Verità, Giovanni

VERITÀ, GIOVANNI. - Priest, b. at Modigliana on 18 Feb. 1807, d. there on 26 Nov. 1885.

Bound to the liberal movement of the Romagna, he made his house in Modigliana the center of conspiracies and played a large part in the risings of 1843 and 1845, devoting himself particularly to facilitating the flight into Tuscany of those most compromised after the failure of the two attempts. Thus was born the so-called "trafia," a clandestine organization for the dissemination of revolutionary writings and the emigration of wanted political figures, which was headed by V. and extended from the Romagna to Tuscany and Liguria. It was of this - as is well known - that Garibaldi also availed himself in 1849, escaping Austrian capture. In the decade 1849-59 V., always suspected by the police but never caught in the act, continued his revolutionary activity: in 1859 he was a deputy to the Tuscan constituent assembly and then accepted appointment as chief chaplain of the army of central Italy, of which Garibaldi was second-in-command under the orders of Manfredo Fanti. Warned late of the departure of the Thousand from Quarto, he could not follow them as he would have wished; but while continuing to serve in the Sardinian army as chaplain of the 42nd infantry, he busied himself actively with recruiting volunteers and collecting weapons and money for the expedition to Sicily. In 1861 he played an important part in the attempt to reconcile Garibaldi and Cavour after their violent parliamentary clash over the cession of Nice to France. In 1866, still as military chaplain, he took part in the Third War of Independence with Cialdini's army corps, and subsequently was on garrison duty at Bologna and in the Abruzzi. When the progressive secularization of the Italian state brought about the abolition of military chaplains, he returned to Modigliana, where he lived privately until 1885. Unfortunately, on his deathbed, skillfully manipulated, he uttered irreverent words against "the ministers of Christ who have disfigured religion through their ambition, arrogance and cruelty," so that the ecclesiastical authority, which, well knowing the man's ingrained probity, had always been long-suffering, was compelled by the scandal that followed to deny him a religious funeral: hence the sectarian and contrived exaltation of V. as a rebel against the Church, a "free thinker," which - in reality - he was not, because he never failed in his priestly duties even though his political convictions were often naively tinged with the contemporary errors of liberalism.

Renzo U. Montini