Descended from an old Calabrian family, Carlo Poerio was born on 13 October 1803 in Naples.

He returned to Naples and practised as a lawyer, and from 1837 to 1848 was frequently arrested and imprisoned, helping among others to prepare the insurrection of 1847; but, when Ferdinand II, moved by the demonstration on 27 January of the latter year, promulgated a constitution, he was made minister of education.

Discovering that the monarch maintained a will to collaborate with the Austrian Empire, he resigned office in April 1849, and returned to Naples to take his seat in parliament, where he led the constitutional opposition.

[1] After the battle of Novara, the king was free to dissolve parliament and renounce the constitution; in the month of July 1849 Poerio was arrested, tried, and sentenced to nineteen years in prison.

Chained in pairs, he and other political prisoners were confined in one small room in the labor camp on Nisida (the Phlegraean Islands).