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Updated: June 18, 2025
The passage of the Piedmontese troops over the Abruzzi mountains was opposed both by a division of the Bourbon army and by armed peasants, who burnt a man alive at a place called Isernia; but their advance was not long delayed. The Neapolitans now began to retire from the right bank of the Volturno, and retreat towards the Garigliano, their last line of defence.
The Garibaldian epic closed with the battle near the left bank of the Volturno on October 1. Still Garibaldi showed no disposition to resign the dictatorship, or to abandon the designs on Rome which he had postponed, not renounced.
The 30,000 men recalled from Salerno and the adjacent districts marched towards Capua. The river Volturno, which runs by that fortified town, was now chosen as the line of defence of the Bourbon monarchy. On the 5th of September the King and Queen with the Austrian, Prussian, Bavarian and Spanish ministers, left Naples for Gaeta on board a Spanish man-of-war.
On Friday, September the 4th, we embarked on the steamer Volturno, employed by the French Messageries Imperiales, and in three days more we were at Marseilles, having no care on our minds except that abominable deceitful compass, which we had mislaid somewhere and could not now examine; but its inexplicable behaviour exercised my mind fearfully.
The political brigandage which followed the downfall of the King of the Two Sicilies began after the battle of the Volturno and extended over five years. Its effect on the general situation was nil; it harassed and distracted the Italian Government and created the odious necessity of using severe repressive measures, but it never placed the crown in danger.
The object of the king in assuming the chief command was to complete the conquest of the kingdom of Naples, in conjunction with Garibaldi. For though Garibaldi had entered the capital in triumph, the progress on the line of the Volturno had been slow; and the expectation that the Neapolitan army would go over to the invaders in a mass had not been realized.
The progress of the Sardinian army compelled Francis to give up the line of the Volturno, and he eventually took refuge, with his best troops, in the fortress of Gaeta. On the maintenance of this fortress hung the fate of the kingdom of Naples.
After a few days' rest Garibaldi followed the disheartened king to Capua, obtained new signal successes on the Volturno, at Santa Maria, and Caserta; but would probably have been unable to accomplish the enterprise had not the Piedmontese, whose government had aided Garibaldi's expedition while pretending to oppose it, overrun the Marches, beaten Lamoricière and the Papal forces at Castel Fidardo, and, crossing the frontier and the Apennines, besieged and reduced the strong places of Capua and Gaëta.
These dispositions were scarcely made when d'Aubigny, having passed the Volturno, approached to lay siege to Capua, and invested the town on both sides of the river.
Buccelin, entrenched among his plunder-waggons by the Volturno stream in the far south, had waited in vain for that dead brother and his dead host, till Narses came on him, with his army of trained Herules and Goths; the Francisc axe and barbed pike had proved useless before the arrows and the cavalry of the Romans; and no more than five Allmen, says one, remained of all that mighty host.
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