PELLICO, SILVIO. - Writer and patriot, b. at Saluzzo on 25 June 1789, d. at Turin on 31 Jan. 1854. The second-born of the numerous children of Onorato P. and Margherita Tournier, Silvio received his first religious formation in the family circle: his mother was a woman of deep piety; his brother Francesco, later a Jesuit, and his sisters Giuseppina and Maria, who entered respectively the Congregations of the Rosines and the Visitandines, were directed toward the service of God. At Pinerolo, where he lived from 1792 to 1799, he was educated by a pious and learned priest, d. Manavella. Unfortunately, having moved in 1806 to Lyon, to the house of his cousin De Rubod, he formed a friendship with an apostate priest, whose pernicious influence was to cost him the precious gift of faith. In 1809 the P. family reunited in Milan, and there Silvio, having become a teacher of French at the Royal College of Military Orphans of the Kingdom of Italy, began his literary career, in spiritual brotherhood with Foscolo. Having lost his chair with the fall of the Napoleonic regime, he entered as a tutor first in the Briche household and then in the household of Count Luigi Porro-Lambertenghi. These were the best years of Silvio's life: a friend of the most cultivated spirits of the time — Foscolo, Monti, Borsieri, Confalonieri, Ermes Visconti, the abbot di Brême, Romagnosi, etc. — he belonged to the Romantic movement and achieved very great fame with the tragedy Francesca da Rimini, triumphantly received on the stage of the Teatro Re on the evening of 18 July 1815, thanks above all to the patriotic ideals that pervaded it. Other tragedies and poetic compositions followed, along with his collaboration on the Conciliatore, the well-known Romantic periodical (1818-19), suppressed by the Austrian censorship because of the liberal inspiration that informed it. In this connection the P. received a severe reprimand from the police and was threatened with expulsion from the Lombardo-Veneto if he occupied himself further with politics. Unhappily, around that time he became intimate with a musician from Forlì, Piero Maroncelli, who enlisted him in the Carboneria, while he in turn won Porro over to the sect and sought to bring Giovanni Arrivabene into it as well. An imprudent letter from Maroncelli to his own brother Francesco, in which the Carbonaro propaganda of the two associates in Milan was spoken of almost openly, fell into the hands of the police (4 Oct. 1820): hence the arrest of Piero (6 Oct.), of Silvio (15 Oct.) and of others named in the fatal missive. The P.'s constant denials before the Milanese authority would have saved him from any measure other than expulsion from the State, had not an order suddenly arrived from Vienna at the end of the year to suspend the trial before the ordinary tribunal and to refer the accused to the Special Commission sitting in Venice to judge political cases, presided over by Gardani and in which the famous Trentine judge Antonio Salvotti acted as public prosecutor.
Having fallen into the hands of so able an interrogator, Maroncelli soon abandoned himself to a series of revelations that laid bare the organization of the Carboneria in northern and central Italy, thus giving rise to the Rivarola trials in the Papal State, the Rubiera trial in the Duchy of Modena and those of the Duchy of Parma. The Jesuit Rinieri, a very well-informed historian of this period, has supposed that Maroncelli hoped in this way to gain impunity; Luzio and Sandonà have instead been able to demonstrate that it was a matter of wretched weakness.
Irreparably compromised by his friend's revelations, the P. could no longer persist in his protests of innocence: in many subsequent interrogations (from 17 Apr. to 22 May 1821) he admitted his own Carbonaro activity, but li-
(by courtesy of Dr. B. Degenhart)
PELLICAN - French illuminated manuscript (14th century) - Paris, National Library, ms. français 343, f. 40°.
he managed to extract the name of Porro only when he learned that the count had already evaded arrest by going into exile in Switzerland.
The death sentence for high treason, pronounced on 10 August by the Commission and subsequently confirmed by the Appeal Court and the Senate of Justice of Verona, was commuted by Francis I (6 February 1822) to fifteen years of hard imprisonment in the fortress of Spielberg, where P. entered on 10 April, to leave it pardoned, after eight years of suffering, on 1 August 1830.
From the Spielberg torment thus flowered the immortal pages of My Prisons, which appeared in print in Turin in November 1832, as did the consoling return of Silvio to the faith of his youthful years. The famous book is too well known for us to dwell on it here: scrupulously exact from the historical point of view, as has been demonstrated also on the basis of official Habsburg documents, it is enlivened by Christian resignation and truly constitutes, for its author, the "itinerarium mentis in Deum." Hence the criticisms of those who would have preferred to find in it a violent indictment of Austria and an open incitement to revolt; and the admiration of those who realized with what charity Silvio had managed to respect the truth without letting himself be carried away by resentment. A book of Christian edification, which the government of Vienna tried in vain to refute and which it failed, as it would have wished, to have condemned by the Church; but it assured P. a worldwide fame, and of it Silvio was not proud, having become, in his angelic piety, estranged from all worldly glory.
Liberated in 1830, he survived, his physique weakened by the anguish of prison, another twenty-four years: which he spent almost entirely in the Turin house of the Marquises Falletti di Barolo, as a precious collaborator in the charitable works of the Marquise Giulia. In this last period of his life he still wrote a great deal: other tragedies and poems (Cantiche and Liriche), a biography of the Marquise of Barolo, a novel (Raffaella), published for the first time in the Civiltà Cattolica: in truth mediocre things, above which rises the golden little book of the Doveri degli Uomini.
Having died piously, his remains found peace in the cemetery of Turin.
Bibliography9 works
Renzo U. Montini