ZAMBIANCHI, CALLIMACO. - Agitator and guerrilla fighter, b. 30 Dec. 1811 in Forlì, d. in 1860 in sight of Buenos Aires.

Of a violent and impetuous character, nourished on ultra-Jacobin ideologies, he soon threw himself into conspiracies, and, following the uprisings of 1831 and the clash of Cesena (v.), in 1832 he had to emigrate to France and then to South America (1843), where he fought under Garibaldi's orders. He followed him to Italy, onto the Lombard battlefields in 1848, and then to Rome, commanding the undisciplined corps of the Finanziari mobili. All historians of the Risorgimento are agreed in recognizing in him, more than debatable military merits, the bloodthirsty brutality of character that made him hated even by many of his fellow soldiers, 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 financiers, of numerous and more secular and regular Roman priests in the garden adjacent to the Palazzo di S. Callisto in Trastevere. A crime against which the government of the Roman Republic did nothing, Garibaldi contenting himself with asserting that Z. was « incapable of excesses except against priests ».

Indeed, wounded in the course of the defense of Rome besieged by the French, after a new emigration he again answered Garibaldi's call in 1860, and, placed at the head of the diversion attempted against the pontifical government during the expedition of the Thousand, from Talamone he pushed with a column to Grotte di Castro (19 May), where he and his men were routed and put to flight by the pontifical troops led by De Pimodan (v.). Cavour then had him arrested and, upon payment of a substantial sum, persuaded him to embark for Argentina.

Bibliography9 works

BIBL.: C. Rusconi, La Repubblica Romana del 1849, Rome 1877, pp. 158-59; L. Farini, Epistol. per cura di L. Rava, III, Bologna 1911-39, pp. 63-64; N. Costa, Quel che vidi e quel che intesi, Milan 1927, p. 57; D. Demarco, Una rivoluz. sociale; la Repubblica Rom. del 1849, Naples 1944, p. 261 ff.; G. Brizzante Colonna, Il rovescio della medaglia; C. Z., in Strenna dei Romanisti, Rome 1949; P. Dalla Torre, Pio IX e la restauraz. del 1849-50, in Aevam. 23 (1949), pp. 282-89; A. Mambelli, s. v. in Diz. del Risorg. Naz., IV, pp. 621-22.

Paolo Dalla Torre

@incollection{ec12_zambianchi_callimaco, author = {Dalla, Torre Paolo}, title = {Zambianchi, callimaco}, booktitle = {Enciclopedia Cattolica}, volume = {XII}, pages = {1769}, note = {Cited by column}, publisher = {Ente per l’Enciclopedia Cattolica e per il Libro Cattolico}, address = {Città del Vaticano}, year = {1954}, url = {https://azioneromana.com/article/zambianchi-callimaco} }

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Zambianchi, Callimaco

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