On this date in 1856, the Bourbon monarchy of Naples avenged the near-murder of its king … but neither sovereign nor state would much outlive the assassin.
Giuseppe Garibaldi had returned two years prior from exile, and the decades-long stirring of patriots whose loyalties eschewed their peninsula’s various sordid rival kingdoms to glory in a shared dream of the future unified Italy — the era of the Risorgimento — was about to draw towards a first culmination.*
The soldier Agesilao Milano (Italian link) shared the dream too. He determined to speed it by removing the man who ruled the Kingdom of the Two Siciliies, Ferdinand II — and so after mass on December 8, he hurled himself upon his sovereign and bayoneted him. The one wound he inflicted before he was subdued was deep, but not fatal, or at least not immediately so: Ferdinand would die three years later at the age of 49 and he morbidly nagged his deathbed doctors to investigate his old bayonet scar for signs of inflammation. (They found none.)
Ferdinand’s son Francis was the last ruler the Kingdom of the Two Silicies would ever have, for in 1860 Garibaldi’s Expedition of the Thousand marched upon that realm and its polity speedily collapsed, becoming absorbed into the newly forged Kingdom of Italy
Milano shared the triumph only from the plane of spirits, for he had been hanged five days after his treasonable attack at the Piazza del Mercato, bearing a placard dishonoring him a “parricide” and crying out, “I die a martyr … Long live Italy! .. Long live the independence of the peoples …”
The Risorgimento cosigned his martyr’s credentials, with Garibaldi creating a diplomatic furor by awarding pension and dowries to the late parricide’s mother and sisters, respectively.
* The Risorgimento truly triumphed (and concluded) only in 1871 after swallowing up the holdout Papal States.
On this day..
- 1669: Susanna One-Ear
- 2009: One stoned and one shot by Islamic militants in Somalia
- 1943: The Massacre of Kalavryta
- Feast Day of St. Lucy
- 1949: John Wilson and Benjamin Roberts, Syd Dernley's first(s)
- 1980: Erdal Eren, leftist student
- 1889: John Gilman, tetchy landlord
- 1861: William Johnson, impulse deserter
- 1828: Manuel Dorrego, Governor of Buenos Aires
- 1532: Solomon Molcho
- 1945: The Belsen war criminals
- 2006: Angel Diaz