The Italian Language

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Political Figures

Sir John Hawkwood (Haccoude, Giovanni Acuto) (1320-1394) was an English mercenary in 14th century Italy. He served the Pope and the Florentine Republic and is commemorated in St. Maria Novella by a fresco by Paolo Uccello.

Greta Garbo as Queen Christina (1933),
a highly fictionalised version of her life

Queen Christina (1626-1689), a convert to Catholicism, a conversion which, combined with her reluctance to marry, led her to abdicate and go into exile. Her city of choice was Rome, where she was soon engaged in the politics of the Papal court. She is best remembered, however, as a patron of the arts. The core of her painting collection came from Prague, to which she added many works she acquired after her exile, by such masters as Titian, Raphael Correggio, Annibale Carracci and Guido Reni. She was the founder of the first public theatre in Rome, the Tor di Nonna, as well as a literary academy, the Accademia Reale. She had a wide collection of books and was also a writer. She also supported several musicians and composers, the best-known of them being Arcangelo Corelli, Alessandro Scarlatti and Alessandro Stradella.

Napoleone Buonaparte, known to posterity as Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821), though Emperor of the French, was in origin Corsican, never mastering the language of his empire. Corsica had been ceded to France only the year before his birth by Genoa. For a time, after his defeat in 1814, he was created Emperor of Elba, an island which is now part of Italy. The family actually come from Florence, from where Francesco Buonaparte (XVI century) moved to Corsica, then a Genoese possession.

Many members of his family became rulers of European counties. His brothers and sister, for example:

his son:

and his nephew:

		One of Napoleon's decendants Jerôme's daughter, Princess Mathilde of Monfort (1820-1904) , married Anatoly Demidov in 1840 (see Aristocrats). She was, incidentally, born in Trieste and was raised in Florence and Rome. Of their descendants who also reigned I can cite Louis II, king of Holland and Joachim I, King of Naples, besides the son of Napoleon III, the Prince Imperial Eugene Bonaparte (1856-1879), who died fighting the Zulus. The King of Afghanistan, Muhammed Zâhir Shah (1914) was in Rome when revolution in his country in 1973 forced him to ask for asylum to the Italian authorities. He remained in Italy until the fall of the Taleban régime in 2001 allowed him to return, no longer as king, but as a respected figure. Edvige Antonia Albina Maino, better known as Sonia Gandhi, now the leader Congress Party of India, was born in 1946 near Vincenza, in Italy. While studying in England, she married Rajiv Gandhi, the son of Indira Gandhi, the then Prime Minister of India, in 1968, returning with him to India. She entered politics in India in 1998, several years after the assassination of her husband, in 1991.
Princess Mathilde of Monfort, by Franz Xavier Winterhalter (1805-1873)

Filippo Antonio Pasquale de Paoli (1725 -1807) was the hero of Corsican independence from Genoa. He proclaimed the first modern democratic republic of modern times when he drove the Genoese from the island in 1755. He was celebrated by all the enlightened philosophers of the day, such as Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. His ideas also inspired the American Revolution. The Genoese, realising they would never regain Corsica, sold it to the French who invaded it and defeating Paoli in 1769, who then went into exile in London. Following the French Revolution, he returned to Corsica, but soon left again for London, disgusted with the excesses of the new French government and with the lack of support for his second bid for Corsican independence.

Two of the Medici, the ruling family of Florence from the XIV to the XVIII centuries, became queens of France: Caterina Maria Romola di Lorenzo de' Medici, better known as Catherine de Médicis (1519 – 1589) and Maria de' Medici, better known as Marie de Médicis (1573 – 1642). The former married Henry II and became the mother of three kings of France. She reputedly took to France some of Italy's eating habits, such as the use of the fork and knife. Maria married Henry IV of France. The Luxembourg Palace in Paris was built in an "Italian" style for her, as she often longed for her native Florence. Giulio Raimondo Mazzarino, better known by his French name, Jules Mazarin (1602-1661) went to France as an assistant to Cardinal Richelieu, eventually succeeding him as minister of France. During Louis XIV minority he effectively directed France's policies. One if his descendants, Maria Beatrice Eleanor Anne Margaret Isabella d'Este (1658-1718), was the wife of James II of England. The Austrian branch of the Hapsburg were Grand Dukes of Tuscany, following the demise of the last Medici. Their claim to the Grand-Duchy was justified through complex dynastic connections, which I shall not discuss here. The first two Grand Dukes, Francis II (1708-1765) (Grand Duke from 1737) and Leopold I (1747-1752) (Grand Duke from 1765) had to leave Tuscany to become Emperors in Vienna, while the next three, Francis III (1773-1824) (Grand Duke from 1790), Leopold II (1797-1870) (Grand Duke from 1824 to 1859) and Francis IV (1835-1908) (Grand Duke from 1859 to 1860) were born in Florence.
		Caterina de' Medici

The Hapsburg were also rulers, directly or indirectly, of the Lombard-Venetian Kingdom, in northern Italy, comprising Milan and Venice (and surrounding territory) and were also for a time Dukes of Parma (1814–1847) and Dukes of Modena (1814–1859).

The Spanish Branch of the Hapsburg, followed by the Austrian Branch were also rulers of Naples and Sicily.

I don't propose to go too far in time or to examine the whole story of foreign rulers in Italy, but suffice it to say that, besides the Hapsburg, in one part of Italy or another several other royal families ruled:

The Normans

The House on Anjou

The Bourbons

The Hohenstaufen

The House of Aragon

A last group of figures are the Popes in Rome, who double as political and religious figures. They have tended to be mostly Italians. in fact there was a long period from 1523, when Adrian VI (1559-1523) (Pope from 1522), a native from Utrecht died to 1978, when John Paul II (1920-2005) (Pope from 1978), a Pole, was elected, that all Popes were Italian. The present one, Benedict XVI (1927) (Pope from 2005) is a native from Bavaria. 16 Popes were French, 8 German, 3 North Africans and one English, besides a number from Greece, Asia Minor, Syria, Spain, Portugal, Dalmatia and the Near East.

		The British envoy to the court of Naples from 1764 to 1800 was Sir William Hamilton (1730–1803) a Scottish, antiquarian, archaeologist and vulcanologist, whose collection of antiquities found, in part, a home at the British Museum. In 1786 Sir William met his future wife, Emma, 31 years younger than he, though his nephew Charles Greville (1749–1809). Emma (1761-1815), the daughter of a blacksmith, lived a difficult life which eventually improved thanks to her famed beauty and ability as a model and eventually hostess. She caught the Attention of Horatio Nelson (the future Admiral, Lord Nelson) when he visited Naples in 1793 to gather reinforcements. He eventually returned to Naples after the Battle of the Nile, in 1798. She gave not only a hero’s welcome but eventually also her affections, becoming the mother of several of his children, an affair not only tolerated by Sir William, but apparently encouraged. After Sir William’s term ended, the three made their way to England together, travelling through Central Europe.
	Lady Hamilton as Circe, By George Romney