Biography
Micca was born at Sagliano (Piedmont). His mother was Anna Martinazzo, of Riabella. Little is known about his years before the siege of Turin.During the siege, a party of the besiegers had succeeded in penetrating by surprise into the tunnels of the fortress on the night of August 29-30, and would undoubtedly have captured it had not Micca, a soldier in the engineers, fired a mine, with the result that he and the attackers were blown into the air and the rest of the force then driven back with heavy losses.
Micca's heroism has been the subject of poems, plays and romances. But, according to Count Giuseppe Solaro della Margherita, the commander of the Turin garrison at the time, it was through a miscalculation of the pace of the fuse, and not by deliberate intent, that he sacrificed his life.
A museum in Turin, devoted to the battle, is dedicated to Pietro Micca.
Sources
- Manno, Antonio (1883). Pietro Micca ed il Generale Solaro de la Margarita. Turin:
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
Last updated on Monday July 14, 2008 at 11:15:15 PDT (GMT -0700)
View this article at Wikipedia.org - Edit this article at Wikipedia.org - Donate to the Wikimedia Foundation
Copyright © 2008, Dictionary.com, LLC. All rights reserved.