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Updated: June 9, 2025
This malignant distemper had destroyed numbers of prisoners during the preceding years. The governor, upon learning that Maroncelli had been attacked by it, agreed with the physician, that the sole hope of remedy was in the fresh air. They were afraid of its spreading; and Maroncelli was ordered to be as little as possible within his dungeon.
Maroncelli contracted a disease of the leg through the hardships endured; amputation became necessary, but could not be performed till permission was received from Vienna a detail showing the red-tapism which governed all branches of the Austrian administration. This patriot went, after his release, to America, where he died, poor, blind and mad.
I expected very soon to rejoin him, and I ardently desired it. Still, I could not have parted with Maroncelli without regret.
While in his subterranean abode, Maroncelli had composed a variety of poems of high merit. He recited them and produced others. Many of these I committed to memory.
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.
To that rock of sorrow, consecrated for ever by the sufferings of some of the purest of men, Silvio Pellico and Pietro Maroncelli, with nine or ten companions, condemned at the same time, were the first Italians to take the road. Here they remained for the eight years described by the author of Francesca da Rimini, in Le Mie Prigioni, a book that served the Italian cause throughout the world.
I then bent down in prayer, though ill able to command my thoughts; and hearing Maroncelli already upon his crutches, and speaking to the servant, I hastened to embrace him. We had both prepared ourselves, with previous exertions, for this closing interview, and we spoke to each other firmly, as well as affectionately.
Maroncelli, on leaving me, ill and dejected, shed tears over me as one whom, it was most probable, he would never more behold. In him, too, I lamented a noble-minded man, cut off in the splendour of his intellect, and the vigour of his days, snatched from society, all its duties and its pleasures, and even from "the common air, the earth, the sky."
This was followed by a similar silence, in order to hear the rest of the document. A fresh murmur arose on the announcement of the following: condemned to hard imprisonment, Maroncelli for TWENTY YEARS, and Pellico for FIFTEEN. The Captain made a sign for us to descend. We cast one glance around us, and came down.
On the 21st of February, 1822, he and his friend Maroncelli were condemned to death; but, their sentence being commuted to twenty years for Maroncelli, and fifteen years for Pellico, of carcere duro, they entered their underground prisons at Spielberg on the 10th of April, 1822.
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