Rocco La Russa Peraino

Rocco La Russa Peraino (1828 – 27 May 1860), commonly known as Rocco La Russa, was a Sicilian physician and patriot from Erice. He took part in Garibaldi’s 1860 campaign in Sicily—part of the Risorgimento, the movement for the Unification of Italy—against Bourbon rule, and was killed during the fighting at the Ponte dell'Ammiraglio in Palermo.^[1]

La Russa was born in Erice in 1828. Under Bourbon rule in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, La Russa and his brother Antonino were arrested for liberal sympathies and subjected to imprisonment and internal exile on Ustica.^[2][3] Liberals advocated constitutional reform and Italian unification.

In the mid-nineteenth century, Sicily formed part of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, governed from Naples by the Bourbon dynasty. In 1860 Giuseppe Garibaldi landed at Marsala with a volunteer force (the Expedition of the Thousand) to overthrow Bourbon rule in the south and join the island to the constitutional Kingdom of Sardinia. A plebiscite later that year led to annexation to the Kingdom of Sardinia, and in 1861 the new Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed.

In May 1860, as the Sicilian phase of the campaign began, La Russa joined local insurgent forces. He fell at the Battle of the Ponte dell'Ammiraglio in Palermo on 27 May 1860, remembered by contemporaries as "the doctor La Russa from Monte Erice" who lay dead on the bridge.^[1][2]

A marble plaque on his former residence (Casa La Russa–Amico, on Via Vittorio Emanuele in Erice) was inaugurated on 15 May 1910. The inscription—composed by the poet and educator Ugo Antonio Amico, La Russa’s brother-in-law—records his birth in the house, his standing as a doctor, his imprisonment and exile with his brother Antonino, and his death “struck in the forehead” at the Ponte dell’Ammiraglio on 27 May 1860.^[2][4][5]

In Palermo, the municipality erected a monument at the Ponte dell’Ammiraglio on 27 May 1877 to mark the seventeenth anniversary of his death; the site received a new commemorative inscription in 1960 during the centenary celebrations.^[2]

La Russa’s name is borne by a former regional hospital complex at Contrada Torrebianca in Erice's Casa Santa district, commonly referred to as the "Ex Ospedale Rocco La Russa".^[6][7] The municipality of Erice has also named a street Via Rocco La Russa.^[8]

La Russa is locally commemorated among the volunteers from the Erice area who joined Garibaldi’s 1860 campaign and in lists of the fallen of the Palermo fighting. His portrait was reproduced in Giuseppe Cesare Abba’s Storia dei Mille.^[9]

• Casa La Russa–Amico
• Commemorative plaque