The Irish volunteers in Italy's Risorgimento

"Strictly confidential" letters reveal the transnational background

To celebrate St. Patrick’s Day here is the story of how I discovered a forgotten historical connection between my homelands - Ireland and Italy .

We know about the Crusaders who travelled to the Holy Land, the pilgrims who walked to Rome for the Holy Years, the men and ladies of the Grand Tour, but how many Irish and English who travel to Italy today realize that Cork and Tipperary farm lads were there before them, in 1860, marching along dusty roads in Umbria, Lazio and Le Marche on a mission in which they believed?

The whole story in Italian and English

The army campaigns and battles leading to the demise of the Papal States as a temporal power and the establishment of a united Italy are the background for our story: that of soldiers from England and Ireland fighting on opposite sides of the barricades in Italy in 1860. Military men from several countries and of different political leanings head a large cast of characters who played upon the stage of Italy’s unification movement. Supporting actors included journalists, correspondents, poets and shadowy, powerful men and women behind the scenes.

Field Marshal Laval Nugent, Irish prince and Austrian military leader

The first impetus for the creation of both volunteer groups - Irish and English- was given by enthusiasts living abroad in exile and by newspaper men. Both groups also had cultural mediators who helped with the organization and integration of the volunteers in realities they faced upon arrival in Italy.

My interest in the subject was sparked during an outing to the Umbrian town of Spoleto over fifty years ago. This romantic hill town comes alive each summer when it is invaded by artists, dancers and theatre people for the International Arts festival known as “The Festival of Two Worlds”.

Exploring the town using an outdated Italian guidebook, my companion and I climbed up to the imposing fortress on Sant’Elia hill high above the town. Built by order of the Papal governor, Spanish Cardinal Albornoz, in the 1300s. At the time of my visit it was, and continued to be so until 1982, one of Italy’s maximum security prisons. Walking over the ancient aqueduct bridge that stretches across the valley to Monte Luco, we could distinctly hear the prisoners’ voices echoing from within the thick fortress walls.

In recent years this fortress complex has been completely restored and is now used for conferences, exhibitions and as the seat of a book conservation school, a far cry from when it was home to Lucrezia Borgia, daughter of Pope Alexander VI. The old red-covered guidebook also mentioned that a “Capitano O’Reilly” and his Irish soldiers had fought a battle at the fortress in 1860. Intrigued by this unexpected “Irish connection “ in central Italy I began researching the topic and during the next (pre-internet) decade scoured libraries and archives in Rome.

Irish volunteer soldiers encampment in Italy 1860

Most of the archives did not have facilities for photocopying so many holidays and Saturday mornings were spent digging through reams of material then transcribing documents by hand. As I followed the trail of the Irish volunteers, I became familiar with their elegant 19th century handwriting and made the acquaintance of many interesting, long-dead personalities. Their heartfelt words read for the first time in over a century came alive again as I felt the sand used to dry the ink still clinging to the thin paper of their urgent letters marked “Strictly Confidential”.

letter in code to Father Mullooly from a secret agent

It is thanks to these confidential letters that we now have a more exact picture of the day-to-day problems and first person accounts of those exciting months of 1860. Sections of the letters are transcribed allowing us to hear the real voice, the very words of the protagonists of this intriguing story. The Irish volunteers’ motivations for coming to Italy, the enrolment and travel processes and their experiences on Italian soil are better understood thanks to the secret letters between Father Joseph Mullooly and his correspondents in several different countries: Ireland, Belgium and Austria.

The letters of Mullooly, the Rector of the Basilica of San Clemente, came to light during the reorganization of the San Clemente archives and library in Rome. Stuffed in a shoe box which had fallen behind shelves in the archives, the cache of letters lay forgotten for over a century until Monsignor Leonard Boyle came upon them. Knowing of my search for information on the Irish volunteer soldiers of 1860, Monsignor Boyle, later the Prefect of the Vatican’s Secret Archives, let me have a first look.

This excerpt is from “The Irish and English in Italy’s Risorgimento “ Etruria Editions, Edizioni Archeoares, Viterbo English edition (2011)

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Italian edition (2022) http://www.elegantetruria.com/book/irlandesi-e-inglesi-nel-risorgimento-newest-book/ Spedizione gratis per indirizzi in Italia

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