The paper aims to study the political uses of the liberal and revolutionary martyrs in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies during the first half of the 19th century. A culture of martyrdom appeared in the liberal opposition to the Bourbon monarchy, based on the memory of the failed revolution of 1799, then enriched in the 1840s through the victims of the repression of the successive revolutions that shook the kingdom. As shown by the Calabrian case during the Revolution of 1848, the memory of the martyrs was one of the privileged supports of the popular politicization at the local scale, crystallising some very often imprecise political identities. It kept its identity-building function at the beginning of the 1850s, while many liberals were exiled in Piedmont: while the liberal martyrs became founding fathers of the Italian Risorgimento, they are mainly used to illustrate the Neapolitan and Southern superiority and primacy in the Italian nation-building.