On an evening in the September of 1860, some excitement was caused among the inhabitants of the secluded town of Oppido in Calabria Ultra, when the gleam of arms announced the approach of regular troops. The dealers in pottery and silk, in wine and oil, and the manufacturers of gloves and stockings from the delicate filaments of the shell-fish named the pinna marina, and the water-carrier by the well, conferred together on this unusual circumstance; the wandering pifferari paused in their strains before the shrine of the Madonna; and the rustics of a more doubtful character—to wit, the armed and lawless carbonari and mountaineers, the brigands, with their sugar-loaf hats, velveteen jackets, and sandalled feet—looked forth from the dense forests and coverts wherein they lurked, defying alike the anathemas of the Archbishop of Reggio and the powers of the High Court there, and thought the time was near to inspect their guns and stilettoes, and set their wives to abandon the distaff for the bullet-mould, as none knew on what errand those troops had come, or what might ensue ere long, and strange things were expected, for Mazzini and "The Liberator" had been busy with their manifestoes; even the Fata Morgana had been showing strange optical delusions of late in the Bay of Reggio and the Straits of Messina.
The battle of Aspromonte had been fought in their vicinity during the preceding month.
Garibaldi, as all the world knows, intent on raising an insurrection in Hungary, had placed himself at the head of a body of Sicilian volunteers, in the forest district of Ficuzza, twenty miles from Palermo, and, by a hasty and ill-advised movement, he landed these men from two steamers on the Calabrian shore, where, on the mountain plateau of Aspromonte—one of the highest of the Calabrian hills, rising immediately behind the town of Oppido—he was attacked by the Royal Italian troops, under Colonel Pallavacino. He fell, wounded by a musket-shot in the ankle, while all his people were surrounded and made prisoners.
Military executions followed on many, though "The Liberator," for his great services in the cause of Italian independence, was never brought to trial; and now the young grass was sprouting above the earthy mounds, and round the rude little crosses that marked where the dead lay in their lonely graves on the slope of the Apennines.
For two noted brigands who had accompanied him, named Agostino Velda and Giuseppe Rivarola, rewards were offered at that time in vain.
The excitement in Oppido was in no way lessened when the sound of bugles came on the evening wind, and ere long the 3rd regiment of Bersaglieri, or Italian Rifles, in the service of Victor Emanuel, with their plumed hats and quaint uniforms, marched into the town, and halted before the Albergo del Leon d'Oro, where the colours were lodged, and the lieutenant-colonel commanding took up his quarters.
The soldiers were placed in an empty monastery; a guard was mounted there, and also at the albergo; and then it began to be whispered about in the market-place and cafés that the Bersaglieri were to remain there until a captain arrived from Reggio with some special instructions for the colonel, Vincenzo il Conte Manfredi, of whom we shall hear more anon.
These rumours were unpleasantly connected with a Bersagliere named Agostino Velda—the same Velda who had followed General Garibaldi, and who had been brought in with the quarter-guard as a prisoner, and was now in a cell of the monastery, heavily ironed, and under the strictest surveillance.
Among the Bersaglieri of Colonel Manfredi were two soldiers of the name of Velda—the prisoner Agostino, and his son Raphael, a youth of little more than twenty years, who bore a character as high and unblemished as that of his father was degraded and low, dissipated and vile. Yet the father and son were both eminently handsome men, and both had fought bravely—the former on the fields of Goïto and Novara, and the latter at Montebello and Solferino; but latterly to many crimes and breaches of military law, Agostino had added that of desertion and consorting with brigands, among whom he narrowly escaped an assassination in which he became involved; and a notice of this event found its way even into the Times.
He had thrown aside his uniform, adopted the well-known costume of the brigands—a gaily-embroidered jacket, a high hat, with broad, flaunting ribbon, and long leathern gaiters—and, armed with a rifle and six-barrelled revolver, made his lurking-place among the mountains near Naples.