Margaret Fuller and That Vineyard: a Note
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Margaret Fuller and that vineyard: A note The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Bannoni, Mario. 2016. Margaret Fuller and that vineyard: A note. Harvard Library Bulletin 25 (2), Summer 2014: 62-66. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:42669230 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA Margaret Fuller and Tat Vineyard: A Note Mario Bannoni nyone acquainted with the story of Margaret Fuller will remember that in one of her dispatches sent from Rome to the New York ATribune in January 1848 she wrote about “a splendid jewel, which a doting grandmother thought more likely to beneft her soul if given to the Bambino, than if turned into money to give her grandchildren education and prospects in life. Te same old lady lef her vineyard, not to these children, but to her confessor, a well-endowed Monsignor, who occasionally asks this youth, his godson, to dinner!” 1 Tat vineyard was called Villa Santucci, from the name of the monsignor. Afer the fight of the pope and the proclamation of the republic, the French government at the end of April 1849 sent an army to restore the temporal power of the papacy, and the French chief commander Oudinot established his headquarters in that same vineyard (see fgure 4.1).2 Afer the fall of the republic in August 1849, Fuller wrote again about the vineyard, this time in a private letter to Emelyn Story: “You have read that the dispatches of Oudinot are dated from Villa Santucci: that beautiful place was the property of Ossoli’s grandmother which, in the religious weakness of her last hours she gave to M[onsignor]. Santucci, then her confessor. As he is Godfather to my husband there was reason to hope he might restore the unjust acquisition at his death; but he has had to fy and hide, his property has been ravaged by the war, and he will feel little love for a godson who served on the Republican side.” 3 Being Roman and having lived in a neighborhood just a short walk from it, I was curious to fnd out about that vineyard. Digging in the Ossoli family papers at the Rome State Archives I found solid documentation on that “doting” grandmother and her legal afairs.4 1 Margaret Fuller, At Home and Abroad; or, Tings And Toughts In America and Europe, ed. Arthur B. Fuller (Boston: Crosby, Nichols, 1856), dispatch dated January 22, 1848. 2 State Archive of Rome, Mixed papers of the Roman Republic, b. 90. 3 Te Letters of Margaret Fuller, ed. Robert N. Hudspeth, 6 vols. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983–1994), 5:262–263. Te document is dated August 31, 1849. Te editorial apparatus describes the letter as “MsCfr (MB: Ms Am. 1450[148]),” that is, a manuscript copy of a fragment of a Fuller letter in a hand other than Fuller’s; location of the original unknown. Boston Public Library, Ms Am. 1450 (148). 4 State Archive of Rome, Ossoli family papers, bb. 1, 2, 40. 62 Margaret Fuller and Tat Vineyard Figure 4.1. Domenico Amici (1808–1894), engraver, afer Carl Friedrich Heinrich Werner (1808–1871), Villa Santucci; Quartier generale francese (Rome: Bujani, 1849). Image supplied by Biblioteca di Storia moderna e contemporanea, Rome; reproduced by terms of use, Europeana Collections <http://www.europeana.eu> (accessed June 15, 2015). Her name was Maria Laura Costaguti, a noble lady of a still-existing family, and she died in 1816, fve years before Giovanni Angelo Ossoli was born. Her will named as heirs all her—at the time—living grandsons, who inherited a substantial estate comprised of several assets. She also lef the vineyard to her confessor, but for his use during his lifetime, not as an outright bequest, for it was implicit that the vineyard had to go back to the Ossoli family afer the monsignor’s death. Te confessor, Monsignor Santucci- Fibietti, was from Casa Castalda, a little village near Perugia, in Umbria. He was named Giovanni Angelo’s godfather and was still on good terms with the Ossolis fve years afer the death of Maria Laura Costaguti. In addition to being a man of the cloth, he became an ambassador, then a judge, and fnally in 1843 was appointed president of the Supply of Food and Cereals (Annona e Grascia), a prestigious department operating within the papal state and closely linked with the pope himself. Tis last appointment was important enough to inspire, in that same year, a satirical sonnet by the famed Roman poet Giuseppe Gioachino Belli in which Santucci-Fibietti was considered not Mario Bannoni 63 only a viable candidate for “cardinal at the next election”—or who knows, pope?— but also, and above all, a skilled businessman able to get himself a handsome cash-in- hand income in “presents from shopkeepers.” 5 Tese social, political, and commercial circumstances would seem to cast the bequest of the Ossoli’s “doting grandmother” in a much diferent light. Giving the astute and on-the-rise monsignor lifetime-only use the vineyard might well be seen as a wise, foresightful investment for the future of her heirs. And, of course, but for war and death, for Giovanni Angelo Ossoli the close relationship with such a powerful, well-positioned monsignor might have been very useful in several contexts in the future, not least of which might have been “diplomatic” assistance with his problematic intended marriage to the “heretic” Margaret Fuller, for which a papal dispensation was needed. But my research to date, by no means exhaustive, has not uncovered evidence in the papers of the Annona e Grascia to suggest that the cleric ever dealt with any Ossoli family afairs. He followed the pope into voluntary exile in Gaeta and returned with the papal court in 1851, but died the next year. I have found that the villa was situated beyond a city gate called Porta Portese—the same gate that presently gives its name to a well-known fea market of Rome—some two miles out in the campagna along the Portuense street and close to the now existing Hospital San Camillo-Forlanini (see fgure 4.2).6 Afer Monsignor Santucci-Fibietti and Giovanni Angelo died, the Ossoli brothers went to the pope and asked to have their vineyard, in very poor condition because of the war, returned to them by right.7 Te speed and tone of the negotiations are unclear, but the next year the pope proposed they sell the vineyard to him, and the brothers accepted for the price of 500 scudi. Fuller herself gave a good sense of the amount of money involved when she wrote that she could live decently for one year in Rome with roughly the same resources, the scudi and U.S. dollar being almost equally valued at that time. Once in his possession, the villa was given by the pope to a seminary he had established in his name, Pius, to be used as an autumn vacation home.8 Afer that, and with the annexation of Rome by Italy in 1870, the villa changed hands again, becoming the property of Clemente 5 Giuseppe Gioachino Belli, I sonetti romaneschi, 6 vols. (Castello: S. Lapi, 1886–1887), 4:168. Translation by the author. 6 State Archive of Rome, Ancient Land Register online, Project Imago: “Catasto Gregoriano” and “Catasto Urbano” compiled under the Pope Gregorio XVI in 1835 and in use until 1870. <http://www.cfr. beniculturali.it/Gregoriano/gregoriano_intro.html> (accessed June 15, 2015). 7 Lifetime use is another name for the concept of usufruct. “Usufruct: the right of enjoying the fruits of property of another person, e.g. the wife of a deceased person living in an estate house until her death.” William J. Stewart, Collins Dictionary of Law, 3rd ed. (Glasgow: Collins, 2006), 446. 8 La Civiltà cattolica, 4a ser., vol.4o (1859): 244. <http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.FIG:000134887> (accessed June 15, 2015). 64 Margaret Fuller and Tat Vineyard Figure 4.2. Villa Santucci today. Digital photograph taken by the author, June 2015. Maraini Jr., senator of the Kingdom of Italy. His wife Maria Guerrieri Gonzaga (1869– 1950) was a niece to Anselmo Guerrieri Gonzaga, whom Margaret Fuller had known in 1847 during her visit to Milan and with whom she had a short romance and epistolary relationship.9 Afer Maria Guerrieri Gonzaga died in 1955 the Villa Santucci, now Maraini, was lef in her will to the Italian Red Cross. We know that Margaret Fuller believed in predestination and that she was very sensitive to strange coincidences she associated with the true or suspected “baleful star [that] rose on [her] birth.” 10 Had Margaret Fuller known about my fndings, I am sure she would have been more cautious in her judgments about Marquise Maria Laura Costaguti’s actions. Restraint and rethinking would certainly have been in order had Fuller been able to read one of Costaguti’s letters in which she convincingly defended 9 Harvard University, Houghton Library. Margaret Fuller family papers, General correspondence, vol. 11, p. 148. Guerrieri Gonzaga Anselmo, letter to Margaret Fuller, dated Milan, September 12, [1847]. General correspondence, vol. 11, p. 119: Guerrieri Gonzaga, Anselmo, letter to Margaret Fuller, dated Mantua, October 4, [1847]. 10 Letter to Ellen Fuller Channing, dated Rome, June 19, 1849.