Pietro Pazzi: The Making of an Englishman

If you had been making your way along Seven Sisters Road in the north London suburbs in 1901 you would have noticed a large flag of St George flying over a modest looking café at the entrance to Finsbury Park. This may have seemed nothing special until you saw the foreign name on the canvas awnings over the shopfront: Pazzi’s Restaurant. It was owned by Pietro Pazzi, who came from the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland. This sort of Swiss establishment with a café in the front room and a restaurant at the rear had been springing up in London, the suburbs and along the seaside resorts of the south coast in increasing numbers over the previous 50 years. By 1900 there was hardly a high street around the capital that was without one, but few made such a show of their patriotism. The path that led to such a display had been dramatic.

Pietro Pazzi was born on November 24th, 1848, the year of revolutions in western Europe, to Giuseppe and Maddalena Pazzi, small landholders from long established families in Semione, a village near the mouth of the Alpine Val di Blenio in the Swiss canton of Ticino. Beautiful though the valley was, the soil was poor and there had been a centuries-long tradition of emigration to Italian cities, including Florence. Just a year before Pietro’s birth, Carlo Gatti, a member of a patrician family from Marogno, a few kilometres further up the valley, arrived in London (having initially moved to Paris), where he soon founded the first of the Swiss café-restaurants and began recruiting his relatives and compatriots to work as waiters, chefs and managers. Men from Semione joined the exodus and by the 1860s the village was becoming known as one which sent its males to Britain as well as to Paris, Lyon and Belgium. Most of the emigrants believed they would ultimately return home.

Relatively secluded though Semione was, Pietro seems to have received a good education. Following a well-trodden path, he emigrated to Paris, most likely after the floods which devastated his valley in the winter of 1868-69. In 1870, probably in connection with the upheavals of the Franco-Prussian War, he moved to England. 

He found a job as a waiter at the renowned Oxford Music Hall in London’s Oxford Street. In the census of 1871 Pazzi is recorded as living not far away in Princes Street between Regent Street and Hanover Square. By that time he had already married his wife Apollonia Togni, who in 1871 gave birth to their eldest son Severino. But, as was quite usual at the time, Apollonia remained in Ticino. He must have returned home regularly, however, since a daughter, Virginia (‘Gina’), was born in Semione in 1875. In the course of 1874 he became an early member of the Unione Ticinese di Londra, a mutual benefit society primarily created for freshly arrived Ticinese waiters and ice-workers (Carlo Gatti had introduced ice-cream to the capital in 1850), which had been founded the previous February.

By 1874, helped by loans from Gatti, Pietro had started his own business, initially in partnership with his brother Massimo, who was five years younger. Apollonia appears to have come to London in 1876, though Severino and the baby Virginia remained in Semione in the care of their grandmother, receiving their education from the parish priest. Virginia only seems to have joined the family in the 1890s.

The location of Pietro’s establishment at 271 Seven Sisters Road was well chosen. Though it was then on the outer periphery of London and therefore, presumably, relatively cheap, it had enormous potential. Finsbury Park had opened just a few years earlier in 1869. Its station then marked the north-eastern limit of the suburban railway and tram network and what was to become the London underground system; the Ticinesi had already learned that the ideal location for their cafés was the immediate vicinity of stations and transportation hubs and in parks. Over the following years Pietro became a family man with a home in nearby Stroud Green Road, where his son Guerino was born in 1877 and his daughter Florida, or ‘Florrie’, in 1879, to be followed finally by his fifth child, Rosa, in 1883.

Although he had been in London for some years, Pietro’s heart and interests remained focused on his native valley. A postcard he sent to a cousin in Paris in 1876 shows his thirst for information from home, while his daughter Florrie had ‘Elvezia’ – derived from the Latin name for Switzerland – as one of her middle names. In 1875 he had become the founding president of a club, the Unione Semionese for the numerous emigrants from his village. It was still thriving in the late 1880s. The Unione Semionese raised funds for the village and others in the valley. Its meetings and rather lavish banquets were held in Pietro’s restaurant. The Unione Ticinese, which had been founded by Carlo Gatti’s conservatively inclined nephew Stefano Gatti, also offered opportunities for meeting his compatriots to play cards or bowls (boccia), to eat, drink and sing folk songs. In the world he occupied Pietro could quite easily have got away without learning English, as many of his contemporaries did.

Allied to Pazzi’s nostalgia for his home valley went an increasing interest in radical politics. Ticino had been riven by sharp political divisions since the time of its creation by Napoleon in 1803. Though the federal constitution of 1848, as revised in 1874, had tied Ticino more securely within the Swiss Confederation, the Ticinese were proud that it was a republic as well as a simple canton. The Gotthard Pass, in the Lepontine Alps, continued to be a massive physical and economic barrier between the Italian and German-speaking parts of Switzerland even after the opening of the Gotthard railway tunnel in 1882. The years 1839, 1841 and 1855-56 had been marked in the Confederation by violent changes of power between the conservatives, who were the allies of the Catholic church, and the liberals who were anti-clerical and had a proud tradition of supporting Italian unification and of offering refuge to Italian radicals and revolutionaries. One of Giuseppe Garibaldi’s most distinguished generals, Antonio Arcioni, came from the Val di Blenio.

The relatives of several leading Ticinese restaurant dynasties, such as the Odones and Reggioris, had been forced to flee to Switzerland from their homes beside the Lombard lakes in the mid-19th century because of their radical views. The most consistently politically extreme of the Ticinesi were the emigrants: some, like the Gattis, who continued to sit in the national and cantonal parliaments, were hard-line conservatives. Others, like Pazzi, already resentful of the poverty that had forced their emigration, became further radicalised by the anarchist or socialist ideas circulating in the great cities where they earned their livings.

A red-bearded revolutionary called Angelo Castioni (1834-1906), born in Stabio in southern Ticino and a participant in uprisings in Europe, was one of Pietro’s oldest friends in London. The two men had met in about 1873 after Castioni had taken refuge in England following his involvement in the Paris Commune of 1871. There, as a member of the central committee and the commander of a battalion of the national guard, he had been held responsible for the executions of several conservatives. He had fled with a price on his head, but, rather surprisingly, he found no difficulty in settling in England late in 1872. This may have been because he had previously won the gratitude of several influential Britons. In the 1860s the longstanding Anglican interest in the welfare of the north Italian protestants had developed into active evangelism. Castioni had attracted attention for the Anglican missionary work (perhaps motivated by his virulent anti-clericalism) that he undertook among poor Sardinian soldiers and supporters of Garibaldi  on behalf of a Miss Burton whom he had met in Domodossola near the Italo-Swiss border.

Although by profession a sculptor who specialised in finishing the work of other artists and, as his letters demonstrate, only semi-literate, Castioni had been taken up by the great and good and was soon living at one of the best addresses in London, 3 Upper Cheyne Row. By the 1880s he was an assistant to perhaps the most eminent English sculptor of the age, Sir Edgar Boehm. Though the rumours that he was one of the lovers of Queen Victoria’s rather rebellious and artistic daughter, Princess Louise, were probably false, there is no doubt about their very close friendship.

The transformation in Castioni’s fortunes has never been satisfactorily explained, but his professional success had in no way altered his radical political views. Indeed the assassination of his brother Pietro by conservatives in Stabio, his home village, in 1879 only added to his loathing of the ruling conservative government in Ticino and fuelled his determination to avenge his brother and his cause.

The political divisions within the canton were reflected in the community in London and in the course of the 1880s they tore the Unione Ticinese apart. While several Ticinese café owners and waiters, like Pazzi, shared Castioni’s radical views, Stefano Gatti and his older brother Agostino acted as recruiting agents for the right-wing parties and regularly shipped their waiters to Switzerland to vote for their conservative allies.

The splits inside the Ticinese community soon became public. In 1885 Stefano Gatti launched the London branch of the Ticinese conservative party while Pietro became the president of the London branch of the Ticinese liberal party. In the course of the 1880s he contributed fiery articles to the liberal’s newspaper Il Dovere and, with his equally radically-minded friends Luigi and Pietro Reggiori, who had restaurants in King’s Cross and in Chapel Street near Edgware Road station, he raised funds to support the liberal cause in his home canton. During a visit to London in August 1889, Romeo Manzoni, one of the most left-wing of the Ticino liberal leaders, visited the Reggioris’ restaurant in King’s Cross. The next day, August 28th, Manzoni joined ‘our able and energetic president’ Pietro and his friends Castioni and the latter’s son-in-law Gottardo Induni, another sculptor, for a ‘succulent meal’ in the Finsbury Park restaurant. That evening he was the guest of honour at a public meeting, attended by 60 fellow liberals and presided over by Pazzi, where Castioni proposed a toast to Manzoni as ‘defender of freedom of thought and emancipating modern ideas’.

This was the prelude to the defining event of Pietro’s life. Gerrymandered elections in Ticino canton in March 1889 had resulted in the return of the conservative government with a crushing parliamentary majority, even though it had barely won a majority of the votes. An attempt by the liberals the following summer to have the electoral districts redrawn by legislative means was thwarted by the new government.

In August 1890 Angelo Castioni was asked by Boehm to go to Carrara in Tuscany to order marble. He was given permission to visit his relatives on the way. On his arrival in Ticino he learnt (if he did not already know) that on August 8th the liberal leaders, armed with a petition signed by 9,000 of their fellow citizens, had presented the cantonal government with a deadline of September 9th by which to make concessions. Otherwise they threatened popular demonstrations or worse. Castioni returned to Bellinzona, the cantonal capital, on the evening of September 10th. By what they later claimed was sheer coincidence, Pietro Pazzi and other London restaurateurs, together with fellow Ticinese emigrants from Paris and Milan, also felt the urge to be in Bellinzona at the same time.

The next day, September 11th, these emigrants with their local friends found themselves involved in directing a popular uprising. Proceedings were organised from the Albergo Cervo (‘Deer Inn’) on the main square outside the town hall. Large numbers of liberals and their supporters from all over the canton who had gathered in the square marched up the hill to the Castello Grande and seized the cantonal arsenal housed there. They took a variety of rifles and other arms down to the town hall and took several government ministers hostage. Using these people as a human shield, the revolutionaries, sporting red armbands, then marched on the offices of the cantonal government a few streets away. They hammered down the stout front doors ‘because, the people go in by the front door and not through the window,’ in the words of one of the leaders. As the crowd surged up the main staircase, Luigi Rossi, a rising young member of the canton’s conservative government, came out to parley with the insurgents. A shot was fired reportedly by a tall, flamboyantly dressed figure with an enormous red beard. Rossi fell wounded and died almost immediately. There was little doubt that the assassin was Angelo Castioni.

Shortly after the shooting the revolutionaries planted a tree of liberty in front of the town hall and, to the sound of a local band, declared a new liberal government and a new political dawn. But the assassination provoked the federal government in Bern into action. A commissioner was appointed to sort out the situation and federal troops were sent to Bellinzona. Barely a day after it had been installed, the new liberal cantonal government was deposed and replaced by a transitional government headed by a moderate conservative and including moderates of both sides.

Though he never admitted to the murder Castioni had incriminated himself during the march on the government offices by his loose talk about the need to avenge the blood of his beloved brother. This and the combination of his dominating physical appearance and red beard led most people to conclude that he was the killer. He seems to have remained at liberty for four days before being smuggled out of Bellinzona.

There is no reason to doubt the family tradition that Pietro Pazzi was instrumental in sheltering Castioni in Semione in the aftermath of the uprising and then smuggling him out of Switzerland at some point between September 15th and 27th. That day Castioni penned a letter from London to Il Dovere denying any responsibility for Rossi’s assassination. The Swiss government formally requested his extradition and when his case was heard on October 24th, 1890, Franklin Lushington, a London magistrate, ruled that, on the basis of Castioni’s reported words at the time, the assassination was a crime of passion and that he should be extradited.

Castioni was imprisoned while Luigi Reggiori took responsibility for his appeal against extradition. Contrary to the expectations of Castioni and Reggiori, the judges of the Queen’s Bench overruled the magistrate, accepted Castioni’s lawyers’ argument that the crime had been political and decided that Castioni should not be extradited. The judgement provoked controversy at the time and later. Castioni’s links with the high and mighty were evoked in the press and the suspicion was voiced that the judges had acted under pressure from the British government that wanted its own back on Switzerland for the immunity that it regularly granted to anarchists and all brands of socialist revolutionaries. Nevertheless in the long run the judgement became the decisive one that established the principle of immunity for political crimes in English law.

In the short term it left Pietro Pazzi feeling ruffled. He may well have been among the group of Ticinesi who were keeping Castioni company in a converted cowshed in the spacious garden of 3 Upper Cheyne Row when Angelo was arrested on October 4th. Though no demand was to be made for Pazzi’s extradition and he was never arrested, he seems to have felt uneasy. He attempted to distance himself from Castioni and to vindicate himself with the Swiss government by collaborating with the federal enquiry into the failed revolution. The Swiss and Ticinese cantonal authorities, however, were probably glad to have Castioni, Pazzi and their friends outside the country and did not pursue a vendetta. Far more unsettling, however, was the rejection over the coming years of Pazzi by his former friends in Switzerland.

In 1892, in order to calm passions on a more permanent basis, Bern imposed a form of proportional representation on the canton, which was intended to prevent any single party from gaining a majority. Over the following decades this model was to be followed throughout Switzerland and created the coalition politics which endure to this day and which have prevented a recurrence of the bitter political divisions of the 19th century.

Safely ensconced in office at last, the sobered and now moderate liberals in the new Ticinese government were afraid of the incriminating disclosures that might be made should Castioni, Pazzi and their allies be allowed to participate in politics again. Within a few years the remaining radicals inside Ticino, like Manzoni, had been marginalised and in 1897 left the liberal party to form their own, initially impotent, radical party.

Disillusioned at the betrayal of his strongly-held beliefs by former political allies in Switzerland, Pietro turned his back on the past, though, initially, he remained a member of the Unione Ticinese in London, which saw a dramatic increase in membership in the following years. Here there had been a reconciliation between the various factions. By 1894, Pazzi’s erstwhile associate Luigi Reggiori and the conservative Agostino Gatti were serving side by side as honorary vice-presidents.

As early as the spring of 1891 Pazzi had told the census enumerator incorrectly that, although foreign-born, he was a British citizen. In 1896, when he finally received British citizenship, he based his application on his wish ‘to have the right to vote, acquire the possession of freeholds and to deal with his properties which are all situate in England’. This was perhaps disingenuous since all of his children, who would have had a similar motivation, retained their Swiss citizenship. Moreover, despite his assertions, he continued to own property in Semione. His family later assumed that, while admitting that it was strange for a Swiss to renounce his citizenship, he did so because, in the words of his English-domiciled grandson, Rex Reggiori, ‘he was a great admirer of this country’. In August 1896, Pietro visited Switzerland with a copy of his naturalisation papers and formally ceased to be a Swiss citizen, a citizen of Ticino and a resident of Semione. Swiss Pietro became British Peter.

Pietro used his increasing wealth and new status to play the stock market. If the funds mentioned in his will are representative, he invested heavily in British government and colonial bonds and particularly in railway funds, though French, German and Prussian bonds also feature – but there is no mention of anything Swiss. By 1899 the ‘sufficiency’ that was the dream of most Ticinese immigrants had been transformed in his case into opulence. When he died aged 65 on August 6th, 1914, Peter left a gross fortune of £26,516/12/3d.

But Pazzi had not completely forgotten the land of his birth. He continued to employ one or two waiters  from his home valley, who had rooms in his large house at 5 Prah Road near the restaurant. In his will, written in 1899, he balanced the £20 that he left to the Royal Northern Hospital by bequeathing the same amount to the principal mental hospital in Ticino, the Manicomio Cantonale at Mendrisio. He also requested his executors to give £5 each to what they judged to be the two poorest families in Semione.

His identification with England increased in the years after he wrote his will. In death he marked his distance from the Ticinese community of which he had once been so proud a member. Fellow radical Pietro Reggiori, who died in 1907, had been buried amid his Ticinese compatriots in the Catholic cemetery at Kensal Green. His gravestone poignantly mentions that he was born among the Swiss mountains and he was later to have a commemorative grave in his home village of Lottigna. Pazzi opted for Highgate Cemetery. He is buried, as ‘Peter Pazzi’, in one of the most prestigious locations in the cemetery, the Circle of Lebanon vaults, surrounded by the great and the good of England. His tomb has a facing of red marble, unlike the cheaper white stone of the other tombs. It is topped with the initials of the first names of Peter and his two sons, picked out in gold in the confident assumption that his dynasty would continue. But Severino and Guerino were not made in his mould. By the early 1930s his restaurant had closed and, with the death of Guerino’s son Harold Roy in 1937, his family became extinct in the male line.

Peter Barber is Head of Map Collections at the British Library.