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The Fineschi, the Faenzi and the Saloni

Franci Scrivani’s family: bakers, a shoemaker and a carrier from Buonconvento

Franci Scrivani’s family runs back through bakers, a shoemaker and a carrier from Buonconvento, and it ends where the Tamanti story begins: on the street outside the Tamanti house, which carries the name of her kinsman Soccorso Saloni. Like the Tamanti two centuries earlier, the Saloni came up the hill from Buonconvento. This page is drawn from the new chapter on Franci’s families in the Palazzo Tamanti storybook, the last of its six chapters on the families connected to the Tamanti.

The bakers

Franci’s family remembers Sante, or Santi, Fineschi, who kept an oven and a bakery at the foot of Via Donnoli, the old Via di Diacceto that runs behind the Tamanti house, with six children who all worked beside him. Her grandfather Corrado Fineschi married Annunziata Pierangioli at Montalcino on 11 May 1930, and together they opened a bakery and pastry shop, first in Via Cialdini, the Ruga, and then in Via Boldrini. Corrado’s brothers and sisters kept a grocery and a pastry shop and bar beside the Scrivani osteria, and took the trade to Grosseto and Florence.

One question is still open. The civil registers of 1894–1910 show a family of bakers spelled Faneschi at Via Moglio 24, the household of Niccolò Faneschi and Noviglia Casini, so Corrado may have been Niccolò’s son rather than Santi’s. The act of the 1930 marriage, which names his parents, will decide it.

Pietro Fineschi and Prisca Capaccioli

The Santi of the family memory can be found in the registers. Santi Fineschi was baptized at Montalcino on 29 January 1870, the son of Pietro Fineschi and Prisca Capaccioli, and was given the name of an elder brother who had died in 1862. Pietro, baptized in 1831, the son of an earlier Santi Fineschi and Rosa Parigi, had married Prisca at Montalcino on 5 October 1855. Prisca, born in 1836, was the daughter of Giuseppe Capaccioli, a mason, and of Camilla Faenzi, a weaver, who had married in 1828. Ernesta Capaccioli, Espartero Brigidi’s wife and Tullio Scrivani’s great-grandmother, came from the same Montalcino surname, though how the two Capaccioli families connect is not yet known.

The shoemaker’s family

Camilla Faenzi, baptized on 23 December 1804, was the daughter of Giuseppe Faenzi, a shoemaker, baptized at Sant’Egidio in 1773, and Maria Saloni. The French civil registers that began in 1808 let the family speak: on 1 July 1808 Giuseppe presented his newborn daughter Maddalena Elisabetta as the child “of Donna Maria, daughter of Luigi Saloni, aged thirty-two, of Montalcino, his wife”. Giuseppe died on 8 December 1843, aged seventy, in the cathedral parish, a poor man, still married to Maria. She outlived him by twelve years and died on 6 January 1856, about eighty, a poor widow, the daughter of the late Luigi Saloni and Teresa Marcelli.

The carrier from Buonconvento

Maria’s father had come up the same road as the Tamanti. Luigi Saloni died at Montalcino on 12 June 1838, aged eighty-seven, a widower and a man of property in the parish of Sant’Egidio, the son of Giuseppe Saloni and Olimpia Angiolini. Seventy years earlier the archbishop of Siena’s survey of souls of 1767 had found the family at Buonconvento: Giuseppe Saloni, aged forty-two, a carrier with his own pack animals who carried provisions for several people; his wife Olimpia, thirty-nine, who spun for others and kept the house; and their son Luigi, fifteen. Baptisms of a Gioseppe Saloni in 1726 and a Pompilio Saloni in 1729 at Sant’Egidio suggest that Giuseppe and the Pompilio who lived nearby were brothers born in Montalcino who had moved down to the Arbia valley. Luigi married Teresa Marcelli, and their children, baptized at Buonconvento between 1771 and 1792, very probably included Maria and her brother Natale, a farmer, who married at Montalcino in 1815. By 1808 the family was back on the hill.

The name on the street

The Saloni whose name the street outside the Tamanti house now carries were the same family. Natale’s grandson Giuseppe, born at Montalcino on 19 May 1854, joined the Carabinieri, rose to Maresciallo, and in 1890 came home to marry Alice Burri of Montalcino. Their son Soccorso was born on 8 May 1895 at Lecce, where his father was serving, on the first day of Montalcino’s feast of the Madonna del Soccorso, whose name he was given. The family came back to Montalcino about 1900, and the boy became a typesetter.

He enlisted in the 7th Bersaglieri in January 1915, fought in the Val di Ledro and on the Carso, won a bronze medal for valor in 1917, and volunteered for the flame-thrower section of the Arditi, the assault troops. On 2 June 1918 the Duke of Aosta gave him a silver medal for a night attack at Capo Sile. Seventeen days later, at the start of the Austrian offensive on the Piave, he left the field hospital of his own accord to rejoin his company, and at Losson on 19 June 1918 he led the counter-attack, was wounded, went on, and was killed. The Gold Medal for Military Valor followed in March 1919. In 1924 Montalcino gave his name to the stretch of the Corso where the family’s house stood, and in 1928 Avv. Giuseppe Tamanti spoke at his parents’ grave; since 1965 the Army’s school for non-commissioned officers at Viterbo has borne his name.

Soccorso was the great-great-grandson of Luigi Saloni, the carrier’s son from Buonconvento, and his great-grandfather’s sister was Maria Saloni Faenzi, Franci’s ancestor. The street on which Palazzo Tamanti and Palazzo Saloni both stand carries the name of Franci’s kinsman.

Still to find

The act of Corrado Fineschi’s marriage of 1930, to settle whether his father was Santi Fineschi or Niccolò Faneschi; the link between the two Capaccioli families; and Luigi Saloni’s marriage to Teresa Marcelli. Tullio Scrivani’s Brigidi have their own page: The Brigidi of Montalcino.

Sources

This page is drawn from the Palazzo Tamanti storybook (version 2.39, October 2026), chapter “The Fineschi, the Faenzi and the Saloni: Franci Scrivani’s family”, where every fact carries a full archival reference. Back to the Tamanti family history.