In Genoa, in the year 1803, a child was born to a family of modest means. His name was Jacopo Ruffini. His father was a republican who remembered the brief Italian republics before Napoleon's fall; his mother was a woman of deep but undogmatic faith.
The boy grew in a city that chafed under foreign domination. First the French ruled, then the Austrians, then the restored Piedmontese monarchy imposed its weight upon the old republic. The Genoese remembered when their merchant fleet had rivaled Venice, when their city was free. Now they were subjects.
Jacopo was sensitive to injustice from his earliest years. He wept when he saw beggars. He raged when he saw police brutality. He dreamed, even as a child, of a world where no one would suffer oppression.
He read voraciously: history, philosophy, poetry. He discovered the ancient dream of liberty that ran like an underground river through European thought. He found his ancestors — the tyrannicides of Rome, the free cities of medieval Italy, the thinkers who imagined human beings could govern themselves.
And he found his friends. In Genoa's cafés and drawing rooms, young men gathered who shared his vision. They spoke in whispers of revolution, of a united Italy free from foreign rule, of a republic that would honor human dignity.
Among these friends, one stood out: Giuseppe Mazzini, whose vision burned brightest, whose words struck deepest. Between Jacopo and Giuseppe a bond formed that would last beyond death.
Of his early years, Jacopo later wrote: "I was born into bondage but not for bondage. Something in me knew, even before I could articulate it, that the natural state of humanity is freedom. Everything I did was preparation for the moment when I could act upon this knowledge."