Carlo De Franceschi
The historian of Istria, and this family's own. Everything the archive holds about one man, in the order it happened.
He is the most-cited De Franceschi in Istria and the reason a great deal of what is written about the province is written the way it is. He is also David's own line — out of the same village, off the same hill. This archive spends a whole page arguing with his book. It had never, until 9 September 2026, read his wedding.
Born at Gologorica, 16 October
In a village of the county of Pazin whose registers open in 1644, in a house whose year — 1711 — is cut into the stone by his great-great-grandfather Giambattista, son of the late Leonardo. The family farmed the bishop of Pedena's rent here until the diocese was suppressed.
His parents are named in his own marriage entry forty-three years later: Giuseppe De Franceschi and Lambertina Pesle di Mattia. (doc)
Signing as a witness at Pazin
The first document in this archive that shows his hand rather than his print: Carlo De Franceschi signs as a witness at Pazin in 1842, aged thirty-two. He is already in the world of courts and paper that his marriage entry will name ten years later.
Married at his own bedside, 1 March
31 · Addì 1 Marzo 1852 · Rovigno«**Il Signor Carlo De Franceschi q.m Giuseppe e della Sig.ra Lambertina Pesle di Mattia, da Gologorizza di Pisino, Assessore presso quest'I. R. Corte di Giustizia**, celibe, d'anni 40, contrasse matrimonio per verba de praesenti colla Sig.ra Maria Michelcich di Luca e di Maria, celibe, d'anni 26; **dispensati dalle trine pubblicazioni dall'Imp. Reg. Capitanato Distrettuale, urgente necessitate, colla nota del primo Marzo c. № 898 … al letto dello Sposo, per essere gravemente ammalato … alla presenza delli Signori Zaccaria Maver, Procuratore di Stato sostituto, e D.r Barzan, Medico**, testimonj.»
He was married lying down. The priest came to the house and performed it at the bridegroom's bed, because he was gravely ill. The three readings of the banns were dispensed by the Imperial-Royal District Captaincy that same day, on urgent necessity, by a note numbered 898 — the Austrian state turned around in hours because a man was thought to be dying.
The witnesses are not family. They are the deputy State Prosecutor and the physician: the law and the medicine, which is exactly who is in the room when a marriage has to be got through in time.
The entry also gives his office — Assessore at the Imperial-Royal Court of Justice at Rovinj — and both his parents' names.
He did not die. He lived another forty-one years. The register calls him d'anni 40; he was forty-two. (doc; the age is the register's, and it is wrong)
A son, and a small coffin
On the same Rovinj film: a burial of «Julius, son of Carlo», born 1853, dead 13 February 1854 at a few months old — conceived within a year of a wedding held at a sickbed, and buried before his first birthday. (doc for both records; that they are one family is inf, and rests on the name, the place and the dates)
«L'Istria», and what it does with the past
His history of the province, still the starting point for anyone working on Istria and still, in places, the problem. This archive reads it as a source and as an argument at the same time — it takes his charters and his household lists gratefully, and it says plainly where his politics are doing the work instead of his documents.
He is also, usefully, a man who names his own kind: it is Carlo who records Franceschi among the nobles of Pola «venuti da Capodistria» before the plague of 1631, which is one of the two candidate parents for the southern Istrian clusters this archive has spent today reading.
The sentence that has to be quoted in full
«l'Istria non fu mai occupata da alcun popolo slavo»
Istria was never occupied by any Slav people. Stjepan Antoljak cites Carlo twenty-one times in Hrvati u prošlosti — and corrects him, including for misreading a charter and for confusing the Rječina with the Raša.
This archive quotes the sentence rather than paraphrasing it, and prints the correction beside it. A family archive that only quoted its ancestor approvingly would not be worth reading.
Died, and remembered on the hill
He is commemorated at Gologorica, under a shield — photographed for this archive in the field. And he is the only man on his concordance page whose likeness is known: a portrait in old age, which is why that page carries a warning about faces as much as an illustration.
The caution is not theoretical. On the day this page was written, another portrait on this site had to be taken off the direct line because it was the wrong Josip.
Rovinj marriages, DGS 005497870 image 211, entry 31, read 9 September 2026 · Gologorica and Gračišće registers, DAPA Pazin · Carlo De Franceschi, «L'Istria. Note storiche», Poreč 1879 · Stjepan Antoljak, «Hrvati u prošlosti».