Articoli correlati a The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara
Describes the 1858 kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, the child of a Jewish merchant, by Italian police acting under the orders of the papal Inquisitor, the public outcry that followed, and the impact of the crime on the downfall of papal power in Italy. 30,000 first printing. Tour.
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L'autore:
David I. Kertzer was born in 1948 in New York City. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1986, he has twice been awarded, in 1985 and 1990, the Marraro Prize from the Society for Italian Historical Studies for the best work on Italian history. He is currently Paul Dupee, Jr. University Professor of Social Science and a professor of anthropology and history at Brown University. He and his family live in Providence.
Estratto. © Riproduzione autorizzata. Diritti riservati.:
CHAPTER 1
The Knock at the Door
THE KNOCK CAME at nightfall. It was Wednesday, June 23, 1858. Anna Facchini, a 23-year-old servant, descended a flight of stairs from the Mortara apartment to open the building's outer door. Before her stood a uniformed police officer and a second, middle-aged man of martial bearing.1
"Is this the home of Signor Momolo Mortara?" asked Marshal Lucidi.
Yes, Anna responded, but Signor Mortara was not there. He had gone out with his oldest son.
As the men turned away, she closed the door and returned to the apartment to report the unsettling encounter to her employer, Marianna Mortara. Marianna sat at the living room table, busily stitching, along with her twin 11-year-old daughters, Ernesta and Erminia. Her five younger children, Augusto, aged 10, Arnoldo, 9, Edgardo, 6, Ercole, 4, and Imelda, born just six months before, were already asleep. Marianna, a nervous sort anyway, wished that her husband were home.
A few minutes later, she heard sounds of feet climbing the back stairs, which could be reached through her neighbor's apartment. Marianna stopped her stitching and listened carefully. The knocking on the door confirmed her fears. She approached the door and, without touching it, asked who was there.
"It's the police," a voice said. "Let us in."
Marianna, hoping though not really believing that the policemen had simply made a mistake, told them what she prayed they did not know: they were at the back door of the same apartment they had visited just a few minutes before.
"It doesn't matter, Signora. We are police and we want to come in. Don't worry; we wish you no harm."
Marianna opened the door and let the two men in. She did not notice the rest of the papal police detail, some of whom remained on the nearby stairs while others lingered on the street below.
Pietro Lucidi, marshal in the papal carabinieri and head of the police detail, entered, with Brigadier Giuseppe Agostini, in civilian clothes, following him in. The sight of the military police of the Papal States coming inexplicably in the night filled Marianna with dread.
The Marshal, not at all happy about the mission before him, and seeing that the woman was already distraught, tried to calm her. Pulling a small sheet of paper from his jacket, he told her he needed to get certain clarifications about her family and asked her to list the names of everyone in the household, beginning with her husband and herself, and proceeding through all her children, from oldest to youngest. Marianna began to shake.
Walking home beneath Bologna's famous porticoes with Riccardo, his 13-year-old son, that pleasant June evening, Momolo was surprised to find police milling around his outside door. He hurried up to his apartment and discovered the police officer and the other strange man talking to his frightened wife.
As Momolo entered the apartment, Marianna exclaimed, "Just listen to what these men want with our family!"
Marshal Lucidi now saw that his worst fears about his mission would be realized, but felt even so a certain relief at now being able to deal with Momolo, who was, after all, a man. Again he stated that he had been given the task of determining just who was in the Mortara household. Momolo, unable to get any explanation for this ominous inquiry, proceeded to name himself, his wife, and each of his eight children.
The Marshal checked all these names on his little list. Having noted all ten members of the family, he announced that he would now like to see each of the children. His request turned Marianna's fright to terror.
Momolo pointed out Riccardo, Ernesta, and Erminia, who had gathered round their parents, but pleaded that his other children were asleep and should be left alone.
Moved, perhaps, but undeterred, the Marshal remained firm. Eventually the Mortaras led the two policemen through the door into their own bedroom, with the three oldest children and the servant trailing them in. There, on a sofa-bed, slept 6-year-old Edgardo. His parents did not yet know that on the list the Marshal had brought with him, Edgardo's name was underlined.
Lucidi told Anna to take the rest of the children out of the room. Once they had left, he turned back to Momolo and said, "Signor Mortara, I am sorry to inform you that you are the victim of betrayal."
"What betrayal?" asked Marianna.
"Your son Edgardo has been baptized," Lucidi responded, "and I have been ordered to take him with me."
Marianna's shrieks echoed through the building, prompting the policemen stationed outside to scurry into the bedroom. The older Mortara children, terrified, sneaked back in as well. Weeping hysterically, Marianna threw herself into Edgardo's bed and clutched the somnolent boy to her.
"If you want my son, you'll have to kill me first!"
"There must be some mistake," Momolo said. "My son was never baptized. . . . Who says Edgardo was baptized? Who says he has to be taken?"
"I am only acting according to orders," pleaded the Marshal. "I'm just following the Inquisitor's orders."
Lucidi despaired as the situation seemed to be slipping out of control. In his own report, he later wrote: "I hardly know how to describe the effect of that fatal announcement. I can assure you that I would have a thousand times preferred to be exposed to much more serious dangers in performing my duties than to have to witness such a painful scene."
With Marianna wailing from Edgardo's bed, Momolo insisting that it was all a horrible mistake, and the children crying, Lucidi scarcely knew what to do. Both parents got down on their knees before the discomfited Marshal, begging him in the name of humanity not to take their child from them. Bending a bit (and no doubt thinking this was all the Inquisitor's fault anyway), Lucidi offered to let Momolo accompany his son to see the Inquisitor at the nearby Convent of San Domenico.
Momolo refused, afraid to let Edgardo into the Inquisitor's hands.
Lucidi recalled: "While I waited for the desperate mother and father, overcome by a terrible agony, to return to reason so that the matter could be brought to its inevitable conclusion, various people began to arrive, either on their own or because they had been called there."
In fact, with Lucidi's permission, Momolo had sent Riccardo to alert Marianna's brother and uncle, and to fetch their elderly Jewish neighbor Bonajuto Sanguinetti, whose wealth and community position, Momolo hoped, might ward off the impending disaster.
Hurrying back to the cafe where, less than an hour before, he and his father had left them, Riccardo came upon his two uncles, Angelo Padovani, his mother's brother, and Angelo Moscato, husband of his mother's sister. Moscato later described the encounter:
"As I sat with my brother-in-law at the Caff? del Genio on via Vetturini, my nephew Riccardo Mortara came running up, in tears and disconsolate, telling me that the carabinieri were in his house, and that they wanted to kidnap his brother Edgardo."
The two men rushed to the Mortaras' apartment: "We saw the mother, devastated, and in such a sorry state that it's impossible to describe. I asked the marshal of the gendarmes to explain what was going on, and he responded that he had an order-though he never showed it to me-from the Inquisitor, Father Pier Gaetano Feletti, to take Edgardo because he had been baptized."
Marianna was "desperate, beside herself," as her brother, Angelo Padovani, recalled. "She lay stretched out on a sofa which they also used as a bed, the sofa on which Edgardo slept, holding him tightly to her chest so that no one could take him."
Trying to find some way to stop the police from making off with Edgardo, Padovani and his brother-in-law persuaded the Marshal not to remove the child before they could consult with their uncle, who lived nearby. The uncle, Marianna's father's brother, whose name was also Angelo Padovani, was still at work in the small bank he ran in the same building in which he lived.
After his nephews filled him in on the dramatic events at the Mortara home, Signor Padovani decided that their only hope was to see the Inquisitor. While the younger Padovani rushed back to inform the Marshal of the need for further delay, the other two men made their way to the convent.
At 11 p.m., they presented themselves at the forbidding gate of San Domenico and asked to be taken to the Inquisitor. Despite the hour, they were rushed up to the Inquisitor's room. They implored Father Feletti to tell them why he had ordered the police to take Edgardo. Responding in measured tones, and hoping to calm them, the Inquisitor explained that Edgardo had been secretly baptized, although by whom, or how he came to know of it, he would not say. Once word of the baptism had reached the proper authorities, they had given him the instructions that he was now carrying out: the boy was a Catholic and could not be raised in a Jewish household.
Padovani protested bitterly. It was an act of great cruelty, he said, to order a child taken from his parents without ever giving them a chance to defend themselves. Father Feletti simply responded that it was not in his power to deviate from the orders he had received. The men begged him to reveal his grounds for thinking that the child had been baptized, for no one in the family knew anything about it. The Inquisitor replied that he could give no such explanation, the matter being confidential, but that they should rest assured that everything had been done properly. It would be best for all concerned, he added, if the members of the family would simply resign themselves to what was to come. "Far from acting lightly in this matter," he told them, "I have acted in good conscience, for everything has been done punctiliously according to the ...
The Knock at the Door
THE KNOCK CAME at nightfall. It was Wednesday, June 23, 1858. Anna Facchini, a 23-year-old servant, descended a flight of stairs from the Mortara apartment to open the building's outer door. Before her stood a uniformed police officer and a second, middle-aged man of martial bearing.1
"Is this the home of Signor Momolo Mortara?" asked Marshal Lucidi.
Yes, Anna responded, but Signor Mortara was not there. He had gone out with his oldest son.
As the men turned away, she closed the door and returned to the apartment to report the unsettling encounter to her employer, Marianna Mortara. Marianna sat at the living room table, busily stitching, along with her twin 11-year-old daughters, Ernesta and Erminia. Her five younger children, Augusto, aged 10, Arnoldo, 9, Edgardo, 6, Ercole, 4, and Imelda, born just six months before, were already asleep. Marianna, a nervous sort anyway, wished that her husband were home.
A few minutes later, she heard sounds of feet climbing the back stairs, which could be reached through her neighbor's apartment. Marianna stopped her stitching and listened carefully. The knocking on the door confirmed her fears. She approached the door and, without touching it, asked who was there.
"It's the police," a voice said. "Let us in."
Marianna, hoping though not really believing that the policemen had simply made a mistake, told them what she prayed they did not know: they were at the back door of the same apartment they had visited just a few minutes before.
"It doesn't matter, Signora. We are police and we want to come in. Don't worry; we wish you no harm."
Marianna opened the door and let the two men in. She did not notice the rest of the papal police detail, some of whom remained on the nearby stairs while others lingered on the street below.
Pietro Lucidi, marshal in the papal carabinieri and head of the police detail, entered, with Brigadier Giuseppe Agostini, in civilian clothes, following him in. The sight of the military police of the Papal States coming inexplicably in the night filled Marianna with dread.
The Marshal, not at all happy about the mission before him, and seeing that the woman was already distraught, tried to calm her. Pulling a small sheet of paper from his jacket, he told her he needed to get certain clarifications about her family and asked her to list the names of everyone in the household, beginning with her husband and herself, and proceeding through all her children, from oldest to youngest. Marianna began to shake.
Walking home beneath Bologna's famous porticoes with Riccardo, his 13-year-old son, that pleasant June evening, Momolo was surprised to find police milling around his outside door. He hurried up to his apartment and discovered the police officer and the other strange man talking to his frightened wife.
As Momolo entered the apartment, Marianna exclaimed, "Just listen to what these men want with our family!"
Marshal Lucidi now saw that his worst fears about his mission would be realized, but felt even so a certain relief at now being able to deal with Momolo, who was, after all, a man. Again he stated that he had been given the task of determining just who was in the Mortara household. Momolo, unable to get any explanation for this ominous inquiry, proceeded to name himself, his wife, and each of his eight children.
The Marshal checked all these names on his little list. Having noted all ten members of the family, he announced that he would now like to see each of the children. His request turned Marianna's fright to terror.
Momolo pointed out Riccardo, Ernesta, and Erminia, who had gathered round their parents, but pleaded that his other children were asleep and should be left alone.
Moved, perhaps, but undeterred, the Marshal remained firm. Eventually the Mortaras led the two policemen through the door into their own bedroom, with the three oldest children and the servant trailing them in. There, on a sofa-bed, slept 6-year-old Edgardo. His parents did not yet know that on the list the Marshal had brought with him, Edgardo's name was underlined.
Lucidi told Anna to take the rest of the children out of the room. Once they had left, he turned back to Momolo and said, "Signor Mortara, I am sorry to inform you that you are the victim of betrayal."
"What betrayal?" asked Marianna.
"Your son Edgardo has been baptized," Lucidi responded, "and I have been ordered to take him with me."
Marianna's shrieks echoed through the building, prompting the policemen stationed outside to scurry into the bedroom. The older Mortara children, terrified, sneaked back in as well. Weeping hysterically, Marianna threw herself into Edgardo's bed and clutched the somnolent boy to her.
"If you want my son, you'll have to kill me first!"
"There must be some mistake," Momolo said. "My son was never baptized. . . . Who says Edgardo was baptized? Who says he has to be taken?"
"I am only acting according to orders," pleaded the Marshal. "I'm just following the Inquisitor's orders."
Lucidi despaired as the situation seemed to be slipping out of control. In his own report, he later wrote: "I hardly know how to describe the effect of that fatal announcement. I can assure you that I would have a thousand times preferred to be exposed to much more serious dangers in performing my duties than to have to witness such a painful scene."
With Marianna wailing from Edgardo's bed, Momolo insisting that it was all a horrible mistake, and the children crying, Lucidi scarcely knew what to do. Both parents got down on their knees before the discomfited Marshal, begging him in the name of humanity not to take their child from them. Bending a bit (and no doubt thinking this was all the Inquisitor's fault anyway), Lucidi offered to let Momolo accompany his son to see the Inquisitor at the nearby Convent of San Domenico.
Momolo refused, afraid to let Edgardo into the Inquisitor's hands.
Lucidi recalled: "While I waited for the desperate mother and father, overcome by a terrible agony, to return to reason so that the matter could be brought to its inevitable conclusion, various people began to arrive, either on their own or because they had been called there."
In fact, with Lucidi's permission, Momolo had sent Riccardo to alert Marianna's brother and uncle, and to fetch their elderly Jewish neighbor Bonajuto Sanguinetti, whose wealth and community position, Momolo hoped, might ward off the impending disaster.
Hurrying back to the cafe where, less than an hour before, he and his father had left them, Riccardo came upon his two uncles, Angelo Padovani, his mother's brother, and Angelo Moscato, husband of his mother's sister. Moscato later described the encounter:
"As I sat with my brother-in-law at the Caff? del Genio on via Vetturini, my nephew Riccardo Mortara came running up, in tears and disconsolate, telling me that the carabinieri were in his house, and that they wanted to kidnap his brother Edgardo."
The two men rushed to the Mortaras' apartment: "We saw the mother, devastated, and in such a sorry state that it's impossible to describe. I asked the marshal of the gendarmes to explain what was going on, and he responded that he had an order-though he never showed it to me-from the Inquisitor, Father Pier Gaetano Feletti, to take Edgardo because he had been baptized."
Marianna was "desperate, beside herself," as her brother, Angelo Padovani, recalled. "She lay stretched out on a sofa which they also used as a bed, the sofa on which Edgardo slept, holding him tightly to her chest so that no one could take him."
Trying to find some way to stop the police from making off with Edgardo, Padovani and his brother-in-law persuaded the Marshal not to remove the child before they could consult with their uncle, who lived nearby. The uncle, Marianna's father's brother, whose name was also Angelo Padovani, was still at work in the small bank he ran in the same building in which he lived.
After his nephews filled him in on the dramatic events at the Mortara home, Signor Padovani decided that their only hope was to see the Inquisitor. While the younger Padovani rushed back to inform the Marshal of the need for further delay, the other two men made their way to the convent.
At 11 p.m., they presented themselves at the forbidding gate of San Domenico and asked to be taken to the Inquisitor. Despite the hour, they were rushed up to the Inquisitor's room. They implored Father Feletti to tell them why he had ordered the police to take Edgardo. Responding in measured tones, and hoping to calm them, the Inquisitor explained that Edgardo had been secretly baptized, although by whom, or how he came to know of it, he would not say. Once word of the baptism had reached the proper authorities, they had given him the instructions that he was now carrying out: the boy was a Catholic and could not be raised in a Jewish household.
Padovani protested bitterly. It was an act of great cruelty, he said, to order a child taken from his parents without ever giving them a chance to defend themselves. Father Feletti simply responded that it was not in his power to deviate from the orders he had received. The men begged him to reveal his grounds for thinking that the child had been baptized, for no one in the family knew anything about it. The Inquisitor replied that he could give no such explanation, the matter being confidential, but that they should rest assured that everything had been done properly. It would be best for all concerned, he added, if the members of the family would simply resign themselves to what was to come. "Far from acting lightly in this matter," he told them, "I have acted in good conscience, for everything has been done punctiliously according to the ...
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- EditoreAlfred a Knopf Inc
- Data di pubblicazione1997
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- RilegaturaCopertina rigida
- Numero di pagine350
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