[4] Antonio Mordini was born overnight on 31 May / 1 June 1819 at Barga,[5] 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,[5] with a focus on literature and history.

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.

[4] 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.

[7] 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.

[6][7] 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).

[7] 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.

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.

[7] 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.

His proposal to proclaim a republic based on a three-way union between Rome Tuscany and Venice was greeted initially with hesitation and then with outright opposition from his government colleague Guerrazzi, who on 27 March 1849 was granted "dictatorial powers" by the newly constituted Tuscan parliament in response to the looming defeat approaching from the north.

[15] Equally unsuccessful were Mordini's attempt to organise on behalf of the provisional government a defence force of volunteer militias, to replace the regular army which had remained loyal to the Grand Duke.

Field Marshall Radetzky with his Austrian army of some 70,000 men, reacted promptly: he seized the fortress town of Mortara through bloody but brief battle with Sardinian forces, which then fell back towards Novara in Lombardy.

The parliament proved truculent, however, and on 11/12 April 1849 "Dictator Guerrazzi" suffered the twin indignities both of his own arrest and of seeing the city authorities of Florence, acting in the name of the Grand Duke, assume the power formerly exercised by what remained of the provisional government.

[15] Following news of the disaster at Novara Antonio Mordini had abruptly left Florence for Pisa, hoping to be able to retire from public life and live quietly with his family.

There followed three weeks during which he was actively sought by the police, but he managed to evade arrest, making his way (by a very indirect route that took in his parents' home in Barga) to Montecatini, near the coast, where he spent the night of 9 May 1849.

His situation nevertheless gave him time to think, and he did become critical of the abortive uprisings that his friend had tried to stage in Mantua and Milan: he attributed their failure to an excess of haste and an insufficiency of preparation, and began to distance himself from Mazzini.

During the next couple of years, although he never abandoned the republican faith, he was more convinced than ever of the futility of actively pursuing the cause in the absence of express support from Sardinia-Piedmont, amounting, in effect, to a declaration of war against the (possibly brittle) might of the Austro-Hungarian empire.

In reality, father and son both fled to Austria, leaving Tuscany administered by another provisional government, this time under the leadership of Ubaldino Peruzzi, Vincenzo Malenchini and Alessandro Danzini.

[5] He left Barga again on 19 June 1859 in order to join up with Garibaldi who was leading a rapidly expanding volunteer army at Valtellina, the area surrounding Sondrio, close to the 3-way alpine Lombard border with Austria and Switzerland.

A few days after the vote on Nice/Nizza he joined the so-called Expedition of the Thousand, a volunteer army organised by Giuseppe Garibaldi in order to capture the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies as part of the still incomplete unification project.

On 20 June 1860 Garibaldi promoted Mordini to rank of lieutenant colonel and appointed him the presidency of the "War Council" ("Tribunale militare" or, sometimes, "Consiglio di guerra"), based in Palermo.

[9][5] That turned out to be no more than a stepping stone, however: on 17 September 1860 Antonio Mordini was appointed interim governor ("prodittatore" - loosely "acting dictator") of Sicily following the resignation of Agostino Depretis, the previous incumbent.

In strategic terms, there are suggestions that he may have sensed that by taking a few more months to consolidate his hold on the southern end of the Italian peninsular, he might find a way to open up opportunities to conquer Rome and the Papal States from the south.

[11][29][30] On 19 October 1860, two days before the plebiscite, he nevertheless implemented a suggestion from his friend, the liberal historian Michele Amari and appointed a Council of State, comprising 38 members, and chaired by Gregorio Ugdulena.

In it they advocated a decentralised structure for the Italian state that would ensure a powerful measure of regional political and administrative autonomy for Sicily, together with the safeguarding of Sicilian traditions more broadly.

He campaigned for the abandonment of the insurrectionist habits which for a generation had been mainstream among his fellow democrat activists, and for the total integration of the individuals concerned into the political institutions of the Italian monarchy.

[7][9][33] The first and probably most significant indication that Mordini had come to see himself as a force for moderation came in August 1862, when he teamed up with fellow parliamentarians Nicola Fabrizi and Salvatore Calvino, to make the trip to Sicily in order to dissuade Garibaldi from setting out on his ill-fated "liberation expedition" towards Rome.

But there was absolutely no indication of any change to his now unwavering faith in Italy's constitutional monarchy, and there was no departure from his continuing belief in the possibility of a closer co-operation between Garibaldi and the king.

[5][22] After a government of the centre-left under his old rival Agostino Depretis came to power in Rome, Mordini felt it inappropriate to remain in office as a prefect in Naples, and in March 1876 he resigned the prefecture.

Mordini initially retreated into opposition from the political right, but subsequently mellowed a little in his attitudes, as he recognised something of his own earlier centrist ambitions in the moves towards constructive parliamentary collaboration - sometimes termed the "Trasformismo" movement - negotiated between Depretis and the economist-statesman Marco Minghetti of the moderate right.