Milan. Battle of the Umbrellas. In the morning, a furious mob entered the Senate and ransacked the chamber, searching everywhere for the hated Prina. Failing to find him, the rioters went to his home. After ransacking the house and finding him in a closet, the rioters stripped Prina and threw him out the window. A shopkeeper on what is now Via Manzoni initially managed to offer him shelter, but Giuseppe Prina himself offered himself to the enraged mob to prevent the shopkeeper’s home from being destroyed and causing further victims. The mob—composed of respectable citizens—began beating him with the tips of their umbrellas. The lynching in the nearby Piazza della Scala lasted a full four hours, despite it being broad daylight, so much so that by the end his body was practically unrecognizable. No civil or military authority came to his aid. The leader of the mob that killed Prina is said to have been Count Federico Confalonieri, who, not many years later, would be Silvio Pellico’s companion in his trial and imprisonment at Spielberg. Others maintain that the lynching was instigated and organized by emissaries of the Austrian police who had incited the mob against Prina. The tragic story became proverbial in Milan:“Prina’s fin did it” it still means today”he met a very miserable end”.
