It is inaugurated in Corso Garibaldi in Salerno the monument in honor of the Martyrs of Freedom, better known as the Statue of Liberty. Made by the sculptor Gaetano Chiaromontewith a cost of 12,000 lire which then dropped to 10,000, the statue is installed on the spot where, after the anti-Bourbon riots in 1823, the condemned people were beheaded Federico Cimmino, Antonio Giannone, Giovanni De Vita and Clemente Prota. The two leaders of the Cilento revolt were also killed in the same place Antonio Maria De Luca, the priest Giovanni de Luca and Costabile Carduccianother protagonist of the Cilento uprisings of 1848. At 11.30 the monument was inaugurated and the plaque to the martyrs of 1823 was unveiled with a speech by the Honorable Enrico De Marinis. After the sports competitions, organized for the event and which began the previous day, the senator’s speech is held at the Verdi theater Matteo Mazziotti.
The author of the statue represents Liberty with the features of a Junoesque woman, with prosperous and exposed breasts, which breaks the chains of slavery. An image, however, that the clergy of Salerno does not like: in the newspaper «Il bonsenso» Don Arturo Capone, as Aniello Ragone tells us, titled one of his articles: «An obscene statue placed in public!» And in it he points out how the sculpted woman (identified as slut and prostitute) defaces and offends the memory of citizens who dream of a free and independent homeland and not a homeland that delights in sluts, as is the female represented there.
The article continues: «When the young men and women stop in front of that figure of a prostitute, and with their eyes run over those parts that the moral sense had hitherto called pudenda because they were destined to be covered, far from becoming enthusiastic at the memory of the so-called martyrs, young people will feel the need to see in nature what is sculpted there in bronze; and the young girls, to strip off their clothes as much as they can, thus seeing the naked body of a female put in triumph!» The anticlerical periodical «L’asino» instead sent one of its journalists to Salerno who highlighted not the obscenities of the statue but rather the choice of place: small, narrow, dirty square, with pavements smeared with dust and muddy mess.
