DANTESQUE APOSTOLATE. - Under this name, at the inspiration and urging of a learned man of letters from Monsampolo, Nicola Gaetani Tamburini, who in the cult of Dante wished to educate Italians to liberty, there was constituted at Ascoli in 1855, in the guise of a literary academy, a political association against the temporal power. The title and the veneration for the supreme poet recalled Mazzini, but its forms still bore the stamp of Carbonarist schemes. Such were the battle names (Ferruccio, Michelangelo, Galileo, Arnaldo, Bruto, Masaniello) of the "founding brothers," such were the rites of the meetings and the relations that bound together the members of the various provinces. Around Tamburini gathered old liberals and young students, such as a certain Selva, an employee at the delegation, a Baldacelli, of the customs, an Orazi, municipal secretary of Cestorano, a Corsini, a Palmarini, a Menghi, a De Tomassi and many others, among whom the best known was Temistocle Mariotti. The action of the D. A. was not great in the vast conspiratorial movement of the Marches, and it may be said that, when in Nov. 1857 the pontifical authority proceeded to arrest its members, it was already in fact inactive. The "Ascoli cause of lese majesty, that is, of aggregation to a secret society" closed with the sentence of 17 Dec. 1858, by which Tamburini, Baldacelli, Palmarini, Menghi and Orazi were condemned to 10 years of hard labor, the others to lesser penalties. A woman, the young Giulia Centurelli, was acquitted through the intercession of the good bishop Belgrado. Between the spring of '59 and the summer of '60 they were all pardoned.
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Alberto Maria Ghisalbeni