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Dr. Antonio Tamanti (1810–1854)

Doctor of law, railway founder, liberal and Regio Economo

At a glance

His story

Antonio belonged to the generation that tried to bring the railway age to southern Tuscany. He took his doctorate in civil and criminal law at Pisa rather than at Siena, and he was already ‘Dottor Antonio’ in a Siena court judgment of December 1832. In 1835, at twenty-five, he entered the ranks of Montalcino’s gonfalonieri, the select group from whom the town’s chief magistrate was drawn. Carle writes that his liberal views set him against the grand-ducal government.

In August 1844 ‘Antonio Tamanti di Montalcino’ was one of eight promoters who appealed to the people of Siena to fund a railway survey, and the only one from Montalcino. The engineer Giuseppe Pianigiani was to survey a line from Siena to the Leopolda railway at Empoli, and the 4,000 lire needed were raised ‘in pochissimi giorni’, in a very few days. The Grand Duke allowed the studies on 3 September 1844, and on 23 December the promoters launched a company with a capital of ten million Tuscan lire. By a motu proprio of Leopold II dated 5 June 1845 and published on 9 June, a decree on the Grand Duke’s own initiative that opens by naming the eight promoters, the men received the right to build and run the Strada Ferrata Centrale Toscana for a hundred years. (An older printed account gives 5 April; the decree itself, preserved in a parliamentary dossier of 1861, settles the date.) Antonio signed the company’s statutes, and on 14 June 1845 he was elected a substitute member of its first board but stood down: the seat went to Augusto de’ Gori Pannilini ‘per la renunzia a quell’ufficio del sig. Antonio Tamanti’. In the same year he served as gonfaloniere of Montalcino. In the printed lists the other promoters carry their titles of count, marquis and cavaliere. Antonio is simply ‘Antonio Tamanti, di Montalcino’.

He was also a liberal of 1848. In 1843 he subscribed to the writings of the Livornese democrat Carlo Bini. On 13–14 February 1849 Montalcino’s democratic Circolo held a special session. ‘Dott. Antonio Tamanti’ moved that the elections be held on a single day, while the vice-president, Clemente Santi, husband of Antonio’s cousin Maria Tamanti, moved the union of Tuscany with the Roman Republic.

In 1845–47 he served as Regio Economo, the crown administrator of the revenues of Montalcino’s vacant bishopric. On 4 March 1845 he warned the sharecroppers of all the bishopric’s farms, Sant’Antimo among them, from Montalcino to San Giovanni d’Asso, Pienza, Buonconvento and Cinigiano, that none might trade livestock without his written consent (Giornale di avvisi ed atti giudiziali, no. 18, 4 March 1845). The notice was very probably part of a fight over a bishop’s debts. When Mons. Giacinto Pippi was moved from Montalcino to Chiusi and Pienza in 1824, he sold his successor, Mons. Bindi-Sergardi, the livestock and farm stock of the bishop’s farms for 1,850 scudi. Bindi-Sergardi died without paying, his estate buried in debts, and Antonio, holding the animals as Regio Economo of the vacant Mensa, tried to keep them against the estate’s creditors. The courts said no. Some twenty years on nobody could tell which beasts were which, the seller had given credit without reserving ownership, and the economo’s possession was, in the judges’ words, only ‘un possesso materiale e fortuito’, a material and chance possession. The Tribunal of Siena ruled against him on 6 February 1846, and the Corte Regia confirmed it on 27 March 1847. The family owned the alabaster quarry at Castelnuovo dell’Abate, and the stone kept the name for a century: in January 1940 the catalogue of the national exhibition of building materials in Rome listed a firm of ‘Passeri & Tamanti – Montalcino (Siena)’ among the makers of alabaster facings, though it does not say which Tamanti was the partner. With his brother he held a large estate at Il Casato. In 1839 he bought from the guardians of the young Stanislao Brunacci Corsetti the farm of the Madonna del Piano, with the lands of the Colombaiolo and the grain mill of San Pietro, and the farm called the Capanna, with the woods of the Macchie del Battellolio, for 3,759 scudi, by a deed of 6 December 1839 drawn by the Montalcino notary Mario Costanti; a court notice of 1847 cleared the farms of the Brunacci mortgages. That same year his brother Ermenegildo, gonfaloniere in 1832 and 1835, was placed under legal interdiction. A Siena judgment of 16 October 1846 released him, but only under a curator, the Montalcino doctor Dionisio Brigidi. He died at forty-four, leaving his young widow Fidalma and a son not yet two.

He had married late. In April 1847, very probably on the 20th (the day is written out in words in a difficult hand), Antonio married Fidalma Muzzarelli in the parish of Sant’Egidio. The civil register enters him, at about thirty-seven, as ‘possidente e Gonfaloniere’, a landowner and the town’s gonfaloniere, and her, aged thirty, as the daughter of Leopoldo Muzzarelli and Palmira Pieri. An earlier, uncertain reading had given her names as Giuditta Ruggerelli; the register entry and the Tuscan marriage index settle them.

Fidalma outlived him by more than half a century. She raised their son Francesco Antonio in the house on the Corso, saw all five of his children born there between 1875 and 1884, and lived to see her granddaughter Fidalma married in 1901. She died at Corso Vittorio Emanuele no. 17 on 15 December 1906, aged eighty-nine.

His land today

Laid over today’s aerial photographs, the georeferenced cadastral sheets of 1820 show where the brothers’ farms stand now. The Il Casato farmhouse is Casato Prime Donne, the ‘Romitorio Villa’ is Castello Romitorio, the Pelagrilli farmhouse is the Siro Pacenti estate, and the Carrione farm at Castel Giocondo carries Frescobaldi’s CastelGiocondo cellar. The Capanna farmhouse that Antonio bought in 1839 is the Capanna winery on the Montosoli hill. These matches locate the farms; they do not mean the present estates hold every field the Tamanti held.

The 1820 owner register adds a farm: the Canalicchio farmhouse (‘Casa e Resedo’, parcel 98) and the fields beside it belonged to Antonio and Ermenegildo. The farmhouse still stands; the land register shows it owned by Montalcino families by 1971 and by the Lambardi family, of the Lambardi winery, since 1980. Two of the brothers’ farms never left the family: Il Casato passed down Antonio’s line to his great-granddaughter Giuliana Tamanti and is now Casato Prime Donne. The others were sold, and the present families arrived between 1957 (Capanna, the Cencioni) and 1984 (Castello Romitorio, the Chia); no estate history yet names the Tamanti seller. Antonio’s own purchases stayed with his line for a century: the succession papers of his great-grandson Gianfrancesco show that in 1951–52 the heirs of Avv. Giuseppe Tamanti still held the Madonna del Piano and the Capanna, so the Madonna del Piano farm sold in 1953 and the Capanna sold in 1957 were very probably sold by them.

Contributions and honours

Still to find

His degree record at Pisa; his other years as gonfaloniere; the company’s own minute books; the cause of his death, which his death act does not give (the cholera years were 1854–55); any obituary in the Monitore Toscano.

Sources

Birth of Antonio Tamanti, 10 January 1810, act 3 (Portale Antenati); Lucia Carle, La patria locale (1996), pp. 297–98; Luisa Scrivani, Era il 1841 a Montalcino; Catasto Generale della Toscana, Il Casato (1820); Delle strade ferrate italiane (1845), pp. 216–18; Repertorio del dritto patrio toscano (1850), ‘Strada ferrata centrale’; Scritti editi e postumi di Carlo Bini (Livorno, 1843), subscribers; Collezione storica (Guerrazzi trial documents, 1852), vol. 2, pp. 826–27; Annali di giurisprudenza, vol. 9 (1847), parte II, cols. 329–332 (Casacci and others v. Tamanti as Regio Economo, Corte Regia, 27 March 1847); Montalcino deaths 1906, act 119 (Fidalma Muzzarelli); Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Stato civile toscano, Montalcino, Morti 1854, p. 141, act 139 (Antonio Tamanti, 26 September 1854), and Repertori generali alfabetici, Morti 1854, Maschi, p. 448 (Portale Antenati); Guida autarchica del costruttore edile (Rome, 1940), ‘Passeri & Tamanti’; Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Ufficio delle successioni di Firenze, pezzo 1456, fascicolo 62 (Gian Francesco Tamanti, 1952); Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Stato civile toscano, Montalcino, Matrimoni 1847, p. 32, no. 22, and Repertori generali alfabetici, Matrimoni 1847, Maschi, p. 182 (Portale Antenati, read 21 October 2026); Cantini, Tesoro del foro toscano (1834); Emanuele Repetti, Dizionario geografico fisico storico della Toscana; Memoria a favore dei signori Ermenegildo, e dott. Antonio fratelli Tamanti (1832); Gazzetta di Firenze, 1832, 1845 (company statutes and board, 14 June 1845) and 1847 (Brunacci sale of 6 December 1839); Giornale di avvisi ed atti giudiziali, 24 October 1846; Almanacco toscano, 1845, p. 466; Camera dei Deputati, railway convention dossier of 26 June 1861 (motu proprio of 5 June 1845); Regione Toscana, Geoscopio (CASTORE 1820 sheets and 2013 orthophoto), consulted October 2026.

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. See also Antonio Tamanti and a changing Tuscany. All ten family leaders.