The second of many children of Onorato P. and Margherita Tournier, Silvio received his first religious formation within the family environment: his mother was deeply pious; his brother Francesco, later a Jesuit, and his sisters Giuseppina and Maria were directed towards service to God, the former joining the Congregation of the Rosine and the latter the Visitation nuns. At Pinerolo, where he lived from 1792 to 1799, he was educated by a pious and learned priest, Fr Manavella. Unfortunately, in 1806 he moved to Lyons to live with his cousin De Rubod and there formed a friendship with an apostate priest whose pernicious influence cost him the precious gift of faith.
In 1809 the Pellico family reunited in Milan, and there Silvio, having become a French teacher at the Royal College of Military Orphans of the Kingdom of Italy, began his literary career in spiritual fraternity with Foscolo. After losing his teaching post with the fall of Napoleonic rule, he entered service first as a tutor in the household of the Briche family and then in that of Count Luigi Porro-Lamberthenghi. These were the best years of Silvio’s life: a friend of the most cultured minds of the time—Foscolo, Monti, Borsieri, Confalonieri, Ermes Visconti, Abbé de Brème, Romagnosi and others—he belonged to the Romantic movement and achieved vast fame with his tragedy Francesca da Rimini, triumphantly received at the King’s Theatre on the evening of 18 July 1815, thanks above all to the patriotic ideals that permeated II. This was followed by other tragedies and poetic compositions and collaboration on Il Conciliatore, the noted Romantic periodical (1818–19), which was suppressed by Austrian censorship for its liberal inspiration. Pellico received a severe warning from the police on this account and was threatened with expulsion from the Lombard–Venetian Kingdom if he continued to engage in politics.
Unfortunately, at this juncture he became closely acquainted with a Forlì musician, Piero Maroncelli, who initiated him into the Carbonari; Pellico in turn brought Porro into the secret society and tried to recruit Giovanni Arrivabene as well. An imprudent letter from Maroncelli to his brother Francesco, in which the Carbonari propaganda of the two accomplices in Milan was virtually laid bare, fell into the hands of the police (4 October 1820): hence the arrest of Piero (6 October), Silvio (13 October) and others named in the fateful missive. Pellico’s consistent denials before the Milanese authorities would have saved him from any further measure beyond expulsion from the state had not, at the end of the year, suddenly arrived from Vienna an order to suspend the trial before the ordinary tribunal and to remit the accused to the special commission sitting in Venice to judge political cases, presided over by Gardani and in which the public prosecutor was the notorious Trentine judge Antonio Salvotti.
Falling into the hands of so skilled an inquisitor, Maroncelli soon yielded to a series of revelations that laid bare the organization of the Carbonari in northern and central Italy, thus giving rise to the Rivarola trials in the Papal States, the Rubiera trial in the Duchy of Modena and those in the Duchy of Parma. The Jesuit Rinieri, well-informed historian of this period, has supposed that Maroncelli hoped in this way to secure impunity; Luzio and Sandonà, however, have been able to demonstrate that it was a matter of wretched weakness.
Irretrievably compromised by his friend’s revelations, Pellico could no longer persist in protestations of innocence: in many subsequent interrogations (from 17 April to 22 May 1821) he admitted his Carbonari activity, but
In 1834 he was released from Spielberg fortress and allowed to return to Piedmont; his remains found peace in the cemetery of Turin.