Ernesto Teodoro Moneta

Ernesto Teodoro Moneta

Every December 10, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel's death in San Remo, Italy, the Peace Prize is awarded in Oslo, Norway. This year, U.S. president Barack Obama will receive the prize for his efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.   To date, only one Italian

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Thu 10 Dec 2009 1:00 AM

Every December 10,
the anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death in San Remo, Italy, the Peace Prize is awarded in Oslo, Norway. This year, U.S. president Barack Obama will receive the prize
for his efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between
peoples.

 

To
date, only one Italian has won the Peace Prize, an honor he shared with a
Frenchman. In 1907, six years after the Peace Prize was first presented,
Ernesto Teodoro Moneta, soldier, journalist and pacifist, was named joint
winner with Louis Renault. Hailed ‘the apostle of peace,’ he received the award
in recognition of his long-term commitment to peace and for founding the Lombard
Union for International Peace and Arbitration.

 

Moneta
was born in Milan on September
20, 1833 into an aristocratic family that had fallen on harder times. In 1848,
then aged 15, Moneta participated, with his father, in the uprising against
Austrian rule, known as the ‘Five Days of Milan.’ Although deeply
affected by the violence he saw in 1848, he afterwards attended the military
academy in Ivrea and took Giuseppe Garibaldi’s side in the Italian nationalist
cause.

 

In
1859, he volunteered to join the Hunters of the Alps brigade, which under
Garibaldi fought to free Lombardy from the Austrians in the
second war of independence. The following year, he was once again at
Garibaldi’s service in Sicily as part of the Medici
division in the Expedition of the Thousand. Although he was promoted
aide-de-camp to Garibaldi’s chief of staff, General Giuseppe Sirtori, and then
was made commander of a division during the third war of independence, he
became disillusioned after the dramatic defeat of the Italian troops at Custoza
on June 24, 1866, where he personally
fought with bravery.

 

Turning his back on
a promising military career, Moneta returned to civilian life and become a
journalist. As editor-in-chief of the Milan newspaper Il Secolo from 1867 to 1896, he
forged it into the most popular daily of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, introducing innovative news-gathering techniques and
modern technology. He also used the paper as a vehicle for expressing his deep
pacifist ideals born of his war experiences. He was among the founders, and
later became president, of the Lombard Union for Peace and International
Arbitration, and he was also among the founders of the Society for Peace and
for International Justice. In 1889, he inaugurated the First National Peace
Congress in Rome.

 

At
about this time, in addition to continuing his prodigious writings on the
subject, Moneta launched a popular annual almanac, L’Amico della Pace (The Friend of Peace), and the journal La Vita Internazionale (International Life). These vehicles made him a prominent and respected
voice in the international peace movement. He was the Italian representative on
the Commission of the International Peace Bureau in 1895 and a participant at
the Hague Peace Conferences of 1899 and 1907.

 

Nonetheless, Moneta
is often described, even in his Nobel biography, as a ‘paradox’ for his stance
as a ‘militant pacifist.’ For, although he was a fervent believer in
international peace, he remained a nationalist and patriot, and he supported Italy’s intervention in World War I.

 

Handsome, dynamic
and athletic as a young man, in later life, Moneta suffered from glaucoma and
struggled against almost total blindness. Despite this handicap, he published
his monumental four-volume work, Le guerre, le insurrezioni e la pace nel
secolo XIX (Wars, Insurrections and Peace in the Nineteenth Century), which
took him 30 years to compile. He died of pneumonia on February 10, 1918.

 

His strong
convictions affected Moneta’s personal life, which was not a very happy one. He
and his wife Ersilia Caglio(1845-1899) had two sons. Devoutly Catholic, his
wife could not accept Il Secolo’s criticisms of the clergy for hampering
Italy’s unification and future development, and she
and the children lived estranged from Moneta for much of the marriage. Again
paradoxically, Moneta remained a practicing Catholic. Indeed, his favourite
grandson and namesake, Ernesto T. Moneta Caglio (1907-1995), became a bishop in
Milan and a world-famous expert in Ambrosian chants
and liturgy.

 

Another of Moneta’s
descendants, his great granddaughter, became famous for a very different
reason. A fledging actress, Marianna Moneta Caglio Bessier d’Istria, known as
Anna Maria Moneta Caglio, was the star witness in one of Italy’s most sensational murder trials of the
twentieth century. Christened by the press ‘the black swan’ for her long neck
and fondness for wearing black, Anna Maria gave evidence about the death of
Wilma Montesi, a young woman whose body was found on the beach near Rome in
April 1953. The story behind Montesi’s mysterious homicide entangled prominent
Italian political figures whose names were splashed all over the tabloids, much
to the fascination of the public, who relished every minute of this titillating
scandal in suc

h high places.

 

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