The Battle of Mentana was fought on November 3, 1867, near the village of Mentana, located north-east of Rome (then in the Papal States, now modern Lazio), between French-Papal troops and the Italian volunteers led by Giuseppe Garibaldi. Garibaldi and his troops were attempting to capture Rome, then the main center of the peninsula still outside of the newly unified Kingdom of Italy. The battle ended in a victory by the French-Papal troops.
When the first Parliament of the Kingdom of Italy met in Turin, Victor Emmanuel II of Savoy was proclaimed King of Italy on March 17, 1861, and Rome was declared capital of Italy on March 27, 1861. However, the Italian government could not take its seat in Rome because Emperor Napoleon III maintained a French garrison there to prop up Pope Pius IX. This created an unstable political situation that led to much strife, both internal and external. In 1862 Giuseppe Garibaldi, the hero of the unification, organized an expedition from Sicily, under the slogan Roma o Morte (Rome or Death) that attempted to take Rome. However, after crossing the Straits of Messina, the expedition was stopped at Aspromonte (known as the Aspromonte incident of 1862) by Italian troops. Garibaldi was wounded, taken prisoner, but subsequently released. This act was forced on the Italian government by Napoleon III, who threatened military intervention if Garibaldi were not stopped.
On September 15, 1864, the September Convention was signed by the Italian government and Napoleon III. The Italian government agreed to protect the Papal States against external menaces and agreed to move the capital of Italy from Turin to Florence. The French garrison would be withdrawn from Rome within two years, during which time the Papal army would reorganize itself into a credible force. This unpopular agreement led to numerous riots (primarily in Turin which objected to its loss of status) and to renewed demands for the Italian government to take possession of its capital, Rome.
Garibaldi's expedition
On August 12, 1866, in the aftermath of the Third Italian War of Independence, Italy gained Mantua and Veneto. Now only Rome and its neighbourhood were missing to complete the territorial unity of the state. In December of the same year, the last French battalions embarked from Civitavecchia to France.
On September 9, 1867, at a congress in Geneva, Garibaldi declared that the papacy was "the negation of God ... shame and plague of Italy". At the time, his popularity was at its apex, since he was the only Italian general who had obtained significant successes during the last war against Austria. He was therefore left free to organize a small army of about 10,000 volunteers. The plan was to march against Rome, while a riot was to break out inside the city.
However, Garibaldi's overt moves allowed Napoleon III to send a relief force in time to Rome. Apart from this official support, the Papal army was at the time composed mostly of French and European volunteers.
Invasion of Lazio
Victory of French Zouaves
Garibaldi's volunteers invaded Lazio, the region that contains Rome, in October 1867. A small contingent, led by Enrico Cairoli with his brother Giovanni and 70 companions, made a daring attempt to take Rome. The group embarked in Terni and floated down the Tiber. Their arrival in Rome was to coincide with an uprising inside the city. On 22 October 1867, the revolutionaries inside Rome seized control of the Capitoline Hill and of Piazza Colonna. In the meantime, Giuseppe Monti and Gaetano Tognetti let explode a mine under the Serristori barracks in Borgo, which was the seat of the Papal Zouaves, devastating the building and killing 27 persons. However, when the Cairolis and their companions arrived at Villa Glori, on the northern outskirts of Rome, the uprising had already been suppressed. During the night of 22 October 1867, the group was surrounded by Papal Zouaves, and Giovanni was severely wounded. Enrico was mortally wounded and bled to death in Giovanni's arms.
At the summit of Villa Glori, near the spot where Enrico died, there is a plain white column dedicated to the Cairoli brothers and their 70 companions. About 100 meters to the left from the top of the Spanish Steps, there is a bronze monument of Giovanni holding the dying Enrico in his arm. A plaque lists the names of their companions. Giovanni never recovered from his wounds and from the tragic events of 1867. According to an eyewitness,[10] when Giovanni died on 11 September 1869:
In the last moments, he had a vision of Garibaldi and seemed to greet him with enthusiasm. I heard (so says a friend who was present) him say three times: "The union of the French to the Papal political supporters was the terrible fact!" he was thinking about Mentana. Many times he called Enrico, that he might help him! then he said: "but we will certainly win; we will go to Rome!
The last group of rebels inside Rome, in the rione of Trastevere, was bloodily captured on October 25. The captured Roman rebels were executed in 1868.
Garibaldi with about 8,100 men, had reached the neighbourhood of Rome, occupying Tivoli, Acquapendente and Monterotondo. Here he halted his march, waiting for an insurrection which never occurred. Minor fights ensued, but without relevant results. Three days later he advanced on the Via Nomentana, in order to spur the rebels to action, but returned to Monterotondo the following day.
On the same day, Italian troops of the Royal Italian Army had crossed the boundary to halt the Garibaldine army, and a French force had disembarked in Civitavecchia.
In the first hours of November 3, the Papal troops, under General Hermann Kanzler, and the French expeditionary corps, under General Balthazar de Polhès, moved from Rome to attack Garibaldi's army along the Via Nomentana. The Allies were well trained and organized, and the French troops were armed with the new Chassepot rifle; Garibaldi's volunteers were less well organized, and nearly without any artillery or cavalry, apart from a small squadron led by Garibaldi's son, Ricciotti.
The Papal vanguard met Garibaldi's volunteers about 1.5km south of the village Mentana, midway from Rome to Monterotondo. The three battalions defending the position were quickly dislodged. However, Garibaldi's resistance stiffened in the fortified village, and repeated papal attacks were all pushed back until nightfall. The situation changed when three companies of Zouaves occupied the road from Mentana and Monterotondo. Garibaldi intervened in person, but could not prevent his troops being routed. The survivors entrenched in the castle of Mentana; some surrendered the following morning, and others fled to Monterotondo.
On November 4 Garibaldi retreated to the Kingdom of Italy with 5,100 men. In Mentana, the monument Ara dei Caduti (Altar of the Fallen) is built over the mass grave of the Italian patriots who died in the battle.
Subsequently, a French garrison remained in Civitavecchia until August 1870, when it was recalled following the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War. Rome was captured by the Italian Army on September 20, 1870, finally giving Italy possession of its capital and concluding the Unification.
Notes
↑ Dupuy R.E. & Dupuy T.N. (1993) The Collins Encyclopedia of Military History (4th. edition) Harper Collins, NY: 1654 pp.
↑ Rosi, Michele (1929) I Cairoli, L. Capelli Ed., Bologna
↑ Bruce, George (1979) Harbottle's dictionary of Battles (2nd. revised edition) Granada, London: 303 pp. ISBN0-246-11103-8
↑ Dupuy R.E. & Dupuy T.N. (1993) The Collins Encyclopedia of Military History (4th. edition) Harper Collins, NY: 1654 pp.
↑ Bruce, George (1979) Harbottle's dictionary of Battles (2nd. revised edition) Granada, London: 303 pp. ISBN0-246-11103-8
↑ Du Picq A.C.J. (1868) Etudes sur les combats: Combat antique et moderne Translated as Battle Studies by J.N. Greeley & R.C. Cotton, 1902; BiblioBazaar, Charleston SC, 2006: 238 pp. ISBN1-4264-2276-8
↑ Bruce, George (1979) Harbottle's dictionary of Battles (2nd. revised edition) Granada, London: 303 pp. ISBN0-246-11103-8
↑ Dupuy R.E. & Dupuy T.N. (1993) The Collins Encyclopedia of Military History (4th. edition) Harper Collins, NY: 1654 pp.
↑ Bruce, George (1979) Harbottle's dictionary of Battles (2nd. revised edition) Granada, London: 303 pp. ISBN0-246-11103-8
↑ Rosi, Michele (1929) I Cairoli, L. Capelli Ed., Bologna, pp. 223–224
Related Research Articles
The Zouaves were a class of light infantry regiments of the French Army serving between 1830 and 1962 and linked to French North Africa; as well as some units of other countries modelled upon them. The zouaves were among the most decorated units of the French Army.
The unification of Italy, also known as the Risorgimento, was the 19th-century political and social movement that resulted in 1861 in the consolidation of various states of the Italian Peninsula and its outlying isles into a single state, the Kingdom of Italy. Inspired by the rebellions in the 1820s and 1830s against the outcome of the Congress of Vienna, the unification process was precipitated by the Revolutions of 1848, and reached completion in 1871 after the capture of Rome and its designation as the capital of the Kingdom of Italy.
Enrico Cialdini, Duca di Gaeta was an Italian soldier, politician and diplomat.
Benedetto Cairoli was an Italian politician, who served as Prime Minister of Italy for 2 years.
Giovanni Nicotera was an Italian patriot and politician. His surname is pronounced, with the stress on the second syllable.
Rome was a department of the First French Empire in present-day Italy. Its principal city was Rome. It was formed on 17 May 1809, when the Papal States were annexed by France, and was first known as the Département du Tibre before being renamed on 17 February 1810. Following the conquest of the Eternal City, Napoleon granted to his son Napoleon II the title of the King of Rome.
The Expedition of the Thousand was an event of the unification of Italy that took place in 1860. A corps of volunteers led by Giuseppe Garibaldi sailed from Quarto dei Mille near Genoa and landed in Marsala, Sicily, in order to conquer the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, ruled by the Spanish House of Bourbon-Two Sicilies. The name of the expedition derives from the initial number of participants, which was around 1,000 people.
The Battle of Aspromonte, also known as the Day of Aspromonte, was a minor engagement that took place on 29 August 1862, and was an inconclusive episode of the Italian unification process. It is named after the nearby mountain of Aspromonte in southern Italy. Giuseppe Garibaldi's army of volunteers was attacked by the Royal Italian Army while marching from Sicily towards Rome, capital of the Papal States, which it intended to annex into the newly created Kingdom of Italy. In the fighting, which took place a few kilometers from Gambarie, Garibaldi was wounded and taken prisoner.
Mentana is a town and comune, former bishopric and present Latin Catholic titular see in the Metropolitan City of Rome, Lazio, central Italy. It is located 29 kilometres (18 mi) north-east of Rome and has a population of about 23,000.
The Battle of Castelfidardo took place on 18 September 1860 at Castelfidardo, a small town in the Marche region of Italy. It was fought between the Royal Sardinian Army – acting as the driving force in the war for Italian unification, against the Papal States.
This is a timeline of the unification of Italy.
The Third Italian War of Independence was a war between the Kingdom of Italy and the Austrian Empire fought between June and August 1866. The conflict paralleled the Austro-Prussian War and resulted in Austria conceding the region of Venetia to France, which was later annexed by Italy after a plebiscite. Italy's acquisition of this wealthy and populous territory represented a major step in the Unification of Italy.
The Capture of Rome on September 20, 1870, was the final event of the unification of Italy (Risorgimento), marking both the final defeat of the Papal States under Pope Pius IX and the unification of most of the Italian Peninsula under the Kingdom of Italy, a constitutional monarchy.
The Papal Zouaves were an infantry battalion, later regiment, dedicated to defending the Papal States. Named after the French zouave regiments, the Zuavi Pontifici were mainly young men, unmarried and Catholic, who volunteered to assist Pope Pius IX in his struggle against the Italian unificationist Risorgimento.
The foreign relations between Pope Pius IX and France reflected Pope Pius IX's hostility to the French Third Republic's anticlerical politics, as well as Napoleon III's influence over the Papal States. But this did not prevent church life in France from flourishing during much of this pontificate.
The Legion of Antibes, also known as the Roman Legion was a formation of the Papal Army created on 8 September 1866 consisting of French Volunteers.
The Monument of Piazza Mentana or Monument to those fallen at the Battle of Mentana is an early-20th century outdoor bronze statue located the said square of Florence, Italy. The monument displays two patriotic fighters of Garibaldi's units, one wounded, the other fighting, in a dramatic scene.
Hermann Kanzler was a German general who commanded the Army of the Papal States and was the arms minister during the reign of Pope Pius IX. He led Papal forces during the Battle of Mentana against Italian troops.
The Cross Fidei et Virtuti, also referred to as Cross of Mentana, was a decoration for military merit bestowed by the Holy See during the Italian unification.
The Monument to the Cairoli Brothers is a prominent patriotic statuary group on the Pincian Hill in Rome. It is located along the Pincian Hill, on a terrace overlooking the center of Rome. The statue is located just below the Terrazza Viale del Belvedere, and can be accessed by walking north from the summit of the Spanish Steps, past the Villa Medici.
References
Gerosa, Guido. Il Generale. ERI-De Agostini.
Pacifici Noja, Ugo. Arturo Dalla Volta. Un garibaldino mantovano alla battaglia di Mentana. Il Varco Editore.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
Italian volunteers
France 
Papal States 
