Luigi Torcoletti
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Biographical notes
Born into a family originally from Senigallia, in the Marche region, Torcoletti was born in Rijeka on 3 May 1881 to Giovanni and Francesca Dergnevich. After finishing high school, he attended the Theological Seminary in Senj, where he was ordained a priest in 1904, and then taught religion in public schools in Rijeka.
Combative and polemic, he opposed the secularizing currents and the nascent socialism of Rijeka. Some of his essays of the time are "Darvinism", "Historical notes on Rijeka freemasonry" and "Will we believe in miracles in the twentieth century?". He then approached historical studies, proving to be a tireless researcher of news. In 1911 he founded a religious propaganda newspaper, "Il Risveglio", for which he wrote articles of a religious nature, some of which also on local history, and which was also distributed outside Rijeka, reaching the Catholic circles of Gorizia, Trentino and Dalmatia.
Between 1917 and 1918 he founded the "A. Manzoni" club, to give voice to the national conscience of young people, but it lasted only a year because the Hungarian police, suspecting irredentist tendencies, then decided to suppress it. On the eve of the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, he formed a secret committee that merged with the National Council.
Between 1918 and 1924, he actively participated in the political events of the city, publishing a series of works that aroused a lively echo, including "The Plebiscite of the Dead". In 1919, he founded the Rijeka section of the Italian People's Party together with Annibale Blau, and in 1920 he approved Gabriele D'Annunzio's enterprise in its initial phase. After the revolt of March 3, 1922 that led to the fall of Zanella's government, he sought, without success, a compromise between the opposing parties.
In 1945, he was stopped by Tito's secret police and tried on charges of having provoked the removal of the Croatian parish priest Kukanic in 1919. The trial ended with the order to leave the city. He first stopped in Palermo, then settled in Zoagli in Liguria, as a guest of the Casa della Compagnia di S. Paolo, where he was able to resume his studies in Rijeka. He died in Zoagli on November 20, 1956.
Critical notes
In "The Plebiscite of the Dead" of 1919, he collected the epigraphs of the cemetery to demonstrate that the Italianness of Rijeka was not recent because even the majority of the oldest were in Italian. It was seized by the French command for expressions considered offensive to the Croats, but some copies escaped seizure and were distributed in Italy, arriving to be reprinted by the National Council in a version purged of the offending expressions.
Bibliography
- The Plebiscite of the Dead, 1919
- Scrittori Fiumani, E. Mohovich, 1923
- Essays in the magazine "Fiume" (1923):
- Bibliographic information on the history of Rijeka
- Tarsatica and the beginnings of Rijeka, Tip. A. Priulla of Palermo, 1950
- Gleaning in the past of Rijeka, Tip. S. Girolamo Emiliani, 1951
- Fiume e i paesi vicini, Tip. S. Girolamo Emiliani, 1954
- Processo a Galileo – Clero e astronomia, 1956
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