The canon had won his suit; it remained for him to survive his triumph. It is the misfortune of lawsuits over money that judgment, in terminating a dispute, does not always terminate wrath. In Rome, in September 1749, Antonio Camardella accosted Donato Antonio Morgigni with a weapon. He came no longer to wrangle over the interest upon a loan. In the words preserved by his interrogation, the house from which he had been cast out returned incessantly: it was the source and, so he believed, the justification of all things. The shot was fired. From that instant, the quarrel between two men passed under another jurisdiction, where one could no longer seize merely four walls.
The House and the Debt
Camardella was a native of the Kingdom of Naples settled in Rome. He was known in the Via di Monserrato, where he dealt in old iron. That trade deals in objects of a peculiar eloquence: locks unfastened from their doors, tools bereft of their craftsman, fragments of a property that has ceased to belong to anyone. Nothing warrants attributing to him a philosophy of his wares. Yet his own house was soon to bring him back to this most material experience of possession: that what one holds today may tomorrow pass to another.
A tenement brought as dowry by his wife, repairs, a loan contracted from the canon: the affair had been forged in these ordinary dealings. Expenses mounted; relations soured. Morgigni invoked in particular an encumbrance burdening the house, of which he claimed not to have been apprised. He prevailed. Camardella offered violent resistance to eviction. His conviction of being persecuted constituted no additional title of property; it transformed, however, the creditor into a mortal enemy.
This passage from obligation to vengeance has reached us in the very language of the accused. Questioned after the murder, Camardella reduced his deed to a resolve to make an end of what he termed a vexation. He had made the canon the sole author of his ruin. Yet between the right a man imagines he possesses and the flesh he resolves to strike, there remains the entire expanse of a choice. The lost house explains the quarrel; it does not raise the fallen man from the dust.
What the Witnesses Could Discern
The homicide now demanded judicial inspection. The corpse was examined; the medical parlance of the trial retained its Latin for the wounds, while common speech returned when the clothing had to be described. The firearm itself unsettled this learned solemnity: it was designated by its operation, burning and rending, then by the leaden pellets it discharged. Beneath the ceremonial phrasing, the matter at hand was to establish a simple and terrible fact: one man had received another man’s blow.
Around this material certainty, the inquest had yet to gather the testimony of eyes. Would those who had caught sight of the author of the crime be able to recognise him? The question appears simple when read from afar. It is far less so for one summoned to convert an instant of terror into a judicial identification. Two witnesses, a surgical practitioner and a writing clerk, replied with assurance. Others wavered: domestic servants, a fruiterer’s wife, and an ecclesiastic did not all promise an unhesitating recognition.
These hesitations efface neither the dead nor the declarations of Camardella. They merely prevent the trial from resembling a procession of omniscient observers. Certain persons had seen; they did not profess on that account to have retained everything. In the phrasing transcribed from the depositions, their reservations endure. Justice demanded a name; memory answered at times that it was unequal to the task. One must grant this modesty to the witnesses, who possessed at least the virtue of not manufacturing a certainty to satisfy the magistrate.
Camardella, for his part, took no refuge in a convenient denial of the feud. His own account tethered the shot to the canon and the eviction. The words uttered before the discharge, as he reported them, lent the murder the character of a retort. But a retort of this nature also destroys the possibility of reply. Morgigni would plead his debt no more; his corpse had become an exhibit in the proceedings brought against his adversary.
The Condemned Man Refuses His Final Role
The sentence brought Camardella to the gallows upon the Piazza di Ponte Sant’Angelo. Yet the pontifical power expected of this death something other than the execution of a decree. The condemned man was to acknowledge his guilt, accept the ministrations of religion, and offer the spectators the spectacle of a reconciled soul. The end might then be set forth as an act of reparation: society punished the crime, the Church redeemed the criminal, and the populace returned to its labours with a lesson properly concluded.
Camardella disarranged this conclusion. He demanded vengeance instead of consenting to the contrition proffered to him. This refusal made so profound an impression that religious accounts and popular tradition alike preserved its memory. The preacher Leonardo da Porto Maurizio intervened at his side. The account of his life published at the close of the century relates that the execution was deferred until nightfall; the exhortations continued without obtaining the hoped-for change of heart. The reprieve granted produced no such scene.
The gallows thus remained standing, the condemned man living, and speech continued its work about him. Here was a struggle wherein the contending forces were not of the same nature. The authorities could dispose of his body; they could not wrest from his lips a sincere assent by the mere force of a command. They wished him to sue for pardon. He persisted in his vengeance. His obstinacy did not render the murder just, but it stripped the ceremony of the consent that would have softened its aspect.
He was hanged. The volume devoted to the preacher affirms that his last resistance endured beneath the very cord. After his death, Leonardo addressed the multitude on the subject of final impenitence. A man had died refusing the conclusion that had been prepared for him; another was now obliged to explain that defiance to the living. The sentence had received its execution. The affair was now entering upon a second existence.
The Name That Remained in the Street
Succeeding generations turned Camardella into a proverb for stubbornness. His name became corrupted into Gammardella, with that casual liberty cities take with those they have adopted. It no longer designated merely the assassin of a canon: it became a turn of phrase to reproach another for recalcitrance, excesses, or sheer ill will. The victim faded behind an expression. It is a frequent injustice of criminal fame: the dead provides the tragedy, the murderer carries off the name.
In 1830, Giuseppe Gioachino Belli devoted sonnets to this memory. In one, a father made of the execution an edifying lesson for his child; in the other, the refusal of the condemned man became a biting satire upon justice and sanctity. This father and child belong to the poem, not to the records of 1749. The popular voice fashioned by Belli struck straight at what continued to scandalise: a man had chosen to wrangle to his dying breath rather than play the penitent.
The editor Luigi Morandi later sought to clarify the circumstances of this history. He was forced, however, to admit that he had failed to find a printed relation announced in 1749. For certain cruelties he suspected had been employed to extract a conversion, he relied on tradition and other executions. Remembrance had already altered the facts. In like manner, the rumour making the Camardella case a decisive impediment to the canonisation of the preacher exceeded what the documents allowed one to assert.
What is most solid requires no such embellishments: a debt, a contested eviction, a gunshot, witnesses of varying certainty, a sentence, and an enduring refusal. A house had stood at the heart of the strife; there remained of it, in the Roman memory, neither facade nor key. What traversed the century was a voice calling for vengeance when all awaited a prayer. And behind that voice, well-nigh forgotten, lingered the silence of Morgigni, who had won his suit, but had not won the right to live.