GIUSEPPE MAZZINI – We were taken to Savona (Western Riviera) to the Fortress and promptly separated. Our arrival was unexpected, and my cell was not ready. In a dimly lit corridor where they placed me, I was visited by the governor, a De Mari, a septuagenarian, who foolishly joked about the nights lost in guilty meetings and the healthy tranquility I would find in the Fortress – then, in response to my request for a cigar, said that he would write to His Excellency the Governor of Genoa to see if it could be granted – made me weep, after he departed, the first tears since my imprisonment. They were tears of anger at feeling so completely under the control of men I despised.
After an hour, I was duly confined in my small cell. It was at the top of the Fortress, facing the sea, which brought me comfort. Sky and Sea – two symbols of the infinite and, with the Alps, the most sublime things nature shows us – lay before me as I cast my gaze through the bars of the small window. The land below was invisible to me. The voices of the fishermen occasionally reached my ears, depending on the wind. For the first month, I had no books: then, the courtesy of the new governor, cav. Fontana, who fortunately replaced the former one, allowed me to obtain a Bible, a Tacitus, a Byron. I also had a companion in captivity, a goldfinch, a charming little bird capable of affection, which I was very fond of. Of people, I saw only an old sergeant, Antonietti, who was my benevolent guard, the officer entrusted daily with my watch who appeared briefly at the door to observe his prisoner, the Piedmontese woman, Caterina, who brought my meals, and Commander Fontana. Antonietti unflinchingly asked me every evening if I had any requests, to which I invariably replied: “a ship to Genoa.” Fontana, a former military man with a sense of Italian pride but deeply convinced that the Carbonari sought plunder, abolition of any faith, guillotines in the squares and such things, lamented the misguidance of youth in me and tried, to set me back on the right path, every art of gentleness, even going so far as to betray his instructions by taking me at night to drink coffee with his wife, a small and gentle woman related, I do not remember in what degree, to Alessandro Manzoni.
Meanwhile, I was exhausting the last attempts to draw a spark of life from the Carboneria with the young friends left in Genoa. Every ten days, I received a letter from my mother, opened, of course, and read and scrutinized by the Governor of Genoa and by that of the Fortress, and I was allowed to reply, provided I wrote in the presence of Antonietti and handed the letter to him open. But all these precautions did not harm the previously arranged plan between my friends and me, which was that we should form words, for extra caution, in Latin, with the first letter of every alternate word. The friends dictated to my mother the first eight or nine lines of her letter; and as for me, I had plenty of time to devise and memorize the phrases I should write. Thus, I sent word to the friends to seek a meeting with several of the Carbonari I knew, all of whom, gripped by fear, rejected proposals and people; and so I learned of the Polish uprising, which I, in youthful imprudence, announced to Fontana, who had assured me a few hours earlier that everything was calm in Europe. Certainly, he must have been more convinced than ever that we had contact with the devil.
Yes, and the childish terror of the Carbonari in that solemn moment, and my long reflections on the logical consequences of the absence of any positive faith in the Association, and a ridiculous scene I had with Passano (whom I met by chance in the corridor while our cells were being cleaned, and at my hurried whisper: “I have a certain way of correspondence”; give me names, he responded by clothing me with all powers and tapping me on the head to confer some indispensable degree of Freemasonry), reinforced my concept formed months ago: that the Carbonari was a dead body and that instead of wasting time and effort to revive it, it was better to seek life where it was and build a new structure from scratch.
Thus, during those months of imprisonment in Savona, I conceived the plan for the Young Italy; I contemplated the principles on which the organization of the party should be founded and the goal we should openly set for ourselves: I thought about the method of establishment, the first individuals I would invite to initiate it with me, and the potential connection of the work with the revolutionary elements in Europe. We were few, young, without resources and with very limited influence; but for me, the challenge lay in grasping the truth of the instincts and tendencies, then silent, but indicated by history and the presentiments of the heart of Italy. Our strength was to descend from that Truth. All great National ventures begin with unknown men and people, without power except for faith and determination that does not consider time nor obstacles: the influential, those powerful in name and resources, come later to strengthen the movement created by those first individuals and often, unfortunately, to divert it from its goal.
(effe) [N.d.T.: Mazzini remained in the Priamàr cell from November 1830 to January 1831] *da Giuseppe Mazzini, Note autobiografiche (1861) [in Id., Scritti editi e inediti, vol. LXXVII, Imola 1938]
