Giorgio Pallavicino Trivulzio (24 April 1796 – 4 August 1878) was a Lombard aristocrat who became a long-standing patriot activist-politician. He was consistent in his backing of Italian unification between 1820 and its accomplishment.
Early life
Giorgio Guido Pallavicino Trivulzio was born into an aristocratic family in Milan approximately one year before the incorporation of northern and central Italy into the growing body of territories that would be reconfigured and rebranded a few years later as parts of the First French Empire. His father was the Marquis Giorgio Pio; his mother was the Countess Anna Besozzi. Pallavicino Trivulzio inherited further titles as he grew up. Little is known of his early years. His father died when he was just seven, leaving his mother to attend to his upbringing. After he died Sebastiano Tecchio, the president of the senate in which he had served, delivered an affectionate oration in which he spoke of Pallavicino Trivulzio's childhood in a privileged single parent family. His mother, Anna, was an educated woman who saw to it that her son was well taught. Contemporary literature reflected Italy's condition of disunity and subservience to the Napoleonic empire: she took care to see that his reading concentrated on the classical authors and orators of ancient Greece and Rome. She forbad the servants from addressing the child by his title as "Marquis" or stepping in to help him to undertake tasks that he should be perfectly well able to undertake for himself, and she inculcated in him the virtues of "severe frugality". For some time he was sent to a boarding school, on which he would look back without pleasure. Aside from the sense of rejection and what he perceived as an excess of religious practices, he found the quality of the actual teaching "superficial and pedantic".
Uprising against Austrian hegemony Starting in 1814, he was able to undertake a succession of lengthy trips away from home, taking in the Italian peninsula and several other European countries. After 1815, there was a backlash on the part of European governments against all the changes that had taken place during the quarter century following the French Revolution, which for the Italian territories now under Austrian hegemony involved strenuous efforts by the authorities to thwart any signs of liberalism or Italian nationalism. A series of anti-Austrian riots broke out during 1820/21 in which Pallavicino Trivulzio participated. During or before January 1821, he joined the secret conspiratorial society being formed by Federico Confalonieri who was recruiting supporters from across Lombardy in preparation for some sort of military insurrection. During March 1821, as rioting broke out in the neighbouring Piedmont-Sardinia (which was not formally under Austrian control), Pallavicino Trivulzio and Gaetano De Castillia together visited Turin on behalf of Confalonieri and secured an interview with the regent, whom they tried to persuade to send Piedmontese troops across the border into Lombardy and take on the Austrians. According to one version of the interview, he subsequently confessed to interrogators that he had secured the assurance of Charles Albert that the Lombard cause was "sacred" to the government of Piedmont, although Pallavicino Trivulzio's own recollection of the meeting seems later to have changed.
From Turin, Pallavicino Trivulzio escaped briefly to the north, crossing into Switzerland, before returning home to Milan. On learning that de Castillia had already been arrested on 2 December 1821, he went to see the police in order to plead his fellow-delegate's case. On 4 December 1821, he was himself arrested and detained and interrogated, apparently in some depth, by the widely feared (among anti-Austrian activists) investigating magistrate Antonio Salvotti. According to one source, it was on 13 December 1821 that, under interrogation, he made admissions which badly compromised himself and other patriots, including Federico Confalonieri: these he subsequently tried to deny the next day, pleading "madness" ("pazzo"). The trial that followed was conducted with "customary [Austrian] rigour and secrecy". His trial and other processes were lengthy and, in the view of his most high-profile obituarist, dependent on false confessions drawn from the mouths of the unwary and uninformed. These rituals appear to have come to an end during December 1823. Pallavicino Trivulzio was condemned to death: the sentence was commuted shortly afterwards to a twenty-year term of "harsh imprisonment" ("carcere duro"). Prison He spent the first and greater part of his incarceration in the Fortress of Spielberg (as it was known at the time) at Brno in Moravia, to which he was delivered on 24 February 1824. The northern wing of the prison had been newly adapted to incorporate a series of specially constructed cells for "state prisoners" (identified in Italian sources as Italian patriots). During the nineteenth century, helped in part by Pallavicino Trivulzio's own compelling written reports of his long incarceration there, Spielberg Castle acquired a level of infamy among the Italian public that twentieth century English speakers would impute to Alcatraz. During his time imprisoned in Moravia he is reported to have suffered from a serious form of neurosis. His cellmates at Spielberg included Pietro Borsieri and Gaetano De Castillia. His attitude to at least some of his former revolutionary comrades became somewhat equivocal, to the extent that he undertook to provide fresh revelations against Confalonieri on condition that conditions governing his own life sentence might be ameliorated. According to a surviving document dated 29 August 1832, he was by that time suffering from various serious gastric symptoms including "diarrhoea alternating with constipation" which subsequent commentators have diagnosed as consistent with acute chronic colitis. That year he was transferred to Gradisca. By 1835, he had been transferred again, this time to Laibach (Lubiana / Ljubljana), and where his physical and mental condition are understood to have become "Precarious". "Amnesty in America" or "Confinement in Prague" In Vienna the emperor died in March 1835 and his son, the well-intentioned "Ferdinand der Gütige", came to the throne. It was a time for new beginnings, and Pallavicino Trivulzio, whose sentence still had more than five years to run, was offered early release. The imperial authorities made arrangements for him to be deported to America as part of a larger group of political detainees. However, it turned out that their illustrious prisoner did not wish to start a new life in America. There could, at this stage, be no question of returning him to Italy, where he might resume his former habit of fomenting separatism, so alternative arrangements were made for him to be "confined in Prague". The intensity of his confinement is unclear, but during his five years in Prague he took the opportunity, in 1839, to marry Anna Koppmann, the daughter of the prison governor. The couple returned to Lombardy in 1840. Their daughter, another Anna, was born later that same year.
They now settled at the family home in San Fiorano (Lodi) near Piacenza: for a few years little more was heard of Pallavicino Trivulzio. There is mention of his having been kept under low-level surveillance by the regional police department.
Political career 1848 He returned to the political stage following the "Five Days of Milan", a brief but intense uprising on the city streets during March 1848 which led to the (temporary) expulsion of the Austrian garrison under Field Marshal Radetzky. Evidence of Pallavicino Trivulzio's attitude to these developments survives in the form of a painting by Giuseppe Molteni of his eight-year-old daughter dressed in the uniform that liberation fighters had adopted for the insurgency. 1848 quickly became a year of revolutions in many of the Italian territories and states (and more widely across Europe), and in view of his earlier experiences following the (far more limited) anti-Austrian insurgencies of 1820/21 it is understandable that Pallavicino Trivulzio's first move involved escaping (again) to Switzerland, from where he very soon moved on to Paris, where he sought to solicit support for the Risorgimento vision. Following the restoration of the Austrian order in August 1848 he moved to Turin, the capital of Piedmont-Sardinia which is positioned directly to the west of Lombardy. During the months when it seemed possible that Austria might capitulate or withdraw and that Italian unification might prove achievable in 1848, Pallavicino Trivulzio emerged as a "sincere and unqualified" advocate of a merger between Piedmont, Lombardy, and Veneto even though integration into the Kingdom of Sardinia would confound his long-standing republican convictions. Turin exile After 1848, as the Austrians sought to strengthen political and social control in the Kingdom of Lombardy–Venetia, Pallavicino Trivulzio remained in Turin, resolved to use his still substantial fortune and his expanding network of contacts with French politicians and Italian exiles in Paris to progress the cause of unification. There were frequent trips to Paris to where, among others, Daniele Manin had escaped and now lived on in exile till his death in 1857.
On 29 March 1849, not long after establishing his new home in Turin, he secured election to the lower house of the bicameral Sardinia-Piedmont parliament, representing at this stage a Genoa electoral district (Genova III). He continued to serve as a deputy (member of parliament) after the 1853 election, now representing a Turin electoral district (Torino II). This period marked the start of a longer parliamentary career, but it does not appear that the parliament in Turin was the dominant centre of political power. Through the 1850s, Pallavicino Trivulzio exercised significant political influence in several different ways, but parliament was only one of various available platforms, and probably not the most effective. He was also generous in his financing of the cause, especially before 1853. He provided significant funding to publications such as L'Opinione, a relentlessly radical-liberal Turin-based daily newspaper.