Cristina Trivulzio di Belgioioso, the woman who decided her destiny

Noble, patriot and revolutionary, social reformer and supporter of female emancipation: here is the identikit of Cristina Trivulzio di Belgioioso , great protagonist of the Risorgimento told by Pier Luigi Vercesi in the volume " The woman who decided her destiny " (Beat, 2023, pp. 304, also e-book).

Born in Milan in 1808, Cristina was noble and very rich. At sixteen she defied her family by refusing to marry the husband chosen for her and got married to Prince Emilio Barbiano of Belgioioso, handsome and cursed, patriot and playboy in Milan in the 1820s. A few years passed and she decided to abandon him because she didn't accept being cheated on, obviously causing a scandal. He could have spent the rest of his life at balls and receptions at court. However, like many other women of the first half of the nineteenth century, she wanted to contribute personally to "making Italy". At less than twenty years of age, Cristina was already considered a suspicious person by the Austrian police but she was not the type to be intimidated. He met intellectuals, artists and nobles devoted to the cause of the unification of Italy. He also collected funds for the cause until one day in 1830, while he was in Switzerland, he received orders from the Austrian authorities to immediately return to Milan. Cristina, fearing that they would imprison her and want to lock her up in a convent for her subversive activity, fled to Paris. Here many fell at her feet, from Alfred De Musset to Franz Liszt, from Heinrich Heine to Honoré de Balzac, but she never went beyond flirting. The only person to whom he was linked was the historian François Mignet, who with his articles in 1830 had caused Charles X of Bourbon to fall and Louis Philippe, the bourgeois king, to ascend to the throne.

However, the first times of his French exile were difficult because all his assets had been confiscated. She supported herself by giving painting lessons and put her writing skills to good use by collaborating with some newspapers. Above all, for the first time in his life he experienced first-hand the hard life of those who did not have a fortune or noble title behind them. It proved to be a fundamental experience when Cristina was able to return to Italy in 1840 thanks to a general amnesty. He regained part of his assets and transformed his agricultural property on the outskirts of Milan into a great social experiment: he made his palace available to the neediest families, he built a kindergarten and also a boys' and girls' school. Furthermore, he created courses to train girls professionally. However, her passion for Italy had not weakened, so much so that Cristina participated in the revolutions of 1848 and the following year she rushed to Rome to participate in the experience of the Roman Republic. On this occasion he organized a nursing service to treat the fighters. After the fall of the Roman Republic, the Milanese noblewoman had to flee again, this time to Asia Minor and the Middle East. Here she wrote a lot, especially talking about the condition of subjugation of women and becoming increasingly aware of the need to support the theme of female emancipation with her writings. The last years before his death in 1871 were thus marked by the foundation of the Italie newspaper, dedicated to telling Europe about Italian politics, by political writings, but above all by the essay "On the present condition of women and their future" which ends with these words: «May the happy and honored women of the times to come turn their thoughts from time to time to the pains and humiliations of the women who preceded them in life, and remember with some gratitude the names of those who opened and prepared the way for them not to never before enjoyed, perhaps barely dreamed of, happiness!

Beautiful and indomitable in Vercesi's book Cristina di Belgioioso confirms herself to be what perhaps only one nineteenth-century man, Carlo Cattaneo, understood: «Italy's first woman».