Remigius baptized Clovis along with three thousand of his warriors in Reims. This moment is considered the symbolic beginning of Catholic France, earning the nation its title as the “Eldest Daughter of the Church.”
Tradition holds that during the baptism, a holy vial of oil—known as the Sainte Ampoule—was miraculously brought by the dove of the Holy Spirit, and it became the sacred chrism used in the coronation of French kings for centuries.
St. Remigius shepherded his flock with wisdom and zeal, strengthening the Church in Gaul, promoting discipline among the clergy, and fostering the spread of Christianity among the Franks. He died on January 13, 533, at the age of ninety-five. His relics are enshrined at the Basilica of Saint-Remi in Reims. St. Remigius, ora pro nobis.
In celebration of his feast, we offer this prayer:
Prayer to St. Remigius
Grant, we beseech Thee, almighty God, that the solemn feast of blessed Remigius, Thy Confessor and Bishop, may both increase our devotion and advance our salvation. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, Thy Son, Who liveth and reigneth with Thee in the unity of the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end. Amen.
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| (L-R) Guardian Angel, San Placido, and San Giuda |
