Upon his breast they had hung a placard proclaiming him impious. He was praying.
This discord accompanied Agesilao Milano to the very foot of the gallows. The authorities sought to display a soldier who had betrayed his king, his oath, and his God; the condemned man, in his final protestations, united religion, fatherland, and liberty. The priests walking beside him could not ignore what lay before their eyes. The man whom the ceremony delivered over to public abhorrence was entreating their spiritual succour and receiving it with a fervour that unsettled the orchestrated spectacle.
Five days earlier, on the 8th of December 1856, a military review had nearly cost Ferdinand II his life. At Capodichino, near Naples, the Third Battalion of Chasseurs was parading before the sovereign. Milano broke ranks and threw himself upon him. He struck with his bayonet; an element of the saddle-trappings blunted the blow. The king was wounded, though his life was not immediately imperilled. An officer threw down the assailant, and the men seized him.
Ferdinand ordered the review to proceed. This composure answered a political purpose as much as a military one: the ceremony was to reassert dominion over the ground where a soldier had just ruptured the established order. The ranks closed once more. Milano, now a prisoner, was parted forever from the army whose uniform had allowed him to draw near to the man he meant to kill.
He hailed from San Benedetto Ullano, in the Calabria of the Italo-Albanian communities. He had studied, read the authors, and composed verses. The young man whom the first official accounts attempted to reduce to a vicious nature was one of intellectual breeding, formed convictions, and acquaintance with the trials of repression. In 1848, he had taken part in the insurrectionary combats. The constitution promised and then repudiated by Ferdinand remained the core of his wrath.
Imprisonment, an amnesty, and police surveillance had occupied the ensuing years. When he entered military service in 1856, he brought with him a history that the administration had failed to discern beneath the guise of an ordinary soldier. The testimonies of his superiors were even to attest to his good conduct. This proved one of the embarrassments of the trial: outward discipline had not betrayed the resolve maturing behind it.
Following the attempt, the investigators cast about for a conspiracy. The king had not been struck down by some stranger upon a highway, but by one of the very men appointed to march before him. It was imperative to discover how he had entered the corps, who had recommended him, and what his comrades might have known. Letters were impounded; former acquaintances were once more cast into the light of suspicious associations.
Milano maintained that he had acted alone. This assertion shielded those whose company he had kept; it likewise answered to the manner in which he conceived his deed. He had no intention of presenting a fault committed under the sway of a superior, but a personal verdict passed upon a king whom he accused of having betrayed his pledges. He did not ask that the man be separated from his gesture. He wished the world to understand why he had bound them together.
The tidings circulated at the outset were, however, less scrupulous than the inquest on several counts. It was announced that he had been expelled from his college for misconduct. A diplomatic dispatch penned in Naples after the proceedings noted that this version had had to be amended. The same observer remarked upon the favourable testimonies regarding his service. While condemning the outrage, he nonetheless observed that the official portrait of the culprit had preceded any verification of his antecedents.
The council of war convened a few days after the bayonet thrust. The defence was entrusted to an advocate who endeavoured to have an impairment of reason acknowledged—a passion that had grown irresistible. This was a path toward life: a man so dominated by his idea as to have his free will extinguished might cease to be that fully responsible criminal whose hanging the prosecution demanded.
Milano declined this succour at the price it appeared to exact. He thanked his counsel, then reaffirmed the conscious deliberate nature of his choice. Accounts of the council depict him entreating the judges to convey to the king an invitation to visit his provinces, that he might observe for himself the condition of his subjects. The accused thus drew the court back to the Calabria whence he came. His judges were investigating the circumstances of an assassination attempt; he spoke to them of the conditions that, in his eyes, had rendered it necessary.
This intransigence opened no avenue to royal clemency. He was sentenced to death by hanging, accompanied by military degradation and an aggravated ceremony of public exposure. The punishment was not merely to extinguish life. It was designed to unmake, before the gathered troops, the uniform, the honour, and the person of him who had broken ranks.
During the vigil, rival narratives already contested his final night. Sympathetic writings imputed to him the grandeur of a martyr; opponents of regicide denounced the crime without always defending the manner of its punishment. The dispatch of the Count of Groppello to Cavour, sent a few days following the execution, preserves this remarkable distinction. The initial horror of the attempt, he wrote in substance, had not vanished; it had mingled with compassion at the sight of the condemned man’s demeanour and the rigours that encompassed him.
On the 13th of December, Milano was led to his death near the Porta Capuana. He requested the comforts of religion. He was degraded; his military attire gave way to the prescribed dark garments. The placard converted his body into a proclamation. Before the assembled soldiers, the authorities had wished to render visible the chasm dividing the loyal subject from the man surrendered to the executioner.
Yet the condemned man did not play his allotted part. The testimonies of the day record his steadfastness, his prayers, and the profound impression produced by an agonizing execution. The diplomat himself observed that the populace had not pelted him with the insults that might have been expected. A penalty intended to fix reprobation had instead rendered pity possible. The monarchy had preserved its sovereign; it no longer held complete mastery over the meaning of the soldier’s death.
Arrests continued across Calabria. Kinsmen, former fellow students, and persons suspected of liberal leanings were pursued. The insistence upon a solitary undertaking did not shield Milano’s native circle. The death by which he had hoped to offer an example furnished the police with quite another: around the culprit, the ordinary bonds of blood and memory could serve to warrant renewed inquisitions.
In 1860, when Garibaldi entered upon the final phase of the kingdom’s conquest, the name of Milano shifted in the scale of memory. He was acclaimed as a hero and a martyr; a pension was voted for his family. The Kingdom of Italy, however, did not accord this promise the full measure of its performance. Tributes travelled with greater ease than relief.
The bayonet had not slain Ferdinand. The gallows had not buried Milano. Between the placard of infamy and the exalted name, there remained a man of twenty-six years, the convictions that had brought him to seek blood, and a family left exposed in the wake of his demise. The cortege had traversed Naples in the space of a few hours. The meaning of that passage was to continue changing hands.