Strade di lago e terre di confine. Il Verbano nelle prime trame cospirative risorgimentali( 1821-1833)

The contribution points out the importance of geographic routes – and particularly of some places like Laveno, situated on the Lombard shore of Lake Maggiore which borders Piedmont and Switzerland -for the diffusion of the first conspiratorial plots of the Risorgimento in Lombardy. Luigi Tinelli lived at Laveno and for this reason he was immediately seen as an ideal propagator of the Giovine Italia and a precious intermediary for the circulation of clandestine papers and writings printed in the Ticino Canton printeries of Lugano and Capolago. He could, in fact, easily get in touch with the executive structures of the sect and, particularly, liaise between the Milanese lawyer Vitale Albera and Giacomo Ciani who resided in Lugano where he ran the famous Ruggia works, printing centre of anti-Habsburg writings: from here Ciani would go to Bellinzona and Locarno which, since 1832, had become proper operational bases in close contact between each other and with Marseilles, where Mazzini stayed hidden from 1831 to April 1833 and where the first instalments of the newspaper “La Giovine Italia” were printed. A clandestine channel to carry printings and letters to Tinelli was the steam-boat Verbano, in its daily runs between the Piedmontese, the Swiss and the Lombard shores of Lake Maggiore, and particularly its accountant, a Sardinian subject in touch with Switzerland, Piedmont but also with the Milanese patriots referring to Fedele Bono.