The monument to Giovanni Nicotera is in the center of the Villa Comunale, commemorating the Salerno-elected parliamentarian and several times minister. Also in the Villa is the monument to Pisacane, who led the ill-fated Sapri expedition with him.
Patrioti risorgimentali
In Salerno’s Villa Comunale, in the center of the square is a bronze statue of Giovanni Nicotera, a Calabrian politician who, however, is linked to Salerno for many reasons. He was in fact the lieutenant of Carlo Pisacane, who at the head of the “three hundred, young and strong,” in 1857 landed in Sapri for that tragic insurrection that was later carried out successfully three years later by Giuseppe Garibaldi.
Nicotera, in his early twenties, was at Garibaldi’s side in 1848 in Rome, and then organized together with Pisacane the expedition to Sapri, which, due to treachery and poor organization, led to the defeat of the insurgents, the death of Pisacane, and the arrest of Nicotera, who was imprisoned and tried in Salerno – in the present location of the State Archives – sentenced to death, a sentence later commuted to life imprisonment. But Garibaldi himself freed him in 1860, and after a youth of insurrections and a life dedicated to the Unification of Italy, he was elected to Parliament precisely in Salerno and, a member of the Left, became Minister of the Interior in the De Pretis government in 1876. Again he was Minister of the Interior in 1891, this time, however, in a government of the Right, to which in later life he had converted, characterized by harsh repression of the nascent socialist movements.
Carlo Pisacane did not have this fate, dying precisely in the expedition to Sansa, a village in Cilento. A monument in the Villa Comunale, the first erected to him, is also dedicated to him. A secluded and almost hidden monument, it is a reminder, however, with respect to Nicotera’s controversial and contradictory political life, that the gods love those who make young men die. They, at least, will remain faithful to the ideals of youth.
