Anelli, Luigi

ANELLI, LUIGI. - Priest and historian, b. at Lodi on 17 Jan. 1813, d. at Milan on 19 Jan. 1890. He embraced the ecclesiastical career and was ordained a priest in 1835. A convinced republican, in 1848 he was part of the provisional government of Lombardy, opposing the law of 12 May, which decreed the fusion with Piedmont. He then emigrated to Nice, where he wrote a Storia d'Italia dal 1814 al 1850 (2 vols., 1856), later continued up to 1867 (6 vols., 1864-68). Having returned to his homeland in 1859, the college of Lodi invited him as its deputy to the Chamber for the VII legislature. In the session of 28 May 1860 A. delivered a most violent speech against the cession of Nice and Savoy to France, a speech that provoked lively incidents because of its attacks on Cavour's policy of bargaining, and whose full text appeared only in Il Diritto. Having withdrawn, therefore, from public life, he spent his last years until his death in Nice and Milan, dedicated to historical and philosophical studies, in a liberal sense however and ever more advanced against the Church and many religious truths. For this reason his anonymous work Storia della Chiesa per un vecchio cattolico italiano (1872) was placed on the Index in 1876; and the other posthumous work I riformatori del sec. XVI (1891) appeared even worse, a jumble of stale dogmatic, theological and historical errors (cf. I. Rinieri, in La Civiltà Cattolica, [1892, I], p. 675 ff.; [1892, II], p. 524 ff.), which was placed on the Index in 1892.