Belfiore_martyrs

The Belfiore martyrs were a group of pro-independence fighters condemned to death by hanging between 1852 and 1853 during the Italian Risorgimento. They included Tito Speri and the priest Enrico Tazzoli and are named after the site where the sentence was carried out, in the valley of Belfiore at the south entrance to Mantua. The hanging was the first in a long series of death sentences imposed by Josef Radetzky, governor general of Lombardy–Venetia. As a whole these sentences marked the culmination of Austrian repression after the First Italian War of Independence and marked the failure of all re-pacification policies.