Centre--Ciro Menotti.


The Austrians fully expected a rising in Lombardy in the middle of
March, and that they were not without serious fears as to its
consequences is proved by the preparations which they quietly made to
abandon Milan, if necessary. The Court travelling-carriages were got
ready, and the younger princes were sent away. Carbonarism had been
introduced into Lombardy the year before by two Romagnols, Count
Laderchi and Pietro Maroncelli. It was their propaganda that put the
Austrian Government on the alert, and was the cause of the Imperial
decree which denounced the society as a subversive conspiracy, aiming
at the destruction of all constituted authority, and pointed to death
and confiscation of property as the penalty for joining it. There was
the additional clause, destined to bear terrible fruit, which declared
accomplices, punishable with life-imprisonment, all who knew of the
existence of lodges (_Vendite_, as they were called) or the names of
associates, without informing the police. In the autumn of 1820,
Maroncelli and many others, including Silvio Pellico, the young
Piedmontese poet, were arrested as Carbonari, while the arrest of the
so-called accomplices began with Count Giovanni Arrivabene of Mantua,
who had no connection with the society, but was charged with having
heard from Pellico that he was a member. Pellico and his companions
were still lying untried in the horrible Venetian prisons, called,
from their leaden roofs, the 'Piombi,' when the events of 1821 gave
rise to a wholesale batch of new arrests. As soon as they knew of a
movement in Piedmont, the Lombard patriots prepared to co-operate in
it; that they were actually able to do nothing, was because it broke
out prematurely, and also, to some extent, because their head, Count
Confalonieri, was incapacitated by severe illness. But though their