Agostino Bertani – physician and politician

Compassionate doctor was Garibaldi’s friend and strategist

Agostino Bertani was a hero for tending
to the wounds of Garibaldi's soldiers

Agostino Bertani, who worked with Giuseppe Mazzini and Giuseppe Garibaldi to liberate Italy, died on this day in 1886 in Rome.

He had been a surgeon in Garibaldi’s corps in the Austro-Sardinian War of 1859 and personally treated Garibaldi’s wounds after the military leader lost the Battle of Aspromonte in 1862.

Bertani became a hero to the Italian people for his work organising ambulances and medical services during Garibaldi’s campaigns and he became a close friend and strategist to the military leader.

Born in Milan in 1812, Bertani's family had many friends with liberal ideals and his mother took part in anti-Austrian conspiracies.

At the age of 23, Bertani graduated from the faculty of medicine at the Borromeo College in Pavia and became an assistant to the professor of surgery there.

He took part in the 1848 uprising in Milan and directed a military hospital for Italian casualties. He organised an ambulance service for soldiers defending Rome in 1849 and distinguished himself by his service in Genoa with Mazzini during the cholera epidemic of 1854.

In 1860 Bertani was one of the strategists who planned the attack on Sicily and Naples known as the Expedition of the Thousand.

Bertani was one of the strategists who
planned the Expedition of the Thousand

Bertani became Garibaldi’s secretary general after the occupation of Naples in 1860. While serving in this role he reorganised the police and planned the sanitary reconstruction of the city.

He organised the medical service for Garibaldi’s 40,000 and fought in the Battle of Mentana in 1867 during Garibaldi’s march on Rome, even though he had been opposed to the campaign.

Bertani became leader of the extreme left in the new Italian parliament established in 1861. He founded La Riforma, a journal advocating social reforms, and launched an inquiry into the sanitary conditions of ordinary people. It was Bertani who prepared the sanitary code adopted by the administration of Francesco Crispi.

In 1885, along with Anna Maria Mozzoni, a journalist and social reformer, he visited the anarchist Giovanni Passannante in prison. Passannante had attempted to kill King Umberto I but had failed. Originally condemned to death, his sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment.

Passannante was kept in solitary conferment in a tiny cell in Portoferraio on the island of Elba. The inhuman conditions he was kept in eventually drove him insane.

Bertani and Mozzoni reported on Passannante’s maltreatment and after an examination by doctors the anarchist was transferred to the asylum of Montelupo Fiorentino, although doctors there were unable to reverse his poor condition.

Bertani continued to serve in the Italian parliament until his death the following year at the age of 73 in Rome.

The statue of Bertani
in Milan

Travel tip:

There are streets named in honour of Agostino Bertani all over Italy and in his home town of Milan there is a monument to him in Piazza Fratelli Bandiera, near the historic gateway of Porta Venezia. In its present form, the gate dates back to the 19th century; nevertheless, its origins can be traced back to the Medieval and even the Roman walls of the city. The surrounding streets are often referred to as the Porta Venezia district.

The storming of the Roman walls at Porta Pia that enabled
Garibaldi to declare the unification of Italy complete

Travel tip:

Italy was officially declared united after crack infantry troops from Piedmont entered Rome on 20 September 1870 after briefly bombarding defending French troops. They got through Rome’s ancient walls near the gate of Porta Pia. A marble plaque commemorating the liberation of Rome marks the place. Not far away in Piazza Montecitorio is the Camera dei Deputati, Italy’s parliament, which Bertani first entered in 1861.

More reading:

The death of Garibaldi

Why Giuseppe Mazzini was the hero of Italian unification

The novel that became a symbol of the Risorgimento

Also on this day:

1762: The birth of Giovanni Aldini, the physicist thought to have given Mary Shelley the idea for Frankenstein

1926: An airship leaves Rome on an expedition to the North Pole

1991: The Moby Prince Disaster


Home

Giovanni Pascoli – poet

Painful childhood inspired great verse

Giovanni Pascoli is considered to be
one of Italy's greatest poets

Giovanni Placido Agostino Pascoli, who was regarded as the greatest Italian poet writing at the beginning of the 20th century, was born on this day in 1855 in San Mauro di Romagna, then part of the Kingdom of Sardinia.

Pascoli’s poems in Latin won prizes and he was regarded by the writer Gabriele D’Annunzio as the finest Latin poet since the Augustan age, which lasted from approximately 43 BC to AD 18 and was thought to be the golden age of Latin literature.

Although Pascoli was the fourth of ten children, his family were comfortable financially and his father, Ruggero Pascoli, was administrator of an estate of farmland on which they lived.

But when Giovanni Pascoli was just 12 years old, his father, returning from Cesena in a carriage drawn by a black and white mare, was shot and killed by an assassin hiding in a ditch at the side of the road. The mare carried on slowly and brought home the body of her master, Ruggero, but the murderer was never brought to justice.

Giovanni Pascoli’s mother died the following year and five other children in the family had also died before he became an adult.

Giovanni Pascoli (right) as a child,
pictured with his father and two brothers

In 1871 Pascoli moved to live in Rimini with some of his siblings, where he began to join in with Socialist demonstrations. He was briefly imprisoned in Bologna for preaching political anarchy after a protest against the capture of the anarchist Giovanni Passannante, who had tried to kill King Umberto I.

Pascoli composed an Ode to Passannante, but he tore it up soon after reading it during a Socialist gathering in Bologna.

He had been studying at the University of Bologna under the poet, Giosuè Carducci, but after his imprisonment he began a career in teaching, first in secondary schools and then in universities, as a professor of Greek, Latin and Italian literature.

In 1905 he was appointed to the Chair of Italian Literature at Bologna.

Pascoli’s first literary work, Myricae, was a collection of short, delicate lyrics inspired by nature and reflecting the psychological unrest of his student years.

His best work is considered to be Canti di Castelvecchio, a collection of moving songs about his sad childhood that also celebrated nature and family life.

The cover of Pascoli's book
of lyric poetry, Myricae

These were written at the home in Castelvecchio di Barga - now known as Castelvecchio Pascoli - in Tuscany that he shared with his sister Maria after 1895.

In his later years, Pascoli wrote nationalistic and historic poetry such as Poemi del Risorgimento, published in 1913. The way he focused on small things in his poetry and scaled back on the era’s grandiose language and rhetoric is thought to have contributed to the modernisation of Italian poetry.

His poems were translated and published in English in the 1920s and he also translated poems by Wordsworth, Shelley and Tennyson into Italian.

Pascoli died in 1912 at the age of 56 in Bologna.

An Italian literary award, the Pascoli Prize, was established in 1962 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of his death and his birthplace was renamed San Mauro Pascoli in 1932 in his honour.

San Mauro is also notable for the ruins of former Roman
brick furnaces discovered during digging for a canal

Travel tip:

San Mauro Pascoli, renamed to honour the poet, is a town in what is now the province of Forlì-Cesena in the Emilia-Romagna region, about 100km (62 miles) southeast of Bologna and just 7.5km (4.7 miles) from the sea. The Italian shoe designer Giuseppe Zanotti was also born there. Pascoli's family home, in what is now Via Giovanni Pascoli, is open to the public as a museum. For more information visit www.casapascoli.it. The town is also notable for the remains of Roman brick furnaces discovered during the construction of the Romagnolo Emiliano Canal.

The Casa Pascoli at Castelvecchio was left to the hamlet
of Barga in Giovanni's sister Maria's will

Travel tip:

Giovanni Pascoli’s house in the hamlet of Castelvecchio Pascoli is also now a museum dedicated to his life and work. After the poet’s death in 1912, his sister, Maria, took care of the house, faithfully preserving its structure and original furnishings. She left the house to the Municipality of Barga in her will and it has since been declared a national monument. In the chapel, which had been restored by Pascoli himself, Maria was laid to rest after her death in 1953, next to her brother.


More reading:

Giosue Carducci, the first Italian to win a Nobel Prize in Literature

Salvatore Quasimodo, the engineer whose poetry won a Nobel Prize

How Gabriele D'Annunzio combined writing with a military career

Also on this day:

The Festa di San Silvestro

1842: The birth of Belle Époque artist Giovanni Boldini

1990: The death of architect Giovanni Michelucci

Home