My Ten Years Imprisonment | Page 3

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This etext was prepared by David Price, email [email protected],
from the 1886 Cassell & Co. edition.

MY TEN YEARS' IMPRISONMENT
by Silvio Pellico

INTRODUCTION.

Silvio Pellico was born at Saluzzo, in North Italy, in the year of the fall
of the Bastille, 1789. His health as a child was feeble, his temper gentle,
and he had the instincts of a poet. Before he was ten years old he had
written a tragedy on a theme taken from Macpherson's Ossian. His
chief delight as a boy was in acting plays with other children, and he
acquired from his father a strong interest in the patriotic movements of
the time. He fastened upon French literature during a stay of some

years at Lyons with a relation of his mother's. Ugo Foscolo's Sepolcri
revived his patriotism, and in 1810, at the age of twenty-one, he
returned to Italy. He taught French in the Soldiers' Orphans' School at
Milan. At Milan he was admitted to the friendship of Vincenzo Monti,
a poet then touching his sixtieth year, and of the younger Ugo Foscolo,
by whose writings he had been powerfully stirred, and to whom he
became closely bound. Silvio Pellico wrote in classical form a tragedy,
Laodicea, and then, following the national or romantic school, for a
famous actress of that time, another tragedy, Francesca di Rimini,
which was received with great applause.
After the dissolution of the kingdom of Italy, in April 1814, Pellico
became tutor to the two children of the Count Porro Lambertenghi, at
whose table he met writers of mark, from many countries; Byron
(whose Manfred he translated), Madame de Stael, Schlegel, Manzoni,
and others. In 1819 Silvio Pellico began publishing Il Conciliatore, a
journal purely literary, that was to look through literature to the life that
it expresses, and so help towards the better future of his country. But
the merciless excisions of inoffensive passages by the Austrian
censorship destroyed the journal in a year.
A secret political association had been formed in Italy of men of all
ranks who called themselves the Carbonari (charcoal burners), and who
sought the reform of government in Italy. In 1814 they had planned a
revolution in Naples, but there was no action until 1820. After
successful pressure on the King of the two Sicilies, the forces of the
Carbonari under General Pepe entered Naples on the ninth of July,
1820, and King Ferdinand I. swore on the 13th of July to observe the
constitution