I misteri del brigante italiano: alle origini di un tipo criminale

This paper focuses on the cultural construction of the «Italian brigand», a prominent figure in the social imagination of the 19th century Europe. The first objective is to establish a connection between the cultural representations of the brigands and the romantic discourse concerning the «mysteries» of the criminal classes. The paper aims especially at analysing the processes of identification, folklorisation, mediatization, politicization and criminalization related to brigands and brigandage in the age of the Italian Risorgimento. In doing that, the paper offers a contribution to the study of the complex mixture of literary imagination, criminological discourse and political conflict, which appears to be the privileged vector of definition of the changing representations of this social type.

Keywords: Brigands; Representations; Crime; Risorgimento