MONTANELLI, GIUSEPPE. – Politician, born at Fucecchio on 21 January 1813, died 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, in Pisa, at his own home, he founded a Sansimonian “church”); he returned to Catholicism through the evangelical Christianity of Carlo Eynard (1843); he then became a fervent Neoguelf, while also displaying a marked sympathy for the ideas of reform of Catholicism advocated by the Tuscan Catholic-liberal group. After the celebrated allocution of Pius IX in April 1848, from the conviction he had formed that the pope could neither “injure anyone” nor “be injurious to anyone,” he drew the consequence of “the incompatibility of spiritual power with the pope’s temporal power” (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 advocated a national Constituent Assembly in which there would be a clear separation of Church and State. On the question of the Constituent Assembly he changed his opinion several times, eventually, after Pius IX’s departure from Rome, proposing, in an anti-Piedmontese capacity, a Tuscan-Roman Constituent Assembly under the presidency of Leopoldo II. After the grand duke’s flight, he joined 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 almost a decade and voted for the deposition of the Lorrainian dynasty. Initially opposed to Tuscany’s transfer under the Savoys, he later became a member of the Parliament of the Kingdom of Italy.
All M.’s various oscillations (by the end, during his Parisian exile, he had become a “socialist” and a “Murattist”) were a symptom not of opportunism but of a restless and highly sensitive Romantic temperament.
BBL.: cf. the preface by V. Mazzei (Rome 1945) and that by A. Alberti (Turin 1945) to the two reprints of Introduzione ad alcuni appunti storici sulla rivoluzione d'Italia; N. Rosselli, Saggi sul Risorgimento, there 1946, pp. 87 ff., 431 ff.; A. M. Ghisalberti, G. M. e la Costituente, Florence 1947 (with complete bibliography); W. Maturi, G. M., in Bollettino storico pisano, 3rd series, 18 (1949), pp. 69–91 (with bibliography); E. Michel, Maestri e scolari dell'Università di Pisa nel Risorgimento nazionale, Florence 1949, passim.