THE BRIGANDS

Body of the bandit Turri Turri


...By a footpath around Nusco, in fact, they came upon an ugly pile of dead men: there were four of them, glassy-eyed and heaped one on top of the other, in floppy poses which signalled that they had been killed not long before. The strange thing was that their beards had been burned off. As they stood conjecturing over that, there came a knocking and rustling sound of sticks and leaves behind them and an old wrinkled peasant woman with a kerchief appeared. She told them—without the aid of many incisors—that the dead men had been killed by Turri-Turri, head of all the bandits. “He hates your King Victor Emanuel. He burns the beards and moustaches of the Italiani he kills.”
...Sandor, who believed every word, asked, “Do you know who it is that Audéoud has following us?”
“A bandit.”
“Turri-Turri?”
“No. The most ferocious of all, Ninco Nanco. When he saw that Garibaldi was winning, he tried to enlist but was rejected and became a full-time outlaw. His first act was to invite a squadron of Piedmontese soldiers to a village fair and poison them all. It’s been one atrocity after another ever since. He’s been trailing you for the last two weeks but you’ve never realized it. He’s better than a hunting dog. He’s a couple of hours away from here. He has a mistress named Maria a’Pastora, who’s got a deadly aim on horseback.”







Ninco Nanco and his gang captured by the Army
Punch magazine satiric print: PIUS IX as brigands chief distributes weapons to south italian brigands (August 1861)
Maria a'Pastora
...The company of men parted to let through a man and a woman on horseback. Eleonora saw the woman’s unpinned hair, gold earrings, black velvet hat and half-jacket, and thought, Maria a’Pastora. A flash of teeth. The bandit rattled her tambourine at the crawling figure and crooned something at him, her hair swaying like black fabric, her eyes tight with exhilaration. As she lashed his back with her riding whip, the man in a white jacket next to her on horseback—the handsome olive-dark one with the thin moustache who had to be Ninco Nanco, shouted at the castle: “Garibaldini!”