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The Women of the Tamanti Story

Fourteen women who carried the land, the house and the name

The history of Brunello is usually told as a line of men, and the Tamanti archive is no different: its deeds, offices and gonfalonieri are men’s. Yet again and again it is a woman who carries the land, the house or the name from one family to the next, who goes to law for what is hers, who founds a school, runs a firm, keeps a household together through a war, or brings up orphaned grandchildren. This page gathers them in one place, in the order of their births, as the new closing part of the Palazzo Tamanti storybook does. Where a woman has a fuller page on this site, the link is given.

Petronilla Canali Santi (1763/64–1848)

Petronilla Grazia Canali, daughter of the late Niccolò Canali and Paolina Gini, carried one of Montalcino’s governing families into another: when the Canali died out in the male line, Lucia Carle observes, they passed into the Santi. She married Luigi Santi, the apothecary of the piazza, and their sons were Clemente and Tullio Santi. The land registers of the 1820s show her as one of the great landowners of the countryside in her own name, at the Greppo, San Polo, Pelagrilli, Montosoli and elsewhere. Her Greppo farm, with the chapel Dr. Tullio Canali had built there in 1722, is the Greppo where her grandson Ferruccio would make the first Brunello. She died a widow on 3 December 1848, the mother-in-law of Maria Tamanti and the grandmother of the Biondi Santi.

Anna Tamanti Ducci (1790–1860)

Filandro Tamanti’s daughter married Guido Orazio Ducci of Subbiano at Montalcino in February 1809, aged eighteen. Widowed in March 1843, she became guardian of her younger sons, and by 1845 she was at law with her eldest, Dario, over the interest on her money and thirty years of unpaid pin money. The appeal court of Florence found for her in 1846; the Court of Cassation took the award away in 1847. She died at Bibbiena on 5 July 1860: the daughter of the palazzo who went to law for her rights. See Anna Tamanti Ducci and The Ducci of Subbiano.

Francesca Tamanti Giuliani (c. 1792–1855)

Anna’s younger sister married Mario Giuliani, a landowner born in Siena, on 24 February 1811. Their twins, Giuseppe and Barbara, were born at San Casciano dei Bagni in 1822. Mario, thirty-six at the wedding and the grandson of an earlier Dr. Mario Giuliani, died at San Casciano on 27 November 1842, aged sixty-seven, a legal procurator. The widowed Francesca made her will before the Bibbiena notary Filippo Gherardi on 21 July 1847; she was still living in December 1850, when her son married at Arezzo, and the Tuscan death index for 1855 enters her at Livorno under both her names, Tamanti and Giuliani, “di Filandro”. Her son Giuseppe rose to the Court of Cassation in Rome, and his daughter Maria Giuliani married Francesco Antonio Tamanti in 1873, so that Francesca’s granddaughter came back to the palazzo her grandmother had left.

Maria Tamanti Santi (1799–1864)

The daughter of Dr. Francesco Tamanti and Apollonia Bardi married Clemente Santi on 12 February 1819 and became the link through which Tamanti blood and, by family tradition, Tamanti land entered the family that created Brunello. Her grandson was Ferruccio Biondi Santi. She died at the Greppo on 23 October 1864. See Maria Tamanti Santi.

Caterina Santi Biondi (1822–by 1889)

Caterina was born on 8 February 1822 and baptized the next day in the cathedral of Montalcino, and after her sister Paolina died in 1839 she was Clemente and Maria’s only surviving child. On 22 January 1844 she married Dr. Jacopo Biondi of Pomarance, aged thirty-one, a doctor already practicing in Florence, who later wrote a book on food and health and contributed to the medical journal Lo Sperimentale. She bore him Paolina (1845–1929) and Ferruccio (1848–1917), and Ferruccio named his own children Caterina and Tancredi Iacopo after his parents. The family histories say that the Greppo and Le Chiuse reached Ferruccio through her, though no will or land transfer has yet been found, and it was her surname that he joined to his father’s: “Biondi Santi” began as family usage. She died before 1889, very probably at Florence. See Caterina Santi and Jacopo Biondi, 1844.

Hilda Zumpt Padelletti (1846–after 1912)

Hermine Mathilde Zumpt was born in Berlin on 4 April 1846, the daughter of the philologist August Wilhelm Zumpt. She married the Roman-law scholar Guido Padelletti in Berlin Cathedral on 27 October 1870, and when he died in 1878 she stayed in Montalcino with her children, Carlo and Sofia. When Sofia died in 1889, aged twelve, the town’s infant school, for which Guido’s brother Dino had pleaded in 1887, took her name: as the Asilo “Sofia Padelletti” it moved into new rooms on 13 May 1894 and took in the children of the poor so that their mothers could go out to work. She translated the Moravian daily texts into Italian (1890). She was also an industrialist: in 1907 the town council called her the sole owner of the mill and electric works, founded with her own capital after the unrest of 1898 and run by her son Carlo, and the firm of H. Padelletti-Zumpt reopened the steam mill in 1908 and lit the town’s loggia with electricity in 1909. She hosted the Carnival ball of 1896, and was still living in September 1912. See The Padelletti of Montalcino.

Maria Giuliani Tamanti (1857–1936)

Born at Arezzo, the granddaughter of Francesca Tamanti, Maria married Francesco Antonio Tamanti at Lucca in 1873, aged sixteen, and lived in the house on the Corso for more than sixty years. She lost her son Giovanni in the war in 1916 and his widow in 1922, and brought up Giovanni’s three orphaned children as their guardian; her husband’s obituary called her “a true angel of goodness”. See Maria Giuliani Tamanti.

Ernesta Capaccioli Brigidi (1864–1947)

Ernesta Clorinda Rosa Capaccioli was born at Montalcino on 26 November 1864, the daughter of the carpenter Angelo Capaccioli and Assunta Magliacani. On 27 October 1890 she married Espartero Brigidi of the Osticcio, and twenty minutes later her sister married in the same office; her son Sebastiano was born in 1892. The Brigidi family remembers the Albergo del Giglio in today’s Via Soccorso Saloni as hers; the inn is older, listed by Baedeker from 1875 and kept by Alessandro and then Pietro Capaccioli, very probably her kin. It was at the Giglio that Avv. Giuseppe Tamanti, Carlo Padelletti and the mayor received Siena’s Friends of Monuments in June 1909. She was the great-grandmother of Tullio Scrivani, who first brought the authors to Montalcino. See The Brigidi of Montalcino.

Fidalma Tamanti Mattei Gentili (1878–1964)

Born in the palazzo on 11 December 1878, the daughter of Francesco Antonio Tamanti and Maria Giuliani, Fidalma married Paolo Mattei Gentili of Pennabilli, the Catholic politician who became an under-secretary of state. Widowed in 1935, “Nonna Mina” wore black for the rest of her life. In the last years of the war she held together a household of some thirty people in the Tamanti house, bought a cow so that the babies would have milk, and saw her family through a month in the vaulted cellar under the shelling of 1944. She died in Rome on 19 November 1964.

Francesca Barluzzi Tamanti (1885–1922)

Born in Rome on 26 October 1885, the sister of the architects Antonio and Giulio Barluzzi, Francesca married Ing. Giovanni Tamanti in Rome on 4 May 1907 and followed him to Antignano, Aulla and Sicily, where their children Leonardo, Gianni and Giuliana were born. Widowed by the Col di Lana in February 1916, she died in Jerusalem, where she had gone for her health and where her brothers were then building, on 6 June 1922, aged thirty-six. Her son Gianni won the Gold Medal in 1943. See Ing. Giovanni Tamanti.

Agnese Calcagni Tamanti (1882–after 1973)

Agnese Calcagni was born in Trastevere on 29 July 1882. Her brother Carlo’s memoir remembers the morning “Beppe” Tamanti walked into his office and announced that he wanted to marry her, having met her by chance in Via del Tritone, and would not leave Rome without an answer. They married on the Campidoglio on 3 April 1913, and she bore seven children. In the First World War she served on the town’s women’s relief committees. Widowed in 1943, she was still living in 1973. See Avv. Giuseppe Tamanti.

Anna Tomada Biondi Santi (1898–1983)

Born at Trieste, then an Austrian city, Anna Tomada left it in May 1915 as one of the Italian-minded exiles. By family memory she met Tancredi Biondi Santi as a nurse in a military infirmary; they had married by 1921. In Montalcino she worked on the committees of the Misericordia and the Red Cross. She died on 18 February 1983 and lies at Montalcino under a plaque that reads simply “Anna Biondi Santi Tomada 1898–1983”.

Giuliana Tamanti Colombini

Giovanni Tamanti’s daughter, orphaned of both parents by 1922, was brought up by her grandmother Maria Giuliani. On 28 April 1930 she married Avv. Giovanni Colombini, son of Prof. Pio Colombini and Elina Padelletti, in Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome. A co-heir of Il Casato, she joined the Tamanti land to the Colombini of Fattoria dei Barbi. Her daughter Francesca, born in 1931, became the first woman to direct a major wine company in Montalcino and was called “la Signora del Brunello”, and in 1998 her granddaughter founded Casato Prime Donne on Il Casato, the first Italian winery run entirely by women. See Giuliana Tamanti Colombini.

Fiorella Biondi Santi (died 1986)

Tancredi and Anna’s younger daughter inherited Le Chiuse on her father’s death in 1970. Following his advice to keep the inheritance intact, she leased it to her brother Franco, whose Greppo Riserva took its grapes, rather than divide or sell it. After her death in January 1986 the farm passed to her daughters, and from 1989 to Simonetta Valiani, who restored the house and Gaetano Tamanti’s chapel and bottled the first Le Chiuse Brunello in 1992. The farm that family tradition traces to Maria Tamanti’s dowry is again in a woman’s hands. See Le Chiuse: The Inheritance Story.

Sources

This page is drawn from the Palazzo Tamanti storybook (version 2.48, October 2026), Part IX, “The Women of the Tamanti Story”, where every fact carries a full archival reference. Connected families · Back to the Tamanti family history.