Belfiore martyrs
Coordinates: 45°9′24″N 10°46′19″E / 45.15667°N 10.77194°E
The Belfiore martyrs were a group of pro-independence fighters condemned to death by hanging in 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 Lombard-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.
The city of Mantua had formed part of the lands of the Austrian House of Habsburg since 1707. It was the capital of a small but quite rich dukedom, as well as being of some military importance, both for the quality of its fortifications but also for its geographic position, allowing it to control the route between the Veneto and Lombardy and a large number of crossings over the River Po. Indeed, the city had been at the centre of the 1797 campaign during the French Revolutionary Wars, with repeated Austrian invasions of the area until Eugène de Beauharnais surrendered it to Heinrich Johann Bellegarde on 23 April 1814. It was thus logical that, from 1815 onwards, the Austrians turned the whole city into a kind of large stronghold, perhaps the strongest one in the Lombardy-Veneto.
...
Wikipedia