Mazzini Letters

Letters, 1869-1871, from Giuseppe Mazzini to Linda Mazini, afterwards Madame Villari.

Guiseppe Mazzini, born in Genoa in 1805, was a propagandist, revolutionary and republican, and a champion of the movement for Italian unity known as the Risorgimento. During the 1860s he was occupied by schemes for seizing Venice and Rome. He withdrew from early contact with the Socialist First International, since the moral and religious basis of his political thought prevented him from accepting either Karl Marx's communism or Mikhail Bakunin's anarchism. Mazzini was repeatedly elected by Messina as its parliamentary deputy, but the elections were quashed by the Italian government. In 1870, he agreed to lead a republican rising in Sicily, but was arrested en route and interned at Gaeta. The occupation of Rome by Italian troops prompted his release and pardon. Italy had thus been united, but as a monarchy and not the republic Mazzini had advocated. He founded the paper 'Roma del popolo' ('Rome of the People'), which he edited from Lugano, and made plans for an Italian working men's congress. He died from pleurisy at Pisa, 1872.

Linda Villari (ne Mazini), an author, died in 1915. Publications: 'In the Golden Shell. A story of Palermo' (London, 1872); 'In Change unchanged' (2 volumes, London, 1877); 'Camilla's Girlhood'(T Fisher Unwin, London, 1885); 'On Tuscan Hills and Venetian Waters' (T Fisher Unwin, London, 1885); 'When I was a child; or, Left behind' (T F Unwin, London, 1885); 'Her and there in Italy and over the Border ' (W H Allen & Co, London, 1893); 'Oswald von Wolkenstein. A memoir of the last Minnesinger of Tirol' (J M Dent & Co, London, 1901). Translated: Pasquale Villari's 'Niccolo Machiavelli and his times' (2 volumes, London, 1878); Mor Joikai, 'Life in a Cave', from the Hungarian (W Swan Sonnenschein & Co, London, [1884]); Pasquale Villari's 'Life and times of Girolamo Savonarola' (2nd edition, 2 volumes, T Fisher Unwin, London, 1889); Pasquale Villari's 'The Two First Centuries of Florentine History' (2 volumes, T Fisher Unwin, London, 1894-1895); HRH Prince Luigi Amedeo di Savoia, Duke of the Abruzzi, 'The Ascent of Mount St Elias, Alaska' (A Constable & Co, Westminster, 1900); Pasquale Villari's 'The Barbarian Invasions of Italy' (T Fisher Unwin, London, 1902); Pasquale Villari's 'Studies, Historical and Critical' (T Fisher Unwin, London, 1907).

Open

The papers are available subject to the usual conditions of access to Archives and Manuscripts material, after the completion of a Reader's Undertaking.

Purchased from Lady Berwick, grand-daughter of Linda Mazini, in May 1970.

Collection level description.

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