Daughter of the Tamanti and ancestress of the Biondi Santi
At a glance
- Born 6 May 1799 (1841 census), daughter of Dr. Francesco Tamanti and Apollonia Bardi; sister of Gaetano.
- Married Clemente Santi on 12 February 1819; described in the act as a twenty-year-old landowner.
- Children include Paolina (born 13 December 1819, died 1 July 1839) and Caterina, who married the physician Jacopo Biondi.
- Grandmother of Ferruccio Biondi Santi (1848–1917), creator of the historic Brunello.
- Died at Il Greppo, the Santi villa, on 23 October 1864, of miliary fever.
Her story
Every member of the Biondi Santi family descends from Maria Tamanti. Her marriage to Clemente Santi in 1819 joined two of Montalcino’s landowning houses. It came just as Clemente was beginning the study of vines and wine that earned him a place in the history of Tuscan agriculture. Their daughter Caterina married Jacopo Biondi, and Caterina’s son Ferruccio, who took the name Biondi Santi, made the Riserva of 1888 that Montalcino later chose as the founding vintage of Brunello; the name itself was already on wines of his grandfather Clemente and of other Montalcino growers by 1870.
Family histories say that Maria brought farms to the Santi as her dowry, and the estate of Le Chiuse traces its own history to her. But the records show her brother Gaetano holding the Chiusa house in 1820 and still owning ‘his podere Chiusa’ in 1840, so the Chiusa at least cannot have been her dowry: Maria and Gaetano were full sister and brother, both children of Dr. Francesco and Apollonia Bardi, and the Chiusa very probably reached her line by inheritance after Gaetano died unmarried in 1861. Which farms, if any, she did bring in 1819 is not yet proved; her marriage settlement is the record that would settle it.
At home in 1841. In the census of 1841 the clerk who walked the parish of San Lorenzo in San Pietro came to house 146 and wrote down the apothecary Clemente Santi, forty-five, a landowner as well as a druggist. Next he wrote his wife, not as ‘Santi’ but by the name she was born with, ‘Tamanti Maria, daughter of the late Francesco’, forty-one, born 6 May 1799, who kept the house. Their daughter Caterina was nineteen; a young assistant from the shop and a servant lived with them. Four houses further on, at no. 150, the same clerk entered her cousin Ermenegildo and his wife.
Later tradition has Caterina bringing Il Greppo, Le Chiuse and land at Pienza into Ferruccio’s inheritance. In Clemente’s time the Santi also kept a town house at Pienza, which passed to Maria’s granddaughter Paolina Biondi in 1885.
Maria also knew loss. In 1839 Sebastiano Brigidi published in Florence a ‘funeral melody on the death of Paolina Santi of Montalcino’, almost certainly for her elder daughter, who died on 1 July 1839, aged nineteen; the date is confirmed by her death act. A copy is catalogued in the Biblioteca Riccardiana in Florence (shelfmark Misc. Vol. 572.13); it has not yet been read, and may say who commissioned it.
Her death, 1864. Maria died at Il Greppo, the villa that would become the cradle of Brunello. The Montalcino death register records that ‘Sig.ra Maria Tamanti’, possidente, daughter of the late Sig. Francesco and Sig.ra Apollonia Bardi, wife of Sig. Clemente Santi, of the parish of San Lorenzo in San Pietro, died at six in the evening on 23 October 1864, aged sixty-five years and five months. A note explains why she died away from town: ‘morta di miliare al Greppo, sua villa, in occasione di villeggiatura’, she died of miliary fever at Il Greppo, her villa, where she had gone for the country season. Her grandson Ferruccio was sixteen; Clemente, who outlived her by twenty-one years and died at the Greppo in 1885, had that same year sent four vintages of his red wine to the agricultural committee in Siena.
Contributions and honours
- 1819: her marriage creates the Tamanti–Santi–Biondi line that produced Brunello.
- Mother of Caterina Santi Biondi and grandmother of Ferruccio Biondi Santi.
- Remembered by Le Chiuse as the source of its land.
Still to find
Her baptism act (the age at death points to about May 1799); her dowry settlement; any will (none is entered for 1864 under S or T in the Florence general register of wills); the text of Paolina’s funeral poem. (The Maria Tamanti aged 41 in the 1841 census is now confirmed as Maria herself, in Clemente Santi’s household.)
Sources
Marriage of Clemente Santi and Maria Tamanti, 12 February 1819, act 8 (Portale Antenati); marriage of Jacopo Biondi and Caterina Santi, 22 January 1844; birth of Paolina Santi, 13 December 1819; death act of Paolina Santi, 1 July 1839, and death of Clemente Santi at Villa del Greppo, 22 April 1885 (Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Stato civile toscano, Montalcino); Boldrini, Bruchi & Cappelli, This Is My Land; Lucia Carle, La patria locale (1996); Le Chiuse estate history; Stefano Cinelli Colombini; Catasto Generale della Toscana (1820); Umberto Bindi, ‘Il palazzetto Santi di Via Elisa 8’, Canonica 12 (2023); Bibliografia italiana (Milan, 1839), no. 2420; Biblioteca Riccardiana, Catalogo delle miscellanee, card 625; 1841 census of Tuscany, Montalcino, S. Lorenzo in S. Pietro, folio 172, house 146 (Portale Antenati an_ua36203202); Montalcino deaths, October 1864, no. 218 (Portale Antenati).
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 Maria Tamanti and Clemente Santi, 1819. All ten family leaders.