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Maria Giuliani Tamanti (1857–1936)

Wife, mother of a fallen soldier and champion of war orphans

At a glance

Her story

Maria came to Montalcino at sixteen from a family of lawyers and magistrates, and lived in the town for more than sixty years. She was also coming back to her own family. Her father, Giuseppe Giuliani, born at San Casciano dei Bagni on 31 March 1822, was the son of Mario Giuliani and Francesca Tamanti, Filandro’s daughter, so the bridegroom was her father’s cousin. Giuseppe ended his career as a judge of the Court of Cassation and spent his last days near her: he died in Montalcino on 9 April 1884, in a house on the same street as the Tamanti house. She lost her first child, Maria Antonietta, born on 6 January 1875, who lived four days; she lost her son Giovanni in the war in 1916, and his widow Francesca in 1922. She then took on the care of Giovanni’s three children, Leonardo, Gianni and Giuliana, as their legal guardian. Giuliana was brought up in her house, and when she married Giovanni Colombini in Rome in 1930 the town paper remembered that she had grown up ‘presso il seno della nonna’, with her grandmother.

Maria’s father had a long career in the courts. In December 1850, very probably on the 15th, already a lawyer and an auditore, a junior judge, living at Poggibonsi, Giuseppe Giuliani, twenty-eight, married Ezzelina Allegretti, twenty-two, daughter of Giovanni Allegretti, at Arezzo; his father was dead, but his mother Francesca was still living. From about 1862 the official gazette and the almanacs follow him step by step. He was then the royal procurator at the Tribunal of Lucca, and from the end of 1865 one of the deputy procurators general at the Court of Appeal of Lucca, a post he held for ten years, the years of his daughter’s marriage; in 1875 he was made an officer of the Order of the Crown of Italy. In 1876 he moved to the Court of Appeal of Florence, becoming a judge (consigliere) there early in 1877, and in July 1878 he was attached to the Court of Cassation in Florence. In 1879 he went to Rome, and on 2 November 1879 he was named a judge in the sections of the Court of Cassation sitting there. In January 1881 he was made a commendatore of the Crown of Italy. He retired at his own request on 1 March 1883 and died in Montalcino thirteen months later, ‘già Consigliere di Corte di Cassazione’ (formerly a judge of the Court of Cassation), in the house at Corso Vittorio Emanuele no. 18.

A glimpse of the young bride survives in an unexpected place. The Roman illustrated weekly Roma – Antologia illustrata printed word puzzles each month and drew lots among the readers who solved them. Among the winners for its August puzzles of 1875 it listed ‘la signora Maria Tamanti nata Giuliani, Montalcino, Siena’. She was eighteen, two years married, and reading the magazines of Rome from her new home.

During the First World War she sent cheese, wine and fruit for the afternoon meals of the soldiers’ children.

Out of that loss came public work. In 1920 she became president of the new Montalcino committee of the Opera Nazionale, the national body for the civil and religious care of the orphans of men killed in the war. In 1922 she was still ‘La Presidente Maria Tamanti’ of the local war-orphans committee, thanking the town for a fair that raised 3,540 lire. Her notice in the paper of 19 November 1922 lets her speak for herself. She hoped the town would take ever more to heart the fate and education of these children, ‘to whom we all owe a debt of gratitude and love, because their fathers gave their lives for their country’. She was writing as the mother of one of those fathers.

In 1923 a ‘Signora Maria Tamanti’, almost certainly she, led the campaign to bring teaching sisters to Montalcino. On 25 January 1923 a meeting of ladies, priests and gentlemen in casa Tamanti agreed, at the suggestion of the Dominican Father Taurisano, to bring a small community of the Minime del Sacro Cuore to care for the children of the people, especially the war orphans. On 16 March she wrote for the committee to the board of the Educatorio di Santa Caterina, asking for rooms for sisters willing ‘a venire fra noi per dedicarsi all’educazione civile e religiosa, specialmente delle figlie del popolo’, to come among us and devote themselves to civil and religious education, above all of the daughters of the people; she signed ‘Per il Comitato, devma. Maria Tamanti’. The board refused. That spring the committee’s printed appeal called the planned house the finest crown of the monument to the town’s war dead, because it would take in first of all the children the fallen had left orphans. For a committee led, it seems, by a mother whose son had died on the Col di Lana, that was not a figure of speech. She went on to raise some 60,000 lire against the opposition of the local Fascists. That opposition was formal: on 23 December 1923 the Montalcino Fascio passed a resolution, printed by Il Libero Pensiero on the 31st, inviting those who had pledged money for the sisters to give it instead to the nursery school and the poorhouse. Whether any did is not recorded.

A house of the sisters did open. By September 1924 it was at work as the Istituto del Sacro Cuore, and although the Fascio claimed its closure at the end of 1925, gifts to a Casa Benefica Sacro Cuore continued in 1926, and Sacred Heart sisters walked at her husband’s funeral in 1932. That May, when Canon Gaetano Petrini marked fifty years as a priest, one of his gifts was a hundred lire to the Minime sisters’ institute for a meal for the orphan girls, the children the committee had set out to gather. In February 1929, after the Te Deum for the Lateran Pacts, the bishop received the town’s authorities in his palace, and the paper noted among the guests a group of ladies and girls in the company of ‘the most honoured Signora Maria Tamanti’, whose daughter was married to the under-secretary of Justice, Paolo Mattei Gentili. Five years after the Fascists’ campaign against the sisters she had championed, she was the lady the bishop’s guests gathered round.

Contributions and honours

Still to find

The founding records of the convent school; her burial; any letters of hers that survive in the family. Three newspaper entries name a “Tamanti Maria” without saying which: five lire for the Unione Operaia’s banner (1895), membership of the Montalcino committee for maternity and infancy (1926), and ten lire for the Befana children’s benefit (1931). They fit her, but need confirming.

Sources

Arezzo births 1857, no. 631; marriage at Lucca, 15 November 1873; Montalcino deaths 1936, act 12; Gazzetta Ufficiale, 23 April and 3 May 1927; Il Progresso (Montalcino) 1920 no. 1, 1922 no. 22, 1928–29 and 1933 no. 1; Il Leccio 1922 no. 18; Il Libero Pensiero, 31 December 1923, 11 April 1923 and 8 January 1926; Il Progresso 1922 no. 22 (19 November, ‘Ringraziamento’); Il Progresso 1923, bound volume, Biblioteca degli Intronati, Siena (‘Le Suore a Montalcino’, 25 January 1923; the committee’s letter of 16 March 1923 and the board’s reply, 1 April 1923; owner photographs, 19 October 2026); Il Progresso 1924 no. 21 (Istituto del Sacro Cuore), 24 February 1929 (the bishop’s reception) and May 1932 (Canon Petrini’s gifts); San Casciano dei Bagni births 1822 and Montalcino deaths 1884 (Giuseppe Giuliani); Montalcino births 1875 (Maria Antonietta); Arezzo, Matrimoni 1850, p. 446, no. 297 (Giuseppe Giuliani and Ezzelina Allegretti), and indexes, Matrimoni 1850 (Portale Antenati, read 21 October 2026); Gazzetta Ufficiale del Regno d’Italia, 1866–1884 (Giuseppe Giuliani’s appointments, honours, retirement and pension; the widow’s pension, 1 October 1884); Il Palmaverde, almanacco, 1863, 1866 and 1870 (Lucca courts); Ilio Raffaelli, Montalcino (1892–1914) (2006), ch. 5.

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.