ANELLI, LUIGI

ANELLI, LUIGI. – Priest and historian, b. in Lodi on 17 January 1813, d. in Milan on 19 January 1890. He entered 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 union with Piedmont. He then went into exile in Nice, where he wrote a Storia d'Italia dal 1814 al 1850 (2 vols., 1856), subsequently continued to 1867 (6 vols., 1864–68). Having returned to his homeland in 1859, the constituency of Lodi sent him as its deputy to the Chamber for the Seventh Legislature. At the sitting of 28 May 1860, A. delivered a most vehement 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 complete text appeared only in Il Diritto. Riti-

Having consequently withdrawn from public life, he spent his final years, until his death, in Nizza and Milan, devoted to historical and philosophical studies, though from a liberal standpoint and increasingly in opposition to the Church and to many religious truths. His anonymous work Storia della Chiesa per un vecchio cattolico italiano (1872) was therefore placed on the Index in 1876; and the other posthumous work, I riformatori del sec. XVI (1891), appeared even worse: a mass of stale dogmatic, theological, and historical errors (cf. I. Rinieri, in La Civiltà Cattolica, [1892, I], p. 675 ff.; [1892, II], p. 524 ff.), and was placed on the Index in 1892.

BIBLI: G. B. De Capitani, L'ab. L. A., Milano 1890; A. Ottolini, L'abate L. A., in La Lombardia nel Ris. Ital., 6–7 (from December 1921 to March 1922), pp. 68–96; F. Gabotto, Di una prima edizione della «Storia d'Italia dal 1814» di L. A., in Il Risore. Ital., 13 (1920), pp. 1–13; L. Fiorini, Saggio sulle dottrine politiche dell'ab. L. A. da Lodi, in Annali di Scienze politiche, 4 (1931), pp. 117–41 and 219–47.