The pistol shot had missed the Cardinal. That error of a few inches was destined to fill prison cells for nearly two years. On 23 July 1826, in Ravenna, Agostino Rivarola returned to his residence alive; Canon Ignazio Muti, who accompanied him, had taken the ball meant for the prelate. In streets still occupied by the festivities of Saint Apollinaris, the rumour spread swifter than the first reliable intelligence. An attempt had been made upon the life of the man sent to crush the secret societies. Henceforth, authors and accomplices had to be uncovered, and, for the pontifical government, the far-flung ramifications of an enemy that wore no uniform.
A Man at the Carriage Door
Rivarola had left the Romagna with a judicial decree whose sheer tally demonstrated its reach: in July 1825, five hundred and eight individuals had been struck by various penalties or restrictions. The capital sentences had been commuted, but families bore the enduring weight of imprisonments, surveillance, and the hardships of living under constant suspicion. The Carboneria, composed of clandestine groups of disparate ambitions, had become for the authorities the name of a universal peril. For its initiates and their kin, the Cardinal embodied repression in its most concrete form.
A year later, the feast day of Ravenna’s patron saint offered the opportunity to approach him. Primo Uccellini, a future memoirist who was himself detained during this repression, relates that a first attack had been contemplated upon leaving a concert. The crowd rendered the design impracticable. The Cardinal’s carriage was shadowed to the Palazzo Rasponi; the conspirators awaited his departure. In the version handed down by Uccellini, a man took up his station opposite the residence, in the gloom of an entryway.
The sentence published in 1828 in turn fixes the decisive moment: the Cardinal was entering the carriage beside Muti; a servant was shutting one door; the gunman appeared at the other side. The shot struck the prelate’s companion. The assailants fled, abandoning weapons that were subsequently recovered in part. Rivarola was unhurt. Muti was grievously wounded; his eventual death would be attributed to this injury in Uccellini’s account. The confusion of that first second must not efface the distinction between the intended victim and the man who was struck.
The Cardinal subsequently departed the Romagna. Yet his survival did not restore peace: the search for the perpetrators was to assume the form of a special commission, directed by the prelate Filippo Invernizzi and Colonel Giacinto Ruvinetti. The newly instituted tribunal was tasked not merely with unravelling the assassination attempt, but also other crimes that had remained without satisfactory judicial explanation. A carriage door opened in the night had led to a far vaster docket.
Three Crimes in a Single Sentence
The first of these other crimes dated back to 5 April 1824. Count Domenico Matteucci, the provincial director of police, had been attacked while knocking at the door of a house where he customarily spent part of the evening. Shots fired into his back had killed him. The commission would lay this assassination at the feet of Angelo Ortolani and Gaetano Rambelli, imputing to it a political motive: hatred of the office and the spirit of faction.
The third murder was of more recent date. On 15 March 1827, Mosè Forti had been shot dead, likewise from behind. The judges designated Luigi Zanoli and Gaetano Montanari as the executioners, Abramo Isacco Forti as the instigator, and retained a charge of complicity against the latter’s brother, Beniamino. The suspected membership of the accused in clandestine societies explained why this case was joined to the preceding ones. Yet that alone did not demonstrate that the murder of Mosè answered to the same political design as the assault upon the Cardinal.
The names thus intersected without the acts being identical. Ortolani worked at the public bakehouse; Zanoli was a shoemaker; Montanari, a barber; Rambelli, a hatter. Abramo Isacco Forti was a merchant. The legal proceedings united these men in a single cause, and posterity was later to join them under a single designation. But the sentence did not indiscriminately accuse every man of having fired upon Rivarola. It distributed responsibilities across the three crimes, adding further, against Ortolani, the accusation of prior attempts at poisoning through bread.
These accusations formed the narrative of the commission. Their publication does not afford us a transparent view of each separate scene: it asserts that the accused were convicted, invokes in particular the confessions of Zanoli, and refers to the other proofs in the dossier. Alongside this judicial certitude, the memoirs of the prisoners preserved an entirely different picture of the means employed to loosen tongues, and of the favours promised to those who informed.
In the Corridors of San Vitale
Uccellini recounts that the scent had been picked up following the arrest of a man involved in a brawl. The latter allegedly offered information in exchange for his liberty; an influential member of the clandestine societies, Stefano Piavi, is said to have contributed subsequently to the disclosures. The memoirist had not witnessed all these negotiations and at times himself notes his uncertainty. What he did see without intermediary was the outcome: arrests multiplied, the ordinary prisons could no longer suffice, and the former convent of San Vitale received fresh contingents of captives.
He entered it in October 1827. His cell had a window almost entirely blocked with wooden planks. Sentinels watched every movement; a lantern allowed this vigilance to continue through the night. From his confinement, Uccellini could not observe the interrogations of all the other prisoners. Yet he heard the footfalls in the passages, knew of the absences, learned of the departures. The life of the corridor became a poor and anxious means of divining the progress of the inquest.
The government encouraged formal abjurations of secret societies, so-called spontaneous declarations, and denunciations. Uccellini judged this policy more destructive to the Carboneria than imprisonment alone: it severed companions, cast suspicion upon any liberty obtained, and confronted every man with the possibility that the other had spoken. His narrative bears the anger of an opponent. It nonetheless leaves no doubt as to what rendered the inquest so formidable to the detainees: the fate of a man might hang upon words he had never heard.
Five Names, One Morning
The commission delivered its sentence on 26 April 1828; the printed summary was published on 9 May. Ortolani, Zanoli, Montanari, Rambelli, and Abramo Isacco Forti were condemned to death. Beniamino Forti received seven years at the galleys; Angelo Branzanti, five years’ imprisonment. Two other defendants were released under police restrictions. The text asserts that a defence counsel had been heard both orally and in writing. Liberal critiques, conversely, focused on the absence of genuine guarantees, the choice of counsel, and the impossibility of producing exculpatory evidence. These two assertions cannot be resolved by erasing one with a stroke of the pen.
On 13 May, Uccellini heard the tolling of the bell that announced executions. The cell doors had been bolted; the corridors were nearly silent. A neighbour asked him what that knell signified. It was, as we learn from his memoirs, the brother of one of the condemned. He who could not see the square already knew, by the bell, that a death was at hand; he did not yet necessarily know which one.
The wait dragged on past midday. The five men were hanged. Uccellini subsequently learned that Rambelli and Forti had resisted the religious exhortations accompanying the preparation for the scaffold. His testimony concerning these final disputes derived from intelligence gathered after the fact; his own experience was that of confinement, of the lingering tolling, and of the return of the turnkeys. When the distributions resumed, he was unable to eat. The execution was over for the administration, but the morning endured in the cells.
The five dead passed into a collective memory of persecution; the imputed acts were simplified, and the names of the victims receded. Yet three separate affairs remained: a police official assassinated before a door, a canon struck down inside a carriage, and a man slain by contract according to the decree. Bringing them together had given the trial its power. Distinguishing them today restores to each his true place within the tragedy—and serves as a reminder that a political conviction may contain very real corpses, without ever exempting us from examining how their authors were named.