MICCA, PIETRO, Piedmontese soldier (d. 1706), was born at Andorno, and achieved fame by his death in the defence of Turin. During the siege of that city by the French in 1706 a party of the besiegers had succeeded in penetrating by surprise into the moat of the fortress on the night of August 29–30, and would undoubtedly have captured it had not Micca, a soldier in the engineers, fired a mine, with the result that they were blown into the air and the rest of the force driven back with heavy losses. Micca’s heroism has been the subject of poems, plays and romances. But, according to Count Giuseppe Solaro della Margherita, the commander of the Turin garrison at the time, it was through a miscalculation of the pace of the fuse, and not by deliberate intent, that he sacrificed his life.
See A. Manno Pietro Micca ed il generale conte Solaro della Margherita (Turin, 1883).