Neo-Bourbonism

Defeat of the Kingdom of Two Sicilies was attributed to internal betrayals, and unification of Italy was view as a Piedmontese invasion, in opposition to academic historiography.

[citation needed] Defunct A revival of the neo-Bourbon ideology took place at the end of the twentieth century, a period of rising support for local independence movements throughout Italy with the success of the Lega Lombarda.

The movement reached its peak with the opposition to the celebrations for the 150th anniversary of the unification of Italy, coming to propose a neo-Bourbon mythology based on a "nineteenth-century nationalist canon with its obsession with violated communities, the blood of martyrs, the honor of heroes and heroines, the impiety of traitors and the cruelty of enemies".

[citation needed] In these years false histories appeared in publication, among the various falsities it was claimed that the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was at the forefront of technology and economics in Europe, attributing to it a long list of discoveries, inventions and primates in every field of human knowledge[2] and that the repression of brigandage had led to a genocide with figures close to one million dead[3] with the establishment of extermination camps such as the Fenestrelle Fort.

[4][5] The historian Alessandro Barbero, who called the story of Fenestrelle "a historiographical and media invention", consulting the original documents of the time, verified how the prisoners of the former Bourbon army actually detained in the fort only numbered just over a thousand, of which 4 died during captivity.