VERITÀ, GIOVANNI. — Priest, born at Modigliana on 18 February 1807, died there on 26 November 1885.
Associated with the liberal movement in the Romagne, he made his house in Modigliana the center of conspiracies and played a major role in the uprisings of 1843 and 1845, devoting himself especially to facilitating the flight to Tuscany of those most deeply implicated after the failure of the two attempts. Thus arose the so-called «trafia», a clandestine organization for the dissemination of revolutionary writings and the expatriation of political fugitives, which was headed by V. Liguria. As is well known, Garibaldi also availed himself of it in 1849, escaping Austrian capture. During 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 senior chaplain of the army of Central Italy, of which Garibaldi was second-in-command under Manfredo Fanti. Informed too late of the departure of the Thousand from Quarto, he was unable to follow them as he would have wished; but, while continuing to serve in the Sardinian army as chaplain of the 42nd Infantry, he actively devoted himself to recruiting volunteers and collecting arms
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, again as a military chaplain, he took part in the Third War of Independence with Cialdini’s army corps, and was subsequently stationed at 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, having been skillfully manipulated, he uttered irreverent words about «the ministers of Christ who have disfigured his religion through their ambition, arrogance, and cruelty»; consequently, the ecclesiastical authority, which, well aware of the man’s unshakable integrity, had always shown him forbearance, was compelled by the scandal that followed to deny him a religious funeral. Hence the sectarian and contrived exaltation of V. Church, as 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.