The wedding of Stefano Türr and Adelina Bonaparte

Hungarian General married Napoleon’s beautiful great niece

Türr switched sides after witnessing
Austrian cruelty against Italian troops

The wedding of a Hungarian soldier who fought alongside Giuseppe Garibaldi to a woman who was the great niece of Napoleon Bonaparte took place on this day in 1861 in Mantua in Lombardy.

The bridegroom was Stefano Türr - Istvan Türr in Hungarian - a soldier, revolutionary, canal architect and engineer, who is remembered in Italy for the role he played in the battle for the country’s unification.

Türr took a major part in the Expedition of the Thousand and was promoted to General, commanding Italian troops as they moved north from Sicily to Salerno. He was appointed Governor of Salerno by Garibaldi. Victor Emanuel II made him an aide de camp and entrusted him with sensitive diplomatic matters.

The bride was Adelina Bonaparte Wyse, who was a cousin of Napoleon III of France and granddaughter of Lucien Bonaparte, Napoleon I’s brother. 

Türr had been accepted into the Austrian Army at the age of 17, but while stationed in Lombardy in 1848 had witnessed the cruel reprisals taken against rebellious Italians at Monza and changed his loyalties.

In 1849 he crossed a bridge over the Ticino river and joined the Piedmont side. He was placed in charge of other Hungarian soldiers who had deserted and led them during the First Italian War of Independence.

Türr married Adelina Bonaparte
at a ceremony in Mantua

After the final Austrian victory at Novara, it was decided to abandon the Hungarian legion. But Türr’s men voted to stay together and continue to fight anyway. Many years of difficulties and disappointments were to follow for Türr, who had to move between Switzerland, France, England and Piedmont because he would have been executed as a deserter if he returned to Hungary.

During the Crimean War he raised  a force of Hungarian exiles to fight against Russia. When he was sent to an area occupied by Austria, he was arrested, court martialled and sentenced to death. There were strong British protests, even involving Queen Victoria, and instead the Austrians banished him from their territory perpetually. Türr returned to Italy to fight in the Second Italian war of Independence and joined Garibaldi’s volunteer unit. He was dubbed the ‘Fearless Hungarian’ after chasing the Austrians near Brescia and being badly wounded.

Türr’s wife, Adelina, was the daughter of Princess Maria Letizia Bonaparte, the daughter of Napoleon’s brother, Lucien. Her legal father was Sir Thomas Wyse, the British Minister to Athens, but Princess Maria Letizia had previously separated from him and she was really fathered by Captain Studholme John Hodgson, her mother’s lover.

Also in 1861, Adelina’s sister, Laetitia Marie, married Urbano Rattazzi, who served as Italian prime minister during the 1860s.

Türr was alongside Garibaldi as he launched
his Expedition of the Thousand in 1860

With the help of Adelina, Türr wrote to Prince Napoleon, the Emperor’s cousin and advisor, on behalf of the Italian cause. The prince was known to be an opponent of the policy of letting French troops preserve the Pope’s temporal power over Rome.

Victor Emmanuel of Savoy had been declared King of the newly unified Italy in 1861 by the first Italian parliament, which had also named Rome as the capital of the new kingdom, even though they had still not gained control of the city.

A French garrison had remained in Rome on the orders of Napoleon III in support of Pope Pius IX, to appease fervent French Catholics.

But in 1870, after the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war, Napoleon III had to withdraw many of his troops. Crack infantry soldiers from Piedmont led by General Raffaele Cadorna seized their chance and after a brief bombardment entered Rome through a breach in the Aurelian Walls near Porta Pia. Victor Emanuel II was able to take up residence in the Quirinale Palace, Italy was declared officially united and the Risorgimento was finally over.  

Victor Emanuel II had previously written to the Pope offering a proposal that would have allowed the Italian army to enter Rome peacefully, but the pope had rejected this.

Pope Pius IX and his successors refused to recognise the right of Italian Kings to reign over what had been formerly known as the Papal States. It was not until the Lateran Treaty of 1929 that ‘the Roman question’ was settled by establishing Vatican City as an independent state.

In 1862, Türr acquired a villa in Pallanza with a garden facing Lake Maggiore. He and his wife Adelina became popular with the local people, Türr helping labourers with donations and becoming honorary president of the Società Operaia di Pallanza, while Adelina visited children in the local orphanages. Türr and Adelina had one son, Raoul, who was born in 1865. They enjoyed long holidays at their villa, often recorded in the local newspaper, which praised Adelina’s beauty.

In the 1870s Türr became a peace activist, regularly attending Peace Congresses and saying he now detested war.

The Piazza Mantegna is at the Renaissance
heart of Mantua, where the couple were married

Travel tip:

Mantua, where Türr married Adelina, is an atmospheric old city in Lombardy, to the southeast of Milan. In the Renaissance heart of Mantua is Piazza Mantegna, where the 15th century Basilica of Sant’Andrea houses the tomb of the artist, Andrea Mantegna. The church was originally built to accommodate the large number of pilgrims who came to Mantua to see a precious relic, an ampoule containing what were believed to be drops of Christ’s blood mixed with earth. This was claimed to have been collected at the site of his crucifixion by a Roman soldier. The highlight of the city is the Renaissance Palazzo Ducale, the seat of the Gonzaga family between 1328 and 1707. The Camera degli Sposi is decorated with frescoes by Andrea Mantegna, depicting the life of Ludovico Gonzaga and his family in the 15th century. The beautiful backgrounds of imaginary cities and ruins reflect Mantegna’s love of classical architecture.

The waterfront at Pallanza on Lake Maggiore,
where Stefano Türr bought a villa

Travel tip:

Türr bought a villa at Pallanza on the shores of Lake Maggiore in Piedmont as a holiday home for himself and his wife. It had been built in the 1850s by Bernardino Branca, the inventor of Fernet Branca, with gardens facing the lake. The family spent long holidays there, but after Türr was allowed to return to Hungary, they visited less and he sold the villa in 1876. It is now called Villa Rusconi Clerici. Türr returned to visit Pallanza many times afterwards and in 1888, when he became a naturalised Italian, it was recorded on the document that he lived in Pallanza.  

Also on this day:

1887: The birth of politician Giovanni Gronchi

1890: The birth of fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli

1930: The birth of holocaust survivor Liliana Segre 

1960: Historic victory at Rome Olympics

Home

Gino Lucetti – failed assassin

Anarchist tried to kill Mussolini with grenade

Gino Lucetti was part of a substantial
anarchist presence in Carrara

Gino Lucetti, who acquired notoriety for attempting to assassinate Italy’s Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini in Rome in 1926, was born on this day in 1900.

A lifelong anarchist, part of a collective of like-minded young men and women from Carrara in Tuscany, he planned to kill Mussolini on the basis that doing so would save the lives of thousands of potential future victims of the Fascist regime.

Lucetti hatched his plot while in exile in France, where he had fled after taking a Fascist bullet in the neck following an argument in a bar in Milan, clandestinely returning several times to Carrara to finalise the details.

After enlisting the help of other anarchists, notably Steffano Vatteroni, who worked as a tinsmith in Rome, and Leandro Sorio, a waiter originally from Brescia, he returned to Rome to carry out the attack.

Vatteroni was able to obtain information about Mussolini’s movements from a clerical worker in the dictator’s Rome offices, including details of his regular motorcades through the city. These were carefully choreographed affairs in which cheering citizens lined the streets, enabling Mussolini to present an image to the world of a popular leader.

Sorio provided a penniless Lucetti with somewhere to stay in Rome while he planned the attack.

Mussolini would ride in an open-topped car,
milking the applause of the crowds

Lucetti settled on September 11 as the day he would kill Il Duce. He had observed how closely his famous Lancia car passed by the crowds and having obtained advance notice that Mussolini’s route that day would pass through the historic gateway at Porta Pia, he loitered in wait for several hours.

When the Lancia came into view, he stepped forward from the crowd and hurled one of two grenades he had in the pockets of his jacket in the direction of the car, hoping to land it at the feet of the dictator as he waved to the cheering masses.

Instead it hit the windscreen, shattering the glass but failing to explode, then bouncing off the running board and into the road.  It blew up after Mussolini’s car had gone by, the force of the blast somewhat ironically knocking Lucetti off his feet.

In the confusion that followed, Lucetti initially sheltered in a doorway in nearby Via Nomentana, but it was not long before Mussolini’s bodyguards found him.

He was beaten up on the spot, then subjected to a violent interrogation at police headquarters.

He compounded his actions by giving police a false identity, insisting he was Ermete Giovanni, from Castelnuovo Garfagnana in Tuscany, as a result of which the town near Lucca was blockaded and dozens of people arrested. Lucetti may have failed in his assassination attempt but regarded showing up the incompetence of the police as at least a small consolation.

Lucetti's grave in Carrara, bedecked in an
anarchist flag 

He stood trial in 1927, at the end of which he was sentenced to 30 years in jail. Vatteroni and Sorio received sentences of around 20 years.

Lucetti spent 17 years in a prison on Santo Stefano, one of the Pontine islands off the coast between Rome and Naples.

He died on the island of Ischia, in the Bay of Naples, in September, 1943, in circumstances that are not clear.  Some accounts say he escaped from Santo Stefano, others that he was transferred to Ischia.

Either way, he was killed during shelling of the island, either by American forces, or by German positions on neighbouring Procida.

Lucetti’s body was returned to Carrara, where he is buried alongside other anarchists, including Goliardo Fiaschi, who was a prominent figure in the Italian resistance in the Second World War, and the Giuseppe Pinelli, who fell from a fourth-floor window of the Milan police headquarters after being taken in for questioning about the Piazza Fontana bombing in 1969, and was later immortalised in Dario Fo’s play, Accidental Death of an Anarchist.

The Michelangelo-designed gate at Porta Pia

Travel tip:

Porta Pia is a gateway in Rome’s ancient Aurelian Walls, designed by Michelangelo and the artist’s final architectural project before his death in 1564. It acquired a special place in Italian history as a result of a section of wall immediately adjoining it being breached in September 1870, enabling forces led by Piedmontese General Raffaele Cadorno to storm the city, overwhelming what remained of the Papal garrisons and completing the unification of the country.

The mountains around Carrara sometimes appear
to be covered in snow even in summer

Travel tip:

Carrara, famous for its blue and white marble, sits in a valley that descends from the Apuane Alps in Tuscany, in which the natural white of the peaks often convinces visitors they are covered with snow even in the summer. Marble has been quarried in the area for more than 2,000 years. Michelangelo was said to have been so taken with the purity of the stone that he spent eight months there choosing blocks for specific projects.  Nowadays, Carrara is a city of almost 70,000 inhabitants.  It became a hotbed of anarchists in the last 19^th and early 20^th century, largely because of the radical views of the quarry workers.

Home

Victor Emmanuel II dies

Christian burial for the King excommunicated by the Pope

Victor Emmanuel II: a portrait from 1860 

Victor Emmanuel II, the first King of Italy, died on this day in 1878 in Rome.

He was buried in a tomb in the Pantheon in Rome and was succeeded by his son, who became Umberto I, King of Italy.

Victor Emmanuel II was allowed to be buried in the Pantheon by Pope Pius IX, even though he had previously excommunicated him from the Catholic Church.

Before becoming King of Italy, Victor Emmanuel, as King of Sardinia-Piedmont, had secretly encouraged Garibaldi in the conquest of Sicily and Naples. He had then led his Piedmontese army into papal territory to link up with Garibaldi, despite the threat of excommunication.

In his quest to become King of a fully united Italy, Victor Emmanuel achieved two notable military triumphs. He managed to acquire the Veneto after linking up with Bismark’s Prussia in a military campaign in 1866. Also, after the withdrawal of the French occupying troops, his soldiers were able to enter Rome through a breach in the walls at Porta Pia and take over the city.

A painting by Sebastiano de Albertis shows Garibaldi hailing
Victor Emmanuel II as King of Italy at Teano, near Naples 

This had antagonised Pius IX so much that he refused all overtures from the new King, when he attempted a reconciliation.

The first King of Italy had been born Vittorio Emanuele Maria Alberto Eugenio Ferdinando Tommaso in 1820 in Turin.

In 1842 Victor Emmanuel married his cousin, Adelaide of Austria, and was styled as the Duke of Savoy, before becoming King of Sardinia-Piedmont after his father, Charles Albert, abdicated the throne following a humiliating military defeat by the Austrians at the Battle of Novara.

After he was proclaimed King of a united Italy in 1861 by the country’s new Parliament, the monarch styled himself Victor Emmanuel II, perhaps implying that Italy had always been ruled by the House of Savoy. This immediately provoked criticism from some factions.

Pope Pius IX

Victor Emmanuel II could trace his ancestry back to Victor Emmanuel I, who had been King of Sardinia from 1802 until his death in 1824.

Victor Emmanuel II had become King of Sardinia in 1849 after his father’s abdication. His father had succeeded a distant cousin to become King of Sardinia in 1831.

The Kingdom of Sardinia is considered to be the legal predecessor to the Kingdom of Italy.

As King of Sardinia, Victor Emmanuel II had appointed Count Camillo Benso of Cavour as Prime Minister of Sardinia-Piedmont, who had then masterminded a clever campaign to put him on the throne of a united Italy.

Victor Emmanuel II had become the symbol of the Risorgimento, the Italian unification movement in the 19th century.  He had supported Garibaldi’s Expedition of the Thousand in 1860, which resulted in the fall of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, giving him control over the southern part of the country.  But when he ascended the throne there were still two major territories left outside the new Kingdom, the Veneto and Rome.

The scene outside the Quirinale Palace at the start of Victor
Emmanuel II's funeral procession

He acquired the Veneto in 1866 and, in 1870, after the French had withdrawn from Rome, he set up the new Italian capital there and chose as his residence the Palazzo del Quirinale.

The Italian people called him Padre della Patria - Father of the Fatherland.

Travel tip:

Porta Pia is a gate in Rome’s ancient walls, named after Pope Pius lV, who commissioned Michelangelo to design it just before his death in Rome in 1564. You will find it at the end of Via XX Settembre, which goes off Piazza di San Bernardo, not far from the Quirinale Palace, which Victor Emmanuel II had chosen as his residence, and the Trevi fountain. A marble and brass monument, the Monumento al Bersagliere, commemorating the liberation of Rome, was put up near the place where the Italian troops found a way through the walls.

The Pantheon has been standing in the Piazza della Rotonda
 since AD118 and is one of Rome's finest ancient buildings

Travel tip:

Victor Emmanuel II is buried in the Pantheon in Piazza della Rotonda in Rome. Considered to be Rome’s best preserved ancient building, the Pantheon was built in AD 118 on the site of a previous building dating back to 27 BC. It was consecrated as a church in the seventh century and many other important people are buried there, including Victor Emmanuel II’s son, Umberto I, and his wife, Queen Margherita.

More reading:

How the capture of Rome completed Italian unification

First Italian parliament convenes to proclaim Victor Emmanuel II King of Italy

Victor Emmanuel I - King of Sardinia

Also on this day:

1878: Umberto I is proclaimed Italy's new monarch

(Picture credit: Pantheon by Klaus F via Wikimedia Commons)

Home

Capture of Rome

Troops enter the capital in final act of unification

Bersaglieri soldiers storm through the walls of Rome in
this 1880 painting by Carlo Ademollo

Crack infantry soldiers from Piedmont entered Rome and completed the unification of Italy on this day in 1870.

Rome had remained under French control even after the first Italian parliament had proclaimed Victor Emmanuel of Savoy the King of Italy in 1861.

The Italian parliament had declared Rome the capital of the new Kingdom of Italy even though it had not yet taken control of the city.

A French garrison had remained in Rome on the orders of Napoleon III of France in support of Pope Pius IX.

An 1860 portrait of
 Victor Emmanuel II

But after the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war, Napoleon III had to withdraw many of his troops. Italian soldiers from the Bersaglieri regiments in Piedmont led by General Raffaele Cadorna seized their chance and after a brief bombardment were able to enter Rome through a breach in the Aurelian Walls near Porta Pia.

King Victor Emmanuel II was then able to take up residence in the Quirinale Palace and Italy was declared officially united.

The date of 20 September, which marked the end of the Risorgimento, the long process of Italian unification, is commemorated in practically every town in Italy with a street named Via XX Settembre.

Porta Pia, designed by Michelangelo in 1564, stands at the
end of Via XX Settembre, not far from the Villa Borghese

Travel tip:

Porta Pia is a gate in Rome’s ancient walls, named after Pope Pius lV, who commissioned Michelangelo to design it just before his death in Rome in 1564. You will find it at the end of Via XX Settembre, which goes off Piazza di San Bernardo, not far from the Quirinale Palace and the Trevi Fountain. A marble and brass monument - the Monumento al Bersagliere - commemorating the liberation of Rome was erected near the place the Italian troops breached the walls, opposite the external façade of the gate.

Travel tip:

One of Italy's many Via XX Settembre can be found in the beautiful city of Bergamo in northern Italy. Bergamo's Via XX Settembre is one of the main thoroughfares in the lower town and has been dubbed ‘the shopping street’ by the locals because of the wealth of smart shops that line both sides, from department stores, book and gift shops to jewellery and fashion stores. Top names gracing the elegant street include Calvin Klein, Stefanel, Benetton, Max Mara, Luisa Spagnoli, Marina Rinaldi and Sisley.

Home