Casa di Gabriele Pepe

The patriot and man of letters Gabriele Pepe was born in this Molise hill town in 1779 and returned here to die in 1849. Soldier of Napoleon, deputy of two parliaments, exile and duellist, he is the sword to his cousin Vincenzo Cuoco's pen, and his family's house anchors that memory in the borgo.

Why it matters

Few villages of a few hundred people can claim a household that helped imagine the Italian Risorgimento before the word existed. Gabriele Pepe, born at Civitacampomarano on 7 December 1779, fought for the Neapolitan Republic of 1799 as a teenager, marched to Marengo with Napoleon's army, sat in the Neapolitan parliament of 1820 and again in that of 1848, and spent his Florentine exiles with the circles of the Antologia and Vieusseux that fed liberal Italy. His house is remembered alongside Cuoco's in the town's cultural history, and his life gives the borgo's stones a biographical spine: the village was the setting of his early life and final return.

What to notice

The house is a patrician dwelling whose significance is tied to Pepe's life and work. The nearby parish church of San Giorgio Martire preserves funerary slabs of the Pepe family. The nearby birthplace of his cousin Vincenzo Cuoco reflects their family relationship and the intellectual history of the borgo.

Context and history

Pepe enlisted young as a cavalry standard-bearer in the Neapolitan regiment and embraced the republican cause of 1799. In the reaction he was arrested and escaped a death sentence only because he was a minor; exile in Marseille followed. He then joined the Italian legion at Grenoble and fought at Marengo in Napoleon's army, re-entered the service under Joseph Bonaparte and Murat, and campaigned in Spain from 1808 to 1811, rising to battalion chief in 1813. Elected deputy in the revolution of 1820, he criticized King Ferdinand I's journey to Laibach in parliament and fought the Austrians at Rieti; arrested, he was confined to Brunn in Moravia until December 1822, then moved to Florence, where he wrote for the Antologia, joined the Circolo Vieusseux and the Accademia dei Georgofili and promoted Vico's philosophy. In 1826 he challenged Alphonse de Lamartine to a duel for calling Italy "the land of the dead", wounding the poet, who conceded the point. Re-elected in 1848, he declined the war ministry but accepted command of the national guard as a general; after the constitutional regime collapsed, he returned to his village on 3 May 1849 and died there on 26 July 1849 — the biography closing where it opened.