TAZZOLI, ENRICO. - Priest, b. at Canneto on 19 April 1812, d. at Belfiore on 7 December 1852. Professor of philosophy at the Mantuan Seminary and a renowned preacher, he joined the Mazzinian Committee of Mantua, of which he soon became president.
The Committee's purpose was to keep alive the aversion to Austria and to collect weapons and funds for a possible insurrection, as well as to obtain data on the Habsburg military preparations. Arrested for the first time in 1848 for a sermon that the Austrian authorities deemed revolutionary, he was soon released after a severe warning; urged by his own friends to emigrate, he refused, in order to devote himself with greater fervor to his conspiratorial activity, nor did he slow his work even when the arrests and capital sentences ordered by Marshal Radetzky to stifle every insurrectionary plot began - toward the end of 1851. On 13 December 1851 T. presided over a meeting at which it was proposed to attempt the life of Emperor Francis Joseph on the occasion of his announced visit to the Lombardo-Venetian Kingdom, but he succeeded in having the mad project disapproved. A few days later (1 January 1852) the police arrested one Luigi Pesci, found in possession of a folder of the Mazzinian loan: Pesci confessed that he had received it from the priest Ferdinando Bosio, who in turn named T. as the distributor of the dangerous material. Although warned in time, T. once again refused to save himself and was arrested on the following 27 January. He was thus involved in the great Mantuan trial, conducted with harsh energy by the auditor Captain Kraus. The silence of the numerous defendants, the flight of many suspects who took care to destroy most of the evidence of the conspiracy, the widespread unease of public opinion and the concern of the government in Vienna to avoid excessive severity were about to render Kraus's efforts futile when, unfortunately, Bosio - who later became an apostate and converted to Protestantism - and Luigi Castellazzo took the path of disclosures; the latter later became a deputy in Parliament and secretary general of Freemasonry, despite the detailed accusations of one of the survivors of the trial, Giuseppe Finzi, who preferred to resign his parliamentary mandate rather than sit in the Chamber together with the traitor, shamelessly defended by the sect. To obtain the promised impunity, Castellazzo - who had been secretary of the Mazzinian Committee - revealed to the judges all that was within his knowledge, except the key to the cipher used by T., which was nevertheless discovered by the Vienna police. At this point T., with heroic selflessness, took upon himself the entire responsibility for the conspiracy, in the hope of saving, at the price of his own life, that of his fellow defendants.
During the proceedings, the governor of Mantua, Gen. Culoz, having approached him to ask what motives induced a large part of the Lombard clergy to oppose Austrian rule, he replied with two measured Memorie (published by A. Luzio, Mantua 1886), in which he traced a precise picture of the conditions of Italy under the oppressive Habsburg government: writings of admirable political wisdom, which one would not think composed in prison, without any assistance from sources. The bishop of Mantua, Msgr. Giovanni Corti - who had delegated
Canon Martini to provide spiritual assistance to the detainees - attempted every means to save them from the death penalty, going so far as to request an audience with the emperor and to invoke papal intervention: but the prelate's generous efforts proved useless, and he also had the painful task of administering the last rites to T. before the condemned man had to mount the scaffold.
The last hours of T., described with moving words by Msgr. Luigi Martini in his celebrated Confortatorio, were admirable for their Christian firmness: he consoled and blessed his companions in martyrdom and, before surrendering to the executioner, said to Martini: "Tell all the priests not to meddle in politics and to be fervent in church." His remains, laid at the foot of the gallows, received honorable burial in Mantua after the liberation of the city.
Bibliography11 works
Renzo U. Montini