This is half funny, half awful – your country of birth, having given you the death sentence, hounds you in exile with bills to cover the cost of your eventual execution. In the event, they left him in (one) peace. He was, by the way, the Principal Librarian of the British Museum, and became a naturalised Brit.

‘Although Panizzi still had a price on his head, he was now long removed from the early days of his exile, when the government of Modena would mail him advance bills for the cost of his own execution.’ 

Source: Matthew Battle, Library: An Unquiet History (London: Vintage, 2004), p. 130

Image credit: b0red at pixabay