Leti, Giuseppe. La rivoluzione e la repubblica romana
(1848-1849). Milan: F. Vallardi, 1913.
Minnocci, Carlo. Pietro Sterbini a la rivoluzione romana
(1846-1849). Marcianise: La Diana, 1967.
JGC revised this file
(http://www.ohiou.edu/~chastain/rz/sterbin.htm) on
October 26, 2004.
Please E-mail comments or suggestions to chastain@www.ohiou.edu
© 1999, 2004 James Chastain.
Sterbini, Pietro. Poet-dramatist, physician, and patriot,
Sterbini was born in 1795 in Sgurgola (Frosinone). His
tragedy La Vestale was banned by the censor soon
after its presentation in 1827; and after his failure in 1831 to
rouse the Roman population to join in the insurrections in
central Italy, he fled to exile, first in Corsica, where he
probably met Giuseppe Mazzini, and later to Marseilles (1835)
where he joined the latter's Young Italy (Giovine
Italia) (1840). Following the amnesty proclaimed by Pius
IX in July 1846, Sterbini returned to Rome, collaborated in the
journal Il Contemporaneo, and engaged in much public
oratory. In March 1848 he was elected to the Council of
Deputies, where he championed war against Austria and Vincenzo
Giobert's proposals for an Italian confederation. The pope's
reluctance to follow so radical a course alienated Sterbini from
Pius IX; following the pope's flight from Rome after the death in
November 1848 of his chief minister, Pellegrino Rossi, in whose
assassination Sterbini was thought an accomplice, Sterbini
entered the new government as a minister of commerce and public
works. Elected member of the constituent assembly in February
1849, he voted for a republic and the abolition of the pope's
temporal power. During the few months remaining to the republic
before it was crushed by French arms, Sterbini`s influence
declined, owing primarily to the hostility of the Mazzinians, who
so detested his insistence on a dictatorship by Garibaldi that
one of their followers made an attempt on Sterbini's life. After
the fall of the republic in July 1849, he went into exile in
France, returned to Italy in 1861, and died in Naples on October
1, 1863.
Salvatore Saladino
Bibliography