Of a deeply Catholic family, of difficult temperament, with an authoritarian and military mentality, averse to any accommodating understanding in civil affairs, he was not always successful in carrying out certain assignments in which, alongside the duties proper to his rank, there were broader administrative, social, political, and even diplomatic tasks, in particularly complex and delicate moments. This was particularly evident in the harsh repression of the lamentable and ill-considered Palermo uprisings of autumn 1866, which, through low anticlerical maneuvers, placed him in serious difficulties with the clergy, wrongly accused en masse of supporting the rebels, and harshly struck at his most distinguished and excellent men.
Nor did the conduct of C. during the brief campaign and his brief governorship of Rome in 1870 escape lesser and no less unjustified criticism from all sides. Unequal to overcoming the many and serious difficulties of an order not only military but above all religious, political, and diplomatic connected with those events, he then and later became the object of bitter controversy, culminating again two decades later with the publication, deliberately delayed, of his volume on *La liberazione di Roma* (Turin 1889), a book that was unfortunate both for the inaccuracies of factual data it contains and for its poor understanding of those events, and for the bitter spirit infused in it, and for the lack of chivalrous sense toward the opposing army, whereas this, as C. himself had at the time recognized and as critical studies demonstrate, had fought with equal idealism and valor tenaciously in the Lazio region and along the Aurelian Walls.