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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 which the Carbonari had proclaimed at
Nola and elsewhere during the preceding month. On the twenty-fifth
of August, the Austrian government decreed death to every member of
a secret society, and carcere duro e durissimo, severest pains of
imprisonment, to all who had neglected to oppose the progress of
Carbonarism. Many seizures were made, and on the 13th of October
the gentle editor of the Conciliatore, Silvio Pellico, was arrested
as a friend of the Carbonari, and taken to the prison of Santa
Margherita in Milan.

In the same month of October, the Emperors of Austria and Russia,

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