VIZZARDELLI, CARLO. — Cardinal, born at Monte S. Giovanni Campano (Frosinone) on 2 July 1791, died at Rome on 24 May 1851.
Ordained a priest at Veroli and having completed his higher studies at Rome, he soon obtained the chair of ecclesiastical law at the University of Bologna, from where he went on to teach the same discipline at the Roman Athenaeum. Having entered the prelature, in 1832 he was appointed secretary of the Briefs to Princes, and in 1843 assumed the secretaryship of the S. Congregation for Ecclesiastical Affairs. On 17 Jan. 1848 Pius IX created him cardinal priest of the title of S. Pancrazio and entrusted him with the prefecture of the S. Congregation of Studies. He was also a member of the commission of cardinals charged with drafting the Constitution granted by the Pontiff on 14 March of that year. A few weeks later the Pope entrusted him with directing the negotiations with the Tuscan government for the conclusion of the Concordat, which was signed on 30 May by V. and by the grand-ducal plenipotentiary, Msgr. Giulio Boninsegni, provost of the University of Pisa. The document, regarded as excessively favorable to the S. See, was not submitted for ratification to the Parliament of Florence; consequently V. text, little different from the preceding one, which was likewise declared unacceptable by the Tuscan ministry. In the meantime, the revolutions of Florence and Rome followed. V. accompanied the Pontiff to Gaeta and Portici, where—Leopoldo II having been restored—he resumed the concordat negotiations, which finally came to an end on 28 Apr. 1851, with the signatures affixed by V. force, with the sanctions of the Pontiff and the Grand Duke, in the following June. V. did not live to see the two sovereign ratifications, because—wasted by phthisis—he had piously passed away on 24 May, at barely sixty years of age.