At Rionero, the outlaw entered like a dignitary long awaited. His mount was decked with ribbons; about him, the townsfolk pressed to clasp his hand, to embrace him, to welcome him beneath their roofs. Pasquale Fortunato, who lived there and was later to recount the man’s exploits without sparing him censure, watched the spectacle with an astonishment still legible in his verses. The fugitive whom the king’s authorities hunted through the hills enjoyed in broad daylight what many an honest burgher attained only with great hardship: ample repasts, abundant friends, and the certainty of a generous hearth.
His name was Angelo Duca. He was called Angiolillo. Along the stony tracks of the Basilicata, that fond diminutive was enough to unloose a purse-string or unbolt a door—and not infrequently both. It was not yet a name out of a ballad. It was the name of an armed man.
A Gunshot at the Threshold
He was native to San Gregorio Magno, in the highland reaches of Salerno. Born in 1734, if one credits the parish registry cited by Benedetto Croce, he had long sustained himself by common rural toil before turning fugitive. Nothing in his youth had presaged what was to follow; the legends that endowed him from the cradle with the authority of a born commander were set down only after the chieftain had rendered such omens profitable.
At the origin of his breach with the law, differing accounts place a pasture dispute upon the estates of the Duke of Martina. A nephew was said to have grazed beasts upon forbidden ground; an armed bailiff treated the youth roughly; Angelo intervened and discharged his piece. The bailiff’s horse took the ball. As to who struck the first blow and under what precise provocations, traditions part company. What remains certain is this abrupt elevation of a rustic grazing squabble into a contest wherein the prerogative of a great lord stood compromised.
Angelo did not deliver himself up to the courts. The mountains he had known from childhood offered an alternative tribunal. He threw in his lot with the band of Tommaso Preda, soon rising to pre-eminence among them. His career as an outlaw appears to have commenced around 1782 or 1783; it was remarkably brief. Yet renown, which outpaces the swiftest herds, soon invested it with the proportions of a long and sovereign reign.
The troop numbered some twenty men rather than an army. Costantino Rocco brought his seasoned cunning; Giuseppe Russo, known as Peppe, his ferocity; others were recruited from neighboring hamlets. They ranged across a territory whose broken crags, vast distances, and rare post-roads rendered regular surveillance nearly impossible. For the soldiers dispatched in their wake, it was not enough to discover where the brigands had slept; one had yet to arrive before some watchful peasant sent word ahead.
The Courtesy of the Carbine
Angiolillo possessed the art of demanding money with the forms of civil address. His ransom missives spared him, on occasion, the labor of laying an ambush; a recognized signature did the work of a sentry posted at the crossroads. Fortunato himself received a requisition for four hundred ducats. He found means to avoid payment, and the bandit’s future chronicler thus obtained, at modest cost, an occasion to form his own estimate of the man’s generosity.
For this silver assumed different meanings as it passed from hand to hand. Walled out of a proprietor’s coffer, it sustained the troop; scattered among the destitute, it became an act of charity; offered to an altar, a pious oblation. Contemporary relations and local traditions attribute to him distributions of grain to the starving, dowries provided for dowerless maidens, and shields interposed against the extortions of minor magistrates. The precision of such anecdotes cannot always be verified against the rolls, yet their very concordance explains a great measure of his ascendancy. Those who received the bounty did not necessarily view the transaction through the eyes of those who had been compelled to provide it.
This money also sustained a hospitality of the most tangible sort. At the monastery of San Michele, near Rionero, the band found board and repose. Angiolillo ordered fine raiment, had masses celebrated, and received suppliants. The ribbons upon his horse’s bridle bespoke a miniature court. The title of *King of the Countryside* fell to him naturally: he possessed no permanent palace, but he commanded the roads that led to every hearth.
Yet such popular favor did not extinguish bloodshed. At Muro, his men seized and executed a fiscal officer named Ciulietto. At Montemarano, one Giovanni Gallo sought vengeance upon an aged physician, Giuseppe Ioni. In the narrative preserved by Fortunato, Angiolillo first proposed an extortion, but then gave free rein to his companion. The physician was shot down; his kin were obliged to wait until the armed men had ridden off before they dared recover the corpse. The ballad of the protector of the poor accords ill with such a scene; yet it belongs inexorably to the selfsame docket.
The King’s Troops and the Hamlets
The pursuit began as a succession of mortifying reverses for the crown. Near Bella, Lieutenant Giacomo Lupo marched his detachment toward a reported lair. Angiolillo had taken the alarm; his men disposed themselves behind the timber and the uneven ground. Lupo fell wounded, and his company fell back. The intelligence that was to lead the soldiers to the outlaw had led them only into his field of fire.
At Calitri, the band took the initiative. A company of fusiliers was disarmed while seated at their dinner; a skirmish ensued hard by their barracks. Dead and wounded fell on either side, and the brigands withdrew, bearing away one of their casualties. The encounter was later commemorated upon a painted banner wherein Angiolillo appeared as a triumphant general. The canvas offered an advantage denied to the battlefield: it allowed the artist to decide once and for all who had retreated.
The royal government at last amended its strategy. Judge Vincenzo Paternò, dispatched from Naples, centralized the intelligence and coordinated the columns. Highways were picketed, frequented defiles brought under watch. What several dispersed patrols had essayed without perseverance was converted into sustained, converging pressure. The bandit might still spring an ambush; he could no longer count, after every escape, upon a week of undisturbed tranquility.
These skirmishes wore down the band. A nephew of Angiolillo perished near Lucera; Peppe Russo fell sick of fever. In a subsequent brush with the militia, Angelo was struck in the thumb. He was now obliged to shield an ailing comrade while attending to his own maimed hand. The province where he had once ranged as master shrank to the dimensions of a single room in which to husband his remaining strength.
The Fatal Sanctuary
The two men sought sanctuary in a convent at Muro. A comrade, Ciccio Zuccarino, disclosed their retreat after securing assurances of royal clemency. Fortunato attributes the betrayal to a quarrel over cards and an unhealed slight; such a motive lends to the catastrophe the petty, familiar complexion common to so many historic falls. The government sought a trophy, the informer an escape from his own neck: their interests met before the convent gate.
The troops surrounded the cloister. Ancient accounts describe the fugitives concealed beneath the rafters, the friars threatened with steel, and fire at last applied to smoke the quarry out. Russo was seized. Angelo gained the roof-tiles and attempted a desperate flight; discovered clinging to a water conduit, he was pulled down and bound. The particulars of this capture have reached us through narratives that readily dramatize the hero’s last extremity. Their outcome, however, admits of no dispute: both men passed into the irons of the king’s officers.
They were conducted to Salerno. A solemn trial seemed imminent; representations were made that counsel might be heard in their defense. The Sardinian diplomatic dispatch cited by Croce attests to this expectation and to the petitions addressed to the throne. It reveals, too, why Angiolillo’s popularity—hitherto his best shield—had now become his most perilous handicap: a public hearing threatened to grant him a dangerous forum.
A royal decree dispensed with the anticipated judicial proceedings. Angelo Duca was hanged in 1784; the corpse of Russo, who had expired in his dungeon in the interim, was likewise dragged to the gibbet. The remains were subsequently quartered and dispatched to the several market-towns where the band had formerly held sway. The Crown restored the highways to the king’s peace by posting along them the severed limbs of him who had proclaimed himself their master.
The common folk did not forget him for all that. The rhymed verses spread from mouth to mouth, the exploits grew in magnitude, and the inconvenient brutalities faded from the tale. There soon remained, in many recollections, only the figure of a generous champion crushed by the mighty. Yet beside the name of Angiolillo there linger still that of the physician of Montemarano, those of the fallen soldiers, and those of the honest men who were forced to pay. The peasant’s song had found its hero; the judicial archive, however, preserves more voices than one.