Carlo's Letter
Giovanni Kobler wrote to Carlo De Franceschi asking about the families of Fiume who carried his surname. Carlo's reply answers, in his own hand, most of what this archive has spent its time trying to establish.
The existing family research has always said its account of the lines came “from historical correspondence between Carlo de Franceschi and Kobler.” That correspondence was printed in 1928 and runs to a hundred pages. This is what is actually in it.
Carlo is writing from Parenzo. He is in his sixties, he has just published L'Istria: note storiche, and Kobler — the historian of Fiume — has sent him notes on the Defranceschi families of that city. Carlo replies as a man identifying his own relatives.
What he says
“Quel Giovanni Batt. De Franceschi venuto dalla Contea di Pisino, come Ella dice, intorno al 1740 è senz'altro proveniente dalla mia famiglia.”
That Giovanni Battista De Franceschi who came from the County of Pazin, as you say, around 1740, is without doubt from my family.
The single sentence this archive has been working toward. The man the received account treats as a separate line is claimed, by the family's own historian, as one of them.
“Suo padre, mio trisavolo, pure Giambattista del fu Leonardo, ebbe due figli Giampietro e Giambattista.”
His father, my great-great-grandfather, also a Giambattista, son of the late Leonardo, had two sons: Giampietro and Giambattista.
Three generations named. And «Giambattista del fu Leonardo» is exactly the phrase the Gologorica register uses in 1769 — «Joannes Baptista Defranceschi filius Leonardi» — the entry that gives the casa-31 branch its byname «detti Leonardi».
“Anche i miei derivano dalla Carnia, ma si stabilirono in Istria intorno al 1700.”
Mine too derive from Carnia, but they settled in Istria around 1700.
The Gologorica family says of itself that it came from Carnia. The 1679 headmen's list already put a De Franceschi of Mione in the County of Pazin; this is the other end of the same road, stated by a descendant.
“Il mio trisavolo fabbricò la nostra casa nel 1711 come da relativa iscrizione.”
My great-great-grandfather built our house in 1711, as the inscription on it says.
The house on the Gologorica square, dated 1711 — built by Giambattista del fu Leonardo. The inscription this archive hoped somebody would photograph was read by Carlo himself.
“Ma ve n'ha tuttodì a Mione e Muina della Carnia.”
But there are still some of them today at Mione and Muina in Carnia.
Mione, named by Carlo De Franceschi. Muina is the next village along the same valley — both frazioni of Ovaro.
“I nostri in origine erano da Bergamo, poi venuti in Carnia, dove avevano castelli, poi fortemente decaduti si dispersero.”
Ours were originally from Bergamo, then came into Carnia, where they had castles, then fell badly and scattered.
The family's own tradition of itself, as told to Carlo by a cousin, Corrado, from papers kept in that branch. Bergamo before Carnia — a claim this archive had no way to reach.
“Noi abbiamo stemma: nella parte superiore dello scudo una croce greca attraversata da due freccie, nell'inferiore un melagrano; sovra lo scudo elmo piumato.”
We have arms: in the upper part of the shield a Greek cross crossed by two arrows, in the lower a pomegranate; above the shield a plumed helm.
The arms of this family, blazoned by its own head. Every heraldry catalogue consulted for this archive offered something else entirely.
“Il nostro nome originario è veramente De Franceschi… Ma venuti negli stati austriaci sembrò alle autorità che volessero arrogarsi il titolo di nobiltà, non sapendo questi che il «de» in Italia aggiunto al nome esprime il casato, e non titolo nobiliare, onde essi nei decreti scrivevano Defranceschi.”
Our original name is truly De Franceschi… But once they had come into the Austrian states it seemed to the authorities that they meant to arrogate a title of nobility — those authorities not knowing that in Italy the «de» added to a name expresses the house, not a title — so in their decrees they wrote Defranceschi.
The fused spelling explained by a man it was done to. Some signed Defranceschi for fear of the fine for claiming nobility they could not prove; others kept De Franceschi; a few went to plain Franceschi.
The pedigree he gives
Four generations, named in a single sentence and the story that follows it.
| Name | When | What Carlo says |
|---|---|---|
| Leonardo | — | the eponym; his son is «Giambattista del fu Leonardo» |
| Giambattista del fu Leonardo | — | Carlo's great-great-grandfather. Built the Gologorica house in 1711. Two sons. |
| Giampietro | — | the elder; a fedecommesso was settled on him in the custom of the time |
| Giovanni Battista | fl. 1740 | the younger; meant for the priesthood, studied at Fiume, «felt a vocation for the sword instead» and volunteered in Maria Theresa's army. Made castellan of Bribir for his service; married a lady of the D'Agnese family. |
The younger son is the one who matters. Intended for the priesthood and sent to study at Fiume, he felt a vocation for the sword instead, volunteered into the army of Maria Theresa, and was made castellan of Bribir for his service, marrying a woman of the D'Agnese family. He is the Giovanni Battista Defranceschi whom Kobler had found arriving at Fiume around 1740 — the man every account of this family, including its own, has filed as a separate and unrelated line.
And the cousins he can place
| Vincenzo | Chancellor of the County of Pazin in the last century |
| Corrado | known to Carlo in 1848; employed at the Trieste customs house |
| others | moved to Zadar and went into the revenue service; the Zadar De Franceschi keep the names Giambattista and Vincenzo |
| Francesco | port captain of Fiume — descended, Carlo thought, not from Giambattista but from Valentino, who came to Fiume directly from Carnia, and who told Carlo his ancestors came from there |
| Ignazio | a De Franceschi drawing master and perhaps engineer at the Fiume gymnasium when Carlo studied there, 1820–1826 |
Note what he does with Valentino. He does not claim him. He says the port captain Francesco descends from Valentino rather than from Giambattista, that Valentino came to Fiume directly from Carnia, and that Francesco confirmed to him that his ancestors came from there. Then he adds, carefully: the Valentino branch “potrebbe essere stato congiunto del mio trisavolo nato in Carnia” — might have been connected to my great-great-grandfather, born in Carnia.
That is exactly the question this archive framed a hundred and fifty years later, and Carlo left it exactly where the evidence leaves it: open, and probable.
But read the next section before using this. Everything above is from the letter of 10 November 1876. Ten weeks later Carlo wrote again and withdrew the Valentino reading.
And then, two months later, Carlo corrected himself
The pedigree above comes from the letter of 10 November 1876. On 31 January 1877 Carlo wrote again, having had more from Kobler, and withdrew part of it — which this archive had been repeating as his conclusion.
“Adesso, la di Lei mercè, sono in chiaro riguardo al ramo della mia famiglia stabilitasi a Fiume. Io confondeva il primo Giambattista col secondo di lui figlio, di nome pure Giovanni, ritenendo che già quello era a Bribir. E mi rincresce assai di non aver saputo che il vivente Francesco sia mio terzo cugino.”
Now, thanks to you, I am clear about the branch of my family settled at Fiume. I was confusing the first Giambattista with his son, also called Giovanni, believing that the first was already at Bribir. And I am very sorry not to have known that the living Francesco is my third cousin.
So Francesco, harbour-master of Fiume, is not descended from a Valentino who came from Carnia in 1739. He is Carlo's own third cousin, four generations down from the same Giambattista del fu Leonardo. Carlo had spent five years living in Fiume knowing the man only slightly, and says so with real regret: «avrei fatto con esso Francesco relazione ben più stretta» — I would have made a far closer connection with him.
Carlo drew the two lines side by side in the letter. They are printed as two columns and this is how they read.
Giambattista — brother of Giampietro
Giuseppe Luigi
Valentino
Francesco — harbour-master of Fiume
Giampietro
Giuseppe
Giuseppe
Carlo — the historian
What his family actually did at Gologorica
The single most useful thing in the correspondence, and it is buried in a technical exchange about the Urbaria of the County of Pisino, dated 19 March 1877.
“Negli Urbari non compariscono Gollogorizza, Tupliaco e Scopliaco, perchè ne era Dominus il vescovo di Pedena. A questi Gollogorizza pagava non già la decima, ma un invariabile annuo corrispettivo in vino, frumento, avena, agnelli, galline ed uova, locchè chiamavasi «affitto fermo», forse per seguito antico accordo. Questo affitto fermo sino alla soppressione del vescovato veniva percepito dalla mia famiglia a titolo di affittanza, rinnovata da ogni vescovo, a cui pagava il convenuto importo. Prima che Gollogorizza fosse dei vescovi di Pedena, era un bene della nobile famiglia Schnal di Pisino.”
Gologorica, Tupljak and Škopljak do not appear in the Urbaria, because the bishop of Pedena was their Lord. To him Gologorica paid not a tithe but a fixed annual render in wine, wheat, oats, lambs, hens and eggs, which was called the «affitto fermo» — the firm rent — perhaps following some ancient agreement. Until the suppression of the bishopric this firm rent was collected by my family as lessees, the lease renewed by every bishop, to whom we paid the agreed sum. Before Gologorica belonged to the bishops of Pedena it was a holding of the noble Schnal family of Pisino.
This is what the De Franceschi were at Gologorica. Not landowners and not peasants — the men who farmed the bishop's rent, holding a lease renewed at every episcopal succession, collecting wine, grain, oats, lambs, hens and eggs from their neighbours and paying the bishop a fixed sum. It is a middleman's position, and a durable one: it ran until the diocese of Pedena was suppressed in 1788. It also explains why the bishops styled themselves «Dominus Gollaegoritiae» and why a village of a few dozen houses turns up in a bishop's title at all — a point Carlo also makes, from the other end, in his book.
He began his collection of Istrian bell inscriptions with his own village
From the letter of 10 November 1876, written at Gologorica — «mio luogo natale», my birthplace — where he had gone to spend a whole month with his family after a bereavement.
«Una porta in caratteri gotici rotondi l'epigrafe 1364: Magister Nicholaus me fecit.» One carries, in round gothic letters, the date 1364 and the words Master Nicholaus made me. «Ella vede che è ben vecchia» — you see it is very old indeed. A second bell by the same Nicolò and his brother Giovanni, a few years later, hangs at Zarečje.
Three inscriptions on one bell. In square gothic: «A fulgure et tempestate libera nos Domine» — from lightning and tempest deliver us, O Lord. In round gothic: «Facta sub Plebano Georgio Challigarich opus Ioannis Albinus 1573» — made under the parish priest Juraj Kaligarić, the work of Ivan Albinus. And beneath those, four Glagolitic letters, which Carlo sent to Volčić to interpret and never reports an answer for.
Carlo's plan was to collect the bell inscriptions of the whole of Istria. He started with the bells he had grown up under.
The siege of Bribir
Giambattista, the brother meant for the priesthood, was made castellan of Bribir after the Seven Years' War. Carlo tells what happened there as a story he had from his elders.
«È interessante il racconto della sua difesa con pochi servi contro una feroce banda di masnadieri forte di 40 e più uomini, che assaltarono e presero finalmente il castello, dopo che egli dall'ultimo suo servo rimasto vivo fu calato nel fondo d'una torre, dove i ladroni nol poterono trovare.» — The account of his defence, with a few servants, against a fierce band of brigands forty and more strong, who attacked and at last took the castle, after his last surviving servant had lowered him into the bottom of a tower where the robbers could not find him.
And then the other half of it, which is why the story survived: «Il vecchio mio professore Potosniak mi narrava d'aver dato gli estremi sacramenti al terribile condottiero di quella banda, morto assai vecchio, e che gli espose la lunghissima serie di tutti i suoi misfatti.» — My old teacher Potočnjak told me he had given the last rites to the terrible leader of that band, dead very old, who laid out for him the very long series of all his crimes. A branch of the family lived at Bribir until about 1836, then moved to Zadar.
A scholar's opinion worth recording
Twice in these letters Carlo states, flatly, that the Istrian Razvod — the famous boundary act dated 1325, one of the oldest documents in the Croatian language and a monument of Glagolitic writing — is not genuine: «Gli studii che ho fatto sul famoso Razvod istriano del 1325 mi inducono a ritenerlo un'impostura elaborata intorno al 1500 nel castello di Pisino.» An imposture put together around 1500 in Pisino castle. Kobler held it authentic, and Carlo notes the disagreement politely — «che io per motivi a Lei noti ammetto come genuino» he writes of Kobler's position, not his own.
It has no bearing on the family. It is here because it shows what kind of reader Carlo was, and because it is the strongest opinion he expresses anywhere in a hundred pages of otherwise mild correspondence.
And now the other half of it
Everything above is Carlo writing to Kobler, from the 1928 printing. Kobler's own letters — the questions Carlo was answering — were edited by Jakov Jelinčić and published in three parts in the Vjesnik of the Rijeka and Pazin archives in 1977, 1978 and after. They are open access, and this archive did not know they existed until September 2026.
Jelinčić opens with a fact worth sitting with. Kobler corresponded with De Franceschi for sixteen years — and «čini se da se Kobler i de Franceschi usprkos obostranoj želji nikada nisu osobno upoznali»: it seems that Kobler and de Franceschi, despite wanting to on both sides, never met in person.
The question that produced the famous answer
Kobler had gone through the civic records of Fiume and listed every Defranceschi household he could find there. Then he sent the list to Carlo and asked, in four words: «È forse Lei un Discendente?» — Are you perhaps a descendant? Carlo's reply is the letter this archive has built half its Carnia argument on.
And Kobler's second entry is a document, not a tradition
“«Valentino Defranceschi, venuto dalla Carnia, fu fatto Cittadino nel 1739, e colla moglie Elena ebbe 10 figli e 4 figlie, aveva casa in contrada dei Capuccini e vigna in Plase, fabbricò nel 1764 la Capella di S. Elena, fece per se tomba nel Duomo con epigrafe nel 1785 e morì nel 1785.»”
Valentino Defranceschi, come from Carnia, was made a Citizen in 1739; by his wife Elena he had ten sons and four daughters; he had a house in the Capuchins' quarter and a vineyard at Plase; in 1764 he built the Chapel of St Helen; in 1785 he made himself a tomb in the Duomo with an epigraph; and he died in 1785. His son Ignazio married Giuseppa Danezello, was a Civic Representative in 1783, and died in 1785 aged forty.
This matters more than anything Carlo says about his own ancestors. The Carnia page of this archive has been resting on a single document — the headmen's list of 1679. Here is a second, from a different researcher working a different record set: Kobler, reading the civic registers of Fiume, states as a matter of record that a Defranceschi came from Carnia and was made a citizen in 1739. It does not connect anybody to this family. It does mean that Carnians of this surname demonstrably moved into the Kvarner in the eighteenth century, which is the whole mechanism the family's own tradition describes.
And Valentino left two things that can still be looked for: the Chapel of St Helen at Rijeka, built 1764, and his tomb in the cathedral with an epigraph of 1785.
Jakov Jelinčić, «Korespondencija Giovanni Kobler — Carlo De Franceschi», Vjesnik historijskih arhiva u Rijeci i Pazinu XXI (1977) pp. 181–196, XXII (1978) pp. 37–57, and part III. Open access on Hrčak.
Valentino's chapel, and the words over its door
This archive has been carrying Kobler's one-sentence summary of Valentino Defranceschi for months — came from Carnia, made a citizen in 1739, built the chapel of St Helen in 1764, made himself a tomb, died in 1785 — and noting that the chapel and the tomb were things that could still be looked for. Kobler's «Memorie per la storia della città di Fiume» were reprinted whole in the «Atti» of Rovigno in 1978, and they are free on the Internet Archive. The full entry is four times as long, and it gives the inscription.
“25. La Cappella di S. Elena. — Esiste presso il confine occidentale, poco più in là di S. Giovanni. Sulla porta d'ingresso si legge incisa l'epigrafe: «Sacellum B. Mariæ Virgini erectum a D. Valentino Defranceschi a. 1764». Quel Defranceschi era venuto a Fiume dalla Carnia circa l'anno 1730, aveva una moglie di nome Elena, e possedeva una casa in Fiume e una vigna in Plasse. Morì nel 1785, e fu sepolto nel Duomo.”
25. The Chapel of St Helen. — It stands near the western boundary, a little beyond San Giovanni. Over the entrance door is cut the inscription: «A chapel raised to the Blessed Virgin Mary by Signor Valentino Defranceschi in the year 1764». That Defranceschi had come to Fiume from Carnia about the year 1730; he had a wife named Elena, and owned a house in Fiume and a vineyard at Plase. He died in 1785 and was buried in the Duomo.
«Sacellum B. Mariæ Virgini erectum a D. Valentino Defranceschi a. 1764.» Not a register entry, not a tradition, not a citation — a lintel. And the D. is Dominus, the same title the Gologorica registers give a Josephus Defranceschi in the same decades and the same title the Rovigno scholarship says a Carnian earned in Istria by buying land.
Kobler puts the two facts in consecutive clauses without joining them: the chapel is dedicated by its inscription to the Blessed Virgin, it is known as the chapel of St Helen, and «aveva una moglie di nome Elena». A man building a chapel and letting it be called by his wife's name-saint is not proof of anything. It is also not nothing.
«era venuto a Fiume dalla Carnia circa l'anno 1730» — he came to Fiume from Carnia about 1730, and was made a citizen in 1739. Nine years from arrival to citizenship. Carlo, writing privately a century and a half later, said his family came over from Carnia around 1700; the 1679 headmen's list has a Zuane De Franceschi of Mione already working in the County of Pazin. Valentino is a later crossing on the same road, and the only one with a year on it.
«Esiste presso il confine occidentale, poco più in là di S. Giovanni» — it exists, in the present tense, near the western boundary a little beyond San Giovanni: Sveti Ivan, on the western side of Rijeka, near Plase where his vineyard was. Kobler was writing in the 1890s. Whether it is standing now, nobody in this archive has looked.
The care of the chapel passed in 1801 to the Faribault family, who had bought the vineyard; and in 1839 Celestino Faribault gave a guarantee for its upkeep and for fourteen masses a year. So it was maintained, under an endowment, for at least seventy-five years after Valentino's death, by people who had bought his land.
And the tomb is confirmed from the same volume. In his account of the collegiate church, Kobler lists the burials that still had their slabs: after the chapter's own vault and the tomb of Bishop Giovanni Antonio de Benzoni, the family tombs of the Stemberg, Velens, Saurich, Troyer, Lumaga and the rest, and then the individual stones — «Giorgio Marchesetti, Valentino Defranceschi, Francesco Calucci…». He adds that almost all of them are eighteenth-century, because the great restoration of 1716–1726 took up the slabs of the extinct families. Valentino's was still in the floor when Kobler walked over it.
Two things to ask for, and they are the most photographable leads this archive has. First, whether the chapel of St Helena above Sveti Ivan still stands, and whether the 1764 lintel is still on it. Second, whether the floor slab is still in the church at Rijeka. Both are questions for the Rijeka conservation office or the parish, and neither needs an archive appointment.
Giovanni Kobler, «Memorie per la storia della liburnica città di Fiume», reprinted complete as vol. 3 of the Collana degli Atti of the Centro di ricerche storiche di Rovigno, 1978 — read from the Internet Archive copy, September 2026. The chapel is no. 25 in his list of the chapels of Fiume; the tombs are in his chapter on the collegiate church.
Kobler's own article on the family, which this archive had never read
The «Memorie» close with a long dictionary of the families of Fiume, house by house and marriage by marriage, out of the civic registers. It has an entry headed «De Franceschi e Defranceschi», and it opens by refusing to do what a family history usually does.
«In Fiume vi furono tre stirpi dei Franceschi; ma non è constatato, se abbiano avuto uno stipite comune. La stirpe più antica si trova registrata De Franceschi, le altre due Defranceschi.» — In Fiume there were three stocks of the Franceschi, but it is not established whether they had a common ancestor. The oldest is registered De Franceschi, the other two Defranceschi. Kobler was Carlo De Franceschi's correspondent and friend, and he still would not join them up.
Stirpe De Franceschi — the old Fiume house
| 1614 | «un Domenico di Francesco si univa in matrimonio con Lucia Trassich» — Domenico di Francesco marries Lucia Trassich. Their children are entered sometimes De Franceschi, sometimes de Francesco; the surname is still forming. |
| c. 1655 | Two of those sons are municipal councillors. Giovanni Paolo, who in 1654 married Margherita, widow of Michele Androcha, had a house by St Vitus and died in 1684. Marco Antonio, who in 1664 married Francesca di Piergiovanni and had sons Giovanni and Marzio. |
| 1655–1727 | Giovanni Antonio, son of Giovanni Paolo: doctor of laws, municipal councillor, and civic chancellor of Fiume from 1694. «Egli si firmava De Franceschi» — he signed himself De Franceschi. He died in 1727 «e fu l'ultimo maschio di questa famiglia in Fiume», the last male of this family in Fiume: no sons of his own, and his brother's sons moved away. |
| And then the sentence | «Ora una famiglia De Franceschi si trova in Istria con possessioni in Golagorica.» — Now a De Franceschi family is found in Istria with possessions at Gologorica. That is how Kobler ends the article on the oldest Fiume stock: by pointing at this family's village. |
I Defranceschi del Friuli — Valentino's house
| c. 1730 | «Valentino, che accennasi venuto dalla Carnia, trovasi in Fiume circa l'anno 1730.» By his wife Elena, between 1737 and 1759, ten sons and four daughters. Made a citizen in 1739. |
| The property | A house in the Capuchins' quarter, and «vigna con casa in Plasse sul confine di Castua» — a vineyard with a house at Plase on the Kastav boundary. There, Kobler says here, he had the chapel of St Helena built in 1761, its front carrying «Sacellum a D. Valentino Defranceschi erectum a. 1764». |
| The tomb, word for word | He died aged eighty-five and was buried in the collegiate church by the altar of the Madonna del Carmine, under a stone reading «Cineres D. Valentini De Franceschi, qui vivens sibi ac posteris suis destinavit hanc aeternae quietis sedem» — the ashes of Dominus Valentinus De Franceschi, who while he lived appointed this seat of eternal rest for himself and for his descendants. |
| His son | «Suo figlio Ignazio nel 1775 prese in moglie Giuseppa Donegalli, fu rappresentante civico nell'anno 1783, e morì nel 1785 di anni 40.» Ignazio married Giuseppa Donegalli in 1775, was a civic representative in 1783, and died in 1785 aged forty — the same year as his father. |
| And the rest | «Dove passassero gli altri, non si sa.» Where the others went is not known. Fourteen children, and Kobler can follow one. |
La presente famiglia Defranceschi — the house from Pisino
| c. 1740 | «Giovanni Battista, venuto da Pisino dell'Istria, abitava in Fiume circa l'anno 1740, e fu fatto cittadino nel 1746.» Giovanni Battista, come from Pisino in Istria, living at Fiume about 1740 and made a citizen in 1746. Sons: Giuseppe, Vincenzo and Giovanni. |
| Giuseppe, 1748–1778 | Married Francesca Tomasich in 1772, died in 1778 leaving a son Valentino; the widow remarried in 1783 to Giovanni Bassan. |
| Valentino di Giuseppe | Civic engineer and steward of Fiume, with a house on the Corso until 1827. Married Orsola de Benzoni in 1793; sons Francesco Giuseppe, Giovanni Nepomuceno, Pietro Giulio and Antonio, daughters Teresa, Lodovica, Giuseppa and Anna. His wife died in 1807 and he built a family tomb in the cemetery where she lay. |
| Francesco Giuseppe | Patrician councillor and royal harbourmaster of Fiume. Died 22 December 1885 — within Carlo's lifetime, and within Kobler's. |
| And the third son | «Giovanni, terzo figlio di Giovanni Battista, era castellano di Bribir nel Vinodol, ove morì nel 1807.» Giovanni, third son of Giovanni Battista, was castellan of Bribir in the Vinodol, where he died in 1807. He owned a small house in Fiume in the St Barbara quarter, between the Zanchi and Mauro houses. A Lodovico, clerk of the civic magistrate in 1814, may have been his son. |
And the third stock walks straight into Carlo's own story
Read stock III beside what Carlo told Kobler in his letters, which is on this page above. Carlo's great-great-grandfather Giambattista del fu Leonardo built the Gologorica house in 1711 and had two sons; the younger, Giovanni Battista, was meant for the priesthood, «studied at Fiume», felt a vocation for the sword instead, volunteered in Maria Theresa's army, and was made castellan of Bribir. A branch of the family lived at Bribir until about 1836 and then moved to Zadar.
Kobler, working from the civic registers of Fiume and not from Carlo, has a Giovanni Battista who came from Pisino about 1740 and was made a citizen in 1746 — and a castellan of Bribir in the family. The two accounts differ on which generation held the castle: Carlo makes it Giovanni Battista himself, Kobler makes it Giovanni, his third son, dead there in 1807. Gologorica is fifteen kilometres from Pisino, and «da Pisino» in a Fiume register means the district, not the town.
This is the closest the archive has come to joining the Gologorica family to a Fiume household by documents rather than by tradition. It is not joined. Kobler himself declined to join his three stocks to one another, and he had both the registers and Carlo's letters in front of him. But two independent tellings — a family's own memory and a city's civic rolls — put a Giovanni Battista of the Pisino country in Fiume in the 1740s and a castellan of Bribir in the same house, and that is a coincidence worth naming out loud.
Three places where the reprint disagrees with what this archive already published from Kobler, all of them small and all of them Kobler's own. He gives the chapel as built in 1761 in the family article and dated 1764 by its inscription, and he transcribes the inscription twice with different wording — «Sacellum B. Mariæ Virgini erectum a D. Valentino Defranceschi a. 1764» in the chapter on the chapels, and «Sacellum a D. Valentino Defranceschi erectum a. 1764» in the family article. And Ignazio's wife is «Giuseppa Donegalli» here, where this archive had «Giuseppa Danezello» from the earlier reading. The stone, if it survives, settles the first two; the marriage register at Rijeka settles the third.
Giovanni Kobler, «Memorie per la storia della liburnica città di Fiume», reprinted as vol. 3 of the Collana degli Atti of Rovigno, 1978, pp. 157–159 in the reprint's pagination — read from the Internet Archive copy, September 2026.
What Carlo's politics actually were
This archive has told Carlo De Franceschi mostly through Italian sources: his own letters, his own book, and the Italian papers of Istria burying him as a patriot. That is one side of a quarrel, and a family archive that only prints one side is not an archive. Daniela Simon's «Die bedrohte Ordnung der Vielfalt: Kulturelle Hybridität in Istrien, 1870–1914» (transcript Verlag, Bielefeld 2024) is a German monograph on exactly this, open access and free, and it puts him where the scholarship puts him.
Simon: «Carlo De Franceschi wies als Erster auf das Problem hin, dass die istrischen Slawen nach politischer Verwirklichung trachteten» — Carlo De Franceschi was the first to point out the problem that the Istrian Slavs were seeking political realisation. And: «Dieser erfahrene italienische Politiker aus Gologorica war ebenso wie Carlo Combi zeitlebens von der ‹Fusion, bzw. notwendigen und unabwendbaren Assimilation› der Slawen in Istrien überzeugt» — this experienced Italian politician from Gologorica was convinced all his life, as Carlo Combi was, of the fusion, or necessary and unavoidable assimilation, of the Slavs of Istria.
The Venetian appeal of 1848 was circulated in the coastal towns and at Pisino, «wo neben De Franceschi Egidio Mrach zu den prominenten und überzeugten Italienern gehörte». Elected in May to the Vienna Reichstag with Madonizza, Fachinetti and Vidulich, the four of them then addressed an interpellation to the Interior Ministry demanding «die Einführung des Italienischen als alleinige Amts- und Schulsprache in Istrien» — Italian as the sole language of administration and schooling in Istria, with the single exception of Podgrad. Interior Minister Franz Stadion rejected it promptly from Kremsier.
The Austrian captain for Istria, Friedrich Grimschitz, called out the peasant militia from Pazin, Gračišće, Pićan and Volosko to march on Labin against pro-Venetian groups there. Simon's judgement is that arming the Slav peasantry was an overreaction that «etablierte dadurch eine Frontlinie zwischen den slawischen Bauern und der italienischen städtischen Bevölkerung» — established a front line between the Slav peasants and the Italian townspeople. The family's own parish was on the muster roll.
An earthquake had wrecked the village of Klana; the parish priest Josip Princ died in the crumbling church during a service. The Diet's executive sent its secretary — Carlo — with a thousand florins of relief, accompanied by Anton Rubeša, the mayor of Kastav. «De Franceschi übergab die veranschlagte Subvention jedoch nicht Rubeša, sondern nahm sie wieder mit zurück zum Landesausschuss.» He did not hand the money over. He took it back, judging the damage neither great nor the repairs urgent. Rubeša afterwards needed gendarmes to protect him when he visited Klana. Carlo's own report of 16 March 1870 is the source.
Simon: «Carlo De Franceschi bezeichnete die Stadt Pazin, in der sich diese proitalienischen Bestrebungen sammelten, als Wächterin gegen die slawische Gefahr» — he called Pazin, where the pro-Italian effort gathered, the guardian against the Slav danger. He was honorary president of the Società Istriana di Archeologia e Storia Patria from its founding.
«Dabei taten sich insbesondere Bernardo Benussi und der Sohn von Carlo De Franceschi, Camillo, hervor. Diese Autoren begriffen die slawischen Bevölkerungsgruppen als Usurpatoren einer natürlichen Ordnung, die sich dadurch auszeichnete, dass ihre Territorien von einem superioren Volk zivilisiert wurden.» Benussi and Camillo De Franceschi understood the Slav population as usurpers of a natural order in which their territory had been civilised by a superior people. That is the son who published his father's memoirs in 1926.
Giovanni Radossi's edition of the Kandler–Luciani correspondence, in the «Atti» of Rovigno for 2014, quotes Carlo on his own position after 1854. Kandler urged him, since he was «in forzato riposo» at Moncalvo for political reasons, to throw himself into historical and archaeological work and to travel Istria for it; Carlo replied that he could do less than before, because the gendarmerie had its orders about him. And then the detail that makes it concrete. His friend Dr Lion Zaccaria, imperial-royal district physician at Capodistria — «eccellente mio amico e già condiscepolo» — was sharply reprimanded by his superiors because, meeting Carlo by chance at Pisino, «egli m'accompagnò un breve tratto di strada, e gli fu vietato di farsi vedere più oltre con me»: he walked a short way along the road with him, and was forbidden to be seen with him again. «L'Eco di Pola» said in its obituary that he was pensioned off «per sospetti politici». This is what that meant on a street in Pisino.
The same volume notes that Kandler addressed a public letter in «L'Istria» of 1846 to «Nobile signore Dr. Luigi de Franceschi - Segheto», recalling their conversations a few months earlier at Seghetto — where they had gone over the arms of the Valier, the Priuli and the Contarini and talked about the days when the Venetian nobles and the cloistered orders kept the countryside alive. So Kandler was at Seghetto in 1845 or 1846, reading coats of arms off the walls with a Dr Luigi de Franceschi, forty years before he was corresponding with Carlo at Gologorica about the same sort of thing. Two branches of the name, and the same man walking into both houses.
None of this is a revelation and none of it is a charge. Carlo held, all his life and in public, the position that his side of the Istrian argument held: that Istria was Italian by continuity from Rome and Venice, and that its Slav majority would and should be absorbed. He was also, on the same evidence, a scrupulous scholar who corresponded as readily with Kukuljević, Kurelac, Bleiweis and Spinčić as with Kandler, who let Kobler disagree with him about the Razvod, and who was pensioned off and put under police watch by the Austrian state for his politics. This archive descends from his village, not demonstrably from him. What it owes him is an accurate account, and an accurate account has to include the Klana money going back in the bag.
Simon also supplies the citation this archive most wants and still cannot read. Miroslav Bertoša's long study of Gologorica — «Etos i etnos zavičaja», Pula and Rijeka 1985, pp. 177–253 — concludes that in the second half of the nineteenth century the village went through «Wallungen der Akkulturation», surges of acculturation. Simon points to pages 225 and 228 in particular. That is the seventy-six pages on this family, by the leading Croatian historian of Istria, which remains the most important thing on this archive's unread list.
Daniela Simon, «Die bedrohte Ordnung der Vielfalt. Kulturelle Hybridität in Istrien, 1870–1914», Histoire Bd. 218, transcript Verlag, Bielefeld 2024 — open access under CC BY, https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839471548. Read in full text, September 2026. Her own sources for the passages used here are Petar Strčić's «Prilog», Benussi, Šnajdar's history of Klana, and Carlo's report of 16 March 1870.
Bakar — a first look, because the family asked
«Have you got anything on the families from Bakar? There were a lot of Defranceschis there.» Nothing. Not a line, anywhere on this site, about Bakar or Buccari — which is an omission, because it sits between Fiume and Crikvenica on the same twenty kilometres of coast this line came down to in 1890, and Kobler's own diocesan geography makes it the seat of an archdeaconry. Here is what a first sweep turns up.
The «Zagrabiense Calendarium» — the Zagreb diocesan almanac, whose 1824–1847 volumes are free on the Internet Archive — lists among the royal-chamber officers «Ant. Defranceschi, Rat. Duct. Navig. Colapians, Regio-Cameralis»: Antonio Defranceschi, director of accounts for the Colapian navigation, a Crown post. The Colapis is the Kupa, and the Kupa navigation was the inland leg of the Karolina and Lujzijana road system that fed Bakar and Fiume. A man of this surname was keeping its books.
The same series lists «D. Franciscus Defranceschi, Cancellista» in the chamber offices. Two men of the name in Habsburg civil employment on the Croatian Littoral in the second quarter of the nineteenth century.
The «Almanacco Fiumano» for 1859 and 1860: «Francesco Defranceschi, Ispettore della Scuola parrocchiale» — inspector of the parish school, listed with the elementary and lower Real school. Alongside him in the same almanac, Giacomo Randić, administrator of Portorè, decorated with the gold cross of civil merit.
The «Atti» of Rovigno cite a study this archive did not know existed: «Stemmi della nobiltà di Buccari» — the arms of the nobility of Bakar — in the «Bakarski zbornik» no. 2 (1996), pages 5 to 62. Fifty-seven pages of the coats of arms of Bakar's patrician houses. If there were De Franceschi among them, that article has their shield.
What this is not. None of the four is yet shown to be a Bakar household — they are Littoral and Fiume men, and Kobler's three Fiume stocks are on this page already. The family's own recollection is that there were a lot of Defranceschi at Bakar, and that is exactly the kind of thing a family knows and an archive has not looked for. What settles it is the Bakar parish registers, which are a separate series from anything this project has touched, and the 1996 armorial.
One more thing turned up in the same sweep, and it belongs to a different open question. The Rovigno monograph on the Wagna refugee camp in Styria — where Istrians were interned during the First World War — prints its intake lists, and two of the entries read «Dignano · Defranceschi Pietro 1860» and «Dignano · Defranceschi Anton 1856», admitted on 16 and 19 February 1917. Dignano is Vodnjan, where the 1945 cadastre counts twelve Defranceschi families — the largest concentration of the name in Istria and the one this archive has never accounted for. Two of them, born 1856 and 1860, were carried off to a camp in Styria in the winter of 1917 and their names written down.
«Zagrabiense Calendarium» 1824–1847 and 1847; «Almanacco Fiumano per gli anni 1859 e 1860»; «Atti del Centro di ricerche storiche di Rovigno» vol. XXXIV (2004), citing «Stemmi della nobiltà di Buccari», Bakarski zbornik 2 (1996), pp. 5–62; «I giorni a Wagna (1915–1918)», Collana degli Atti n. 42 (2016). All read from Internet Archive copies, September 2026.
How the Istrian press buried him, January 1893
«Il giovine Pensiero» of Pola for 25 January 1893 runs a piece on three men the Italian movement had lost in a few months, and it names them together: Carlo Dordi of Trento, Carlo Favetti of Gorizia, and Carlo De Franceschi of Istria. «E chi sono dessi?» — and who are they?
“Il terzo è l'illustre istriano Carlo de Franceschi, che venne a mancare il giorno otto di questo mese. Non meno dei primi, sì per ingegno che per patriotismo, passò tutta la sua vita piena di sacrifici ed abnegazione studiando e combattendo per difendere l'italianità dell'Istria…”
The third is the illustrious Istrian Carlo de Franceschi, who died on the eighth of this month. No less than the first two, in talent as in patriotism, he passed his whole life full of sacrifices and self-denial, studying and fighting to defend the Italianness of Istria.
And then the line this archive had been looking for without knowing it: «l'illustre storiografo riposa nell'umile cimitero» — the illustrious historian rests in the humble cemetery of his own village. Box 12 of the family archive in Zagreb holds the architect Giuseppe Hirsch's printed plan for the «Cappella della famiglia di Carlo de Franceschi nel cimitero di Moncalvo di Pisino». The chapel and the grave are the same story, and neither has been photographed.
The week of the funeral: three notices, January 1893
Carlo De Franceschi died at Gologorica on 8 January 1893. Within ten days the Istrian Italian press had printed a career obituary, a front-page life, and a letter from Pisino by a man who had sat with him. All three were found in the Austrian National Library's newspaper archive (ANNO) in September 2026 and read through the page images. None of them had been in this archive before.
How these were read. The scans were located by OCR — the engine here has no Italian model — and then every passage quoted below was enlarged on the page image and read letter by letter against the type. What is inside quotation marks is what the paper printed, including its own compositor's slips, which are marked. Sentences summarised rather than quoted are marked as summaries.
A full column, opening «Un'altra nobile figura di patriota, di scienziato e di storico, è sparita» — another noble figure of patriot, scientist and historian has vanished. It runs the career: Fiume for gymnasium, Gorizia for philosophy, Graz for law; a trainee at the Rovigno tribunal from 1832, rising to assessor; elected in 1848 to represent Pisino, Rovigno and Dignano at the Vienna parliament and then at Kremsier.
“ma nell'anno 1854, nel nuovo ordinamento amministrativo, venne cassato dal ruolo degli impiegati e messo in quiescenza per sospetti politici.”
but in the year 1854, under the new administrative order, he was struck off the roll of officials and pensioned off on suspicion of political sympathies.
This archive already knew Carlo lost his post in 1854. It did not have the reason in print. The paper goes on to say the pension left him so little that he had to leave for Fiume «onde provvedere al mantenimento della propria famiglia» — to provide for the keep of his own family — where he found a place in the office of the advocate Thierry and stayed until 1861, when the Istrian Provincial Committee made him its secretary. The figure the paper gives for the reduced pension is damaged on the scan and is not repeated here.
«L'Eco di Pola», Pola, 14 January 1893, page 2
The obituary closes by listing what he left unpublished — and it is the plainest statement this archive has of what was in the house at Gologorica on the day he died.
“A tanta attività d'ingegno egli lascia morendo un volume di memorie ed uno studio incompleto sulla nazionalità dell'Istria, ed altri lavori d'indole minore, e che speriamo — massime i primi due — di vederli presto per le stampe, essendo quei documenti troppo importanti per noi e per i tempi che corrono.”
To so much activity of mind he leaves, dying, a volume of memoirs and an unfinished study on the nationality of Istria, and other works of lesser kind — and we hope, above all for the first two, to see them soon in print, those documents being too important for us and for the times we are living through.
The memoirs did reach print, but not for thirty-three years: his son Camillo published them at Trieste in 1926. In January 1893 they were a manuscript in a house at Gologorica that nobody outside the family had read. Boxes 1 to 5 of the family archive now in Zagreb are described in the published inventory as Carlo's own working papers, which is where the unfinished study on the nationality of Istria should be looked for first.
«L'Eco di Pola», same column
“L'illustre storiografo e scienziato Carlo De Franceschi nacque a Moncalvo (Gollogorizza) il 17 Ottobre 1810 da famiglia abbastanza agiata.”
The illustrious historian and scientist Carlo De Franceschi was born at Moncalvo (Gologorica) on 17 October 1810, of a reasonably comfortable family.
Two things. First, the standard reference date for Carlo's birth is 16 October 1809; both papers printed within ten days of his death give 17 October, and this one gives 1810. That is not a correction — a newspaper is not a baptismal register, and the Gologorica register is the only thing that will settle it — but it is a discrepancy this archive should carry openly rather than quietly adopt the tidier date. Second, and worth more: «da famiglia abbastanza agiata». It is the only contemporary description this archive holds of the standing of the Gologorica household in the generation before Carlo — comfortable, not poor, not noble.
«Il giovine Pensiero», Pola, 18 January 1893, page 1
A letter from Pisino, and the only piece of the three written by somebody describing his own habits. He will not hear him again in his favourite seat at the Casino di Società; he will not see «brillare i suoi occhi di fuoco giovanile» — his eyes flash with youthful fire — when he spoke of the national struggles.
“Non lo si vedrà più nella giornata di sabato in piazza della fontana, attorniato dai poveri del Comune, spargere largamente l'elemosima [sic], intrattenendosi a lungo ed affabilmente seco loro. Il nostro amatissimo Sor Carlo riposa ora in pace nell'umile cimitero di Moncalvo.”
He will no longer be seen on a Saturday in the fountain square, surrounded by the poor of the commune, handing out alms freely and staying a long while talking with them affably. Our much-loved Sor Carlo now rests in peace in the humble cemetery of Moncalvo.
«Sor Carlo», in italics in the paper — the Istrian familiar, not «l'illustre storiografo». And a fixed weekly habit in the square at Pisino, remembered by name six days after the burial. The cemetery line is the same one this archive found in the paper's issue of 25 January, printed a week earlier and by somebody who had stood there. The misprint «elemosima» for «elemosina» is the compositor's and is kept as set.
«Il giovine Pensiero», same issue, «Corrispondenze istriane»: Pisino, 15 January 1893, signed «Don Ramiro»
The same issue reviews Carlo's study of the Chersano document — the copy of the Istrian Razvod found, corroded, among the old papers of Momiano castle, with two further copies that Tomaso Luciani of Albona dug out of the Venetian archives at Carlo's request. The paper reports his verdict: the document is «apocrifo e falsato in lingua slava fra il 1400-1500», forged into Slavic between 1400 and 1500, most likely at the instance of a count of Pisino.
In the Kobler letters Carlo says the same thing privately, and this archive already records it. This is the first time we can show he had said it in public, and that the Istrian press was still arguing about it in the week he was buried.
«Il giovine Pensiero», same issue, review column
One more search, and it did not stay a blank. This archive went looking for the other side of the argument — «Naša Sloga», the Croatian paper of Istria, which fought the De Franceschi of Gologorica in print for forty years. Two issues name them. The first, 13 April 1900, is a false lead: «Načelnikom u Umagu bijaše izabran dne 9. t. mj. g. Fr. de Franceschi, bivši načelnik one općine» — a Fr. de Franceschi elected mayor of Umag, ninety kilometres west, and nothing yet connects him. The second, 25 March 1909, is the thing itself: the paper takes page 351 of Carlo's own «L'Istria», with its 1102 charter and its three Slavic place-names, and turns his argument inside out. It is set out on the Gologorica line, because it is about the village rather than about him.
Reading order, for what it is worth: «L'Eco di Pola» tells you what he did, «Il giovine Pensiero» tells you where he came from, and Don Ramiro's letter from Pisino tells you what it was like to stand next to him on a Saturday morning.
What this closes
Carnia is not a hypothesis. The 1679 headmen's list put a Zuane De Franceschi of Mione at work in the Habsburg County of Pazin. Carlo, who had never seen that list, says his family came from Carnia and settled in Istria around 1700, and that there were still De Franceschi at Mione and Muina in his own day. Two independent sources, a hundred and ninety years apart, describing the same road.
The 1711 house has a builder. Giambattista del fu Leonardo — and the register confirms the name, because a godparent entry of 1769 records a “Joannes Baptista Defranceschi filius Leonardi”, which is where the casa-31 branch gets its byname detti Leonardi.
The spelling has an author. Not drift, not a clerk's ear — Austrian officials who mistook the Italian de for a claim of nobility, and family members who fused it rather than risk a fine they could not answer. This archive argued that from the pattern of the records; Carlo states it as something done to him.
And there is a coat of arms after all. A Greek cross crossed by two arrows above, a pomegranate below, a plumed helm over the shield. Not one of the achievements sold by surname; his own, described in a private letter, and matching nothing in any catalogue this archive consulted.
«Lettere di Carlo De Franceschi a Giovanni Kobler», printed 1928, pp. 107–207 — a hundred pages of letters written between 6 February 1873 and 19 June 1889, most from Parenzo. The family holds a scan. It was read through in September 2026 and the passages below are all of it that touches the family, its parish and its name.
The Benzoni, and a caution about where answers come from
The register entry of 25 March 1720 is signed by the Provost and Vicar of the Cathedral of Pedena, and the name is not securely read. A search engine's generated summary offered an answer: that the vicar general of Pedena in 1720 was Giovanni Antonio Benzoni, noble nephew of Bishop Marotti, who went on to become Bishop of Pedena in 1730. It is half right, and the half that is wrong is the half that sounds most like a fact.
Kobler settles it, in his own dictionary of the families of Fiume: «Giovanni Antonio de Benzoni, nato in Fiume nel 1687, figlio dei coniugi Felice de Benzoni ed Orsola Marotti, nel 1717 canonico di Fiume, poi vicario generale del vescovo di Pedena, fu fatto vescovo di Segna e Modrussa nel 1730, e li 3 decembre 1745 morì in Fiume, ove fu sepolto nel Duomo. Essendo vescovo recavasi talvolta scalzo in parecchi luoghi a predicare.»
Giovanni Antonio de Benzoni, born at Fiume in 1687, son of Felice de Benzoni and Orsola Marotti; canon of Fiume in 1717, then vicar general of the bishop of Pedena; made bishop of Senj and Modruš in 1730; died at Fiume on 3 December 1745 and was buried in the Duomo. As bishop he would sometimes go barefoot to various places to preach.
He was vicar general of the bishop of Pedena, and he was Marotti's kinsman — his mother was an Orsola Marotti, which fits the nephew exactly. And Ivan Grah's edition of the Pićan bishops' reports confirms Juraj Marotti as bishop from 1716 to 1740: a Rijeka man of noble family, Jesuit-educated, doctor of philosophy and theology, and tutor to the son of the Emperor Charles VI, appointed auxiliary at Pićan in 1713 because Bishop Gaus was ill, who crowned the image of Our Lady at Trsat in 1715 and died at Rijeka.
He did not become Bishop of Pedena. He became bishop of Senj and Modruš, a different diocese, in 1730. Grah's list of Pićan bishops runs Marotti to 1740 and then Giovanni Giuseppe Bonifacio Cecotti from 1741 to 1765; there is no Benzoni in it. The only Benzoni in Grah is a Jesuit, Franjo Ksaverije, who represented Bishop Cecotti in Rome in the 1750s and 60s.
Because a family archive that publishes with confidences attached cannot take a generated summary as a source. The right use of it is exactly what happened here: read it as a lead, then go to Kobler and Grah — both of which this archive already had on disk — and let them answer. The lead was worth having. It was not evidence.
And it turns out to bear on this family directly. Kobler's own article on the three Fiume stocks of the surname records that Valentino Defranceschi, civic engineer and steward of Fiume, «ammogliatosi nel 1793 con Orsola de Benzoni», married an Orsola de Benzoni in 1793 and had eight children by her. So the Defranceschi married into the Benzoni — the Fiume house that had produced, two generations earlier, the vicar general of the diocese of Gologorica and Gallignana and then a bishop. And Giovanni Antonio's own mother was an Orsola, which is where the name in the family comes from. The bishop is buried in the collegiate church at Fiume. So is Valentino Defranceschi of Carnia, under a floor slab by the altar of the Madonna del Carmine.
Giovanni Kobler, «Memorie per la storia della liburnica città di Fiume», reprinted as vol. 3 of the Collana degli Atti of Rovigno, 1978; Ivan Grah, «Izvještaji pićanskih biskupa Svetoj Stolici (1589–1780)», Croatica Christiana Periodica IV (1980) no. 6. Both read from Internet Archive copies. The generated summary that prompted the check is not cited as a source and should not be.
The house at Fiume that this family married into, and a sentence that gets it half right
A short history of Rijeka on fiumemondo.com names the surname in a single line about the city's immigrant merchants. It puts two of this archive's families in the same clause, which is why it is worth reading closely — and worth checking, because it turns out to be a compression of Kobler with the joins showing.
«In the second half of the seventeenth century the population of Rijeka exceeded 3000 inhabitants and there was an improvement in the economic situation, as is demonstrated by the fact that some Italian merchants settled in Rijeka with their families, such as the Cremonese Benzoni, the Apulian Bono, the Istrian De Franceschi, the Venetian Orlando.»
«Circa l'anno 1650 erano venuti a Fiume e vi aveano preso domicilio stabile Giovanni Battista e Vincenzo fratelli Benzoni di Cremona, dedicandosi al commercio, e poco dopo furon fatti cittadini.» About 1650 the brothers Giovanni Battista and Vincenzo Benzoni of Cremona came to Fiume and settled there permanently, taking up trade, and were made citizens shortly after. Cremona and the date are exact.
Kobler's first Bono at Fiume is «Alessandro Bono de Francavilla», in a document of 1578, among the founders of the confraternity of the Immaculate Conception. Francavilla is in Apulia, so the origin holds — but he is there a lifetime before the second half of the seventeenth century.
Kobler's oldest Fiume stock of the surname is registered in 1614, when «un Domenico di Francesco si univa in matrimonio con Lucia Trassich» — sixty years before the period the sentence describes. And Kobler closes that stock not by saying it came from Istria but by saying where it went: «Ora una famiglia De Franceschi si trova in Istria con possessioni in Golagorica» — now a De Franceschi family is found in Istria with possessions at Gologorica. The genuinely Istrian arrival at Fiume is Kobler's third stock, Giovanni Battista «venuto da Pisino dell'Istria» about 1740. Istrian, yes. Second half of the seventeenth century, no.
Kobler names the wholesale trading houses of Fiume in that exact period — «Case commerciali all'ingrosso, con depositi di olio e granaglie, nella seconda metà del secolo erano le seguenti: Androcha, Benzoni, Marotti, Minoli, Monaldi, Orlando». The great houses with oil and grain depots. Benzoni and Orlando are on it. The De Franceschi are not, and neither are the Bono. The sentence on the modern page has taken a real list and widened it.
None of which is the interesting part. The interesting part is what the Benzoni actually were, because in 1793 Valentino Defranceschi married Orsola de Benzoni — and that was not a marriage into an ordinary merchant family.
Giovanni Battista and Vincenzo, trading. Giovanni Battista married Antonia Tremanini in 1653 and was, in Kobler's words, «negoziante molto attivo e fortunato». Vincenzo already owned a house with vineyard and wood at Škurinje by 1682.
Giovanni Battista wanted a seat on the civic council, «ma in quel tempo vi arrivava difficilmente chi non era di famiglia patriziale» — in those days it was hard to get there if you were not of a patrician family. Refused, he went over the council's head to the imperial regency at Graz, «il che dispiacque alla municipalità», which displeased the municipality. Graz gave him the title of councillor. He died in 1709 without ever having sat in the patrician council. It took his grandsons to get in.
His son Felice, born 1662, imperial inspector of the maritime crown estates, who «si distinse nella guerra per la successione spagnola facendo ritardare l'approdo della nemica squadra francese» — distinguished himself in the War of the Spanish Succession by delaying the landing of the enemy French squadron. On 24 July 1716 he was killed on the public square by a saluting mortar that burst by accident. He was buried in the chapel of the Immaculate Conception, where an inscription badly eaten by time still recalled it in Kobler's day. He had married Orsola, daughter of Nicolò Marotti — of another house on that list of six.
Charles VI conferred the knighthood of the Holy Roman Empire on Felice's four sons and their descendants, with a modification of the arms and the predicate «de Benzonijs», in view of their ancient nobility, their ancestors' merits toward the Empire and the house of Austria, and the petitioners' own useful service. Three generations from a Cremonese trading counter to an imperial diploma — and it is dated six weeks before the Gallignana register records a Count Damian de Franceschis at the font.
Giovanni Antonio, born 1687, studied at the German College in Rome; canon of Fiume 1717; then vicar general of the bishop of Pedena — the diocese Gologorica and Gallignana belonged to; bishop of Senj and Modruš in 1730. «Essendo vescovo, andava scalzo a predicare nei luoghi della sua diocesi» — as bishop he went barefoot to preach in the places of his diocese. He built the great house on the piazza of St Vitus running through to the Contrada di San Michele, and bought the braida by Sant'Andrea. He died at Fiume on 3 December 1745 and was buried in the collegiate church under a slab — the same floor that holds Valentino Defranceschi of Carnia.
Stefano Giovanni, born 1690: municipal councillor of Fiume in 1724, and then «luogotenente nella contea di Pisino» — lieutenant in the County of Pazin. That is the county. Gologorica and Gallignana are in it. So in the same decades in which this family was standing godparent at Gallignana and keeping the house at Gologorica, the bishop's own brother was holding office over the district. It is not a family connection and this archive does not claim one. It is the size of the world these people moved in, which was small.
Giuseppe Gabriele, born 1700, imperial colonel of the Slunj regiment, made a baron in 1754. Francesco Saverio, a Jesuit at Rome. Then canons — Simone Vincenzo at Fiume from 1730 to 1780, Antonio a canon at Bakar and then at Fiume from 1749. Carlo, prior of the Augustinians in 1756. Giulio, royal assessor, who gave the city his library of nine hundred volumes and who in September 1773 was the commissioner deputed to inventory the suppressed Jesuit college. A daughter, Giovanna, married the imperial engineer Antonio de Verneda in 1726 — the man who drew the plans for the Benzoni house itself.
What this does not settle is Orsola. Kobler's Benzoni article traces the descendants of Stefano Giovanni, of Giuseppe Gabriele and of the Vincenzo branch, and no Orsola of the right generation appears in it to be the woman Valentino Defranceschi married in 1793. The name is certainly in the house — the bishop's own mother was Orsola de Marotti — but which branch Valentino's wife came from is unresolved, and it is the marriage register of Fiume that would say. She died in 1807, and he built the family tomb in the cemetery where she lay.
There is one more sentence in Kobler worth copying out, because it is this archive's own problem in miniature. «Gli attuali discendenti in Fiume tengono un grande albero genealogico di stipite molto rimoto; ma la continuazione fu negletta, sicchè vi manca il nesso coi Benzoni di Fiume.» The present descendants at Fiume keep a great genealogical tree going back to a very remote stock; but the continuation was neglected, so the link to the Benzoni of Fiume is missing from it. A family with a magnificent chart and a hole where the join should be. That is exactly the condition this archive found itself in, and exactly what it is for.
Giovanni Kobler, «Memorie per la storia della liburnica città di Fiume», reprinted as vol. 3 of the Collana degli Atti of Rovigno, 1978 — the Benzoni, Bono and De Franceschi family articles, the list of wholesale houses, and the chapter on the collegiate church. Read from the Internet Archive copy, September 2026. The modern page checked against it is «Brief history of Rijeka» at fiumemondo.com, read 7 September 2026.
Reading the rest of the book, and finding a daughter Kobler said he had lost
The family article is three pages. The «Memorie» are six hundred. So the whole volume was searched for the surname, page by page — the lists of chancellors and secretaries, the council rolls, the street-by-street topography, the chapters on the churches and the diocese. It turns up eleven more times, and two of those are worth the search on their own.
«Serie dei Vescovi di Pola … Francesco de Franceschi, intorno l'anno 1424. Domenico de Luschis dal 1426 al 1451.» Kobler says he is abridging Kandler's list to the men who appear in acts of Fiume — so he had a Fiume document with the bishop's name on it. And he is not alone: Cavalli's «Della regione litorale Austro-Illirica» of 1845 gives the same sequence independently — Biagio Molino, Tommaso Tommasini, Francesco de Franceschi, Domenico de Lucteriis. Two nineteenth-century Istrian lists, compiled separately, put a De Franceschi in the see of Pola between Tommasini's departure and de Luschis's accession in 1426. This archive has no primary act for him. It is by three centuries the earliest bearer of the name it has found holding office in Istria.
Kobler prints the official series «desunta dai libri pubblici», drawn from the public books. In the secretaries: «De Franceschi Antonio, 1682». In the vice-chancellors: «Giovanni de Franceschi, 1682». In the chancellors: «De Franceschi Giovanni Ant., 1694–1718», and then «De Franceschi Dr. Ant., 1727». Four appointments across forty-five years. For a generation the oldest Fiume stock effectively held the chancery of the city — and Kobler's family article says of Giovanni Antonio only that he was «cancelliere civico dal 1694 in poi» without mentioning the others at all.
In the roll of councillors for the second half of the seventeenth century, between Fracassa and Franul: «Franceschi Girolamo, Franceschi Giulio, Franceschi Giov. Ant.» Girolamo and Giulio appear nowhere in the family article.
In the Giacomini article: Ascanio di Francesco Giacomini, judge in 1725 and public notary in 1735, «ammogliatosi nell'anno 1697 con Margherita de Franceschi» — married in 1697 to Margherita de Franceschi. Their son Antonio was made a councillor in 1733.
From the papers of the imperial finance ministry in Vienna: the engineer Gnamb's plan for the planned quarter, and an act of 1756 marking the site of the new custom house «ed assegnava altri fondi di fabbrica a Bradicich, Dani, Deseppi, Defranceschi, Ellenz, Glavan, Lusser, Marotti, Minoli, Ruppani e Zuzulich» — assigning further building plots to eleven named families. Out of that plan came the Piazza della Fiumara, the theatre square, the market square and the Corso. Valentino Defranceschi of Carnia, twenty-six years off the boat, was given a lot in the making of modern Fiume.
«Patrizi consiglieri che abitavano in Fiume nel 1848» — the patrician councillors living in Fiume in 1848. The list is alphabetical, and there between Dall'Asta and Deseppi stands «Defranceschi Francesco». That is Valentino's grandson, Francesco Giuseppe, son of Valentino di Giuseppe and Orsola de Benzoni, royal harbourmaster of Fiume. Twelve names further down the same list: «Kobler Giovanni», with a footnote saying that he and Cimiotti were the two historians of Fiume and also its two last patricians.
Kobler finishes his account of Valentino's household with a shrug. Fourteen children between 1737 and 1759, one son traced, and then: «Dove passassero gli altri, non si sa» — where the others went is not known. But in the chapter that walks Fiume street by street, describing the Contrada dei Cappuccini, he writes without a backward glance: «Nel 1763 si trova accennata una casa di Valentino Defranceschi, la quale poi fu di Carlo Rossi, vice console inglese, e di sua moglie Giuseppa, figlia del detto Defranceschi, e nel 1794 passò in proprietà di Elena ved. Faribault.» A house of Valentino Defranceschi is noted in 1763, which afterwards belonged to Carlo Rossi, British vice-consul, and to his wife Giuseppa, daughter of the said Defranceschi; and in 1794 it passed to Elena, widow Faribault. There she is. Giuseppa Defranceschi, one of the fourteen, married to the British vice-consul at Fiume — named in the same book by the same author who said he did not know what became of her. He simply never put the two chapters side by side.
Which leaves a question this archive is not going to guess at. The house passed in 1794 to «Elena ved. Faribault». The vineyard at Plase was bought by the Faribault, and with it, in 1801, the care of Valentino's chapel — for which Celestino Faribault gave surety in 1839 for its upkeep and for fourteen masses a year. So the Faribault ended with the house, the land and the chapel. And Valentino's wife was named Elena; the chapel is called St Helen's for her. Is Elena widow Faribault his widow remarried, or a daughter of the same name, or a coincidence of a common name? Kobler does not say, and he plainly did not notice the question. The marriage and death registers of Fiume would answer it in an afternoon.
None of this is in the family article, and that is the lesson. Kobler wrote the family entry from the civic registers and then wrote six hundred other pages from everything else — and the two do not talk to each other. A family archive that reads only the entry with its surname on it will take his «non si sa» as the end of the road. Reading the rest of the book gives a bishop of Pola, a chancery held for a generation, a building plot in the new city, a councillor of 1848, and a daughter's married name.
Giovanni Kobler, «Memorie per la storia della liburnica città di Fiume», reprinted as vol. 3 of the Collana degli Atti of Rovigno, 1978 — the series of bishops of Pola, of chancellors, vice-chancellors and secretaries, the council rolls, the chapters on the new town and the Contrada dei Cappuccini, and the Giacomini family article. The independent list of the bishops of Pola is in Francesco Cavalli, «Della regione litorale Austro-Illirica», 1845. Both read from Internet Archive copies, September 2026.
«Affitto fermo» — what it means, and the four bishops who renewed it
The phrase has stood on this site for months without being explained, and it carries more than it looks. It is the difference between a family that farmed and a family that collected.
«Affitto fermo» is a firm — that is, fixed — rent. Set against it stands the ordinary arrangement of the Istrian countryside, «colonia», where a tenant handed over a share of whatever he grew, so that lord and peasant rose and fell together with the harvest. A fixed render does not move. Carlo names it exactly: not a tithe but «un invariabile annuo corrispettivo in vino, frumento, avena, agnelli, galline ed uova» — an unvarying yearly render in wine, wheat, oats, lambs, hens and eggs. The same basket every year, whatever the weather did.
This is the sentence that matters and it is easy to misread: «Questo affitto fermo sino alla soppressione del vescovato veniva percepito dalla mia famiglia a titolo di affittanza, rinnovata da ogni vescovo, a cui pagava il convenuto importo» — until the suppression of the bishopric this firm rent was collected by my family as lessees, the lease renewed by every bishop, to whom we paid the agreed sum. They did not pay the affitto fermo. They took it. They leased the bishop's right to it, paid him a lump, and kept whatever the village rendered above that. That is a tax-farm, and it is a merchant's position, not a peasant's.
The lease, Carlo says, was renewed by every bishop. Across the period the family was there, that is four men. Peter Anton Gaus von Homberg, bishop 1693–1716 — in whose time the house was built, «ANNO · DOMNI · 1711». Georg Xaver Marotti, 1716–1740. Bonifatius Cecchotti, 1741–1765. And Aldrago Antonio de Piccardi, 1766–1785, the last of them.
Andreas Daniel von Rauchnach held Pedena from 15 December 1670 to 9 December 1686 — and this archive already holds Elvis Orbanić's study of him, «Andrea Daniel di Raunnoch kao pićanski biskup 1670.–1686.». Gian Battista, whom Bertoša calls «il vecchio stipite», the old stock, died in November 1686. He and his bishop went out of the village within a month of each other.
De Piccardi was translated to Senj and Modruš on 14 February 1785 and not replaced; the see stood vacant and was suppressed on 20 August 1788, its territory divided between Gradisca and Trieste. The lease died with the bishopric. Whatever the family's standing in Gologorica had rested on for most of a century simply stopped existing — and it is worth noticing, without making anything of it, that the last bishop of Pedena went to Senj, which is where this family's grandfather is buried a hundred and sixty years later.
Carlo adds one more line: «Prima che Gollogorizza fosse dei vescovi di Pedena, era un bene della nobile famiglia Schnal di Pisino» — before Gologorica belonged to the bishops of Pedena it was a holding of the noble Schnal family of Pisino. That is a thread this archive has not pulled.
Carlo De Franceschi to Giovanni Kobler, in the letters printed in «Fiume» (1928) and held in this project's source library; the succession of the bishops of Pedena from the diocesan lists, cross-checked September 2026; Elvis Orbanić on Rauchnach, held in the library.
A Defranceschi signs a Fiume election protocol, 1871 — printed at Paris in 1919
The family supplied a scan of «An Abridged Political History of Rieka (Fiume)» by **Ferdinand Šišić**, professor at the University of Zagreb and a member of the Yugoslav delegation to the Paris Peace Conference, printed in Paris in 1919. It is a brief for a border, and its back half is a documentary appendix — the actual papers of Fiume's nineteenth-century fight over whether it belonged to Hungary or to Croatia. The surname occurs once in a hundred and sixty pages, and it occurs in the right place.
Appendix XVIII: the protocol of the electoral committee of the second college of the city of Fiume, sitting in the municipal council chamber on 20 April 1871 to choose a deputy to the Croatian-Slavonian Diet in place of the resigning Giovanni de Ciotta. President Pietro Dabalà; assessors «Signor Francesco Defranceschi» and Francesco Seemann; notary Carlo Sigovich. Of 1,115 registered electors 128 came; 126 voted for Dr Antonio Randich, one for Giovanni Mansoni, one paper spoiled. And at the foot, among the three signatures that close the protocol: «Frco Defranceschi.»
Almost certainly Francesco Giuseppe de Franceschi, whom Kobler names in this same page's stock III — «patrician councillor and royal harbourmaster of Fiume», dead on 22 December 1885. An electoral assessor of a city college in 1871 is a civic office-holder, and Kobler's Francesco Giuseppe is the civic office-holder of the name then living. That is an inference from two independent sources agreeing on a role, not a proved identity.
Stock III is the Fiume household Kobler describes as «venuto da Pisino» and made a citizen in 1746 — and «da Pisino» in a Fiume register means the County of Pazin, which is where Gologorica and Gračišće are. This site already calls that the closest the archive has come to joining a Fiume household to the Istrian family by documents rather than tradition. Here is one of its members, thirty-nine years after the last date Kobler gives him, sitting on a bench in the town hall and signing his name.
The same appendix prints the Fiume manifestos of the 1860s: «*Fiumani!* … an *evviva* to the immediate union of Fiume with the Crown of St Stephen» — the Italian-speaking party's case for Hungary against Croatia. Šišić printed all of it at Paris in 1919 as evidence for the other side. Whatever Francesco Defranceschi thought, he was administering the ballot in the argument that would end with the city being fought over by four states in the next thirty years.
The Fiume electoral rolls. The protocol names 1,115 registered electors of the second college in 1871 and says the list was checked name by name at the door. If that roll survives at Rijeka it is a census of the enfranchised householders of half the city, with a Defranceschi on the committee that kept it.
Ferdinand Šišić, «An Abridged Political History of Rieka (Fiume), with a Facsimile», Imprimerie Graphique, Paris 1919 — 160 pages, the documentary appendix at pp. 100–160. Supplied by the family as a scan in September 2026 and now in this project's library. The surname appears once, in appendix XVIII, twice on the same page.
The full bibliography, with what each source gave and where it is weak →