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Francesco Antonio Tamanti (1852–1932)

Gentleman farmer, councillor and benefactor

At a glance

His story

His father died before he was two, and Francesco Antonio grew up with his mother in the house on the Corso. At twenty-one he was in the second year of the agriculture course at Pisa when, at her wish, he broke off his studies and came home to run the family estates. Montalcino’s newspaper remembered him as a passionate farmer who planted new vines and olives and improved his land, keeping ten or twelve labourers in steady work. His mother never left the house on the Corso. Fidalma Muzzarelli had been widowed in her late thirties; she saw all five of his children born in the house, stood godmother to her granddaughter Luisa in August 1884, and died there on the evening of 15 December 1906, aged eighty-nine, fifty-two years after her husband.

He served as town councillor and assessore in the administration of Mayor Angelini. He also sat on the hospital board, the Congregazione di carità (the town charity board) and the Opera della Madonna del Soccorso. In 1895–96 he was a councillor and the treasurer of the Unione liberale per l’ordine.

He gave quietly. In February 1898 Il Progresso listed “Tamanti Antonio”, ten lire, among the supporters of the town’s zuppe economiche, a cheap-soup kitchen in casa Grassi in Via Cialdini that was serving about two hundred portions a day at less than half their cost. That same winter he sat on the committee that brought agricultural teaching to Montalcino: at its invitation Dr. Domenico Bufalini of Torrita lectured to farmers in the town schools, and the committee dined with him afterwards at the Giglio. Thirty-four years later his son Giuseppe helped revive the same cause. He also gave three cartloads of firewood to the poorhouse in 1912 and a fourteenth-century fresco to Sant’Egidio. In March 1931, “in memory of his beloved son, the engineer Giovanni”, he gave two lire to every resident and attendant of the poorhouse.

His stable makes a brief appearance in the paper too. On the night of 26 June 1925 a mare kept there was stolen; her unusual shoes left a trail towards Castiglion Fiorentino, and “Avv. Tamanti” and his nephew Leonardo, very probably Giuseppe and Antonio’s grandson, followed it by car and brought her back on 29 June. At his death he asked that no flowers be bought and the money go to charity. In 1927, after his son Giovanni’s death, the Treasury briefly named him guardian of Giovanni’s three children before the record was corrected to his wife.

His town’s farewell remembered more than his offices. He had been ill for several years, Il Progresso wrote in January 1933, but always resigned, and he turned often to God, above all in the bitterest of his sorrows, the loss of his son Giovanni. According to the paper, he found comfort for so great a grief in thinking that Giovanni had fallen for a just cause, and in keeping near him his grandchildren Leonardo, Giovanni and Giuliana, “nei quali vedeva rivivere l’amato figliuolo”, in whom he saw his beloved son live again. The paper closed by greeting Maria, who had been to him “a most gentle companion, a true angel of goodness”.

The papal nobility

His obituary calls him ‘N. H.’, nobil homo. It says that on 6 January 1727 a papal grant made his ancestor Gaetano Tamanti, with all his descendants, a hereditary noble and knight of the Golden Spur (Speron d’Oro). The historian Lucia Carle repeats the claim twice: in a 1992 conference paper, printed in Disuguaglianze (1997), vol. 2, p. 474, and in La patria locale (1996). She dates it 1726, which is the same date: in the Sienese calendar the year began on 25 March, so January 1726 there is January 1727 by modern reckoning.

Carle names her source as a family typescript of the 1930s, ‘Notizie circa la famiglia Tamanti e parenti’, and warns that its claims are not entirely accurate. No grant has yet been found. The parish registers, the town’s eighteenth-century book of families, and the Vatican’s registers of papal briefs are now being checked.

One check has already come back negative. Vittorio Spreti’s Enciclopedia storico-nobiliare italiana lists the families whose titles were recognized by the Italian state, and it has no Tamanti entry: the letter T runs straight from Talon Sampieri to Tamburini (pp. 536–539). The family’s title was therefore never registered with the Kingdom of Italy, even though the obituary of 1933 still calls him nobil homo. A papal grant could still exist, since a papal title did not have to be recognized in Italy. Spreti’s two appendix volumes have still to be checked.

Contributions and honours

Still to find

The council minutes of the Angelini administration; the 1726/27 papal grant to Gaetano Tamanti; the date of the Madonna del Piano gift.

Sources

Il Progresso (Montalcino), 1933 no. 1, p. 3, obituary; Il Progresso 1896 no. 7, 1898 nos. 1 and 4, 1899 no. 14, 1912, 1925 no. 13, 1931 and 1932 no. 23; birth index 1852; marriage at Lucca, 15 November 1873, and death act, Montalcino 1932 no. 65; Montalcino deaths 1906, act 119 (Fidalma Muzzarelli); Sant’Egidio baptism registers (Luisa Tamanti, August 1884); Gazzetta Ufficiale, 1927; Catalogo generale dei Beni Culturali (Madonna del Piano fresco); Lucia Carle, La patria locale (1996), pp. 295–98 and note 75; L. Carle in Disuguaglianze: stratificazione e mobilità sociale nelle popolazioni italiane, vol. 2 (Bologna: CLUEB, 1997), p. 474.

This page is one of ten family-leader profiles drawn from the Palazzo Tamanti storybook (version 1.39, October 2026), where every fact carries a full archival reference. It will be enlarged as new records are found. All ten family leaders.