ZAMBIANCHI, CALLIMACO. - Agitator and guerrilla fighter, born on the 13th day of December 1811 in Forlì, died in 1860 off the coast near Buenos Aires.
Of a violent and impetuous character, steeped in ultra-Jacobin ideology, he soon threw himself into conspiracies, and following the uprisings of 1831 Cesena (v.), in 1832 he was forced to emigrate to France and then to South America (1843), where he fought under Garibaldi’s orders. He followed Garibaldi back to Italy, serving on the Lombard fields in 1848 and later in Rome, commanding the undisciplined Mobile Finance Corps. All historians of the Risorgimento are agreed in recognizing in him, more than questionable military merits, a bloodthirsty brutality of character that made him hated even by many of his comrades—especially when, among other things, news spread of the infamous massacre he perpetrated, without even the slightest semblance of legal formality and with the aid and complicity of his finance troops, of numerous secular and regular priests in the garden adjacent to the Palazzo di S. Callisto in Trastevere. A crime to which the government of the Roman Republic took no action, Garibaldi contenting himself with asserting that Z. was “incapable of excesses except against priests.”
Indeed, wounded during the defense of Rome besieged by the French, after another period of exile he again answered Garibaldi’s call in 1860. Placed in command of the diversion attempted against the papal government during the Expedition of the Thousand, he advanced from Talamone with a column to Grotte di Castro (May 19), where he was routed and put to flight by the papal troops led by De Pimodan (v.). Cavour then had him arrested and, after the payment of a substantial sum, convinced him to embark for Argentina.