Early Life
Felice Orsini was born at Meldola in Romagna, then part of the Papal States.
His biographer, the Englishman Michael St. John Packe, describes him:
According to the prosecutors in his trial, Felice Orsini was born a conspirator. Whether that can be believed or not, quite certainly his mother had no notion of it. She was a gentle, cultivated girl of twenty, Florentine, graceful, kind and true. She suckled him and crooned at him in the usual manner. She treated him as, a year or so before, she had treated his elder sister Rosina, as she would likewise treat, in three years’ time, his younger brother, Leonidas, all with the best results. She did not realize that his infant thoughts were of a repressed and furtive trend; that when he waved his wooden spoon and gurgled, he was marshalling secret armies in craggy places, or that his wondering unfathomable eyes, jet black and shining, screened from her view a world of incipient revolution, wherein already he was blowing up Emperors and dethroning Popes. Yet such, maintained the prosecution, was the case.
Orsini was encouraged to become a priest, but he abandoned that lifestyle and became an ardent liberal, joining the Giovane Italia, a society founded by Giuseppe Mazzini.
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