Setting off an outbreak of revolt against the Bourbons with the support of the population and to promote the unification of Italy. The plan elaborated by Carlo Pisacane provided that all this should take place in Cilento, after having freed the political prisoners imprisoned in Ponza.
In June 1857 Pisacane and 24 other patriots embarked in Genoa on the steamship “Cagliari”, heading south. The first landing took place on 25 June 1857 in Ponza, where every political prisoner and even some common prisoners were released, rising the number of participants in the expedition that sailed back to the main destination to three hundred. In two days the "Cagliari" took them to Sapri, where the landing took place. Except that instead of finding a population ready for revolt, Pisacane and his family were welcomed by strongly hostile peasants, armed with their working tools. The Bourbon soldiers, in fact, took care to communicate to the population that a group of criminals escaped from Ponza was about to land. And so Pisacane and his family were forced to escape and chased to Padula. There they found themselves surrounded and, in the battle, Pisacane himself lost his life with a large number of his men. The few who survived, including two Englishmen, initially sentenced to death, obtained not to be executed, but to have the sentence commuted to life imprisonment, thanks to pressure from the English government. At the landing point in Sapri there is a statue of the gleaner from the famous poem by Luigi Mercantini. Instead, those who lost the lives of the "three hundred young and strong" are buried in the church of the Ss. Annunziata in Padula.
