Luigi Zamboni

Law Student and Martyr of Independence (Bologna, 12 October 1772 - Bologna, 18 August 1795)

Luigi ZamboniVery few people of Bologna, and even fewer students, know the origin of the name of Via Zamboni, the street on which the city’s University stands.

As soon as Italy was united, in 1867, the former Via San Donato was named after the young Law student, Luigi Zamboni, who, in 1795, joined forces with his friend Giovanni Battista De Rolandis and other young men inflamed by French ideals in an attempt to free the city from the absolutism of the Church.

Luigi Zamboni was born in 1772 to a family of modest means. His father Giuseppe was a cloth merchant in Via Strazzacappe, where a plaque still commemorates the birthplace of the young local revolutionary.

Despite his humble origins, Luigi managed to read Law at university. In 1790, he became close to the anti-papal movements, which were conspiring to oust the Papal Legate and restore the municipal order.

The student’s feelings of freedom were intercepted by Antoine Christophe Saliceti, the self-styled ‘Abbot Bauset’, who involved him in a more organised international conspiracy network.

Realising that Bologna and Italy as a whole were not yet ready for a collective revolt, Zamboni decided to set off for France where, having enlisted in the Revolutionary militia, he could learn more about the country’s ideals and military strategies.

After several exciting experiences in Corsica, Sardinia and Perpignan, he felt ready to undertake a secret mission under a false name, Luigi Rinaldi, with which he enrolled in the Roman papal cavalry to spy on its tactics and actions, with a view to conducting a more decisive revolt against the absolutism of the Church.

When he returned to Bologna in 1793, Saliceti introduced him to his latest subversive comrades.

Among them, Luigi instantly became friends with a young aristocrat from Asti, Giovanni Battista De Rolandis, sent by his mother to the capital of Emilia to keep him away from trouble after he had criticised the seminary in which he was enrolled. In Bologna, the aristocratic idealist enrolled in the Faculty of Theology and lodged in what was then the college reserved for students from Piemonte, the Palazzina della Viola, today the seat of the University's International Relations Division.

Luigi and Giovanni Battista led a small group of university students, young graduates and simple street kids. Driven by enthusiasm, on the night of 13-14 November 1794 they undertook a botched uprising with the aim of ousting the Swiss Guards, kidnapping the Papal Legate, freeing the political prisoners and distributing weapons to the people.

However, the uprising failed to rouse the citizens of Bologna, and in the end Zamboni and De Rolandis, betrayed by two of their comrades, were captured while attempting to escape to the Tuscan-Emilian Apennines.

They were brought back to the city and imprisoned in the Carceri del Torrone, in the City Hall.

A long trial began, marked by interrogations and torture, until finally, on 18 August 1795, Luigi Zamboni was found hanging from a rope. The records spoke of suicide, although rumours of murder circulated right from the start.

De Rolandis, instead, was publicly hanged the following year, on 23 April 1796 – ironically, just days before Napoleon Bonaparte's arrival in the city on 19 June.

Bologna soon rewarded these two young men, whose ashes were carried in triumph through the city streets and placed in an urn on a tall column in Piazza del Mercato, now known as Piazza VIII Agosto.

However, the cenotaph was destroyed a few years later, in 1799, during the brief return of the Austrians, and the ashes of the two revolutionaries were lost.

After the Napoleonic period, at the time of the Restoration, the people of Bologna continued to resent the absolute power of the Church, and this time numerous senatorial families began to organise secret Carbonari, Masonic and Irredentist meetings, such as the one held in Palazzo Hercolani, currently the seat of the Departments of Economics, of Political and Social Sciences, and of Sociology and Business Law.

In one of its sumptuous rooms, two winged victories bear the colours of France and Italy, considered democratic sisters in those dark years.

When Italy was finally united, the figures of Zamboni and De Rolandis began to be celebrated in connection with the Italian flag.

Their fame and merit were restored through the 1860 edition of Giuseppe Ricciardi's “Martirologio italiano dal 1792 al 1847”. This work, which brought the exploits of the two pioneering revolutionaries of the Unification of Italy to fame, was followed in 1862 by “I primi martiri della liberta italiana e l’origine della bandiera tricolore; congiura e morte di Luigi Zamboni di Bologna e Giovanni. Battista De Rolandis di Castel d'Alfero presso Asti, tratta da documenti autentici e narrata da Augusto Aglebert”. In this volume, Aglebert reported that, during an appeal hearing, De Rolandis had claimed that, during the uprising, Zamboni's mother and aunt had made rosettes in three colours, white, red and green (the third colour was purposely not blue, to set the Italian uprising apart from the French revolution).

Such public testimonies led the people of Bologna to proclaim themselves the creators of the Italian flag, however the theory was later dismantled by the academic Vittorio Fiorini, who found no documents on the subject in the court papers. Indeed, a statement by Zamboni himself was later found, in which he mentions that the lining of the revolutionary symbol was green, and that the colours white and red were not a reference to French ideals, but to the municipal colours of Bologna. Even Antonio Aldini, a politician and Professor of Law at the Alma Mater Studiorum, in defending De Rolandis in court, claimed that his client only supported the liberation of Bologna and not the revolutionary values from beyond the Alps, and to this end recalled the two-coloured municipal rosettes found in his possession.

Aldini's defence, however, contradicts the account given by Ito De Rolandis in his “Origine del Tricolore”, where he recalls that the lawyer gave Giovanni Battista's rosette - which featured the colour green - back to his relatives from Piemonte.

In any case, today it has been established that the first three-coloured flag appeared in Milan in 1796 and that it was definitively consecrated to the Italian cause at the Cispadane Congress session of 7 January 1797, held in Reggio Emilia.

The issue of the Italian flag, however, succeeded in keeping alive the collective memory of Luigi Zamboni and Giovanni Battista De Rolandis, whose exploits Giosuè Carducci recalls in the poem “Nel vigesimo anniversario dell’VIII Agosto 1848”.

I wish to sink my winning eagles
where your Zamboni died
thinking of the three colours; ...

The year before this poetic tribute, the Bologna City Council had named two streets after the young insurgents. These still cross today, in the heart of the university district. The road dedicated to Luigi Zamboni is the old Via San Donato, to which the new headquarters of the Alma Mater Studiorum were moved in 1803, a few years after his death.