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Pietro Micca

Miner from the Biella area in the Savoyard army, killed in the tunnels of the Citadel during the siege of Turin of 1706 and made into a hero of the city.

Image from the Il Torinese article
From the article by Il Torinese, 2026-09-24

Pietro Micca (Sagliano, 1677 – Turin, 1706) was a soldier in the miners' company of the Savoyard army, killed in the underground tunnels of the Citadel during the siege of Turin of 1706 while setting off a mine to stop a French incursion.[1][2] A mason from the Biella area who became a symbol of the Savoy capital's resistance, he gives his name to one of the city centre's main streets, to a barracks and to the civic museum that preserves the counter-mine tunnels where he died.

From the Biella area to the miners' company

He was born in Sagliano d'Andorno, in the Biella area, today Sagliano Micca: according to the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani on 5 March 1677,[1] according to the 1934 Enciclopedia Italiana the day after.[2] His father Giacomo was a mason and his mother, Anna Martinazzo, was his second wife; Pietro followed his father's trade. On 29 October 1704 he married Maria Caterina Bonino, by whom he had a son, Giacomo Antonio.[1]

In July 1705 he joined the miners' company of His Royal Highness, a unit created in 1657 under duke Carlo Emanuele II to work the mines and later placed among the artillery's workforce. In the rolls he appears, as was customary, under a nickname, “Passapertut”, which the Dizionario Biografico explains by his skill at slipping through the narrowest tunnels.[1]

The night at the Citadel

The pentagonal Citadel, designed by Francesco Paciotto for Emanuele Filiberto in the sixteenth century,[3] was the heart of the defence when in 1706 the army of Louis XIV laid siege to the capital of duke Vittorio Amedeo II. Beneath the bastions ran a network of counter-mine tunnels in which Savoyard and French miners hunted each other in the dark; the miners' company played a central role there.[1] The Enciclopedia Italiana sums up the decisive moment thus:

“During this siege, on the night of 30 August 1706, some French grenadiers had managed to get as far as the tunnel leading into the interior of the stronghold.”

Armando Tallone, Enciclopedia Italiana, 1934

According to the same account, Micca sent away the comrade who was with him and set fire to the mine, trying in vain to get to safety: the explosion sealed off the passage to the French and killed him.[2] The popular version places the event around midnight between 29 and 30 August and has it that, to give the enemy no time, the two chose a short fuse; tradition puts into Micca's mouth, addressed to the too-slow comrade, a phrase in Piedmontese, “It ses pì long che na giornà sensa pan”, which Mole24 renders as “Get up, you're taking longer than a day without bread”.[4] The underground stairway identified as the scene of the episode was found only in 1958 by Guido Amoretti, later a general.[5]

What the documents say

Historical research has separated fact from myth. Accounts from the time or shortly after do not give Micca's name; the papers show his presence in the tunnels when the fuses were lit that helped bring about the French surrender, but not the decisive effect of a spontaneous individual act.[1] Tallone himself noted that the artillery commander's official report had not highlighted the episode, and that his contemporaries had neither recognised nor rewarded him for it.[2]

The document closest to the events is the petition his widow addressed to the duke on 26 February 1707 to obtain a pension. It states that her husband had been

“ordered by cavalier Castel Alfieri, colonel of the artillery battalion, or else moved by the generosity of his spirit to go and set fire to the said mine, notwithstanding the evident danger to his life”

Petition of the widow Micca to duke Vittorio Amedeo II, 26 February 1707

The officer named is Giuseppe Amico di Castellalfero, charged with coordinating gunners, miners and engineers during the siege: the petition thus leaves open the possibility that he was acting on an order. The duke granted the family “two rations of bread” starting on 26 February 1707; in 1709 the widow remarried, to Lorenzo Pavanello.[1]

Building a hero

Fame came more than seventy years later. In 1781 the “Piemontesi illustri” series, promoted by the Accademia Sampaolina, devoted to Micca, by the hand of count Durando di Villa, the first exemplary portrait, placing him alongside no less than prince Eugene of Savoy. In the nineteenth century the miner became a recurring subject: the painting by Stefano Chiantore (1828), the canvases of Giulio Piatti, Michele Cusa, Andrea Gastaldi and Luigi Di Giovanni, the drama by Vittorio Bersezio (1852), the ballet by Luigi Manzotti (1871), the statue by Giuseppe Cassano (1864). By royal patent of 8 March 1828 king Carlo Felice granted the last descendant, Giovanni Antonio Micca, an annuity of 300 lire a year.[1]

In 1834 the sculptor Giuseppe Bogliani was commissioned to make a bronze monument, unveiled in the courtyard of the Royal Arsenal on 4 December 1837, the feast of Saint Barbara, patron saint of artillerymen: a warrior Minerva beside a herm bearing Micca's bust, couch grass as a symbol of tenacity and artillery trophies.[6] The granite pedestal was by Alessandro Antonelli.[1] The work later moved to the barracks named after the hero in via Valfrè, built to a design approved in 1885, and has been at the museum since 1961.[7] In 1880 Sagliano too got its own monument, by Giuseppe Maffei.[1]

In 1897 via Pietro Micca opened to the public, the diagonal street linking piazza Castello to piazza Solferino, created by the redevelopment of the centre begun in the 1880s and today lined with arcades and Art Nouveau buildings.[8] In 1938 Aldo Vergano shot the film Pietro Micca, the debut of Clara Calamai, with sets and costumes by Carlo Levi and Carlo Mollino and exteriors shot at the citadel of Alessandria: the film is considered lost, and a fragment of about five minutes survives at the Museo Nazionale del Cinema.[9]

The Pietro Micca Museum

The civic museum at via Guicciardini 7/A is devoted to the siege of 1706. The first tunnels of the Soccorso half-moon bastion were opened to visitors as early as 1913, after research by colonel Pietro Magni; in 1958 the City, the Genio Civile and the Army began the full recovery of the counter-mine system, and the museum was opened on 14 May 1961, for the centenary of Italian unification. Of the roughly 14 kilometres of underground passages identified, 9 can be walked.[10] Its first director was Guido Amoretti (born 1920), who ran the museum from 1961 until his death in 2008; in 2024 the City named the stretch of via Guicciardini in front of the entrance after him.[5]

Closed on 26 February 2024 for extraordinary maintenance work, the museum reopened on 11 June 2024 with the route through the tunnels where the episode took place.[11] In 2019 a life-size bronze statue was announced for the entrance, modelled by an American descendant of the family, Kelly Micca, depicting the miner fleeing the explosion.[12]

Related articles: Assedio di Torino del 1706, Biella, Gran Madre di Dio, Santuario della Consolata, Vittorio Amedeo II

Pages linking here

Sources

  1. Treccani – Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani —
  2. Treccani – Enciclopedia Italiana —
  3. MuseoTorino
  4. Mole24 — 29 August 2014
  5. TorinoClick – Città di Torino — 29 November 2024
  6. Mole24 — 28 January 2026
  7. Mole24 — 22 January 2026
  8. Mole24 — 29 August 2017
  9. Mole24 — 11 September 2025
  10. Mole24 — 20 September 2021
  11. TorinoClick – Città di Torino — 4 June 2024
  12. Mole24 — 29 May 2019

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