Michele Angiolillo

Michele Angiolillo Lombardi (; 5 June 1871 – 20 August 1897) was an Italian anarchist. He assassinated Spanish prime minister Antonio Cánovas del Castillo on 8 August 1897 and was captured and executed by Spanish authorities later that month.

Motive and the Montjuïc trial On 7 June 1896, a bomb was thrown at the Corpus Christi procession in Barcelona. At least twelve people died and 45 were seriously injured. The crime, which was attributed by police to an unidentified anarchist, precipitated an aggressive reprisal against Spanish anarchists, communists, socialists, and republicans, in what became known as the Montjuïc trial: 300 alleged revolutionaries were jailed at Montjuïc Fortress, and confessions were extracted by torture.

Angiolillo, was at the time, working as a printer in the little-known Typographia institution, the section of the British printer's union that was reserved for foreigners. On May 30, 1897, Angiolillo, among at least ten thousand other people, attended a demonstration in Trafalgar Square against the brutal repression of worker's rights movements within Spain, specifically under Cánovas. Organized by the Spanish Atrocities Committee led by the anarchist Joseph Perry, a wide range of activists spoke to the crowd, including Fernando Tarrida del Mármol and Charles Malato. Malato, in his speech, asked who would avenge the people who had died under the regime of Cánovas.

After the protest, Angiolillo personally met with Francisco Gana, who had been tortured at Montjuïc. The German anarchist Rudolf Rocker, who was also present, wrote the following about the meeting:

That night when Gana showed us his crippled limbs, and the scars over his entire body left by the tortures, we understood that it is one thing to read about such matters, but quite another to hear about them from the very lips of the victims" ... "We all sat there as if turned to stone, and it was some minutes before we could utter a few words of indignation. Only Angiolillo said not a word. A little later, he suddenly rose to his feet, uttered a laconic goodbye, and abandoned the house...This was the last time I saw him. When he reached Madrid, he learned that Cánovas had travelled to the thermal bath resort of Santa Águeda (now a psychiatric hospital) in Mondragón, Guipúzcoa, and decided to pursue him there.

About Angiolillo, the New York Times wrote:

Angiolillo allowed the authorities to capture him and vehemently denied other parties' involvement in the assassination. He was executed by garrote in the nearby town of Vergara.

There is some evidence that he originally planned to kill one or two young members of the Spanish royal family, but was dissuaded by Puerto Rican nationalist leader Ramón Emeterio Betances, who suggested Cánovas del Castillo as a target instead. Betances provided logistical assistance for Angiolillo's safe travel into Spain, as well as some money.

Legacy There is a street named after him in Foggia.