Raffaella Luigia Faucitano

Recent studies have highlighted the emergence during the nineteenth century of multiple female educational paths, often obscured by the homologating bourgeois model of the virtuous and segregated mother in the domestic space. Such studies have revealed the presence of new and socially transversal instances: from intellectuals to commoners, from bourgeois to workers, from aristocrats to peasant women. A Risorgimento has emerged in which the female voice is anything but inert and silent. Profiles are thus outlined that are distant from the canonical models of nineteenth-century femininity and traced by researchers in often unexpected or even surprising forms (in inventories, catalogues, archival funds) since very often the female subject is hidden, encapsulated within the male one. Raffaella Luigia Faucitano, affectionately known as “Gigia”, was a central figure of the southern Risorgimento. Born in Naples into a modest and deeply religious family, initially destined for monastic life, she was instead the protagonist of a life marked by courage and political commitment, in close symbiosis with the patriotic story of her husband Luigi Settembrini, writer, patriot and opponent of the Bourbon regime. Gigia met Settembrini for the first time in 1834 by chance in the streets of Naples. After a period of courtship, the two married, building a very deep emotional and political bond. In 1837, her husband joined the organization “Sonnili della Giovine Italia” of Benedetto Musolino, a movement linked to the formation of a constitutional monarchy free from the Bourbon bond. Gigia's life was turned upside down in 1839 with the arrest of her husband due to Musolino's participation in the organization, imprisoned first in Catanzaro and then transferred to Naples to the prison of the former convent of the church of Santa Maria Apparente where he remained until 25 October 1843 despite having had no conviction. At the time, pregnant and with a young child, she had to take on the responsibility of the family, facing travel, economic precariousness and social isolation. Gigia's first important political act was the request for an audience with Ferdinand II of Bourbon to denounce the unjust detention of her husband. Over the years, this fighting spirit led her to take an active role in the Neapolitan female patriotic committees, in contact with leading figures such as Agostino Bertani. During Settembrini's long detention, Gigia wrote him numerous letters. However, he was poorly aware of the documentary and historical value of his letters: he did not keep a copy and many were destroyed by Settembrini himself for security reasons. Only two of these have survived, included in Settembrini's Ricordianze with the title of First and Second Stories of my wife, which most likely came down to us because her husband took care to send them back to Naples, with the request to keep them. Perhaps because she had understood its historical as well as literary value, since they document Luigia's commitment to supporting political convicts and detainees as well as the personal affectionate and familiar travail for the fate of her beloved spouse and childrenGigia, on the contrary, was scrupulous and careful in preserving her husband's letters and writings. He personally transcribed many of them and entrusted them to trusted figures at the British consulate. After the unification of Italy and Settembrini's return to freedom, Gigia's political mission ended and the couple lived a relatively middle-class life. She died in 1881, five years after her husband. Gigia embodies a female figure outside the box of her time. She was not only the guardian of a family legacy, but a true protagonist of the Risorgimento, capable of giving voice to a resistant and participatory femininity.