Antonio Mordini (Barga, 31 May 1819 – Montecatini, 14 July 1902) was a longstanding Italian patriot and, after 1861, a member of the Parliament of the Kingdom of Italy. In 1869, he served as Minister of Public Works of the Kingdom of Italy, a member of the third Menabrea government.
Biography Provenance and early years Antonio Mordini was born overnight on 31 May / 1 June 1819 at Barga, a long established hill town north of Lucca in northern Tuscany, where his father served for a number of years as "Podestà" (leader of the municipal government). A scion of the aristocratic Mordini family, his early education, provided by private tutors under the direction of his father, had a strongly conservative and religious character, with a focus on literature and history. In 1833, he enrolled at the University of Pisa where he studied Law. He emerged four years later with a degree "in utroque iure" (in both civil and church law). In 1838, he teamed up with a number of other young lawyers, including Robustiano Morosoli to form a "philonomic" legal partnership. In the increasingly animated political and cultural spirit of Pisa at that time, Mordini was drawn to the re-emerging democratic and republican ideas that would ignite the 1848 uprisings across Italy. In 1843, Mordini, relocated to Florence the intellectual and political centre of the Grand Duchy. In 1845,Carlo Fenzi, Leopoldo Cempini, and various other contemporaries who subsequently became Italian politicians, he was listed among the promoters of a secret society intended "to contribute to the achievement of [Italian] independence [from Austrian domination] by all possible means, and to the creation of a unitary [Italian] republic". The comrades had access to a "clandestine printing press" which they used to produce political propaganda.
Pressures for change In Rome's Quirinal Palace, a new pope was elected and installed in June 1846: The new man had studiously avoided giving commitments to any particular faction during the election process, and had a broadly liberal reputation based on his record as Archbishop of Spoleto. He was believed by those who wished to believe it to be sympathetic to reformist politics, which encouraged the Florentine democrats to intensify their activities. Towards the end of 1846, a subscription was organised in order to be able to offer a Sword of Honour to Giuseppe Garibaldi. Thanks to his exploits in Latin America, Garibaldi was already an iconic figure for those who dared to dream of Italian independence. Mordini was given the honour of delivering the sword to "The General" on his return to Italy. During the early months of 1847, Mordini was one of the organisers of numerous street protests in Florence, intended to encourage the Grand Duke to enact "liberal" reforms in Tuscany. As a lawyer, he also found himself frequently in court, appearing as a defence attorney representing arrested protesters. During 1847, he participated in the clandestine meetings of the "Florentine Revolutionary Committee" ("Comitato rivoluzionario fiorentino") which was gaining the backing of his increasingly influential friend Ferdinando Bartolommei. In September 1847, the Grand Duke was persuaded to create a National Guard ("Guardia Civica"), and Antonio Mordini immediately enlisted. On 20 December 1847, he was elected to the rank of captain within it. It was a sign of the times that on the very same day Giuseppe Mordini, his father, joined Tuscany's National Guard with the same rank.
Another sign of the times, at the end of 1847, was the establishment in Florence, of the "National Society for the Manufacture of Armaments" ("Società nazionale per la fabbricazione delle armi") under the presidency of Ubaldino Peruzzi, another well connected democratic reformer of aristocratic provenance (and, through his paternal grandmother, a Medici descendant). The members represented a range of diverse political orientations. Antonio Mordini served as the society's secretary. Among his more significant fellow members, in terms of future political developments, were Ferdinando Bartolommei, Luigi Guglielmo Cambray-Digny, Emilio Cipriani and Ferdinando Zannetti.
1848 On 17 February 1848, with the popular agitation in the city streets continuing to mount, fuelled by reports of insurrection in Sicily and the military successes achieved by the "forces of liberalism and patriotism", Grand Duke Leopold found himself obliged to bow to protesters' demands for a constitution. By the next month, it was clear that war between Italian patriots and Austria was imminent. Mordini was among the first to volunteer for military service. Mordini left Florence on 23 March 1848 to make his way towards northern Italy and the Austrian border. On 1 April 1848, he joined "Padua Legion" initially as a lieutenant. The legion consisted principally of university students, most of them from Padua, but numbers were subsequently greatly increased by democrat-republican volunteers from other universities, most notably Rome and Bologna. A few weeks later Mordini was appointed Captain Instructor with the legion. On 4 May 1848, he was appointed to the rank of captain in the "Cacciatori del Reno" volunteer battalion, becoming one of the officers in the general staff around Colonel Livio Zambeccari. It is hard to know the details of the fighting in which he was involved, but from his letters to his father it is clear that he fought in a number of the battalion's military engagements in and around Treviso and Venice during May and June 1848. After Treviso fell, he was recalled to Venice where he participated in the defence of the short-lived Republic of San Marco. In August 1848, following the Armistice of Salasco, whereby Charles Albert of Sardinia abandoned the Kingdom of Lombardy–Venetia to the Austrian armies, Mordini became captain of the General Staff of General Pepe, who after much soul-searching had abandoned his king and determined to remain in Venice and there continue the patriots' fight for Italian independence, entrusted by President Daniele Manin with command of the defence of Venice. For Mordini, this ensured that he continued to be involved not just on the military front, but also in the politics of the revolution, for as long as he remained in Venice.
Mordini now emerged as a left-wing opponent of the government policy of President Daniele Manin. In Venice, he was a founder member of the "Circolo italiano" and was committed to republican ideals and the necessity of sustaining the war against Austria in order that Lombardy–Venetia might become the embryo from which a liberal and democratic unified Italian state might develop. Inspired by Giuseppe Mazzini, the circle drew moral sustenance from Giuseppe Mazzini and from the political slogans of the time such as "People's War" ("Guerra di popolo") and "Italian constitution ("Costituente italiana"). In the context of the political and military situation in northern Italy during the weeks following the Armistice of Salasco, the circle's ambitions can be seen as, at best, optimistic. They were nevertheless widely shared in Venice. On 1 October 1848, Antonio Mordini and Giuseppe Revere joined to draft a document, intended for circulation throughout Italy, which was highly critical of Daniele Manin, the de facto head of government in the Republic of San Marco. The paper accused Manin of having frittered away the revolutionary momentum of the previous months, and of not having been effective in combatting government corruption. On learning of the document Manin eacted promptly: on 4 October 1848, Mordini and Revere were arrested and immediately expelled from Venice.
Pushing for a unified republican Italy He arrived back in Florence just a few days after the fall of the government of Gino Capponi, which was followed by several months of intensifying political instability in the Grand Duchy. The Grand Duke, not without misgivings, invited Giuseppe Montanelli to form a replacement government in succession to that of Capponi. Leopold hoped that Montanelli, who was known to be popular with the protesters on the street, might be able to use his influence to calm the situation. Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi, appointed Minister for the Interior, quickly emerged as the most important member of the government. Mordini, meanwhile, became a leading member of the so-called "Popular Circle" ("Circolo popolare"), of which shortly afterwards he assumed the presidency. On 2 November 1848, he was a co-founder of a "provisional central committee", created with the objective of organising a "National Constituent Congress" in Rome, to be elected through universal suffrage. The congress should discuss how to progress the war against Austria, affirm the principle of the sovereignty of the people and create the conditions for the unification of Italy under a republican government system. Mordini himself was a powerful advocate for the republican agenda of the time and place, calling for the union of Tuscany with the Roman Republic in preparation for a wider unification process.
He promoted his vision in "La Constituente", a political journal that he launched and directed. The first edition, printed by Felice Le Monnier, was published in Florence on 23 December 1848. In several of his articles, he expressed his strong opposition to the idea, dear to the heart of its promoter, Vincenzo Gioberti, of a "federative constitution" with the pope as the head of state in a unified Italy. He closely followed political developments in Piedmont to the north and in the newly established Roman Republic to the south. He urged that Grand Duke Leopold should send a delegation of deputies to the Roman Congress convened on 5 February 1849. He believed that the presence of deputies from Tuscany could transform the Roman congress into a national Italian congress, especially once-revolutionary governments from Sicily and Venice had also seen the direction of travel and determined to send their own deputies. Mordini's was a characteristically ambitious vision, which some might have thought fanciful, but with continuing pressure on the streets for "independence" and "republican democracy", the vision was powerful enough to alarm the Grand Duke. During January 1849, Mordini's vision turned up as a parliamentary bill, accepted by the Montanelli-Guerrazzi government, and sent to Leopold for his signature. Leopold, who on 30 January 1849, had unexpectedly relocated his court to Siena, refused to sign the bill into law. Instead, overnight on 7/8 February, he fled Siena and headed for Porto Santo Stefano on the coast. On 21 February 1849, he embarked for Gaeta where he arrived on 23 February 1849. Here, under the protection of King Ferdinand II of the Two Sicilies, he evidently felt himself sufficiently distanced from the turmoil on the streets of Florence.
Minister The constitutional position for a Grand Duchy without a constitution in which the Grand Duke had gone missing being far from clear, Giuseppe Montanelli and Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi formed a provisional government together with the law professor (and committed democrat) Giuseppe Mazzoni. Antonio Mordini, after entrusting "La Constituente" to the editorship of Leonida Biscardi, accepted an invitation from the triumvirate to join the government as Minister for Foreign Affairs. This was the best opportunity he would get to try and make a reality of his vision for a united independent Italian republic. On 13 February 1849, following the resignation of Mariano d'Ayala, responsibility for the Ministry for War was added to Mordini's portfolio.