L'Emira di F. A. Santori tra storia e letteratura
F. A. Santori's Emira between history and literature

Summary/Abstract: Emira by Francesco Antonio Santori is a vivid portrait of the events that followed the unification of Italy in 1861. The author was astonished by the profound and ferocious upheavals against the new Italian order. Arbëresh communities had enthusiastically welcomed Garibaldi's revolution. There was a great expectation of a new era of prosperity and justice. In its initial popular form, the "Red Shirts Revolution" had conceived the utopia of offering criminals locked up in the horrendous prisons of the Kingdom the possibility of redemption by offering their contribution to the national cause. Many political formations were born from the union of common criminals with opponents of the new regime, immediately branded as brigands. Santori wanted to undertake the difficult task of documenting the drama the civil resistance to the new regime and the ferocious repression of any form of dissent. It was written by Santori out of a desire to be a faithful chronicler of events, an "instant book" that recorded the epic nature of events that pitted criminality and political dissent with a blind repression of any form of resistance to the brutal cancellation of local identity. The conditions of the time did not allow criticism or doubts about the unification process, so much so that for the press - even if mutilated by the work, it was necessary to wait about twenty years that made its relevance fade. In the drama we find treated with profound realism the great social, economic and political difficulties of the period, the chaos and violence exercised especially in Calabria after 1861. The entire Mezzogiorno was subjected to a severe military regime. Santori describes traumatic episodes, such as the ferocious and cruel repression of the phenomenon of brigandage by Colonel Pietro Fumel, with brutal and arbitrary methods, also exercised on many innocent people. The story focuses on the deterioration of living conditions and the collective anxiety created by events such as the shooting of 10 inhabitants of Picilia, an event that deeply shocked all the inhabitants of the country and gave Santori the impetus to write the work. Emira offers Santori the opportunity to use all his expressive abilities: current events, social commitment, popular involvement, educational didactic purpose with a vivid and real language, taken directly from the local communities. Numerous archive research and the use of historical sources help the author of the article to reconstruct the time and events that gave Santori the opportunity to write this work, to hypothesize the reasons for the delay in publication and to determine how Santori positions himself between the chroniclers and the creator.

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