On this date in 1863, the famed Italian bandit Antonio Locaso was shot in Castellaneta at the tender age of 22.
A former goatherd, Locaso supposedly embarked his career in brigandage in the classic style of the social bandit, impetuously intervening to fight off an agent of the law who was bent on ill-treating some penniless neighbors.
He thereafter was compelled to conceal himself in the wildernesses near Castellaneta,* down at the hinge of the Italic boot’s heel.
No mere highwayman, he fell in as a lieutenant of the ex-Bourbon officer turned outlaw/rebel Sergente Romano. This brought a violent crackdown by the Kingdom of Italy.
In a Christlike turn, he was betrayed by a comrade for the price on his head — and found slumbering amid his repast where “bread, cheese and salami there was also a bottle of narcotized wine.”
* Although it’s hardly a city on the front rank of the world’s conscience, it’s on the credit scroll of every episode of The Simpsons as it confers the municipal ancestry and the surname on Homer Simpson voice actor Dan Castellaneta.
On this day..
- 1938: Vladimir Beneshevich, Byzantinist - 2020
- 1890: Three hangings in Louisiana - 2018
- 1959: Jose Cipriano Rodriguez - 2017
- 3,001 Days of our Deaths - 2016
- 1983: Wang Zhong, small-time grifter - 2016
- 1949: Hiroshi Iwanami - 2015
- 1944: Max Sievers, freethinker - 2014
- 1907: Three "terrorists" in an Odessa public garden - 2013
- 2006: Clarence Ray Allen, "beyond rehabilitation" - 2012
- 1945: Szymon Srebrnik survives execution at Chelmno - 2011
- 1799: Dun Mikiel Xerri, Maltese patriot - 2010
- 1961: Patrice Lumumba - 2009
- 1977: Gary Gilmore - 2008