Camillo De Franceschi

His baptism is in the indexed Poreč register: Camillo Romano Defranceschi, born 3 August 1868, of Carlo Defranceschi and *Maria Michelcich. Every printed account of him gives his mother as Maria Micheli. The register gives Michelcich* — a Croatian surname in -ić, written the Austrian way. Somewhere between the font and the page, the mother of Istria's great Italian antiquarian was quietly Italianised out of her own name.

He was the last of Carlo's four children, and his father moved to Pisino to be near him while he attended the German gymnasium there. When the institute closed he finished school in Trieste and took a commerce degree in 1889.

From 1886 he was in the Julian Action Committee, distributing the clandestine L'Eco dell'Alpe Giulia and helping build a conspiracy network across Istria. On 24 March 1889 a committee of pro-Austrians tried to inaugurate a monument in Trieste's station square celebrating the city's devotion to the Habsburgs. The Action Committee left a firecracker there. A police inspector picked it up and injured his hand.

The arrests followed in September. At the trial, after five months of solitary confinement, the court described the accused as a society positively opposed to the present order of things. Camillo, at twenty-one the oldest of the group, got two years — six months more than the others — aggravated by a day of fasting and isolation every second month. He served it in the castle of Gradisca.

Released in February 1892, he reached home in time to help his father through his last months; Carlo died the following January. Attilio Hortis then found him a position at the municipal library in Trieste, and he spent the rest of his life in the archives.

His Storia documentata della Contea di Pisino — the largest and probably most important thing he wrote — was published in Venice in 1964, eleven years after his death, edited by his own son Carlo. He had died in Venice in 1953, an exile from the province he spent his life documenting.