Napoli 1848. Il movimento radicale e la rivoluzione

The revolution of 1848 was a crucial step for the apprenticeship in the democratic practices in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Historians have been dedicating scarce attention to this theme, since they consider political life in Southern Italy as a prerogative of a very small group of capital citizens.
This book deals with the political mobilization in Naples during 1848 and aims at challenging the idea of the Italian Mezzogiorno as peripherical in the European revolutionary context. To this end, two aspects of the process are focussed and explored: first, the street politics, which played a key role in the making of public opinion, i.e. the demonstrations, the petitions, the sociabilité in the coffeehouses and the popular figures; second, the radical group which tried to lead the political mobilization in the Bourbon capital. The latter, in addition, has been deep investigated in its cultural, ideological and socio-economical aspects with the ambition to explain its contribution to the realization of the much more widespread “imaginaries”and istances of the Neapolitan revolution.