Maria Emanuela Pignatelli

From the Capo di Leuca to Naples in the early nineteenth century

THE JOURNEY OF THE PRINCESS OF TRICASE

It took eight days, in September 1817, for the Princess of Tricase, Maria Emanuela Pignatelli, widow of Prince Giuseppe Gerardo Gallone, to travel home at summer’s end from Tricase to Naples, where she resided. The analysis of the note published by D. Lala in his L’Archivio dei Principi Gallone, Tricase 2001, p. 277, reveals, beyond the duration of the journey, other interesting details about how the nobility travelled in the early nineteenth century. The papers of the feudal family of Tricase were donated to the State Archives of Genoa in 1965 by Lady Simonetta della Posta (1916–1986), of the Dukes of Civitella Alfedena, only daughter of Princess Maria Bianca Gallone, last direct descendant of the house. In 1979 the archival collection was transferred to the State Archives of Lecce, but other important papers are kept in Angers, France, where Simon Guerri dall’Oro di Tricase e di Moliterno, born in 1985, was born and resides. To his father Guido (1941–2019), by ministerial decree of 21 January 1999, the addition of the predicate to the surname was recognised, transmissible also to his descendants.

The protagonist of the Tricase–Naples journey, Princess Maria Emanuela Pignatelli, was born on 21 April 1775 to Giovanni Battista, Prince of Moliterno and Marsiconovo (in Basilicata), ambassador of Naples to the court of France, and to Luisa d’Avalos, of the Princes of Aquino d’Aragona. In 1796 she married the Prince of Tricase, Giuseppe Gerardo Gallone (1766–1806), and from their marriage were born five children: four daughters (Beatrice, Maria Luisa, Brigida and Michela) and the only son, Giovanni Battista (1800–1868), heir of the house.

M. Emanuela Pignatelli was widowed in 1806 and died, at the age of 42, on 23 March 1818, in the Neapolitan villa of S. Maria degli Angeli. She was buried in Naples, in the chapel of the Immaculate, under the patronage (juspatronato) of the Gallone family, in the basilica of S. Pietro ad Aram, where her husband and daughters were buried and where a marble epitaph to her once stood, later removed and left mutilated (cf. E. Morciano, “Vestigia napoletane dei principi di Tricase” in Ne quid nimis. Studi in memoria di Giovanni Cosi, ed. M. Spedicato and L. Montonato, Edizioni Grifo, Lecce 2017, pp. 201–225).

Belonging to one of the most powerful and prestigious families of the Kingdom of Naples, Maria Emanuela was the sister of Girolamo Pignatelli (1773–1848), a politically controversial figure. Captain of the people during the Neapolitan revolution of 1799, he was sent to Paris to seek recognition of the new government, but the French doubted his democratic convictions and confined him. Returning to Italy in 1806, he sided once more with the Bourbons and followed them to Palermo, where they had fled upon the arrival of the French in Naples. Financially ruined, he passed the title of Prince of Moliterno and Marsiconovo to his sister Emanuela, Princess of Tricase, who transmitted it to her descendants. Hers was a troubled life, though a comfortable one, for the Gallone family was still among the most considerable of the Kingdom. Her daughters died in infancy or early youth; she witnessed the revolution of 1799 in which several nobles were killed by the enraged mob; she saw the royal family forced to flee to Sicily twice; under the Napoleonids she endured, between 1806 and 1808, the laws abolishing feudalism. Yet some positive note was not lacking: the purchase in her name of the hamlet of Teverolaccio, in the municipality of Succivo, in the province of Caserta. The Napoleonic land register (Catasto Provvisorio) of 1815 indeed records the “Princess of Tricase” as the foremost taxpayer of the municipality of Succivo, with a rendita of 3,178 ducats — ahead of Prince Francesco Paolo of Bourbon and the Mensa Vescovile of Aversa — for arbusted lands, gardens and dwelling houses concentrated at Teverolaccio (cf. L. Russo, “Succivo nel Catasto Provvisorio”, Rivista di Terra di Lavoro, State Archives of Caserta, 2007). She was widowed at about 31 in 1806 — her husband was forty — and that same year her last-born, Brigida, died at about one year of age. Perhaps all these worries shortened her life, for she died at 42 in 1818. Of her, at Tricase, a memory survives in the mother church, in the two altars of the transept, formerly under the patronage of the Gallone family and dedicated to the Virgin of Constantinople and to St Charles Borromeo. On these altars one notes the impaled Gallone-Pignatelli arms, executed in inlay of precious polychrome marbles.

When Princess Emanuela Pignatelli-Gallone returns from Tricase to Naples she is 42 years old. It is in all likelihood the last journey of the kind she undertakes, for she dies about six months later in her villa of S. Maria degli Angeli, in the centre of the city. With the princess, in the carriage, are the seventeen-year-old young prince Giovanni Battista (1800–1868) and Domenico Risolo, “agent” of the House; the staff includes a maidservant, otherwise unnamed, the groom Vincenzo Longo, with other servants charged with the care of the House’s mounts and of the pack animals to be returned to Tommaso Grande of Lecce.

Other particulars can nonetheless be highlighted. The stages of the route with overnight stops: Fasano, Bari, Barletta, Cerignola, Bovino, in Apulia; Ariano Irpino, Mirabella, Avellino in Campania. The meals were prepared by the princess’s personal cook. Among the extra expenses, besides the ice cream for the young prince and the purchase of “amber tincture”, we find the “cassette di S. Nicola”. They were bought by Ignazio during the stop at Bari. They are in all likelihood the phials containing the “manna of St Nicholas”: the water that, according to tradition, issues from the saint’s bones. Mixed with natural water and traditionally collected in flasks for devotional purposes, it could also be used for curative ends. The presence of the personal cook, the purchase of amber tincture and of the manna, would suggest a hypochondriac princess, delicate, of anxious temperament and frail health. For such a condition, the medicine of the time prescribed a particular diet and the use of amber derivatives as an antidepressant and restorative drink, or “to be carried always about one to smell [as a perfume] and to anoint the temples”: N. Cirillo, I Consulti Medici, Vol. I, Naples 1738, p. 325. Note further the custom of giving tips, the so-called “good hand”, to obtain privileged treatment: the gratuity to the “gatekeeper” of Barletta who by night “opened the city gates” and to the gendarmes, “wherever there was need”. These are all features characteristic of travel in an age when moving about was dangerous because of the presence of brigands and uncomfortable owing to the disastrous condition of the roads, whose upkeep fell to the poor municipalities with their drained budgets. The total cost of the journey, including the return of the mules as far as Lecce, is 268.60 ducats.

Published in “Il gallo”, no. 19/2021, p. 22.

Ercole Morciano

The passage of the two Principalities to the House of Gallone

Her brother Girolamo III Pignatelli (1773–1848), 3rd Prince of Moliterno and 5th of Marsiconovo, a politically controversial figure and by then financially ruined, ceded the titles and the fiefs to his sister Maria Emanuela. Through her marriage to Giuseppe Gerardo Gallone, 6th Prince of Tricase, the Principalities of Moliterno and Marsiconovo thus flow into the House of Gallone — and it is from that moment that Tricase is also Principality of Moliterno.

The inheritance then passes to the only son Giovanni Battista Gallone (1800–1868), 7th Prince, and then to the grandson Giuseppe Gallone (1819–1898), 8th Prince and Senator of the Kingdom of Italy. The direct descent will close with Maria Bianca Gallone, so that the titles will pass at last to the Guerri dall’Oro (cf. Decree of 21 January 1999).

The patronage altar in the Basilica of San Pietro ad Aram

In the Basilica of San Pietro ad Aram, one of the oldest churches in Naples, the Gallone Family retains the right of patronage over a side altar, a tangible testimony of their presence in the Neapolitan nobility between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.

The altar, in polychrome inlaid marble (pietre dure), bears the Gallone arms executed with remarkable craftsmanship: a crowned cock, gules on a field azure, surmounted by a six-pointed star or and set upon a mount vert — the whole framed by a baroque cartouche in yellow and red breccia marble. A holy-water stoup likewise bearing the family arms accompanies the altar.

Altar patronage in a historic church was a privilege reserved for the most established noble families. For the Gallone, it coincides with the Neapolitan rooting of the house, particularly intense from the time of Stefano II Gallone (1st Prince of Tricase, 1601–1662), who maintained mercantile agencies there, and still more under Stefano III (3rd Prince, 1666–1733), who resided there from 1681 to 1703.

The presence of Maria Emanuela Pignatelli in Naples — already the seat of her family of origin, princes of Moliterno and Marsiconovo — is consistent with the perpetuation of this patronage through the marriage of 1796 to Giuseppe Gerardo Gallone: the two great Neapolitan branches of the nobility converge symbolically in this place of worship, where the princess herself will be buried in 1818 in the chapel of the Immaculate, under Gallone patronage.

Family tree