Silvio Pellico

On the marriage of his twin sister Rosina with a maternal cousin at Lyon, he went to reside in that city, devoting himself for four years to the study of French literature.

Of the powerful literary executives that gathered about Counts Porro and Confalonieri, Pellico was the able secretary on whom most of the responsibility for the review, the organ of the association, fell.

The sentence of death pronounced on him in February 1822 was finally commuted to fifteen years of jail in harsh condition, and in the following April he was placed in the Spielberg, at Brünn (today's Brno), where he was transferred via Udine and Ljubljana.

In 1832, his Gismonda da Mendrisio, Erodiade and the Leoniero, appeared under the title of Tre nuove tragedie, and in the same year the work which gave him his European fame, Le mie prigioni [it], an account of his sufferings in prison.

[1] On the decease of his parents in 1838, he was received into the Casa Barolo, where he remained until his death, assisting the marchesa in her charities, and writing chiefly upon religious themes.