Carmine Crocco

Carmine Crocco (5 June 1830 – 18 June 1905), known as Donatello or sometimes Donatelli, was an Italian brigand. Initially a soldier for the Bourbons, he later fought in the service of Giuseppe Garibaldi.

Soon after the Italian unification he formed an army of two thousand men, leading the most cohesive and feared band in Southern Italy and becoming the most formidable leader on the Bourbon side. He was renowned for his guerrilla tactics, such as cutting water supplies, destroying flour-mills, cutting telegraph wires and ambushing stragglers.

Although some authors of the 19th and the early 20th century regarded him as a "wicked thief and assassin" or a "fierce thief, vulgar murderer", since the second half of the 20th century, writers (especially supporters of the Revisionism of Risorgimento) began to see him in a new light, as an "engine of the peasant revolution" and a "resistant ante litteram, one of the most brilliant military geniuses that Italy had".

Today, many people of Southern Italy and, in particular, of his native region Basilicata, consider him a folk hero.