Giulio Bechi

In 1914, the book “Caccia Grossa” appeared for the Treves publishing house. Scenes and figures of Sardinian banditry” and has received good critical acclaim. Behind the pseudonym Miles lies its author, Giulio Bechi (1870-1914), an infantry lieutenant from the small Florentine nobility, with a vocation for writing, who arrived in Sardinia as part of that expeditionary force that the Minister of the Interior Pelloux sent to the island to try to radically deal with the emergency of banditry, which in those years shed blood and could not seem to be contained.
This sort of expedition, of big game hunting, begins, as the young soldier had to call it in an unhappy way, who participates directly in the Supramonte and is deeply impressed by it, while profoundly sharing the strategy of terror implemented by the Government, which places the entire Barbagia under siege in an attempt to create a vacuum around the fugitives. All this happened from April to July 1899, when the soldiers were quartered in Nuoro, and from there, commanded by Captain Patella, they deployed through the areas of Nuoro, Barbagie and up to the Gocean, accusing hundreds of families of aiding. Impressive is the raid carried out on the night between 14 and 15 May, which Bechi significantly calls “Saint Bartholomew's Night” in reference to the massacre of the French Huguenots on 24 August 1572. A thousand people were arrested, including old people and women, who were taken in a procession to the prisons: “The bomb went off: on the same night, at the same time, a large roundup of all the big supporters in all the municipalities of the district. That devil of a captain, shut up shut up, had already devised a real siege plan. The city divided into seven districts, the staff, police officers and police officers, in seven groups; the prisoners' depots are ready: piles of handcuffs, chains, ropes: all calculated and prepared for months... It's midnight, it's a sway in every sense of the police, the guards, the soldiers. A thrill is in everyone's heart.” The book is a precise reportage, which the use of dialogue makes it more direct and effective, and has the merit of rendering well the condition of a Sardinia that faced the twentieth century with hundreds of fugitives scattered in the mountains, and what was the emotional and psychological impact of a soldier, who came from Tuscany not yet thirty, to wage war there.

Update

25/6/2026 - 13:10