VERITÀ, GIOVANNI. - Priest, born in Modigliana on 18 Feb. 1807, died there on 26 Nov. 1885.
Linked to the liberal movement in Romagna, he made his home in Modigliana the center of conspiracies and played a major role in the uprisings of 1843 and 1845, particularly devoting himself to facilitating the escape to Tuscany of those most compromised after the failure of the two attempts. Thus arose the so-called *trafila*, a clandestine organization for the dissemination of revolutionary writings and the exile of political fugitives, which was under V.’s direction and extended from Romagna to Tuscany and Liguria. As is well known, Garibaldi also made use of it in 1849, escaping Austrian capture.
During the decade 1849–59, V., though constantly under police suspicion but never caught in the act, continued his revolutionary activity: in 1859 he was elected deputy to the Tuscan Constituent Assembly and then accepted the appointment as chief chaplain of the Central Italian Army, of which Garibaldi was second-in-command under Manfredo Fanti. Warned too late of the departure of the Thousand from Quarto, he was unable to join them as he would have wished; but while continuing to serve in the Sardinian army as chaplain of the 42nd Infantry, he actively engaged in recruiting volunteers and gathering arms and money for the Sicilian expedition.
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 a military chaplain, he took part in the Third War of Independence with Cialdini’s corps, and subsequently was stationed in Bologna and in Abruzzo. When the progressive secularization of the Italian state led to the abolition of military chaplains, he returned to Modigliana, where he lived privately until 1885. Unfortunately, on his deathbed, cleverly manipulated, he uttered irreverent words against “the ministers of Christ who have plundered His religion for their ambition, arrogance, and cruelty,” so that the ecclesiastical authority, though well aware of the man’s inner integrity and always unforgiving, was compelled by the ensuing scandal to deny him a religious funeral: hence the seventh and artificial exaltation of V. as a rebel against the Church, a freethinker—which in reality he was not, since he never failed in his priestly duties even though his political convictions were often naively tinged with the contemporary errors of liberalism.