A-Infos (en) Italy, Sicilia Libertaria #457 - THE FAILED SICILIAN INSURRECTION OF MAY 1, 1891 Part One (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Davide Turcato's book, Il metodo anarchico, has reopened the "case" of 
the failed anarchist insurrection planned for May 1, 1891. Turcato 
focuses his attention on the events in Piazza Santa Croce in Gerusalemme 
in Rome and on the favorable attitude towards the street riots that 
Malatesta supposedly had in those days. ---- In reality, riots, or more 
often badly aborted insurrectional preparations, were counted both in 
Rome and Florence - where several hundred anarchist militants were 
arrested on May 1 - and in many other places in Italy. But the 
generalized insurrection, planned throughout the country and even 
abroad, did not take place. And despite those, like Eugenio Pellaco and 
Pietro Gori, who saw in them an initial "splendid affirmation of 
anarchy" (with the obvious intent of quelling the subsequent heated 
polemics), they mostly served as a pretext for the government to 
disorganize the weak structures of the anarchist party born in Capolago 
the previous January.

In addition to Lazio and Tuscany, the main organizational attempts of 
the new party were manifested in Romagna, Naples and Sicily, where state 
repression was unleashed ahead of schedule, between the end of March and 
the beginning of April. The Romagna anarchists of the various tendencies 
had begun to group together in a federation, electing the city of Forlì 
as their federal center. In Sicily and Naples, since the spring of 1890, 
the organizational work had been started by Merlino, who had made two 
clandestine trips there, by Paolo Schicchi who landed in Catania on 
January 2, 1891 and by a large number of militants who had sprung up 
like mushrooms and who in the main cities of the island were connected 
by the tireless work of an anarchist railwayman, Emmanuele Gulì.

On the mandate of the investigating judge of Forlì, intent on 
criminalizing the Romagna federation, a series of arrests and searches 
were also carried out in Sicily, starting on March 25, and then in 
Naples, on April 10 and 17, 1891, for the crime of "conspiracy tending 
to violently change the constitution of the State and the form of the 
Government". Numerous papers and correspondence were seized from 
Amilcare Cipriani and the main exponents of southern anarchism, which 
served to corroborate what, thanks to some infiltrators in the ganglia 
of the movement, the police were already aware of regarding the 
insurrectional project. The findings, and the tip-offs from Leopoldo 
Cristina - one of the founders of the Catania anarchist group -, allowed 
for example the judicial authority of the city of Etna to open a line of 
investigation parallel to the one in Romagna, which involved, in 
addition to the well-known Cipriani, Merlino, Malatesta, Nabruzzi, 
Paoletti, Manzoni di Rimini and De Felice Giuffrida, as many as 45 
anarchists from the provinces of Catania, Palermo, Messina, Agrigento, 
Caltanissetta and Trapani. The investigation was concluded six months 
later, for all the defendants (in Catania, by sentence of the Council 
Chamber, on 3 August 1891), with a dismissal due to insufficient 
evidence, given the refusal of the individual police commissioners to 
reveal their sources of information to the judicial authorities.

In these months, the anarchists of the regions involved found themselves 
persecuted and monitored at close range by the police, to such an extent 
that the anarchist movement seemed to revive in Romagna, where it had 
the greatest consistency, only at the end of June, due to the presence - 
reported on several occasions - of Errico Malatesta, while in Sicily it 
ended up disintegrating due to the bitter conflict between the 
"antiprimomaggisti" (who contested the fixed-date revolution and party 
discipline) and the "primomaggisti", a declination of the more 
well-known opposition between "free initiative" (or anti-organization) 
and the structured organization.

The report of the chief inspector of P.S., cav. Dal Fabbro, acting 
police commissioner in Catania, drafted on the spur of the moment on the 
same day he was carrying out the first searches - informs us of the 
consistency of the Sicilian insurrectional project. In some essential 
passages, verified in other sources of the contemporary and subsequent 
era, we read that «at the beginning of the year 1890 there was still no 
anarchist group in Catania. But since, in the spring, the well-known 
Merlino Francesco Saverio appeared here to carry out propaganda, 
recommended to Giuseppe De Felice Giuffrida, he recruited the young men 
Leopoldo Cristina, Giuseppe Giuffrida Monaco and Barnaba Giordano in 
Catania to the party, just as in Caltanissetta he attracted the railway 
employee Gulì Emanuele: and from then on they began to work for the 
Social Revolution».Among the Crispi papers published by Palamenghi in 
1924, some reports stand out, the result of denunciations within the 
Roman anarchist groups, which refer to the "work" that, in August 1890, 
«Merlino is awaiting, in agreement with Malatesta, and for which he 
recommends the anarchists also in Rome to hasten their organization». 
That "work" consisted in advocating «an attempted insurrection of the 
sulphur mines of Sicily, to which some provinces of the Continent should 
respond». And in fact, Dal Fabbro continues, «Gulì Emanuele, taking 
advantage of his relatives in Palermo and the facilities he had in 
traveling as a railway employee and paymaster in the various towns of 
the Island, spread revolutionary ideas especially among the sulfur 
miners, pushing them, even with public harangues, to strikes and to war 
against the bosses[...]His activity then grew considerably following the 
Anarchist Congress of Capolago (4, 5 and 6 January 1891) and the 
formation of the Organizing Commission of the Italian Socialist 
Congress, made up of Malatesta Enrico, Cipriani Amilcare and Paoletti 
Enrico, as well as following the publication of the relative Manifesto 
compiled by Francesco Saverio Merlino with the aim of promoting serious 
agitation with physical violence for May 1, 1891, also resorting to 
revolt in various parts of the Kingdom».

Therefore, the birth of the anarchist party in Capolago does not precede 
the insurrectional project, which in Sicily is already outlined, but 
follows it and supports it, to coordinate and replicate it at a national 
level. «At that same time - Dal Fabbro continues - Gulì was negotiating 
for the arrival of Amilcare Cipriani in Sicily, to whom he assured that 
all the sulphur miners here are ready with Gulì for the social 
revolution. Expecting such an arrival, he then urged his associates to 
coordinate with him to be ready when Cipriani was here, and he gathered 
them in secret conferences[to incite them]to criminal activity, reading 
among other things a letter, apparently from the pasta maker Gallo 
Giuseppe from Girgenti, where it was said that the sulphur miners' 
personnel are all with them and that many others are in agreement with 
them and long for the 1st of May to make the Social Revolution».

Since April 1889, following the death of a pickaxe operator and the 
incipient crisis in the sector, the unrest of the sulphur miners (the 
main "industrial" class in Sicily, with over 30,000 workers) had seen a 
crescendo of strikes, riots and clashes with the police, throughout the 
mining basin located between the provinces of Agrigento and 
Caltanissetta, culminating in real insurrectional episodes in Sommatino 
on 10 June, in Favara on 24 June and in Montedoro on 7 July 1890. In 
March 1891 the unrest had flared up again especially in the Apaforte 
mine of Serradifalco, at Grottacalda in Piazza Armerina, at Tallarita in 
Riesi, at Cozzo Disi in Casteltermini and at Canicassé in Caltanissetta, 
in the latter two certainly by anarchists and revolutionary socialists.

On March 5, Gulì left Catania, on leave for family reasons, for Palermo. 
In reality, «Gulì also had to go to Palermo to take part in a meeting of 
anarchists from every town on the island. This then took place on the 
11th of this month in a sacristy granted for this purpose by the 
custodian. There were about 40 people present, among whom, in addition 
to Gulì, were Gallo Giuseppe, a pasta maker from Girgenti, and Noè 
Giovanni from Messina, owner of the newspaper Il Riscatto. In this 
meeting it was decided that everyone should prepare until April 10, from 
the 10th to the 20th they should wait to see if any other part of Italy 
rose up, and on the contrary, in case Sicily took the initiative on May 
1st. And it was established that the movement would be made by uniting 
one hundred leaders from different parts of the island, well armed, in 
Grotte, and from there they would move to Canicattì to raise the sulphur 
mines and disarm that company of soldiers, as well as the Carabinieri of 
Recalmuto, after which, dividing into teams, they would throw themselves 
towards Caldare in Palermo and on the other side to Girgenti, while 
other members would stir up the population in the different cities". Of 
this "plenary meeting", which remained unknown to the confidant prince 
of the Palermo police headquarters, Salvatore Zappulla, various news and 
anecdotes have reached us, in different periods, such as the one told by 
Paolo Schicchi, who took part, in the "Vespro dei Gladiatori" in 1950: a 
proposal emerged, rejected unanimously with disdain, to seek a meeting, 
in order to make up for the lack of financial means, with none other 
than the former queen Maria Sofia of Bourbon!

In some letters seized from him at the time and in other writings now 
deposited at the Swiss Federal Archives in Bern, Schicchi confirms the 
intense proselytism activity carried out in those days among the miners 
in the interior of the island in view of the planned insurrection, the 
plan of which (concentration in Grotte, capture of the Caldare station, 
a nerve center railway hub near Aragona, and assault, divided into 
"squads", on the cities of Palermo and Agrigento) is linked to events 
from the Sicilian revolutionary past, especially the Palermo revolt of 
"seven and a half" (16-22 September 1866) but also to the republican 
movement of Grotte on 8 February 1868.

The main direction of the insurrection would have been accompanied by 
armed uprisings in the main cities of the island. We do not know in 
detail what had been established for Messina, Trapani and Marsala. For 
Catania, where Cipriani would cement an agreement with De Felice 
Giuffrida, they thought of invading the surrounding towns, unprotected 
by police forces, staging a "workers' walk", seizing the Circumetnea 
trains, at Piano della Tavola or Valcorrente, to then swoop down on 
Catania and thus revive the epic of Garibaldi's capture of the city.

In Palermo, on the other hand, since April 6 the police commissioner had 
shown himself to be perfectly aware of the anarchists' ongoing contacts 
"with all those of the various parties that exercise the greatest 
influence on the masses, and especially with many of those who played an 
important part in the insurrection of 1866[...]They took note of these 
people, as well as of the men on whom each of them, at the moment of 
action, could safely rely". He even assured that "some malicious people 
who usually take advantage of the opportunity, as they did in 1860 and 
1866, are building cartridges and collecting ammunition".

On the evening of March 18, Amilcare Cipriani, the "colonel of the 
Commune", arrived in Sicily, or rather the one who, as Dal Fabbro 
specified, "among the lower classes some call the Second Garibaldi".

Natale Musarra

https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/
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