MONTANELLI, GIUSEPPE. - Politician, b. at Fucecchio on 21 Jan. 1813, d. there on 17 June 1862.
Anticlerical and rationalist in his youth, he "converted" at the beginning of 1832 to the theories of Saint-Simon (indeed he founded a Saint-Simonian "church" in Pisa, in his own house); he returned to Catholicism through the evangelical Christianity of Carlo Eynard (1843); he was then a fervent Neo-Guelph, showing moreover a marked sympathy for the ideas of reform of Catholicism advocated by the Tuscan Catholic-liberal group; after the celebrated allocation of Apr. 1848 by Pius IX, from the conviction he had formed that the pope could not and should not "wound anyone," he drew as a consequence "the incompatibility of spiritual power with the temporal power of the pope" (letter of 10 May 1848, in U. Mondello, Epistolario di G. M., dal 22 marzo al 29 maggio 1848, in Rassegna storica del Risorgimento, 24 [1937], p. 1337).
A man of courage, he fought at Curtatone with the Pisan university volunteers (in 1840 he had been appointed professor of civil and commercial law at the University of Pisa), and was wounded. He was a supporter of a national Constituent Assembly, in which there would be a clear separation of State from Church: on the question of the Constituent Assembly he changed his opinion several times, coming, after Pius IX's abandonment of Rome, to outline, in an anti-Piedmontese key, a Tuscan-Roman Constituent Assembly under the presidency of Leopold II; after the grand duke's flight he was a member of the Provisional Government with Guerrazzi and Mazzoni. The grand duke's return found him on a mission in France, where he remained in exile. He returned to Italy after nearly a decade and voted for the deposition of the House of Lorraine. Initially opposed to the passage of Tuscany under the House of Savoy, he later became a member of the Parliament of the Kingdom of Italy.
All the various vacillations of M. (he had been, at the end, during his Parisian exile, a "socialist" and a "Murattist") were a symptom not of opportunism, but of a restless and highly sensitive romantic temperament.