Priest Giuseppe Andreoli
Giuseppe Andreoli ( San Possidonio , 6 January 1789 - Rubiera , 17 October 1822 ) was a priest and patriot Italian .
Biography
He was born in San Possidonio , in the Modena area, on January 6, 1789, to Luigi and Antonia Soresina Jugali. Already a teenager he would have manifested to the parish priest of the town the desire to become a priest, but due to the economic situation and the paternal aversion he undertook technical studies, becoming a land surveyor in 1813 at the University of Bologna, thanks also to the economic help of local landowners. family of the Taccoli marquises.
The religious vocation, however, was not dormant, and like his uncle - Giovan Battista Andreoli, archpriest of San Martino in Rio , with whom he spent long periods - in 1814 he entered the seminary in Reggio Emilia , where he cultivated his literary interests and where he came ordained a priest on April 6, 1817.
Remaining in Reggio, in 1819 he was given the post of tutor in a noble city family, precisely he became the "tutor of Rettorica" of the counts Domenico and Francesco Soliani Raschini. Already in the living room of the Soliani, open to new ideas and trends, he would have begun to hear progressive and democratic speeches.
In another Reggio family, that of Carlo and Giuseppe Fattori, he would instead have come into real contact with the Carboneria , to which he would later become affiliated in the spring of 1820, entertaining relations with some intellectuals and professionals from Reggio with liberal ideas (i Grillenzoni, Leone Levi and Torreggiani, according to the accusations).
In that same year, Andreoli thanks to the Soliani obtained the chair of grammar and rhetoric in the Collegio di Correggio : it was an ancient institution (founded in 1722 by the Piarist fathers ), reopened by the Duke of Modena and Reggio only the previous year to satisfy both the local nobility is the diocese ; in fact it was also a seminary, and entrusted to a congregation of priests - called the Oblates - therefore subject to the bishop.
The arrest
According to some sources, the transfer of Don Andreoli to Correggio, organized by the Soliani Raschini, had to have the purpose of removing him from the attention of the police and removing him from the Carbonari circles of Reggio, that is, from the risk of being identified and overwhelmed by the ferocious ducal repression. The fact is that on February 26, 1822, the young priest was arrested: taken overnight by the Duke's police in his room inside the seminary-college, after a stop of a few hours in Reggio he was transferred to Modena on the morning of the 27 to be questioned.
It must be said that there is also another version of the capture: he would have been summoned to Modena by deception, during the day and accompanied by the unsuspecting vice-rector, Don Gaudenzio Vaccari, and only at destination arrested, after being followed while the two who came from Correggio were walking along the walls [1] .
In any case, to contest the accusations was the governor Luigi Coccapani, marquis and "minister of good government", who then entrusted him to the hands of Giulio Besini, notorious police chief (who not even three months later will be stabbed to death in the street by a young patriot). Andreoli was interrogated in the cells of the town hall and detained here until mid-June, when he was then transferred to the fort of Rubiera (known as the “Sasso”), where an extraordinary state court was located.
The "summary" process
The extraordinary state courts were special courts established in March 1821 by Francis IV of Austria-Este to repress opponents - in particular to prosecute the "crimes" of treason and adherence to sects and secret associations; in addition to the fact that they were made up of people appointed by the Duke because of the faithful, the procedures were also exceptional: first of all they abolished every "privilege of the Forum", which in this case meant removing the priest from the ecclesiastical tribunal, then - as stated in the sentence - had to "judge summarily, and in a single instance" [2] . Therefore summary and final judgment.
Earlier, in September 1820, the ruler had decreed beheading for members of secret societies, so these special courts could send the condemned to death. While in detention, Andreoli allegedly endured suffering and humiliation, resisting the flattery of the governor and threats from the chief of police. In particular, Andreoli denied any wrongdoing in the interrogations, but confided in a cellmate who was actually a spy. This is the only "proof" in the hands of the prosecution.
According to historians, therefore, it is false in fact and in law to define him as "guilty confessed and convinced" as the ducal judges did to lead him to the gallows. The deeds of the preliminary investigation, however, were soon destroyed by the Este authorities, so any reconstruction is based on the orality of more or less direct witnesses. Instead, the text of the condemnation has come down to our days, precisely the decree with which Francis IV confirmed the "definitive sentences".
With Don Giuseppe Andreoli there were about sixty patriots denounced in the same investigation, more than half of them from Reggio: several were tried "by default or refugees", the others tortured and drugged to extort "confessions" and names. The sentence was handed down on 11 September: 47 prisoners, of which ten - including the priest - were sentenced to death, but for all, except Andreoli, the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment or pardoned.
The execution
Against the capital punishment, obviously disproportionate to the material faults of the accused, the bishop of Reggio intervened in vain, among others, going in person to Verona where the sovereign was staying in those days: but Francis IV, who simultaneously signed the sentence to death of the priest and pardon for a confessed parricide offender, he was deaf to every request for clemency, wanting to give his subjects an exemplary lesson, for the double and potentially “dangerous” role of Andreoli, shepherd of souls and educator of young people.
Not only that: the Austro-Estense also wanted to humiliate him, ordering to reduce him to the lay state. Something that the new bishop of Reggio, Monsignor Angelo Ficarelli, refused to do [3] : but not that of Carpi , Filippo Cattani; so the day before the execution, the poor priest - even before the authorization from the Vatican arrived - was "defeated".
This, from the point of view of the duke and the pope, formally meant that not a priest, but a former priest was executed.
To implement his terrible decision, countersigned on 11 October, Francesco IV spared no expense: he had a guillotine and its executioner brought from Brescia on purpose . The public execution was scheduled for 12 noon on 17 October 1822, in front of the “Sasso” of Rubiera.
Even on when he learned of the sentence, and on how he reacted to the news, there are contrasting versions, albeit dating back to the time of the facts as made by fellow prisoners or in any case by his contemporaries. Who speaks of a serene and impassive attitude, who of a nervous breakdown due to discouragement and disbelief (he would have fainted, then he would have spent the last night between tears and prayers).
According to tradition, the man sentenced to death would have cut his hair himself ("to spare the executioner the penalty") asking to give his mother a lock of it; then he would have donated his objects (snuffbox, handkerchief, book) formally confiscated by sentence to other inmates, then he would go to the gallows.
But the procession would leave early, so to respect the fixed time the order was given to return to the cell: however Don Andreoli would have refused, asking to wait sitting on a wall, to pray, under a thick rain.
Also according to some witnesses, the poor priest after having first refused then accepted the blindfold, would have fallen into a swoon in positioning himself on his back, so much so that the blade would have hit him badly, cutting his humerus too. When the executioner showed his severed head to the people, suddenly the sky, hitherto leaden and rainy, would open and the sun would return.
The body was buried in Rubiera, in a deconsecrated church, with the feet facing east and the severed head between the legs. In 1887 he was exhumed and some bones were returned to his native town, where they have been found since that day. [4] The blade used, according to tradition, to behead Andreoli, is kept in Modena in the Civic Museum of the Risorgimento .
Ideas
The documentation on the "political" activity of Giuseppe Andreoli is scarce: even more than some biographical uncertainty, it remains unsolved for scholars what and how much was the role of the Emilian priest in the proto-Risorgimento movement. There are practically no "ideological" or programmatic documents of his - writings or correspondence or even just notes; at the moment of the sudden arrest, it seems that the ducal thugs had found nothing compromising among what they seized him; The contacts he had before and after joining the Carbonari are also difficult to reconstruct, that is, the people who involved him and those who later involved him - young people in particular, according to the accusation.
From what remains of the trial, its role seems quite indefinite; on the other hand, there are also no documents on the rest of his short life, while on the last eight months - those ranging from capture to beheading - contemporary authors and even comrades in struggle or detention have written pages of passionate patriotism, but "contradictory in facts and in evaluations ". [5]
Memory
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The memory of Don Giuseppe Andreoli and his sacrifice, very strong even after the end of the Risorgimento and the Unification of Italy , is still kept alive in various ways in the places where he spent his short life: his birthplace, San Possidonio, in The centenary of the assassination dedicated to him the monument to the martyrs of freedom which stands in the central square, the work of the sculptor Alfredo Gualdi, inaugurated on October 17, 1922.
Even earlier, precisely from 1887, a commemorative monument in Rubiera reminds posterity that here the priest was detained and executed: located under the portico of Palazzo Sacrati, municipal residence, the bust with dedication was commissioned by a committee including Rubierese doctor who as a boy had witnessed the execution, and the village pharmacist who in that same 1887 was one of the supporters of the discovery of the body of Don Andreoli and its return to his native town; the monument, located on the left of the entrance door to the Town Hall, was executed by Luigi Montanari: inaugurated in the 65th anniversary of the beheading "in the presence of numerous parliamentarians, politicians, representatives of the State and a very large crowd", [6] has been restored in autumn 2017. [7]
In Correggio , a town where he taught and lived at the time of his arrest, a state school bears his name: it was named after him as soon as it was built, in the sixties of the twentieth century, with the reform that introduced the "unified middle school" (today "secondary first degree"); moreover, a plaque still remembers the room in which he stayed, and where he was arrested, inside the college of the Oblates (which later became a national boarding school at the end of the nineteenth century, named after Rinaldo Corso and separated from the classical high school, despite having both kept the same title) . The plaque, inaugurated on October 22, 1922, shows these words, written by the Corrected MP Vittorio Cottafavi (1862-1925), grandfather of the director of the same name [8]: «The veneration of posterity / reminds visitors / that Don Giuseppe Andreoli / beheaded in Rubiera on October 17, 1822 / for the freedom of Italy / lived in this room / modest educator of young people in life / heroic martyr in death». [1] .
Finally, the small square in front of the entrance to the boarding school of Corror bears the name of Don Giuseppe Andreoli ("patriot"). After all, there are innumerable public buildings, streets and squares dedicated to the priest, not only in Emilia.
Then in Modena, the monument dedicated in 1879 to Ciro Menotti , made of Carrara marble by Cesare Sighinolfi and placed right in front of the former ducal palace (now the Military Academy), shows on the left side of the base a relief effigy of Giuseppe Andreoli - half-length portrait, in profile, looking to the right (west) - with the inscription "School to the nephews / the works of the ancestors".