ZAMBIANCHI, CALLIMACO. – Agitator and guerrilla fighter, born on 30 December 1811 at Forlì, died in 1860 off 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 Cesena (v.), in 1832 was forced to emigrate to France and then to South America (1843), where he fought under Garibaldi’s orders. He followed him to Italy, on the Lombard battlefields in 1848, and then to Rome, commanding the undisciplined corps of the Mobile Finanziari. All historians of the Risorgimento agree in attributing to him, more than any questionable military merits, the bloodthirsty brutality of his character, which made him disliked even by many of his comrades-in-arms, especially when, among other things, news emerged of the infamous massacre he perpetrated, without even the slightest semblance of legal formality and with the assistance and complicity of his Finanziari, of numerous secular and regular Roman priests in the garden adjoining the Palazzo di S. Callisto in Trastevere. Against this crime the government of the Roman Republic did nothing, while Garibaldi contented himself with declaring that Z. was “incapable of excesses except against priests.”
Indeed, after being wounded during the defense of Rome besieged by the French, following a new emigration he once again answered Garibaldi’s call in 1860 and, placed in command of the diversion attempted against the Papal government during the Expedition of the Thousand, advanced from Talamone with a column to Grotte di Castro (19 May), where he and his men were routed and put to flight by the Pimodan (v.). Cavour then had him arrested and, in exchange for the payment of a substantial sum, persuaded him to embark for Argentina.