CALANDRELLI, ALESSANDRO

CALANDRELLI, ALESSANDRO. — Scholar of military sciences, born in Rome on 8 Oct. 1805, died at Albano Laziale in 1888. Artillery officer, he reorganized the papal artillery school; of moderate political ideas and conduct during the reformist period of Pius IX, when the Pope departed for Gaeta following the tragic events of 15–16 Nov. 1848, Calandrelli remained in service, accepted the rank of major of artillery, and entered as substitute into the War Department (17 Feb. 1849), temporarily directing it, sitting as deputy for Rome in the Constituent Assembly, and technically preparing the resistance against the French. After participating in the siege operations, he was excluded from the papal army as head of a corps that had remained in service to the revolutionary regime. When serious political suspicions arose regarding him, Calandrelli was arrested on 3 Oct. 1849, and on the basis of seized documents and complicity in violent searches against religious institutions and private individuals, on 23 May 1851 he was condemned by the Sacred Consulta to twenty years of public works and, as a military man, to death for high treason. These sentences were commuted by Pius IX on 19 Aug. to twenty years’ imprisonment to be served in the Ancona penitentiary; a further commutation in 1853 allowed Calandrelli to go into perpetual exile. From then on he lived laboring and studying in Berlin. He returned to Rome only after 1870.