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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.
I tried to sing them, adapting to them, as well as I could, the favourite air of my poor Maddalene. What was my surprise to hear a voice, close to me, reply in the same words, sung to another air. When he had finished, I cried out, "Bravo!" and he saluted me with great respect, inquiring if I were a Frenchman. "No; an Italian, and my name is Silvio Pellico." "The author of Francesca da Rimini?"
Dante has placed the two lovers in his Inferno for their sin, but in the fifth canto, where he first sees them, he is moved to such pity for their unhappy lot that he exclaims: "...Francesca, i tuoi martiri A lagrimar mi fanno tristo e pio!" In a more recent time this story has been told by Silvio Pellico, who wrote a tragedy on the subject, and by Leigh Hunt in a poem.
His health gave way completely, and he found almost all food impossible to assimilate. ``But, if his body became enfeebled, his spirit remained inflexible. He feared one thing above all. It was to find himself some day led, by the debilitating action of prison, to the condition of degradation of which Silvio Pellico offers a well-known type.
"To the veneration of the turnkeys for the king of the future I owe it that one day when I was led to trial, and had to pass by his cell, they opened the doors that I might see my illustrious friend. An examination of Silvio Pellico's work will convince the reader that Silvio Pellico was by no means a believer in the genuineness of his companion's claims.
Nor were the generous exile's humble surroundings alien to these impressions: the effigies of his country's poets were the favorite ornaments of his sitting-room; a volume of Foscolo on the table, or a fresh letter from Silvio Pellico under his snuffbox, the grim, old-fashioned type of his Sentenza, as it was originally distributed through Austrian Italy, and hanging in its black frame, a memorial of startling import to a freeman's eyes, a landscape representing the Castle of Ferrara, the far-away scene of his youthful life, and a primitive engraving from one of the old masters of that city, dedicated to him in one of those euphonious inscriptions peculiar to Italian artists, these and such as these tokens of his experience and tastes gave interesting significance to his companionship.
Among them were representatives of every rank, vocation, and section of the land, noblemen, professors, military officers, advocates, physicians, priests, men of wealth, of genius, and of character. Those known in America, either personally or by their writings, are Count Gonfalonieri of Milan, Silvio Pellico, Castilla, Borsieri, Maroncelli, and Foresti.
The Silvio Pellico official, during these exasperating and tiresome hours, sometimes regretted not having simply succeeded his father.
At the same time with Petrarch and Galileo, and Tasso and did she know about any other Italians? Oh, yes. Silvio Pellico, wasn't he in prison and didn't he write about it? And was not the leaning tower of Pisa in Italy? Was that one of the Seven Wonders of the World? And weren't there Seven Wise Men of Greece? And wasn't there a story about the Seven Sleepers? But weren't they in Asia?
Many seizures were made, and on the 13th of October the gentle editor of the Conciliatore, Silvio Pellico, was arrested as a friend of the Carbonari, and taken to the prison of Santa Margherita in Milan. In the same month of October, the Emperors of Austria and Russia, and the Prince of Prussia met at Troppau to concert measures for crushing the Carbonari.
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