Hunger Robbers for Robbery Wars, 5

A little intermezzo is a must here between before and after the cure, to put in the explicit light they deserve a few details about the aforementioned character labelled “patriots”.
The political and press demonisation campaign against Naples alone was not sufficient to justify the invasion. Indeed, attacking another sovereign state within one’s same Italian soil could be hardly called otherwise. Therefore, to cut through that, as cliched as it is, the invasion had to be packaged as a humanitarian war of liberation. And here is the reason why, alongside the iconic Garibaldi and Mazzini, I chose to mention Ippolito Nievo and the little known Filippo Curletti.
Curletti was a secret agent of Cavour, and when the latter imprisoned him as a reward, he took revenge with a book we can still read today, “La verità sugli uomini e sulle cose del Regno d’Italia”, “The Truth on the Men and Things of the Kingdom of Italy”. And quite cliched indeed the truth is: a clandestine war, fought with secret organisations and propaganda, undercover agents and operations under the command of Turin and Cavour, such as the “spontaneous” “popular” revolt of Turin Carabineers disguised as commoneers in Florence, rushes to ransack the public coffers, accusing the attacked rulers of taking what they looted, melting the looted precious metals to ensure they couldn’t be tracked by their legitimate owners, you name it.
The heroics of Garibaldi were no different, but on the contrary the epitome of such cliched strategies: he was gifted three million French francs from the British crown, and after the fall of Naples two thousand three hundred Bourbonist generals found a tantamount position within the Turin army. Two of them were Guglielmo Acton and Ferdinando Lanza; Acton was in command of one of the ships guarding the Sicilian coast when the Garibaldians landed in Marsala, and those ships on guard duty waited for the Garibaldians to land before opening fire on their ships; Lanza was in charge of the defence of Palermo when the Garibaldians arrived, and he first kept his soldiers inside the Royal Palace and then delivered into the hands of Garibaldi the coffers of the Regio Banco di Sicilia, the Royal Bank of Sicily, amounting to about eighty−six million Euro of today, which incidentally was the first act of the dispossession of the South. Another general, Francesco Landi, in Calatafimi ordered his three thousand men to retreat without fighting facing one thousand poorly armed men. All while the Bourbonist soldiers who refused to fight against their compatriots were shooted by explicit order of Cavour, even though the Savoy law did not provide for that.