Partire da Sud. Nicola Fabrizi e l'iniziativa meridionale per l'unificazione italiana

Nicola Fabrizi was an Italian democratic refugee in Malta, who gave a great contribution to the building process of the Italian State. He was born in Modena in 1804 and, when he was 17 years old, he began his revolutionary struggle in that territory. Then he carried forward revolution and freedom for all over Europe with the help of his brothers, Paolo and Luigi, until he decided to prepare a strategy for the liberation of Italy. He stopped in Malta, where another brother, Carlo, had a commercial enterprise, and he worked with a group of other Italian refugees for the preparation of different insurrectional attempts in Italy. He could be considered a crucial character of the Italian history of Risorgimento because he was the one who began the process of Italian liberation and unification from Sicily. He was persuaded that in that Island there were the ideal structural, geographic and moral conditions for the growth of the revolutionary germ. He strove to convince other revolutionaries, such as Giuseppe Mazzini and Giuseppe Garibaldi, that the liberation had to begin from the South in order to provoke the rebellion of oppressed people in Italy. He had been meditating for a long time upon the usefulness of “war of bands” in all Southern territories of Italy and, consequently, he imagined the creation of the Italic Legion, an army composed by some groups of well instructed volunteers aimed at spreading revolution over there.