Benedetto Musolino (8 February 1809 – 15 November 1885) was an Italian soldier and politician, who was a member of the Chamber of Deputies of the Kingdom of Italy from 1861 to 1876 and later a member of the Senate of the Kingdom of Italy. Musolino was associated with the Historical Left in Italian politics. A native of Calabria, Musolino was a radical republican and atheist engaged in militant activity against the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies during the Italian unification. In the aftermath of the Revolutions of 1848, he was involved with Giuseppe Mazzini's Roman Republic. Later, he took part in the Expedition of the Thousand under the command of Giuseppe Garibaldi, as the Kingdom of Italy was created through the conquest of the Two Sicilies by the Kingdom of Sardinia.
Biography
Early life
Benedetto Musolino was born to Domenico Musolino and Francesca Starace, he grew up and was educated in a family of republican ideas, in which his father and uncle had been forced into exile for having participated in the Parthenopean Republic, the semi-autonomous regime set up under the auspicies of the French First Republic during the French Revolutionary Wars. When Musolino was just six years of age, at the castle in his hometown of Pizzo, Calabria, the Napoleonic King of Naples, Joachim Murat was executed by firing squad at the hands of the Bourbon monarchists.
After school, he moved to Naples where he continued his studies in law, also showing an inclination for philosophy. In Naples he was able to establish relations with Luigi Settembrini and with a group of like-minded radical intellectuals, and for his ideas he suffered a short period of imprisonment. Driven by his passionate and romantic character, he then left for Palestine and also visited the eastern islands of the Mediterranean Sea, before making his home in Constantinople (then under the Ottoman Empire), admitted to the court of the Vizier of which he was a councilor.
Militancy in the Two Sicilies
In 1832, on his return to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, driven by radical education and passionate outbursts, he dedicated himself to the organization of an anti-Bourbon underground militant group called "I Figliuoli della Giovine Italia" (The Sons of Young Italy); despite the name that recalls Giuseppe Mazzini's Young Italy and the common progressive and anti-monarchist intent, the two figures differed in spirit (Mazzini's religiosity as opposed to Musolino's militant atheism) and in the organization: "I Figliuoli della Giovine Italia" were in fact configured as a clandestine society with symbols and rituals typical of quasi-Masonic secret societies such as the Carbonari.
In 1839, denounced to the Bourbon authorities by informers, Musolino was captured together with a group of republicas: his brother Pasquale, Settembrini, Raffaele Anastasio and Saverio Bianchi. After serving more than three years of detention and then confined to Pizzo, together with his nephew Giovanni Nicotera, Felice Sacchi and Eugenio De Riso, he clandestinely exercised a secret political activity in the country to lay the foundations for revolutionary uprisings, and in 1848 - the year in which Ferdinand II of the Two Sicilies was forced to promulgate the Constitution on the basis of the riots in Palermo - he was elected deputy in the Neapolitan Parliament in the district of Monteleone. When the Chamber was dissolved of authority, Musolino and other Calabrian parliamentarians, following Giuseppe Ricciardi - and after Cosenza had become the seat of the provisional government - organized an armed resistance connected with the uprisings of Cilento and Sicily. The royal forces, however, had the upper hand and put down the insurrection: they devastated the town of Pizzo, shot a brother of Musolino and set fire to the family home; the father was killed and shortly afterwards the mother, the other brother and the sister-in-law died in distress in the years followed.