One evening, the two condemned men arrived at Massimo d'Azeglio’s residence alongside several companions, possessed of hearty appetites. Their host had already dined; the table had to be reset, ham served, an omelette prepared, and wine poured. He derived but meager pleasure from this untimely visit. A year later, he saw them once more upon the Piazza del Popolo, beneath the blade of the guillotine. In his memoirs, that troublesome collation and the public execution stand side by side with terrifying immediacy: the young men one merely wished would depart had become those to whom no tomorrow would ever be granted.
D'Azeglio was chiefly acquainted with Leonida Montanari, a physician from Rocca di Papa. He admired the man’s vivacity, courage, and conversation. He recalled having once discovered him absorbed in reading Machiavelli, precisely at the chapter devoted to conspiracies. In hindsight, this recollection assumed the solemn weight of a premonition. Montanari had studied the perils of clandestine designs; yet he entangled himself in an enterprise wherein mutual suspicion between comrades culminated in an attempt at murder.
Angelo Targhini, the son of a cook in the service of Pius VII, belonged to the very same circle. His past already weighed heavily upon his shoulders. A prior conviction for the homicide of Alessandro Corsi, committed in 1819, had seen him cast into prison. The sentence of 1825 would attribute his initiation into secret societies to that incarceration, followed upon his return to Rome by the organization of a Carbonari lodge. The prosecution portrayed him as an authoritarian leader; his questioned accomplices ascribed to him an imperious desire for command that could brook no desertion.
The society brought together men of widely disparate stations: a physician, students, clerks, a man of law, and individuals without steady employment. Though they might share an aversion to the papal government, they shared neither the same audacity, nor the same grudges, nor indeed the same conception of the end to be attained. Certain members drifted away. Within a forbidden association, an adherent who ceases to attend does not merely leave a seat vacant. He carries away names, clandestine meeting places, and whispered words that his fellows would give anything to recall.
Two such men aroused the suspicions of the lodge. Emilio Pontini was one of them. Had he truly betrayed his former brethren to the authorities? Even D'Azeglio, who shows little indulgence toward the conspirators, maintains the alternative: he had turned traitor, or they merely believed he had. Between those two possibilities, a human life could easily be lost. Terror of the papal police served to transform an uneasy doubt into a formal accusation, and that accusation into a private death sentence. Those who denounced the arbitrary rule of the government faithfully replicated its mechanisms within their own circle.
The judicial ruling allows one to trace that evening of June 1825 as reconstructed by the prosecution. Targhini sought out Pontini at his home, drew him into a tavern where they drank together, and then accompanied him into the street. Nothing in this friendly guise betrayed the impending assault. In the vicinity of Sant'Andrea della Valle, according to the judgment, Montanari lay in wait and struck the passerby in the flank. Subsequent accounts do not all agree upon whose hand delivered the blow; the exact share of guilt became, in itself, a matter of fierce contention.
Pontini survived. This circumstance, almost eclipsed by the subsequent fame of the two condemned men, altered the entire course of the enterprise. The man marked for perpetual silence was now able to speak. The police soon traced the conspirators and uncovered their connections. The society, which had believed it was safeguarding its secrets by chastising a defector, had through this very violence exposed itself to the roundups it sought to avert. A vengeance intended as a shield had delivered the entire group to the magistrate.
Another visit, paid at almost the very same hour, figured prominently in the dossier. Luigi Spadoni and Pompeo Garofolini had repaired to the lodging of a second former companion. One waited in the street, while the other attempted to entice him outside. The man, indisposed, was taking a footbath; he refused to follow them. The special commission linked this visit to the assault upon Pontini, viewing it as a coordinated undertaking. That trifling domestic circumstance had sufficed to preserve a man from an encounter that might well have proved fatal. It would weigh heavily in the political reading of the conspiracy.
On the 21st of November, a special commission convened under the presidency of Tommaso Bernetti, Governor of Rome and Director-General of Police, sat in judgment upon six accused men. The dossier joined the strike delivered to Pontini with the capital crime of lèse-majesté. The affair thus exceeded the bounds of violence committed against an individual: it called into question a prohibited faction and challenged the sovereign authority of the Supreme Pontiff. An advocate for the indigent submitted grounds of defense, both orally and in writing, as the printed text of the sentence attests. Yet the proceedings remained those of an extraordinary tribunal of state, summoned to make an example.
Targhini and Montanari were condemned to death; Spadoni and Garofolini to the galleys for life; Ludovico Gasperoni and Sebastiano Ricci to ten years’ imprisonment. While the graduation of penalties distinguished the degrees of culpability, the printing and public posting of the verdict throughout the Papal States invested the judgment with an exemplary, collective significance. It was intended that every subject should know the cost of frequenting such circles and of translating their clandestine threats into deeds.
It was a Holy Year: the capital thronged with pilgrims, even as the suppression of secret societies absorbed the full energies of the government of Leo XII. The solemnities of religion had in no wise suspended the rigors of political retribution.
On the 23rd of November 1825, the two men were conducted to the Piazza del Popolo. D'Azeglio recalled a prolonged vigil within an improvised chapel, the friars importuning them to accept the sacraments, and their unwavering refusal. The execution was carried out. He did not deduce from this final scene an innocence he never believed they possessed; rather, he saw in it a contradiction that moved him to indignation. The very power that sought to obtain their conversion determined the exact hour beyond which repentance would forever be impossible.
His testimony does not grant an equal measure of sympathy to both men. Montanari remains in his eyes the promising young physician led astray to his destruction; Targhini becomes the sinister genius of the plot. Other memoirs have contested this overly convenient division between the misguided youth and the depraved corrupter. Once the dead were elevated into political martyrs, their characters were disputed with the same fervor that had attended the legal definition of their crime. Partisans of the regime dwelled upon the cowardly ambush; its adversaries invoked the extraordinary commission, the scaffold, and the intent to terrorize the populace.
Their memory ultimately took possession of the very square where authority had sought to eradicate them. A commemorative tablet was affixed there in 1909. Between posthumous homage and official condemnation, Pontini risked being reduced once more to a mere incidental figure. Yet he had been a living man, enticed from his threshold under the guise of fellowship. The entire tragedy resides also in the crossing of that doorway: the trust bestowed, the blow sustained, the survival that thwarted a secret design, and then two lives extinguished in the name of an authority determined to have the final word.