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Avv. Giuseppe Tamanti (1876–1943)

Lawyer, deputy mayor, Catholic leader and justice of the peace

At a glance

His story

Giuseppe was the family’s public man for thirty years. He entered the town council in the partial elections of July 1905 by an unexpected road. The Catholics ran a list of their own for the first time, but Giuseppe, a Catholic, stood with the monarchist liberals and came first of all, with 239 votes from 385 voters; even so, the liberal paper admitted that some of its own influential voters had worked against him. Within two years he had left them. With the socialist Marcello Tozzi, the priest Don Emidio Orsi and the liberals Carlo Padelletti and Giovanni Costanti, he founded the paper Libertas and the Unione Popolare. This coalition of socialists, Catholics and progressive liberals won Montalcino in July 1907 and ended the rule of the old conservative group.

In the council, 1907. The town’s own minute-book for 1907, photographed on 14 October 2026, shows him at work months before that victory, already an assessore in Mayor Angelini’s giunta. At the session of 15 January 1907 the council divided eight to seven over the board of the town hospital, Santa Maria della Croce: Giuseppe, an outgoing board member, polled seven votes and lost his seat, two centuries after Dr. Jacomo had governed the same hospital. In the same sitting, on a 138-lire bill from Siena’s hospital of Santa Maria della Scala for treating a boy from a family “reduced to poverty”, he argued that an appeal would be unfounded, unjust and unwise; only Ing. Costanti sided with him. The council also asked the Province for an anti-phylloxera consortium for the district, whose vineyards at Castelnuovo dell’Abate had already been struck. On 14 March 1907 he spoke at length against the giunta’s reform of the hospital statute, asking for a separate president, a working surgeon and an operating room, to be paid for by the sale of works of art, citizens’ gifts and a town grant. The reform passed ten to five; the five were Avv. Carlo Padelletti, Angelo Cavaglioni, Avv. Giuseppe Tamanti, Cino Padelletti and Ing. Giovanni Costanti, the core of the coalition that won the town that summer. When the new council first met on 20 and 27 August to choose a mayor, with Costanti presiding as first assessore, Angelini’s group stayed away and the quorum failed. On 23 September 1907 the new giunta, Costanti as mayor with Carlo Padelletti, Giuseppe Tamanti and Cino Padelletti as assessori, signed its programme in the first number of Libertas: medical care free for everyone, the peasants included; free medicines for the poor; new schools in four villages and night schools for grown men and women who could not read; and new taxes on servants and on dogs.

He became deputy mayor (vice sindaco) under Mayor Costanti. The opposition weekly Il Progresso mocked the new council: on 5 January 1908 it called the clerical side’s leaders “don Antonio Tamanti” and “don Arcangelo”, a sneer that Raffaelli glosses as meaning the lawyer, and which may explain why later writers sometimes call the 1907 leader “Antonio”. He was re-elected assessore in 1910. When the Unione Popolare broke up, after the socialist councillors resigned in November 1913, he stayed in office: at the elections of 28 June 1914 the “constitutional” list re-elected Giovanni Costanti as mayor, with Giuseppe Tamanti as deputy mayor and assessore and Carlo Padelletti in the majority, all three veterans of the popular coalition. His socialist allies left a portrait of him. In June 1909 a declaration by Montalcino’s Socialist Section, printed in Libertas (no. 11, 13 June 1909), said that among the coalition’s leaders “vi primeggia l’Avv. Tamanti, democratico sincero quant’è sinceramente religioso”: ‘a sincere democrat as much as he is sincerely religious, an unbending opponent of everything that seems unjust; a gentle and exquisitely kind soul; a mind not very disciplined, perhaps, but fervently open to all the boldest currents of modern thought’.

Agnese’s brother Carlo Calcagni later remembered how the marriage was made. One morning ‘Beppe’ walked into Carlo’s office in Rome and announced that he wanted to marry Agnese. As the two men went out they met her by chance in Via del Tritone; Beppe asked for her hand on the spot and insisted on an answer before he left Rome. He came back that evening, and the engagement was settled. Carlo’s portrait is affectionate but candid: honest and kind, but stubborn and long-winded.

He was a Catholic in politics. In 1908 he had the town bell kept silent on Good Friday, and in 1909 he asked for religious teaching in the schools. In 1920 he was one of three Montalcino delegates to the first congress of Don Sturzo’s Partito Popolare in Naples.

Religion in the schools, 1909. On 30 August 1909 the school at Sant’Angelo in Colle asked for religious lessons. Giuseppe told the council he would rather there were no need for them, since the parish priests already taught the young with energy and zeal. But against the anti-religious propaganda of the day he could not deny “il diritto dei padri di famiglia”, the right of fathers of families, most of them working men, to give their children a little religious instruction as the law allowed. Only he and Don Emidio Orsi voted yes; the socialist Tozzi wanted a strictly secular school. Giuseppe then reported that a teacher had been mocking religion in class, and the whole council agreed that the mayor should act firmly against any teacher who broke the freedom of conscience.

Host to the Friends of Monuments, 1909. On 6 June 1909 the Brigata Senese degli Amici dei Monumenti, Siena’s society of friends of monuments, took the first train to Torrenieri and drove up to Montalcino. At the Albergo del Giglio they were received by the mayor, Ing. Costanti, “il Socio corrispondente avv. Giuseppe Tamanti”, and two “egregi cittadini”, Avv. Carlo Padelletti and Signor Donzellini, who guided the visit and began it with “un lautissimo rinfresco”. The party saw the Rocca, the frescoes then being uncovered in Sant’Agostino, the church of the Senesi, the pictures gathered in the Palazzo Comunale, Luca della Robbia’s relief in San Francesco, the Conservatorio di Santa Caterina and the library. They were then led down a dark stair under the old hospital into a frescoed room, once its pilgrims’ hall and then a store for firewood and charcoal; at their request the mayor agreed to have it cleared and protected, and Corrado Ricci asked the Soprintendenza of Siena to act. In the rain they went on to Sant’Antimo. The society’s account ends with thanks to Tamanti, Padelletti and Donzellini, who had helped to prepare the day, given the morning reception and “annaffiata la colazione dei Soci con vini squisiti delle loro tenute”, washed down the members’ lunch with exquisite wines from their own estates (Rassegna d’arte senese V, 1909, pp. 52–60, read at the Biblioteca degli Intronati, Siena, on 19 October 2026).

He led the Misericordia brotherhood as its Governatore (1908–10), was president of the Congregazione di carità from 1921, and sat on the Deputazione of the Madonna del Soccorso through the 1920s: in July 1922 he was one of the four members of its new Deputazione, with the canons Gaetano Petrini and Camillo Capitani and Domenico Bartoli, who called the town to the solemn twenty-five-yearly festival of the image postponed by the war, more than two centuries after Dr. Jacomo’s altar and a century after Filandro’s term as its camarlingo. His Catholic commitment drew fire from the town’s anticlerical weekly, Il Libero Pensiero, which in February 1923 attacked ‘casa Tamanti e simili’ for promoting a convent of sisters in the church of Sant’Antonio. In 1928 the Court of Appeal of Florence appointed him justice of the peace.

Governor of the Misericordia, 1910. As Governatore he gave the old brotherhood a new constitution. The statute drawn up under his governorship, reported in Libertas in March 1910, had the Governor elected by the assembly, a council of fifteen renewed by a third each year, secret ballots, and a yearly general assembly to which the Governor had to give account. In the same weeks he buried the confraternity’s secretary, Mario Fiaschi, Montalcino’s first state-school teacher. Speaking at the cemetery for the town and the Misericordia, he praised Fiaschi for calling the brotherhood back to the nobility and purity of its old traditions, for having it help not only its own members but all the poor, and for trying to soften hatreds and bring peace back into families. It is a fair picture of what Giuseppe wanted the confraternity to be.

The “quadrumvirate”, 1912–1914. By 1912 the coalition was under fire for its taxes. A committee of its opponents called a public meeting, and their manifesto of 25 February named the four leaders “il quadrumvirato Tozzi-Costanti-Tamanti-Padelletti”. On Sunday 3 March more than two hundred voters met in the gymnasium of the Educatorio di Santa Caterina and voted against the continual raising of taxes. When Giuseppe, as assessore, rose to reply, the hall turned on him so fiercely that the chairman closed the meeting. Even Il Progresso, no friend of the council, wrote that he should not have been stopped, since he could prove his case with facts, and offered him its columns. Two years later, after the socialists had left the coalition and the “constitutional” list had won, the socialist paper Il Lavoratore answered its defeat with abuse: on 19 July 1914 it called the new majority a criminal gang and Giuseppe an “orthodox clerical”. It was a partisan paper’s abuse, not a finding of fact, but it shows what it cost to be the Catholic face of the town hall.

The town paper fills in his years as assessore. In March 1912 he, Giulio Nozzoli and Dr. Franceschi persuaded the council to seek an extension of the Montepulciano–Torrenieri motor-bus service to Montalcino, and more than once he stood in for an absent mayor, as he had at the town hall in November 1908 and October 1909, when the marriage registers name “Avvocato Giuseppe Tamanti, Assessore Municipale” as the official who married the couple. In April 1918 he took his dead brother Giovanni’s three children to Rome to receive their father’s silver medal, and in May the prefect named him the commune’s agricultural commissioner. In November 1917, when refugees from the Veneto reached Montalcino, the family gave 100 lire and his wife Agnese gave clothing and linen. In September 1919, at Castelnuovo dell’Abate, he received the marble memorial to the village’s fourteen war dead on behalf of the Comune. Post-war price controls touched him too. On 25 March 1920 he was one of nine men summoned before the local magistrate for selling and buying olive oil above the official price, and the Pretore acquitted all of them in full, finding that no offence had been committed. The family had an olive press of its own: in January 1922 Il Progresso names the “Oliviera Tamanti” at work that winter. On 28 April 1930 he was a witness at his niece Giuliana’s wedding to Avv. Giovanni Colombini in Santa Maria sopra Minerva, Rome. That February the paper had noted that the new cooperative olive mill stood in ‘un vasto stabile di proprietà Tamanti’ near Piazza San Pietro.

The year 1925 shows him at work in three directions. In March he joined the committee for an exhibition of ancient art in the Palazzo Comunale. It opened on 10 May, drew English and American visitors, and the works gathered for it later became the core of the Diocesan Museum, opened as a permanent collection in 1953. In August he was among the landowners called together by the prefectural commissioner to secure grain at an agreed price for townspeople who grew none; he spoke in the discussion, and the owners agreed to release a tenth of their harvest. In the autumn the Misericordia blessed its first motor ambulance, a Fiat, in the cathedral square. The appointed speaker, Pio Colombini, was ill, and Giuseppe spoke in his place, on compassion and the love of one’s neighbour. In March Signora Agnese Tamanti had been among the women who planned the charity fair to help pay for it.

That summer also left a family adventure. On the night of 26 June 1925 a mare was stolen from Antonio Tamanti’s stable. Its unusual shoes left a trail through Torrenieri towards Castiglion Fiorentino, and “Avv. Tamanti” and his nephew Leonardo, very probably Giuseppe and his brother Giovanni’s elder son, followed it by car. The mare was back in Montalcino on the evening of 29 June.

The conciliator’s chair, 1928. His appointment as justice of the peace came with the death of the man who held the office. In February 1928 Giuseppe Saloni, a retired Maresciallo of the Carabinieri, the town’s giudice conciliatore and the father of Soccorso Saloni, the Gold Medal of Losson, died the evening after his wife Alice Burri, and the town gave them a double funeral. Giuseppe Tamanti spoke at the graveside. “Dio, Patria e Famiglia”, God, Country and Family, he said, had been the ideals of Saloni’s whole life, and he recalled the Maresciallo’s years in the worst posts in Sicily, where he had won credit by proving the innocence of men unjustly accused. Three months later the President of the Court of Appeal of Florence named Tamanti conciliatore in Saloni’s place. In March 1932, when the Deputazione of the Madonna voted to keep the 8 May festival inside the church, without the celebrations in the streets, Il Progresso protested that the decision lacked the support of most of the Deputazione, naming Guido Angelini, Giuseppe Tamanti and Canon Camillo Capitani.

Agriculture ran through two generations. In 1898 his father Antonio sat on the committee that first brought agricultural lectures to Montalcino; in December 1932 the paper named “avv. Tamanti Giuseppe” among those who had revived the local section of the travelling school of agriculture, the Cattedra ambulante, first opened in 1906.

In the wine and oil cooperatives of the late 1920s and 1930s he worked beside Tancredi Biondi Santi and Carlo Padelletti. A 1933 University of Siena handbook names the Tamanti as one of the four leading farming companies of the Biondi Santi & C. cooperative cellar, whose members had 1,200 hectares of vines and sold Brunello and Moscadello in Italy and abroad. Tamanti grapes therefore went into commercial wine, under the cooperative’s name rather than the family’s. In January 1932 he received, with Tancredi Biondi-Santi and Carlo Padelletti, the ministerial commission that came to define Montalcino as a typical-wine zone, and took them to taste Brunello at the Cantina Sociale. In 1933 he was president of the Accademia degli Astrusi, which ran the town theatre. The academy is recorded from 1678. Its little theatre, designed by Leonardo De Vegni in 1763, has a horseshoe auditorium with two tiers of boxes. In Giuseppe’s day its painted curtain, by the Sienese painter Alessandro Maffei, showed the Sienese exiles arriving at Montalcino in 1555. In June 1933, as the academy’s president, Giuseppe wrote to Prof. Arturo Luciani, who had painted a new scene for the theatre, to name him its Soprintendente, so that the theatre should be kept in the best condition and made ever fitter for the high aims of public education for which, he wrote, our ancestors built it. The curtain was used until 1955 and now hangs in the council chamber of the old town hall; in May 2026 the Comune began its restoration (Comune di Montalcino).

He died at Arezzo on 30 October 1943, in the first weeks of the German occupation, and his estate was registered at Florence. The succession files of the Florence tax office, photographed for the storybook in October 2026, show what came after. He had made a handwritten will on 24 May 1940, which a Florence notary published in February 1944. It made Agnese his heir, saving the children’s legitimate shares, so that the land registers gave her seven twenty-firsts of every property, as heir of the disposable third with the legal life interest, and each of the seven children two twenty-firsts. His Florence home was the flat at Via Gustavo Modena 13, and it was his second son, Ing. Carlo Tamanti, who handled the family’s papers. His son Gianfrancesco (Giovanni Francesco), an engineer, unmarried and living in Florence, died at Pistoia in 1951 without a will, and the declaration of his share, filed in 1952, lists what the family still held: Palazzo Tamanti itself, entered as Corso Vittorio Emanuele 17, a house of three floors and seventeen rooms ‘abitato dai proprietari’, lived in by the owners; the three sharecropped farms of Canalicchio, Madonna del Piano and Capanna, 188.65 hectares in all, about half of it woodland; Villa Tamanti at Poggio Mendico, San Fabiano, with 68.68 hectares of farms around it; and a town house in Arezzo. The farms soon went: the Madonna del Piano farm sold in 1953 and the Capanna in 1957 were very probably sold by Giuseppe’s heirs. In 1958 a division before the Arezzo notary Bandini settled the Montalcino house on three of his children, Cecilia, Francesco Antonio and Paolo, and in 1973 they divided it into three homes. Paolo’s lot, the corner on Piazzetta Tamanti and Via Soccorso Saloni, appears to be the portion that later came to the Pasch family.

Via Gustavo Modena 13, Florence, the Florence home of Avv. Giuseppe Tamanti, now the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz
Via Gustavo Modena 13, Florence: the Florence home of Avv. Giuseppe Tamanti at his death in 1943, and the address from which his son Ing. Carlo Tamanti filed the family’s succession declarations in 1950–52. The building now houses the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz. Photograph 2026.

Contributions and honours

Still to find

The autumn 1907 session that elected Costanti mayor and Giuseppe deputy mayor; his burial; the 1958 Bandini division of his estate; his admission to the bar; his years at Roquemaure (France) and San Fabiano; the full memoir of his brother-in-law Carlo Calcagni; the Misericordia’s 1925 accounts and the exhibition committee’s minutes.

Sources

Montalcino births 1876; Montalcino marriages 1908 act 72 and 1909 act 49; Il Popolo Romano, 1913 no. 94; Rassegna d’arte senese, Anno V (1909), “Le Gite della Brigata Senese degli Amici dei Monumenti: … Montalcino – L’Abbazia di S. Antimo”, pp. 52–60; Lucia Carle, La patria locale (1996), pp. 237, 298; Ilio Raffaelli, Montalcino (1892–1914) (2006), chs. 1, 5, 7, 9, 11, and pp. 90 and 135 (citing Il Progresso, 5 January 1908 and 19 July 1914); Il Progresso (Montalcino), 1898 and 1907–1933, including the 1925 issues of 1 and 15 March, 7 June, 5 July, 2 and 15 August and 1 November (Archivio della Memoria); Misericordia di Montalcino, history; Comune di Montalcino, history of the museum complex; Libertas, no. 1, 27 October 1907 (giunta programme); 1909 no. 11, 13 June, and no. 17, 12 September (council of 30 August 1909); 1910 no. 4 (Misericordia statute; Fiaschi obituary) (Archivio della Memoria); Il Progresso 1912 nos. 5 and 6 (manifesto of 25 February; meeting of 3 March), 1920 no. 7 (‘Alla Pretura’), 1922 no. 2 (‘Oliviera Tamanti’), 1928 nos. 3, 4 and 11 (Saloni funeral and speech; appointment as conciliatore), 1932 no. 6 (‘Per l’8 Maggio’) and 1933 nos. 12 and 23 (Astrusi); Il Lavoratore, 19 July 1914 (via Raffaelli); Rome, Matrimoni 1913, act 725, and Nati 1914, act 796 (Archivio di Stato di Roma, via Portale Antenati); 1933 University of Siena handbook of Siena wines (via Do Bianchi, 2012); deed of division, notary Alberto Carli, Montalcino, 26 October 1973, rep. 41023 (Archivio Notarile Distrettuale di Siena), which records his death at Arezzo on 30 October 1943; Comune di Arezzo, deaths 1943, act 328; Archivio Storico Comunale di Montalcino, Atti del Consiglio comunale 1907, sessions of 15 January, 14 March, 20 and 27 August 1907 (owner photographs, 14 October 2026); Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Ufficio delle successioni di Firenze, pezzo 1372, fascicolo 9, and pezzo 1446, fascicolo 4 (succession of Giuseppe Tamanti, 1950–51, citing his handwritten will of 24 May 1940), and pezzo 1456, fascicolo 62 (succession of Ing. Gian Francesco Tamanti, 1952), reproductions supplied by the Archivio di Stato di Firenze, October 2026.

This page is one of ten family-leader profiles drawn from the Palazzo Tamanti storybook (version 1.42, October 2026), where every fact carries a full archival reference. It will be enlarged as new records are found. All ten family leaders.