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Ing. Giovanni Tamanti (1881–1916)

Railway engineer and Silver Medal for Military Valour

At a glance

His story

Giovanni built railways. After graduating in Rome in 1904 he worked on the Livorno–Vada line. By 1907 he was chief engineer of the Aulla–Monzone section of the Lucca–Aulla railway, and his son Gianni was born at Aulla in 1909.

When the Aulla works ended in 1912 he set up on his own and completed the Bivio Margonia–Favara section in Sicily. His wife joined him there, and their daughter Giuliana was born in Sicily. In March 1914 the Superior Council of Public Works approved an agreement with the ‘Impresa Tamanti’ over the materials for the line’s keepers’ houses.

In the war he could have claimed exemption as director of state works. Instead he enlisted as a sergeant in the territorial militia, was commissioned in the Engineers, and was sent to the Cadore front to build barracks at Caprile. On 13 February 1916 he heard that an engineer’s advice was needed in the front lines on the Col di Lana. Though not ordered to, he went up, crossed ground swept by rifle fire, and was killed.

The Silver Medal citation, published in July 1918, says he died ‘col nome della Patria sulle labbra’, with the name of the Fatherland on his lips. His widow Francesca received a war pension in August 1916.

In October 1924 his body was brought home from Caprile. It lay for several days in the private chapel of Ing. Giovanni Costanti, mayor during the war and now an assessore, at his villa Il Colle. On Sunday 19 October the coffin was carried through Porta Cerbaia and halted before the loggia in the piazza, where the mayor, Guido Angelini, reminded the crowd that Giovanni could have claimed exemption and had chosen otherwise, ‘because he knew there are national interests higher than those of the family’. Il Progresso remembered him as ‘alto della persona e gentile di modi’, tall and gentle in manner. The coffin was blessed at the Madonna del Soccorso and buried in the Montalcino cemetery while flowers fell from the balconies. His sons Leonardo and Giovanni, boys of the Avanguardia, had kept watch day and night over the coffins (in the chapel of the Misericordia, according to Il Libero Pensiero, where Il Progresso has the chapel of Il Colle), and they walked first behind his coffin: ‘seguono i figli del valoroso, Leonardo e Giovanni’. Leonardo, the elder, later built roads like his father and in 1952 took British nationality in the Somaliland Protectorate (see Giovanni and Gianni Tamanti). In 1928 the family gave an altar to the votive chapel of the fallen in his memory, and that May one of the five classrooms of the Scuola complementare at the Conservatorio di Santa Caterina was named after him, for an officer remembered for his steady heart, adamantine temper and deep religion of duty.

Seven months before he died, Giovanni wrote down what he feared. A letter dated 7 July 1915, printed in Eno Mecheri’s anthology Testamenti della Grande Guerra (Milan, 1936), finds him calm about his own danger: ‘Morire per me sarebbe niente; sento di non aver affatto paura della morte; ma come lascerei i miei cari?’ Dying would be nothing to him, he wrote, but how could he leave his loved ones? He worried for Francesca, for his mother and for the children, and accepted the risk for his country while entrusting their future to divine mercy. The anthology names the second son Renato, where every other record calls him Giovanni (Gianni); Montalcino’s newspaper used the same name in its obituary of February 1916 (‘Leonardo e Renato’), so Renato was evidently what the family called him at home; the original letter has not been traced (transcription, Fronte Dolomitico).

The town’s farewell, 1916. Il Progresso of 22 February 1916 gave him most of a page. It records a volunteer year in the 3rd Engineers, work for the Roman contractor Saverio Parisi, and four happy years at Antignano and Aulla after his marriage in May 1907. By 1915 he had gathered the men and capital for a construction company able to take on major public works. In June 1915, when two companies of his battalion were drawn by lot for the Isonzo and he was not among them, he took the place of a sergeant who should have gone. He was buried at Caprile with religious and military honours, ‘con la faccia volta verso l’Italia’, his face turned towards Italy. Among the wreaths was one from the Caporali family, who farmed the Tamanti podere of Madonna del Piano.

The news from the front, 1916. The same issue printed the telegrams that brought the news. Colonel Fenoglio asked the mayor to tell Signora Tamanti, with every proper care, that her husband had fallen on the 13th, “an officer of great distinction, a friend sincerely loved”. A second wire, from a lieutenant at the front, was more exact: hit by a rifle bullet while walking the line of the outposts, he had died soon after, remembering his wife and children, whom he commended to the officer cadet Carpi of the Bersaglieri. Only weeks before, home on leave in January, he had met the editor, Adolfo Temperini, in the town, full of faith in victory. “Povero ingegnere! Amarlo era necessità,” Temperini wrote: poor engineer, to love him was a necessity.

The medal, 1918. In April 1918 the paper reprinted from the Corriere d’Italia a scene in Rome. Giovanni’s three children went up to General Marini to receive their father’s silver medal. As the general bent to pin it on, the youngest, little Giuliana, burst into tears and would not stop until he let her hold the medal herself. Their uncle, Avv. Giuseppe Tamanti, had brought them.

The war diary, 1922. In July 1922 the weekly Il Leccio printed the list of families asking the state to bring their dead home free of charge; Giovanni’s name stood first. When the town unveiled its stone to the war dead on 24 September 1922, the same paper gave short lives of the decorated fallen. Giovanni’s printed his citation in a slightly fuller version, which has him go up “scornful of danger as always”, and told something the town had not known. He could easily have been exempted and would not be; the struggle in his soul between two loves, equal and so terrible for their equality, “Famiglia e Patria”, family and country, became known only after his death, when his faithful war diary came home to the family with his dearest keepsakes. The diary has not been found.

Francesca in Jerusalem, 1922. Giovanni’s widow never recovered from his loss. Il Progresso reported that she died in Jerusalem on 6 June 1922, where she had gone in search of better health: “she had never been able to resign herself to fate, except to live for her children, wholly theirs.” Her family is now known. In 1972 Andrea Busiri Vici published in the Strenna dei Romanisti a photograph of a family outing of October 1892 with a numbered key; no. 46, a little girl in the front row, is “Francesca Barluzzi”, the future wife of Ing. Giovanni Tamanti; the key gives her birth as 5 October 1885. Her parents were Camillo Barluzzi, a clerk of the papal Secretariat of State, and Anna Maria (Marianna) Busiri Vici, and she was a sister of the architect Antonio Barluzzi, who was then building churches and hospitals in the Holy Land; her brother Ing. Giulio Barluzzi stood beside the Tamanti at Giovanni’s reburial in 1924 and at Giuliana’s wedding in 1930. A 2024 report on the Catholic cemetery on Mount Zion places her sarcophagus in its older north-eastern part. Her civil birth act has now been read in the Rome register, and it corrects the published date: she was born on 26 October 1885, at Piazza del Gesù 96, to Camillo Barluzzi, a property owner of forty-three, and Anna Busiri. She was therefore thirty-six when she died, not thirty-seven as both Montalcino papers said.

Contributions and honours

Still to find

The exact day of the July 1918 medal decree; the five 1916 files at the Museo Centrale del Risorgimento in Rome; the volume holding the 1907 marriage act itself (its supporting dossier has been read, but the volume is not online); his war diary, which may survive among his descendants’ papers.

Sources

Montalcino births 1881, act 91; Gazzetta Ufficiale, 13 December 1904, no. 289 (degree); L’Ingegneria Ferroviaria 1914; Gazzetta Ufficiale, 8 August 1916 (pension); Bollettino ufficiale (Ministero della Guerra) 1918, vol. III, dispensa 46 (Silver Medal); L’Arma del Genio nella Grande Guerra (Rome, 1940), p. 157; L’Illustrazione Italiana 1916 no. 16; La Tribuna 1916 no. 59; Il Progresso 1916 no. 4 (22 February, obituary and telegrams), 1924 no. 22, 1928 no. 11 (classrooms) and no. 19; Il Leccio 1922 no. 10 (‘Eroi che torneranno’) and no. 14, 24 September 1922 (‘Cenni biografici dei Caduti decorati’); Rome, Matrimoni 1907, Parte I, Serie B, act 144, and its allegati (banns no. 673/1907); Rome, Nati 1885, Serie B, act 1944 (Francesca Teresa Barluzzi); Fronte Dolomitico, ‘Tamanti Giovanni’ (Archivio Danilo Morell). For Francesca: Il Progresso, June 1922; A. Busiri Vici, Strenna dei Romanisti (1972), photograph of October 1892, key no. 46; Treccani, Dizionario Biografico, “Barluzzi, Antonio”; D. Cinelli Colombini (2017); press report on the Mount Zion Catholic cemetery (2024).

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. See also Giovanni and Gianni Tamanti. All ten family leaders.