By Brenda Moore-McCann
Years after his death in Genoa, Italy, in 1847, the heart of Daniel O’Connell (b. 1775), the internationally renowned politician of Catholic Emancipation, lawyer and former lord mayor of Dublin, went missing in Rome. The heart of ‘the Liberator’ has not been seen since. It is a story that brings us from Ireland to Italy, involving a cast of characters that included the pope in Rome, an Italian in Ireland who had developed Ireland’s first transport system, the Bank of Italy, the Irish College in Rome and, recently, a contemporary Irish artist.
In Genoa O’Connell stayed at the Feder Hotel on Via al Ponte Reale, which also hosted, among others, Hermann Melville and George Eliot. He was accompanied by his son Daniel Jr, a servant and his chaplain/doctor, Fr John Miley. The latter recorded his famous last words—that he wished his body to go to Ireland, his heart to Rome and his soul to heaven. Fifty years after his death, a commemorative plaque was erected on the site of the former Feder Hotel by the Genoese. O’Connell’s embalmed heart was brought by Miley to the sixth-century Gothic church of the Irish College in Rome, Sant’Agata dei Goti on Via Mazzarino. Following a funeral Mass, the heart is thought to have been placed in an urn in the church crypt. Pope Pius IX organised two days of special honours for O’Connell in May 1847, with a newly commissioned sung Mass at Sant’Andrea della Valle, the cathedral church of Rome. A Latin inscription in a corner of the church marks the event. O’Connell’s funeral in Dublin’s Sackville Street (later renamed O’Connell Street) attracted a crowd of half a million.
A few years later, in 1851, Charles Bianconi (1786–1875) made a visit to Rome. This Italian-born founder of Ireland’s first transport system, who lived in Clonmel, Co. Tipperary (where he was twice mayor), was an ardent supporter of O’Connell. Finding the urn in a poor state, he immediately commissioned a sculpted tablet to protect it. In 1855 a stone tablet, engraved with a scene of O’Connell refusing to sign the oath of allegiance to the British Crown, was fixed to the wall of the church. It was thought that the heart, encased in a silver casket, was installed safely behind it. Seventy years later, the fate of the heart was revealed.
The Bank of Italy on Via Nazionale, wishing to expand its premises, bought part of the churchyard and extended into the grounds and, possibly, the crypt of Sant’Agata dei Goti in 1925. A visitor’s leaflet describes how ‘the monastery was torn down and the Irish College transferred’. In the process of the College’s relocation to its present site on Via dei Santi Quattro, Bianconi’s stone tablet was prised off the wall of Sant’Agata’s. There was nothing behind it! Had the heart really been placed there in 1855? Is there any record of the event in Bianconi’s papers, held in a private collection since the 1980s? Was it stolen along with its silver casket? Could it be somewhere in the vaults of the Bank of Italy? Could it still be in the crypt of Sant’Agata?
These are some of the tantalising questions that remain to be answered. One clue that points to the heart’s location being in the crypt of Sant’Agata is an entry in the Catholic Directory of 1859 and a commemorative plaque embedded in the floor of the church inside the front door. It records the death of a young seminarian, Terence McSweeney, and the Directory states that his remains were to be interred in the crypt ‘beside the heart of O’Connell’.
The most recent episode in the story is that of Irish artist Claire Halpin, who sought (artistically) to resolve the mystery of O’Connell’s missing heart. As part of her exhibition in Rome in the Galleria Voltaire, a stone’s throw from Sant’Agata, she made a life-size plaster cast of a heart. Called Daniel O’Connell’s Lost Heart, she donated it to the church in March 2023.
Brenda Moore-McCann is an art historian, medical doctor and assistant professor (adjunct) in Trinity College, Dublin.