It was not, however, until the comparatively recent epoch of the last half of the Eighteenth Century that the “bravo” as an institution acquired his widest celebrity by the commission of what were practically acts of open warfare against the then moribund Republic of Venice. These acts were committed under the leadership of a man the like of whom Italy had not known since the days of the Despots, one Count Alamanno Gambara, a native of the parts about Brescia.
Gambara may well and reasonably be called the Last of the Despots, for he was assuredly the last private person to terrorise a large district of Upper Italy, with both comparative impunity and a certain measure of hereditary authority. As one of Thackeray’s characters says of Lord Mohun in “Esmond,” he could handle a foil—and a bloody one, too—before ever he learned to use a razor. At an age when most boys are in the Fourth Form of an English public school, Gambara was the terror of the countryside in which his paternal castle of Pralboino was situated; so that, when he was only about fifteen years old, the Venetian Government found itself compelled to place him under restraint, his father being dead and his mother unable to control him. Finally, he was confined as a prisoner, first in Verona and then in the fortress of Palma, from the latter of which he escaped; for a while he wandered about the country, pursued by the police, who were unable to lay hands on him, until at last he decided to surrender himself to the authorities, of his own accord, which he did, and was exiled to Zara, the Governor of Dalmatia being requested by the Venetian Government to treat him with all possible consideration and to provide him with good company for the benefit of his moral welfare!
Gambara, however, was soon allowed to return to his estates, and once there lost no time in gathering about him a bodyguard of “bravi,” with whose assistance he soon signalised himself in various encounters with the representatives of law and order in the province. Having engaged upon a kind of warfare with the Customs officials at Calvisano—a village near Porella, some distance south and east from Brescia—a detachment of Gambara’s bandits raided the Custom-house there and killed one of them, beating the others and all but murdering their captain as well. On being summoned to appear before the Council of Ten at Venice, to render an account for his misdeeds, Gambara retorted by fortifying his two castles and adding to his little army of “bravi,” thus openly setting the law at defiance. And now a reign of terror was inaugurated by him and by his henchman, Carlo Molinari, the head of his band of assassins.