Ugo & Camilla

One test of a nation's sense of stability is the manner in which it treats crimes against the state. In Britain month ago a young Highland officer, Lieut. Norman Baillie-Stewart, was tried for espionage and high treason in the full glare of publicity. In Italy last week a secret military tribunal met behind locked doors to try the case of 25-year-old half-French, half-Italian Camilla Agliardi of Brescia and her lover, Warrant Officer Ugo Traviglia. They had been in jail for months, but only a handful of people in all Italy knew they had been arrested. Even Warrant Officer Traviglia's wife did not know what had become of him until two days before the trial. The charge was simple. The beautiful Camilla seduced Ugo when she learned that he was employed as a messenger in the Ministry of Marine. His job was to carry important documents from one office to another, also to collect and burn all waste paper in every office every night. Documents he photographed or copied. From the scrap-basket scribblings he managed to guess very shrewdly just what plans were under consideration. The beautiful Camilla smuggled the documents out of the country to France and Jugoslavia in the frames of oil paintings. Both confessed, both were condemned to death though King Vittorio Emmanuele forestalled French martyrdom by commuting Camilla's sentence to life imprisonment.

In the courtyard of Fort Braschi at dawn Ugo Traviglia was marched before a firing squad. Dramatically he begged his executioners' pardon, asked to be shot in the breast, facing the rifles with his eyes unbound. It was not granted. Ugo Traviglia was blindfolded, shot in the back.

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