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Anna Tamanti Ducci (1790–1860)

A daughter of the Palazzo who went to law for her rights

At a glance

Her story

Anna’s marriage settlement survives because she fought for it. Her father gave her a dowry of 1,000 scudi and a trousseau, plus 3,000 scudi of separate property at 4½ per cent interest. The marriage articles were signed on 19 October 1808 and ratified on the wedding day, under the dotal rules of the Napoleonic Code. Filandro gave up his own life interest in the money to her. Her husband was to manage it and account for it ‘at every sign and request’ of hers, and he promised her forty scudi a year in pin money, with her clothes at his own expense.

Their first son, Dario Maria Gaspero, was born at Subbiano on 17 November 1809, nine months after the wedding; his birth act names his mother as ‘Sig.ra Anna del Sig. Filandro Tamanti’.

The Ducci brothers. Anna married into a family that was no stranger to the courts. Guido Orazio was one of six sons of Dario Ducci and Alessandra Fini. When their mother died in 1823 she left Guido her universal heir, charged to pay 1,200 scudi to each of his brothers. Guido was a stubborn litigant. Bound by an arbitrators’ award of 1800 to pay his brother Ottaviano a balance in cash, he offered instead a few scraps of land, and lost before the Ruota of Arezzo (30 July 1827) and the Supreme Council. Having won at first instance in March 1829, he proposed to pay his brother Tommaso in perpetual annuities that need never be redeemed; the Ruota of Arezzo ruled against him on 24 September 1829, and the Supreme Council confirmed it. Both times the judges split the costs ‘atteso lo stretto vincolo del sangue’, because of the close tie of blood. Anna’s own lawsuit against her son, twenty years later, followed a family habit.

A widow at Bibbiena. Guido died at Bibbiena, in the parish of Sant’Ippolito, on 9 March 1843, aged about seventy-one (the register says seventy-six). A notice in the Gazzetta di Firenze of December 1843 shows Anna in charge. Living at Bibbiena in the Casentino, she acted with Ugolino Marcucci as guardian of her younger sons Alessandro and Giuseppe, whose property included the Fattoria di Laterina. Together they warned the public that the farm’s tenant families, at the Casa, the Pozzo, Mongibello and Bano, had been forbidden to buy or sell livestock without the estate’s administrator, and that any such contract would be void.

Mother against son, 1845–47. As a widow she sued her son Dario, one of Guido’s heirs, for the interest on her 3,000 scudi and for thirty-odd years of unpaid pin money. The Tribunal of Arezzo ruled in 1845 and Anna appealed. The appeal judgment of the Corte Regia in Florence, 30 June 1846, reads in places like a family memoir. Dario could produce neither receipts nor his father’s account books; instead he questioned his mother under oath, ‘torturing the memory and the conscience of the mother’, in the court’s words, to make her admit that she had kept the tenant farmers’ customary gifts. She answered that everything the farmers brought her on her husband’s orders had gone on the household, and the judges believed her: it was what was done every day in the families of wealthy country landowners. Nor would they accept the commonplace assumption that a wife who had gone about well dressed, as befitted her station, must have had her pin money. Her clothes were her husband’s separate duty: if Signora Tamanti was always well provided, that showed only that he had met that obligation.

Even so, the victory was partial. The court gave Dario two months either to render his father’s accounts or to pay his mother one quarter, his share as one of Guido’s four heirs, of the 4½ per cent interest on her 3,000 scudi from 6 February 1809, the day after the wedding, less 15 scudi, his quarter of the sixty Guido had paid to her aunt the nun. The pin money it did not award as a separate claim: on that point it confirmed the Arezzo judgment for Dario, holding that Guido had meant to pay the forty scudi a year out of that same interest. Dario then took the case to the Court of Cassation, which quashed the judgment on 27 April 1847. Under the French code, it held, a wife who leaves her property in her husband’s hands can claim its income only if she has expressly charged him to account for the income, not merely the capital; otherwise the law presumes it went on the common household. The printed reports end there. Whether a fresh hearing or a settlement between mother and son followed has not been found. Both sides printed their arguments: the brief for Dario, by the advocates Gaspero Capei and Ercole Boninsegni, was published in Florence in 1846 as a 55-page pamphlet.

The case preserves details no parish register records. In a written answer of 17 June 1845 Anna agreed that from 1812 to 1818 her husband had paid ten scudi a year on her behalf to an aunt of hers, a nun at Pienza, a sister of either Filandro or Barbara Francescoli whose name is still to be found.

Her death, 1860. Anna outlived the lawsuit by thirteen years. The Bibbiena death register records that ‘Sig.ra Anna Tamanti’, possidente, died at eleven in the morning on 5 July 1860, aged seventy, in the parish of Sant’Ippolito, a widow of ‘Ducci Sig. Guido’. The clerk garbled her parents’ names as Ferdinando and Barbara Franceschini (for Filandro and Barbara Francescoli), but her age, widowhood and husband leave no doubt. She died in the Casentino town of her husband’s family, where she had lived since at least 1843 (Bibbiena deaths 1860, fol. 437, parish act 33).

Six years earlier she had put her affairs in order. On 5 September 1854 she made a secret will before Giovanni Franceschi, a notary of Bibbiena; the Florence general register of wills enters it under ‘Tamanti Anna, vedova Ducci, di Filandro’. The will survives in the Archivio di Stato di Firenze among the secret wills that were never published, sealed and still unread.

In June 1870 the Gazzetta Ufficiale declared vacant the post of the late notary Dr. Dario Ducci in the Arezzo district, and this has been taken as the death of Dario, the son she took to court. But Florence’s notarial inventory lists two notaries of exactly that name: Dario son of Francesco, of Subbiano, who practised from 1840 to 1868, and Dario son of “Guidi Orazio”, of “Tallo” (probably Talla, in the Casentino), who practised from 1839 to 1875. The second is Anna’s son; the 1870 notice gives no father, and since her son was alive to recognise his own son in 1872, it very probably concerns the other Dario. The Comune di Arezzo’s council index for 1866–69 also names a Dario Ducci three times, once as the “dott. Dario Ducci” who applied to build a terrace, without saying which.

Her sister’s will. Anna was not the only daughter of Filandro to settle in the Casentino. The Florence register of wills for 1846–1850 enters “Francesca Tamanti, vedova Giuliani, di Filandro”, with a will received by the Bibbiena notary Filippo Gherardi on 21 July 1847. Francesca had married Mario Giuliani in Montalcino in 1811 and was a widow by 1847. Her will, in Gherardi’s testament protocol, has not yet been read.

Two Darios, and a grandson. The registers now tell the two notaries apart. The Dario Ducci who appears in the 1841 census at Subbiano, next door to Guido Orazio, as a royal notary with his wife Teresa and their baby son Francesco, was not Anna’s son but his cousin: Dario son of Francesco, Guido’s brother. He had married the noblewoman Teresa Guadagni, daughter of Cavaliere Maggiore Agostino Guadagni and Angiola (Angiolina) Albergotti, in the church of the SS.ma Annunziata at Arezzo on 30 April 1839. Her father, very probably the Agostino Guadagni who commanded the town guard of Arezzo in 1815, had married Angiolina by a contract of 17 September 1812 and died about March 1817, leaving young children; their mother, as guardian, later married Cav. Luigi Boncompagni, and in 1829–33 the couple were before the courts over the guardianship accounts. Teresa’s age is uncertain: her marriage act gives thirty-two, the 1841 census twenty-seven. Anna’s own son was still unmarried fifteen years later. On 17 October 1854 a boy, Guido, was born at Arezzo to Ermenegilda Borghini, daughter of Marco, with no father named. On 11 August 1856, in the parish of San Cristofano a Cozzano near Castiglion Fiorentino, Dario, “son of the late Guido and of Anna Tamanti”, 44 and never before married, married Ermenegilda, 31; and a note later written beside the boy’s birth entry records that Dario recognised him by an act of 15 May 1872 and that the marriage had made him legitimate. Guido was therefore Anna’s grandson. The 1913 Libro d’Oro lists the Ducci of Arezzo, resident at Subbiano, as nobles of Arezzo, with this Guido, born in 1854 and son of the late Dario, at their head.

The next generation. The official registers of the new kingdom fill in the generation after Anna. Her son Dario was alive and still managing the family’s farms on 22 November 1867, when he signed a notice in the official gazette, ‘Dario del fu Guido Orazio Ducci di Subbiano’, forbidding his tenant farmers at Sarna to sell livestock or crops. The family’s nobility of Arezzo, granted by a grand-ducal diploma of 1815, was recognised by the State in 1906, and the Libro d’Oro of 1913 lists both of Anna’s grandsons named Guido. Guido son of Dario, born in 1854 and a knight of the Crown of Italy, had three children: Raoul and Varrone, both entered as born in 1898 (one of the years may be misprinted), and Bianca, born in 1905. His cousin and namesake, very probably Guido son of Giuseppe, born on 17 January of the same year, had three children of his own, and his younger brother was Filandro, born on 18 May 1857 and named after Anna’s father in Montalcino. One of the two Guidos had been mayor of Subbiano before 1904 and the other was mayor in 1907; each was made a knight of the Crown of Italy as such, and the gazette does not say which was which. In 1925 an army list names ‘Varrone di fu Guido’, which suggests that Guido son of Dario had died by then.

Anna’s marriage also began the family’s long connection with the province of Arezzo. On 24 January 1848 her half-brother Ermenegildo’s elder son, Filandro, married Letizia Ducci at Arezzo, the second Tamanti marriage into a Ducci family; whether Letizia’s Ducci of Arezzo were kin to Anna’s of Subbiano, the act does not say. Her brother Antonio’s grandson Giuseppe would later live at San Fabiano, near Arezzo.

Contributions and honours

Still to find

The contents of her sealed will of 5 September 1854 (Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Notarile moderno, Testamenti segreti non pubblicati, busta 29, inserto 621); her younger sons Alessandro and Giuseppe; the Arezzo recognition act of 15 May 1872 and the deaths of Dario and Guido; which of the two Guido Ducci was mayor of Subbiano before 1904 and which in 1907; the parish entry for her death (Sant’Ippolito, deaths 1860, no. 33); her sister Francesca’s will of 21 July 1847 (notary Filippo Gherardi, protocol no. 3928); the name of the nun at Pienza; what followed the Cassation of 27 April 1847, a fresh hearing or a settlement.

Sources

Marriage of Anna Tamanti and Guido Orazio Ducci, 5 February 1809, reg. 94, act 7 (Portale Antenati); Annali di giurisprudenza, vol. 8 (1846), parte II, cols. 731–736 (Corte Regia, 30 June 1846) and vol. 9 (1847), parte I, cols. 335–338 (Corte di Cassazione, 27 April 1847), the Tamanti–Ducci judgments; Tesoro del foro toscano, vols. XXII (1830) and XXVII (1832), the Ducci brothers’ cases; Subbiano, Nati 1809, act 63 (Dario Maria Gaspero Ducci, Portale Antenati); Bibbiena, Morti 1843, parish act 205 (Guido Orazio Ducci, Portale Antenati); 1841 census, Subbiano, S. Maria, p. 32, houses 120–121 (Portale Antenati); Arezzo, Matrimoni 1839, SS.ma Annunziata, no. 56 (Dario di Francesco Ducci and Teresa Guadagni, Portale Antenati); Castiglion Fiorentino, Matrimoni 1856, S. Cristofano a Cozzano, no. 58 (Dario Ducci and Ermenegilda Borghini, Portale Antenati); Arezzo, Nati 1854, Cathedral, progressive 195, with the marginal note of 15 May 1872 (Guido Ducci, Portale Antenati); Gazzetta Ufficiale, 12 June 1870, no. 160; Libro d’Oro della nobiltà italiana (1913), vol. 2, pp. 233–234, ‘Ducci, fam. di Arezzo, resid. Subbiano’ (Internet Archive); Gazzetta Ufficiale, 24 November 1867, no. 322 (notice of Dario del fu Guido Orazio Ducci, Internet Archive), 18 February 1905, no. 41, and 10 August 1907, no. 190 (the two Guido Ducci, mayors of Subbiano); Bollettino ufficiale delle nomine (Esercito), 1925 (‘Ducci Varrone di fu Guido’); Cantini, Tesoro del foro toscano, volumes for 1832 and 1834 (the Guadagni guardianship), and G. Marcotti, Cronache segrete della polizia toscana (1898) (Agostino Guadagni); Gazzetta di Firenze, December 1843 and 1844, notices of ‘Anna Tamanti Vedova del fù Guido Orazio Ducci’; Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Repertorio generale dei testamenti 1846–1850, T, fol. 615; notarial inventories N/488 and N/488 bis; Comune di Arezzo, index of council deliberations 1865–1899; Bibbiena, Morti 1860, parish of Sant’Ippolito, parish act 33 (Portale Antenati).

This page is one of ten family-leader profiles drawn from the Palazzo Tamanti storybook (version 2.17, October 2026), where every fact carries a full archival reference. It will be enlarged as new records are found. All ten family leaders.