Jonathan Keates - The Siege of Venice

CONTENTS

About the Book

Venetia, as far as the Adige River, including the city of Venice, Istria and Dalmatia, were ceded by Napoleon to Austria in 1797 and confirmed as Austrian possessions at the Congress of Vienna in 1815.

The siege of Venice in 1848 is one of historys most thrilling and tragic episodes. After half a century of Habsburg imperial rule, the Venetians drove out the occupying army and established their own republic. Led by the Jewish lawyer Daniele Manin, a man of immense courage and personal integrity, they embraced the lofty values of the Risorgimento, Italys struggle for national unity, freedom and justice. When the Austrians returned with a massive army, intent on recapturing Venice, Manin rejected their surrender demands. The city braced itself for a siege lasting more than a year, ending only when bombardment, cholera and starvation made further resistance impossible.

This epic story, in Jonathan Keatess gripping and meticulously-researched account, embraces the wider world of the revolutionary Italy of Garibaldi, Mazzini and Pope Pius IX, its battles, its dreams and its wild zigzags between hope and despair. Besides Manin and his fellow freedom-fighters, the exotic cast includes warrior priests, militant actresses, death-or-glory poets, a Mata Hari-type siren spy and a rebel princess. At the centre of the whole crowded canvas, however, stand the truest heroes of all the people of Venice. Their grit, humour and endurance, under a hail of bombs and a tide of blood sweeping across their once peaceful lagoon, make The Siege of Venice a profoundly touching and unforgettable book.

About the Author

Jonathan Keates is a prizewinning biographer and novelist, well known as a reviewer and as a writer on Italian culture and history. He teaches at the City of London School and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Also by Jonathan Keates

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The Strangers Gallery

Soon to be a Major Motion Picture

Smile Please

Non-Fiction

Handel: The Man and His Music

Stendhal: A Biography

Purcell: A Biography

Tuscany

Umbria

Italian Journeys

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Plate section I

Emperor Ferdinand I of Austria

Baroness Anna Marisch Bandiera (Bologna, Museo del Risorgimento)

Emilio Bandiera (Genoa, Museo del Risorgimento)

Attilio Bandiera (Genoa, Museo del Risorgimento)

Domenic Moro (Genoa, Museo del Risorgimento)

Daniele Manin

Niccol Tommaseo

Manins triumphal entry into Piazza San Marco, from a painting by Alvise Nani 1876 (Venice, Fondazione Querini Stampalia)

Manin and Giorgio saying farewell

Giulia Targione Tozzetti, The Wounded Volunteer, 1848 (Turin, Biblioteca Civica)

Alessandro Gavazzi

Ugo Bassi, drawing by Angelo Lamma (Bologna, Museo del Risorgimento)

Bassi and Gavazzi preaching in Piazza San Marco

Laval Nugent

Karl Culoz

Constant DAspre

Ludwig von Welden

King Charles Albert of Piedmont

Fieldmarshal Radetzky

Plate section II

Princess Cristina Belgiojoso, from a painting by Henri Lehmann

Daniele Manin in the uniform of Venices Civic Guard

The battle of Curtatone

The battle of Vicenza

Order issued to the defenders of Treviso

The attack on Mestre (Rovigo, private collection)

Giuseppe Sirtori (Venice, Museo Correr)

Girolamo Ulloa

Julius von Haynau

Proclamation issued by Haynau in Verona

Prince Felix Schwarzenberg

The Austrian high command at Mestre, from a painting by Franz Adam

Rocket attacks on the railway viaduct

Austrian bomb balloon

Venetians fleeing from Cannaregio

Manin and his family go into exile

Emilia Manin (Venice, Museo Correr)

Daniele Manin on his deathbed

LIST OF MAPS

Italy in 1848

Venetia, 1848

Northern part of the Lagoon, with principal forts and batteries

Venice, 1848

To Venice, for all she has given me

PROLOGUE

WHO DIES FOR THE MOTHERLAND?

IN THE SESTIERE of Castello, easternmost of Venices seven districts, along the Riva degli Schiavoni, past the grand hotels, Danieli, Savoia Iolanda, Londra Palace, the immense equestrian statue of King Victor Emmanuel II, the vaporetto stop and the ferry station for the Lido, past the sellers of necklaces, caricatures, clockwork toys, souvenir hats, plastic gondolas and bad paintings, the ice-cream parlours with their vats of sludgy granita and flavour selections Mirtillo, Amaretto, Stracciatella, Pistacchio, Limone, Yogurt, Menta beyond the church of the Pieta, its ceiling frescoed by Tiepolo and its classical faade completed as late as 1906, a little lane named, like several others of its kind, Calle del Dose, leads you up into the Campo San Giovanni in Bragora.

Nobody knows what a bragora is or was. Perhaps the name derives from the dialect word bragola, meaning a market square, or the term bragolare, used to refer to the fishing business. The Gothic church of San Giovanni itself is among Venices oldest, with three aisles and a wood-beamed ceiling. Cima da Conegliano painted the lyrical Baptism Of Christ above the high altar, and in the font the composer Antonio Vivaldi was baptised being supposed close to death in 1678.

Outside in the mournful campo, apart from an ironmongers shop and a big palazzo divided into holiday rental flats, there are a few unpromising trees, a vera da pozzo or decorated well-head, often spray-painted with graffiti, and a rusting bench on which housewives en route to the shops in Salizzada San Antonin pause to let their children kick a football about over the pale flagstones. Even the robust, confident voices of these little Venetians cannot purge the place of its sadness, the legacy, as it might seem, of a story connected with the small grey house standing at its north-west corner. For, as a marble plaque between the shuttered, iron-balconied windows tells us, this was once the home of Attilio and Emilio Bandiera, among the bravest, most famous and most foolish martyrs in the cause of Italian political liberty.

Nine years divided the brothers from one another in age. They were the sons of Baron Francesco Bandiera, a vice-admiral in the Austrian imperial navy, commanding the Levant squadron in the war conducted on behalf of the Turkish sultan in 1840 against the rebel Pasha of Egypt Mehmet Ali. Admiral Bandiera was a schwarzgelber, the name given in Austria to subjects unquestioningly faithful to the imperial black-and-yellow (schwarz/gelb) flag. Having grown grey under the discipline of arms, Attilio once described his father, he respects nothing but an oath of loyalty sworn once and once only. He strives to make himself useful to his motherland by fulfilling all the duties appropriate to his profession. Bandieras sons, despite following him into the navy, learned early enough to question these ideals.