Tito Speri

Tito Speri

Tito Speri (born August 2, 1825 in Brescia , † March 3, 1853 in Belfiore near Mantua ) was an Italian freedom fighter.

Life

Tito Speri was the son of a picture restorer who had fought for Napoleon I. As a teenager he participated in uprisings against Austrian rule in northern Italy. In October 1846 he entered a seminary , but was able to get his parents to enroll him at a Lyceum in Lodi a year later . When the March Revolution against the Austrians broke out in Milan in 1848 , he volunteered in the fighting, including in Governolo . In 1849 he was one of the leaders of the ten-day uprising in Brescia . To put down this uprising, the Austrians needed a complete army corps . After a brief exile in Lugano , he joined Giuseppe Mazzini's republican movement in Turin .

At the beginning of 1850 he returned to Brescia after an amnesty . In his hometown he was monitored by the Austrian police . He participated in a liberation committee founded by the priest Enrico Tazzoli . He procured weapons, trained young men to use them and distributed propaganda material. The Austrians tried several times in vain to arrest him. They got hold of him on June 18, 1852 and took him to Mantua on June 28 . There the trials against the members of Enrico Tazzoli's Liberation Committee took place. Tito Speri was sentenced to death hanging on a rope with a number of other freedom fighters. He was executed on March 3, 1853 in the fortress of Belfiore near Mantua.

Tito Speri is one of the most important figures in the Italian unification movement because of his commitment to the uprising in Brescia and because of his tragic death in Belfiore near Mantua .

Web links

• Biography in Italian