It
was followed by the tragedy of Bragadino; and in the year 1845 he
wrote Le Prime Storie, which he suffered to lie unpublished for twelve
years. It appeared in Verona in 1857, a year after the publication of
his Monte Circellio, written in 1846.
[Illustration: ALEARDO ALEARDI.]
The revolution of 1848 took place; the Austrians retired from the
dominion of Venice, and a provisional republican government, under the
presidency of Daniele Manin, was established, and Aleardi was sent as
one of its plenipotentiaries to Paris, where he learnt how many fine
speeches the friends of a struggling nation can make when they do not
mean to help it. The young Venetian republic fell. Aleardi left Paris,
and, after assisting at the ceremony of being bombarded in Bologna,
retired to Genoa. He later returned to Verona, and there passed
several years of tranquil study. In 1852, for the part he had taken
in the revolution, he was arrested and imprisoned in the fortress at
Mantua, thus fulfilling the destiny of an Italian poet of those times.
All the circumstances and facts of this arrest and imprisonment are so
characteristic of the Austrian method of governing Italy, that I do
not think it out of place to give them with some fullness. In the year
named, the Austrians were still avenging themselves upon the patriots
who had driven them out of Venetia in 1848, and their courts were
sitting in Mantua for the trial of political prisoners, many of whom
were exiled, sentenced to long imprisonment, or put to death.
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