The historiography of the ‘great brigandage’ in southern Italy in the 1860s has undergone several phases over the past 60 years. The initial outburst of studies was dominated, between the 1960s and the 1980s, on the one hand by Liberal historians such as Giuseppe Galasso and Alfonso Scirocco, who viewed Italian national unification as a positive outcome, and on the other by Marxist historians such as Gaetano Cingari, who interpreted the ‘great brigandage’ as a social revolt and a peasant war. The Marxist school culminated with Franco Molfese's Storia del brigantaggio dopo l'Unità (1964), still considered the best monograph on the subject. More recently, another major outburst of studies has occurred since the 2000s, partly, in the case of professional historians such as Francesco Gaudioso and others, as a result of the influence of the new historiography of the Mezzogiorno, and partly, in the case of non-professional historians such as Gigi Di Fiore, as a consequence of popular attempts to revisit, often polemically, the narrative of Italian national unification as a historical catastrophe for southern Italy. Many of the former, especially Salvatore Lupo, John Davis, and Carmine Pinto, have talked about the ‘great brigandage’ as a civil war, beginning a new phase of studies that has analysed the southern Italian conflict of the 1860s as a complex phenomenon, with political, social, and economic elements entangled in a guerrilla warfare that witnessed the participation of different interest groups fighting for the control of the Mezzogiorno during the first ten costly years of existence of the Italian nation.

Much as Molfese's exhaustive study epitomised the Marxist season of historiography of the ‘great brigandage’, Pinto's La guerra per il Mezzogiorno is an encyclopaedic work that takes into account the nuances and insights of the past 50 years of scholarship and provides an interpretation that reflects the current prevalent view of the subject among historians. One of the novelties of Pinto's work is that his book has attempted a general interpretative synthesis of the ‘great brigandage’ based on long and painstaking research in a number of different archives, not just the Italian Army Archive in Rome or the State Archives in Naples, but also several southern Italian regional archives. In his book, Pinto has integrated effectively the evidence coming from the many archival sources he has consulted with those from a number of important published primary sources and from fundamental works written by historians, in order to create an extremely engaging and detailed account. Pinto's account is partly a chronicle of the most important developments and partly an interpretation of all the major issues agitating southern Italy in its tormented relationship with the new Italian nation in the crucial decade of the 1860s.

The result is an extraordinary work organised in nine chapters, plus one Epilogo, through which the reader can follow and understand clearly how Italian unification and the defeat of the Bourbons led to the rise of the legitimist struggle to put the Bourbon King Francis II back on the southern Italian throne, and how this, in turn, led to the beginning of the ‘great brigandage’. As he details the contours of this complex narrative, Pinto provides an account of southern Italy in the 1860s which is both chronological and thematic (chapters 1–5). In subsequent chapters, he shows the importance of distinguishing different phases within the ‘great brigandage’, his analytical interpretation of a fundamentally multi-layered phenomenon evident in the chapter titles (‘The War of Ideas’, ‘The Combatants War’, ‘The Civilians War’, ‘The War of the Nation’). Interestingly, Pinto always provides accounts from both the point of view of the pro-Italian forces and that of the pro-Bourbon forces, while showing how different dimensions came together in the southern Italian conflict: the tactical and strategic element of the war, the ideological element, the political element, and the nationalist dimension.

Even though it was a type of irregular guerrilla warfare, rather than a war fought by regular armies on the battlefield, brigandage was a large-scale phenomenon that affected most of southern Italy, forcing the Italian government to put ‘over 360,000 men’ from the Italian army and the National Guard in the field by 1863 (p. 350). Its influence was also felt outside Italy, as European conservatives rushed to join the legitimist camp and fight for the Bourbons. Ultimately, Pinto argues that the brigands followed ‘ancien régime social models and mind-sets’ (p. 266), and therefore that they were somewhat relics of the past, attached, as they were, to the two poles of the Bourbon king and the Church, for both of which they claimed to fight. In line with current historiography, Pinto argues that the brigands ‘did not want to destroy the socio-economic order … rather they extolled the more simple and traditional values of society, starting with religion … and thus, without concrete political aims, they could not compete with the powerful imaginary of Italian nationalism’ (p. 266). Thus, Pinto makes an opposite claim to Molfese, and, since he cites him in his footnotes in the above section, it would have been interesting to see him engaging with Molfese's interpretation in more depth.

In sum, for Pinto, both the cause of Bourbon legitimism and brigandage never had a chance against the political and social forces that advocated Italian unification in southern Italy. Partly, this was because the total number of fighting brigands – leaving aside all the non-fighting supporters – was probably only 20,000, and they also lacked the Italian army's training, coordination, organisation, and leadership. But partly, and perhaps more importantly, the reason was that ‘the supporters of unification who had taken over the southern Italian institutions in 1860 by involving [in their cause] the local political groups, succeeded in tipping to their own advantage the balance in the conflict for the control and consensus of the civilian population. The Italian national movement combined together a strategy of social integration, political mobilisation, and military action’ (p. 322). As a consequence, despite the fact that there was widespread brutality in warfare on both sides, the brigands found themselves increasingly isolated, because their targets were mostly southern Italian civilians and the nature and motivation of their action was often just criminal. Perhaps Pinto could have expanded his treatment of female brigands, drawing on several recent works on the subject, such as those by Maurizio Restivo, Simona De Luna, and Domenico Scafoglio. He could also have paid more attention to the recent works of historians based outside Italy – such as Pierre-Yves Manchon and Simon Sarlin, among others. All the same, there is little doubt that this is an extraordinary work, a worthy successor of Molfese's book, and a perfect complement to it, and a study which will likely become one of the fundamental works on the ‘great brigandage’ in southern Italy in the 1860s.