Teresa Filangieri

In a hidden area in the Chiaia district of Naples, there is a street named after Teresa Filangieri, a woman with a complex and refined character, intellectual, writer, journalist. A figure out of the ordinary, whose life was, however, profoundly marked by the grief of the loss of his beloved daughter Lina. Born in Naples on 5 January 1826, Teresa belonged to a family of great prestige: she was the niece of the famous philosopher Gaetano Filangieri, daughter of General Carlo Filangieri and sister of the Prince of Satriano, Gaetano Filangieri. In 1847 she married Duke Vincenzo Ravaschieri Fieschi. Despite living in a strongly chauvinist era, Teresa established herself as a reference figure in noble salons and in Neapolitan cultural life. Teresa made herself loved and respected even outside aristocratic circles: she welcomed the poorest into her home, offering them work or financial support. Her figure is linked above all to the social and humanitarian commitment that made her a pioneer of healthcare. In the 1860s she was appointed by Leopoldo Rodinò as mistress of the boarding school for blind girls founded by Lady Strachan. Shortly afterwards the prefect Mordini entrusted her with an investigation into the royal students and during the cholera of 1873 the organized relief committee entrusted her with the organization of free popular kitchens. The greatest pain of his life was the death of his daughter Lina, who passed away at just 12 years old, on 1° September 1860, after a long illness. Eighteen years later, Teresa decided to transform that mourning into a project of hope, founding the first surgical hospital for children in Italy, today the Santobono Pausilipon Hospital The hospital was founded on the building of an old seventeenth-century building and responded to the needs of care of the main pathologies that affected Neapolitan childhood at the time, rickets and osteoarticular deformities, tuberculosis, syphilis, polio and malnutrition. To make the environment more welcoming, Teresa commissioned the sculptor Francesco Jerace, her friend and protégé, to create a series of high reliefs and stuccos intended to instill courage in young patients. The works include a great angel of the resurrection and a Madonna, symbols of hope and consolation. Parallel to her charitable activity, Teresa dedicated herself to writing: in 1879 she published her monumental work “History of Neapolitan Charity” in four volumes. In 1903, he published “How My Hospital Was Born”, a book chronicling the genesis of the children's hospital and the social and cultural networks that helped make it possible. Teresa Filangieri died in Posillipo on 10 September 1903. His name remains engraved in the memory of the city, witness to a life spent for others, for culture and for abandoned childhood.