Eugenio Agneni

In 1849 Eugenio Agneni was a major in the army of the short-lived Roman Republic. He commanded a battalion that fought the Neapolitan army at Velletri, south of Rome, and earned particular praise from Garibaldi. The year before, he had been wounded in the Veneto, fighting the Austrians with a Roman volunteer legion. When French troops restored the pope's rule that summer, Agneni left with a safe conduct obtained from an English diplomat and spent the following years abroad.

He was a painter from Sutri, a small town north of Rome, born in 1816, and before the revolution he had painted for churches, work that brought him to the attention of Pope Pius the Ninth. In exile he worked in France and then in London, where he decorated a room at the Covent Garden opera house and rooms in Buckingham Palace, and exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1859 and 1862.

He came back to fight beside Garibaldi in 1859 and again in 1866, settled in Rome in 1871, once it had become the capital of Italy, and died at Frascati, in the hills outside the city, in 1879.