"Historical Memoirs of the Siege of Missolonghi by Giovanni Romey edited by Alessandro Ferranti" a review by Carlo Coppola

A rare first-hand testimony from the Greek War of Independence

Historical Memoirs of the Siege of Missolonghi by Giovanni Romey, edited by Alessandro Ferranti: A Rare First-Hand Testimony from the Greek War of Independence

There are books that need no invented narrative. They simply restore a voice that time was about to swallow.

Memorie storiche dello assedio di Mesolongi (Historical Memoirs of the Siege of Missolonghi), the original text by Giovanni Romey and edited by Alessandro Ferranti — since 2025 the Ambassador of Italy to Yerevan — belongs to this rare category. It is neither a historical novel nor a reconstruction written with the comfortable distance of two centuries. First and foremost, it is a direct testimony: the gaze of a man who lived one of the most dramatic episodes of the Greek War of Independence — which saw in Ioannis Kapodistrias its most radiant hero — from a profoundly contradictory position.

Between 1825 and 1826, the siege of Missolonghi became the symbol of European philhellenism. The city’s resistance, the suffering of its inhabitants, and the desperate final sortie entered the collective memory of the continent almost immediately. Romey’s story, however, invites us to view those events from another perspective: outside the walls, among the ranks of the besieging army.

Born in Trapani in 1770, a military engineering officer, Romey tested himself in the revolutions that swept the Mediterranean between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Arrested in 1795 on suspicion of Jacobin conspiracy, he took part in the Neapolitan movement alongside figures such as Guglielmo Pepe. Then came the uprisings of 1821, exile in France, and, in 1824, his arrival in Alexandria, Egypt, in the service of Muhammad Ali Pasha. Finally Greece, at the heart of the conflict.

A philhellene by deep moral conviction — first inspired by his reading of the classics — Romey found himself enlisted in the Ottoman-Egyptian forces of Ibrahim Pasha. In this short-circuit lies the core of his story. He maintained contacts with the Italian patriots who had rushed to support the insurgents, passing them information on military plans and hindering operations as far as he could. To call him a spy would be reductive and perhaps unjust: he was a champion of higher duties, navigating between ethics and necessity, between professional rigor and political passion, and in practice foreshadowing the more mature revolutions of the peoples in 1848.

In 1826, while the events were still hot, he set these memoirs down on paper (he would later also document the Battle of Navarino of 1827). The value of his writing lies in the dual nature of the author: the technical competence of an engineering officer — attentive to fortifications, strategies, and maneuvers — merges with the emotional tension of someone who knew that the besieged were fighting for the same cause as his own. This is not the polished prose of a professional writer, but the rough report of a man who observes and measures the battlefield while forced to stand on the opposite side from the one he considers just.

Into this framework fits the editorial work of Alessandro Ferranti. Rescuing Romey’s text from the risk of oblivion — between specialist archives and collections on Risorgimento exile — means putting a precious document back into circulation. Ferranti’s curation is not limited to philological recovery; it stitches the fragmentary biography of the author (from the Jacobin arrest to Egyptian service) into a coherent trajectory, restoring the complexity of a man who crossed various camps to serve a single higher idea: Liberty.

Thanks to this fortunate new edition, Romey ceases to be a marginal note and becomes a junction between the Neapolitan revolutions, the Italian Risorgimento, and the philhellenic movement. It is an operation that completes the picture of a nineteenth-century Mediterranean understood not as a sum of isolated national histories, but as a dynamic network of exiles, conspiracies, and cultural exchanges.

History gains depth when we listen to the uncomfortable voices, those that escape the rigid and ergonomic categories of hero and enemy.

by Carlo Coppola