Carducci secret: arrested at 15, reported by his father

ByEditor

Aug 11, 2026

An arrest at the age of fifteen, a complaint filed by his father and a file from the grand ducal gendarmerie which remained in the archives for over a century and a half. This is the picture that emerges from the volume “Giosuè Carducci. Writer, politician, freemason” (Bastogi), in which the historian Aldo A. Mola, a scholar of Freemasonry, reconstructs a hitherto little-known episode of the youth of the future poet who won the Nobel Prize for Literature, awarded in 1906.

According to the documentation examined by Mola at the State Archives of Rome and published in the volume, on 26 July 1850, on the eve of his fifteenth birthday, Giosuè Carducci (1835-1907) was arrested in Florence together with his younger brother Dante following a complaint from his father Michele. In a confidential report from the gendarmerie it is stated that the two young people had mistreated their parent “because it was contrary to their republican maxims”. The report of the Government Delegation of the Santo Spirito district of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany also reports that Michele Carducci would have had to “save his life at home” since his son Giosuè would have “suddenly attacked him with a surgical iron”. When questioned by the police authorities, the young man replied that the law did not allow punishing children “who had no other fault than not loving their father”.

Dante, then thirteen years old, was released the same evening because his father considered him “less guilty”. Giosue, however, was held in a “sequestration room”, defined in another document as a “force chamber”.

The episode, explains Aldo A. Mola to Adnkronos, takes place in the years following the uprisings of 1848-1849, when the Grand Duchy of Tuscany had restored rigid control over political activity. Michele Carducci, already hit by a banishment order in 1831 for his past Carbonari sympathies, would have feared that his eldest son’s political activism would once again attract the attention of the authorities.

According to the interpretation proposed by Mola, the story represents a key to understanding the formation of the future poet, marked since adolescence by the conflict between rebellious impulse and search for discipline. After his arrest, Carducci returned to his studies and, in the autumn of 1850, he composed some of his first poems, including “A la sventura”, “Il delirio del Trovatore” and “La mia vita”, in which the strong bond with his mother also emerges.

The historian also notes that Carducci never spoke publicly about this episode. Years later, in fact, he rejected the request of the writer Onorato Roux to collect memories of his youth, avoiding addressing a page which, according to Mola’s reconstruction, remained deliberately hidden until the discovery of the archive documents. (by Paolo Martini)