Dear Readers,
Count of Cavour, Camillo Benso (1810-1861) was a leading figure in the movement toward Italian unification, however, Cavour never planned for the establishment of a united Italy. When he became Prime Minister of Piedmont, in late 1852, his main objective was to expand Piedmont with the annexation of Lombardy and Venetia, rather than a unified Italy. Camillo was born in Torino in 1810, during Napoleonic rule and attended the Turin Military Academy when he was only 10 years old. In 1827, he enlisted in the Engineer Corps of the Piedmontese-Sardinian Army, studied English, left for London, toured the Netherlands, Germany and Switzerland and eventually landed back in Torino.
Between 1838 and 1842 Cavour, as he is usually called, attempted to solve economic problems in his home province of Piedmonte, and experimented with different agricultural techniques on his estate, such as the use of sugar beets. He was also one of the first Italian landowners to use chemical fertilizers. Cavour also founded the Piedmontese Agricultural Society and was a supporter of transportation by steam engine and sponsored the building of many railroads and canals.
Before he became Prime Minister of the kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia in 1852, Cavour had risen in rank through the Piedmontese government Chamber of Deputies and served as Minister of Marine, Commerce, and Agriculture and Finance. Camillo Benso, Conte di Cavour became the first Prime Minister of a United Italy in March 1861, when Victor Emmanuele II became King of Italy and Cavour officially became Prime Minister.
Cavour died in June 1861, only three months after the declaration of a United Kingdom of Italy and thus did not live to see Venetia or Rome included in the Kingdom. Cavour was succeeded as Prime Minister by Bettino Ricasoli, husband of one of the many ladies that Cavour once romanced. Like Italy’s current Prime Minister, Cavour liked the Ladies, but unlike Italy’s current Prime Minister he did not have to contend with “paparazzi”, recording devices and those ubiquitous iphone video cameras which have caused Silvio Berlusconi’s romantic imbroglios to be splattered across television screens and tabloids in Italy and beyond.
Nonetheless, whatever you may think of Signor Berlusconi and his frequent misbehaving with the Ladies, no one can ever accuse Berlusconi of being a hypocrite. And, since this year is the 150th Anniversary celebration of the Unification of Italy I thought I’d share with you some info culled from the pages of “Cavour and the Ladies” by Denis M. Smith, professor of History at Oxford. As you may recall, it was at the Palazzo Carignano in Torino (Piedmont) that in 1861, the first “Parlamento Italiano” of the United Kingdom of Italy met.
It was also in Torino and environs that the Piedmontese statesman Camillo Benso di Cavour had his private playgrounds.
Cavour was a lifelong bachelor with a distaste for matrimony but not for married women. Yet Cavour exerted an undoubted fascination over the other sex, a fascination to which his elevated social position no doubt contributed. He often exploited them for political purposes, as when he bribed the Countess of Castiglione to seduce the French Emperor, in which she succeeded.
Not one of his mistresses ever received from him the admiring respect that he bestowed on his mother whom he called responsible for “what little good there is in me”. After the death of his parents he continued to inhabit the family house that now belonged to his elder brother, where he felt isolated. Though he blamed his brother’s family for this, his own temperament was partly to blame. In a letter to a friend he quoted a phrase from a poem by Lord Byron about the need to treat women roughly if you want to succeed with them; and Cavour added his own comment, using the English words, “very excellent precept!” As a young man, Cavour had a number of affairs which he referred to as being “numerous”, though his close friends were sure he never put his whole heart into any relationship.
Most of Cavour’s affairs were with women older than himself and who already had husbands and children, almost as though he was deliberately playing safe. And sometimes he pursued several serious affairs concurrently. Nor did such philandering hypo-critically prevent him from dismissing one of his servants for keeping a mistress. Prior to her death, Cavour’s mother reproached him for contributing to the break-up of other marriages. The Marchioness Anna Giustiniani, after several failed attempts, committed suicide in 1841 by throwing herself out of a window, and the Marchioness Clementina Guasco threatened to do the same when he withdrew his attentions. A list of other names would not mean very much.
Nor would quotations from his love letters. Some of these letters have been published. Others, especially those written late in life, were destroyed by his heirs who bought them after his death at a high price; because their indeli- cacy of language if generally known, would damage his reputation. In the 1890’s, when another collection of his corre- spondence surfaced in Vienna, King Umberto found the money to purchase them after bribing their Austrian owner with an Italian title; they were said to be very shocking, and the king agreed after reading them that they too should be burnt.
Until Cavour’s death in mid 1861, at age fifty, his good friends continued to suggest hi’m to find a wife. Cavour usually replied by turning the suggestion into a joke. Once, more seriously, he explained that even if lucky enough to find a good and virtuous wife, his position and his many time-consuming duties would only expose her to temptation and put himself in the same ridiculous position of those husbands he had cuckolded. Public ridicule, by interfering with his own political success, would be a calamity for the nation as well as for his own peace of mind.
In 1856, at the age of 45, he confessed that he was no longer capable of real passion. But during the next five years he nevertheless succeeded in finding consolation with someone far removed from the aristocratic station of his earlier affairs and was less demanding on his time and attention. Bianca Ronzani was also much younger than himself. Her husband, who managed the Royal theater in Turin, was persuaded with the assistance of government money to leave the country. And it is not without interest to note that when Anna Giustiniani, another lovely that caught Cavour’s eye and later committed suicide, the Giustiniani family was assisted by Cavour with a subsidy from secret police funds.
Signora Bianca Ronzani, wife of the Royal Theater of Turin Manager who had been persuaded to depart and paid with government funds, had earlier been the mistress of Victor Emmanuel. Another of the discarded Royal mistresses was subsequently married off to a gent who succeeded Cavour as prime minister. Cavour called Bianca Ronzani, his last mistress a beauty and seemed to be genuinely devoted to her. Unlike his previous attachments, he went out of his way to conceal this particular relationship, because he knew that she was widely disliked and despised.; but the secrets were hard to keep in Turin.
She was often on his mind during the final months of his life and some of his letters to her were written in the course of cabinet meetings when the future of Italy was being decided. On the very day he was struck down by his fatal illness, he had earlier visited Bianca at the large villa he bought for her just outside town.
Compared to Cavour, me thinks Italy’s current Prime Minister is a choir boy...
